That laptop looks to be in very good condition. Nice find

Today my Chaintech 6VIA5T arrived from Russia - all looking clean and nice though I haven't tested it yet - such a tough board to find. I like my Abit VH6T Tualatin setup with the V5 5500, but it's too big and I wanted to use my Time branded Inwin D500 Micro ATX case for something good. Since that's what my ultimate retro PC was meant to be in so many years ago, but based on an Aopen MX3S motherboard.
I was worried this thing had been lost in shipping, it took a long time and the tracking details went dark for a long time. It finally turned up today.

This thing has it all, AGP, ISA, PCI, Tualatin support, a thermal sensor 😁 I'll have to go give it a go tomorrow, today I was writing up my experience with designing my own HardMPU PCB - someone asked me what was involved and I realised there are so many steps, I was documenting it for myself as much as I was him.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2020-07-15, 22:29:

Today my Chaintech 6VIA5T arrived from Russia - all looking clean and nice though I haven't tested it yet - such a tough board to find. I like my Abit VH6T Tualatin setup with the V5 5500, but it's too big and I wanted to use my Time branded Inwin D500 Micro ATX case for something good. Since that's what my ultimate retro PC was meant to be in so many years ago, but based on an Aopen MX3S motherboard.
I was worried this thing had been lost in shipping, it took a long time and the tracking details went dark for a long time. It finally turned up today.

This thing has it all, AGP, ISA, PCI, Tualatin support, a thermal sensor 😁 I'll have to go give it a go tomorrow, today I was writing up my experience with designing my own HardMPU PCB - someone asked me what was involved and I realised there are so many steps, I was documenting it for myself as much as I was him.

It needs SBLink to have it all, and yes such matx s370 boards exist. What case are you planning on using for it? There are some nice modern compact cases for reverse DOS sleepers.

Picked up this Aptiva 2196-20A for pocket change. It's a K6-2+ 550, and needs a HDD & optical drive. Also needs a low profile PCI video card. I'll be on the lookout for an FX5500 at a non-silly price.

Today I received a couple floppy drives. Found them on "mercadolibre" (LatinAmerica's eBay) and paid like $5 for them, shipping included. The two units that arrived are a black sony one, dated 2005 and a white samsung one. Both appear to work, but the sony seems to read faster and more reliably than the samsung.

Pierre32 wrote on 2020-07-15, 23:49:

Picked up this Aptiva 2196-20A for pocket change. It's a K6-2+ 550, and needs a HDD & optical drive. Also needs a low profile PCI video card. I'll be on the lookout for an FX5500 at a non-silly price.

Nice one! This must be one of the last Aptivas before switching to the NetVista models?

I guess adding a 36x or 40x CDROM should be most period correct, and a 5GB hard drive? Seems like the hard drive bay itself is missing...

waterbeesje wrote on 2020-07-16, 10:12:

Pierre32 wrote on 2020-07-15, 23:49:

Picked up this Aptiva 2196-20A for pocket change. It's a K6-2+ 550, and needs a HDD & optical drive. Also needs a low profile PCI video card. I'll be on the lookout for an FX5500 at a non-silly price.

Nice one! This must be one of the last Aptivas before switching to the NetVista models?

I guess adding a 36x or 40x CDROM should be most period correct, and a 5GB hard drive? Seems like the hard drive bay itself is missing...

Yep, no HDD or ODD brackets! They'll be tough to track down and I don't want to get into fabrication or making permanent changes to the case. Instead I'm thinking of installing a front-accessible CF card via a 5.25 drive bay adapter. Should be easy to mount, and will be reversible should the opportunity arise to return it to stock.

This will also free up a little PSU headroom, which it turns out is only 95W. Downsizing my video card aspirations in light of this too, and now looking at an MX440.

You can also look for a mx460 as well it's a decent card with a little more power than a mx440

Click click

Yay! Finally got parts bought to almost finish my Deskpro M. All these parts missing is rails for external drive bays so I can mount a optical drive in it. LG DVD pata? which I have plenty.

Last thing is find a hard drive or something IDE or PATA to round the rebuild off.

Sometimes this is very expensive hobby but worth the trouble for me.

Cheers!,

Picking this up on the weekend. Will be my 3rd vintage laptop. Not sure why I like them but they are satisfying to restore compared to modern laptops.

Lostdotfish wrote on 2020-07-16, 14:41:

Click click

Ahh the sweet mechanical relay of the Orchid Righteous 3d. LOVE it!

So I went to a town about 60 miles away because a seller was cleaning out a building and I could see a few PC's of the right era with disassembled, but with lots of parts left in them.

Well I get there, and it turns out since the seller took the pictures scrappers hit the building, and took all the PCs that had circuitry in them and stole any parts that were laying around.

The good news is that, not pictured, there was a Dec 1995 build date Dell Trinitron P1110 21" CRT monitor there that hadn't been stolen (I don't blame them, its 75lbs). I tested it on site and after about 20 seconds of very loud crackling from condensation getting kicked out, it displayed its self-test stuff so I paid him the sum of $20 for it.

I've got it outside and I verified the screen was just dirty, not scratched, but I've yet to hookup a VGA cable and run Nokia Monitor Test to see if it performs well.

Even if it does do I really want to set this leviathan ontop of my Compaq Deskpro, I don't know if the internal supports can handle this much weight. It's also missing its monitor stand which might actually be good since that should distribute the weight.

EDIT: So I tested it and I'm kind of underwhelmed. Its functional, and not really degraded in any way but I can tell this monitor was never producing award winning visuals (relative to the late 90s) in the first place. I imagine it lower high end for the year 1995 but my Gateway CrystalScan 17" blows it out of the water in terms of color and contrast. It's interesting to have such a large CRT display though. I might fiddle with it some more at some point and see if I can't talk a little more performance out of it. Was the P1110 not among the "extreme high end" and sought after Dell Trinitrons from the 1990s? or is it just the later models that have such reknown?

EDIT 2: The plot thickens: so the designation 21TE also leads back to the P1110, but its also for what I have which is not a P1110 but infact a Mitsubishi built D2130T-HS which is based off their ProScan series and isn't even Aperture Grille. 0.30mm dot pitch and a maximum of 1600x1200@75HZ, far from the impressive specs of the P1110. Absolutely disgusting, probably going in the garbage. It looks like this model was meant for screen space over quality to keep price down. A 20 inch Sony built model was also available with certain Dell XPS machines of the mid-90s. This model does have BNC connectors, which explains why it was there as the guy had stacks of 70s studio monitor displays.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2020-07-17, 01:55:

So I went to a town about 60 miles away [...]

I do sympathize... it's bad enough you drive all that way (which would have me end up in another country) to find all's been cleaned out by scrappers. The crappy monitor is sour icing on an already foul cake. Hopefully you'll have better luck next time.

Artex wrote on 2020-07-16, 21:37:

Lostdotfish wrote on 2020-07-16, 14:41:

Click click

Ahh the sweet mechanical relay of the Orchid Righteous 3d. LOVE it!

Just installed and tested it. That sound is nostalgia!

I somewhat ironically received both of these today:

On the left is a Seagate 80MB ST-4096 drive. Haven't tested it fully yet, but I can say that it shakes the entire table when the head actuators move.

On the right is a Seagate Exos x16 16TB He-filled data center drive. Sustained transfer rate is up to three ST-4096s per second.

I guess that's a good one to follow up with this ^^

got another EPSON SD-800 and a Tandon 8" Floppy drive :3

I received several things today :
First this lot

(whith also a P3 650 slot1 and a P2 233 and 4x 4MB simm modules)

Then a lot with this board arrived :

More about this board here Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Brand new Siig Minitouch PS/2 arrived. I also have some custom blue arrow keys on the way for it. 😀

If that SIIG Mini is from eBay, I had it bookmarked before it sold. 😀

I've been looking at one of those keyboard( Small and beige! ) for my Raspberry Pi. I have a USB to PS2 adapter which works from my testing.