Dusted, cleaned, and lubricated a Sony MPF920 3.5" floppy drive from September of 2004 (about 16 years old today) so that I can place that in my 386DX/486DLC machine sometime this week in place of the other one as it's having a bit of motor craziness. I'd do that right now, but I have work in the morning.

Planning a trip for this weekend to pickup "a lot" of Commodore related items. Earlier this year or maybe even last year my wife mentioned her uncle had a ton of Commodore stuff that he wanted to get rid because it was taking up too much space in his house. It's about a 4 hour drive, so I never made it up there due to being busy with work, wife's health problems, then COVID hit. Well, my wife was just up there last weekend and talked to him and he said he still has it and to make a trip soon to come get it. I guess there are multiple computers, tons of software, peripherals, drives, etc. I tried to get her to take pictures while she was there, but it was all boxed up at the back of a closet and she couldn't get to it. I'll be sure to post pics when I get it. Should be interesting, because it hasn't been touched since the early 90's. 😁

Tested my newly acquired HD7990 last night.
That card needs 8pin PCI-E connectors x2
My test PC's PSU only had a 6 pin connectesr x2

Opened the adapters that came with my 2 GF 590's that converts 2x 6 pin to a single 8 pin, half way there.
Had to use raid my other machines for Molex splitters to be able to convert 2 molex connectors to 2x 6 pin PCI-E which I could then convert to a 8pin with the 2nd adapter from the 590.
1 Molex to 3, back to 1 PCI-E, not pretty!
Card tested ok and it all got undone! It'll get a proper PSU in its final build

chinny22 wrote on 2020-09-21, 13:16:

Tested my newly acquired HD7990 last night. That card needs 8pin PCI-E connectors x2 My test PC's PSU only had a 6 pin connectes […]
Show full quote

Tested my newly acquired HD7990 last night.
That card needs 8pin PCI-E connectors x2
My test PC's PSU only had a 6 pin connectesr x2

Opened the adapters that came with my 2 GF 590's that converts 2x 6 pin to a single 8 pin, half way there.
Had to use raid my other machines for Molex splitters to be able to convert 2 molex connectors to 2x 6 pin PCI-E which I could then convert to a 8pin with the 2nd adapter from the 590.
1 Molex to 3, back to 1 PCI-E, not pretty!
Card tested ok and it all got undone! It'll get a proper PSU in its final build

That's a fire hazard to be sure, make sure to buy a more modern PSU for that card..

appiah4 wrote on 2020-09-21, 13:36:

That's a fire hazard to be sure, make sure to buy a more modern PSU for that card..

yeh the whole process took longer then the actual testing.
worse then been a fire hazard it looked terrible 😉

Today I finally gave up on my 2nd 2000 PC build for the time being. The first motherboard was picky with CPUs and wouldn't work with much over 450MHz and the 2nd worked fine with a 1.1GHz Celeron but had terrible performance that I was never able to resolve. The 3rd worked great and would have been ideal, but needs recapping. I have other motherboards in my collection that may very well work, but they all lack AGP.

As I want 2 systems from roughly the same era for LAN gaming purposes, I'm going to have to cheat slightly and make the 2nd PC a 2001-based Tualatin Celeron 1.2GHz PC instead, with a PCI GeForce FX 5500. Already have that set up, so not going to cost me anymore money importantly.

Aside from that, just been installing games for most of the day to the 2000 PC that is working. At least that is coming along quite nicely.

The other day I picked up two enourmous Fujitsu Siemans Socket 603 dual CPU PCs. One PC is being "improved" but keeping the original motherboard etc. The other, I decided to covert so that I can put any motherboard in there. It started out like this:

• Removed the various metal framework - the RAM card front bumper thing, the lower card protection door thingy, the lower front fan cover
• Removed the old part-working CD Drives including their rail thingies
• Remove floppy drive from the other PC and install in this one, so it has two (the other PC now has both green front panel blank plates things, so it doesn't need the HDD cage at all)
• I have 6 drive bays to fill (two cases). I have rails for four drives and I have two faceplates. One build however will use both a faceplate and the a rail (mounting a 3.5" bay in the 5.25" bay) so I electrical tape one of the dead drives in place!
• Remove heatsinks and mounting plate so I can remove the the old motherboard
• Remove the Socket 603 heatsink mounting holes that are part of the chassis and stick out as much or more than the standoffs
• relocate standoffs
• (re)install front and rear 120mm fans
• Remove PSU (it's enormous!)
• Put ATX bracket onto SFF PSU
• Put AT bracket on ATX bracket onto SFF PSU
• Install SFF PSU (It's tiny!)
• Realise the power button connector is all one blob and is non standard. Separate out the power button using stanley knife
• Realise the power switch is not long enough to reach the motherboard, order a new one (and pwr and HDD LEDS) from eBay.
• Mount motherboard, GPU etc
• Faff about with poorly seated RAM and the PC remembering its overclock (despite clearing the CMOS twice) that I was very keen to avoid given the SFF PSU is not that powerful

I used my 1156 board as it's the biggest (to see how well it fitted) and probably the most reliable board I have but I'm thinking of getting a Socket 754 board and putting it in there.

I love that TINY Pentium II PC in the background. Post about that one instead if you ask me 🤣.

Swapped the floppy drive in my 386DX/486DLC and the system needs new AA batteries for the CMOS/RTC. Also attempted to use the XT-IDE Universal BIOS on the Promise EIDE Pro Super I/O controller card, but I need to set the BIOS address to the specific address space the card is set to (c8000h).

I was trying to get online with a 486 notebook + W98 using this Etherent XIrcom CEM33. For sme reason it did not work.
But the funny thing is that whem I plugged in this 25 y.o. card to my Tinkpad X60s with WinXP - worked right away, without any drivers or so, and I could get online. 😀 It's just a 10Mbit card, as I understand.

appiah4 wrote on 2020-09-22, 11:27:

I love that TINY Pentium II PC in the background. Post about that one instead if you ask me 🤣.

It was new unopened. I wrote about it ages ago on another forum:

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/forums/threads … 98-pc.18839073/

Right now it's got a Pentium 4 in it

Attempting to get an XT-IDE Universal BIOS chip to work on my Promise EIDE Pro ISA card and nothing. Reason for switching the BIOS is because the Promise EIDE BIOS takes a chunk of conventional RAM and once it's low, certain games never work.

Cleaned an absolutely filthy (but cheap!) ASUS A7M266-D.
Looked like its been up a chimney for a year or so.
Soap and water then dried in oven (60-70C or so) for a few hours.
Looks great now.
Also recapped it while i was at it.
Havn't tried it yet tho, giving it a few days in case there's some moisture hiding somewhere.
Looking forward to adding another dual to the collection!

Today I reconfigured and reinstalled a Socket 7 machine that I rarely use.

Specs are now:
- Asus TXP4 (430TX chipset)
- AMD K6 233MHz
- 32MB SD-RAM
- S3 Virge/DX 4MB
- Diamond Monster 3D (Voodoo 1 card from a scrap lot, working but shows artifacts, I'll swap it for a working card)
- Aztech 2320 ISA sound card
- 2 GB Fujitsu HDD
- Creative DVD2240E DVD-ROM (Dxr2 decoder card will go in there, too)

I installed a fresh copy of Windows 95 and all the drivers and did some basic testing.

Because the system hasn't seen much use in the last years (due to redundancy with other two Socket 7 rigs) I might sell it some time soon, probably keeping the Creative DVD drive for one of the other systems.

Just finished recapping a S370 Gigabyte GA-6VA7+ mainboard. Not that the board did not work, or the caps were bad, I just like to do it on stuff I plan to keep and use. This now goes to P3-667mhz and V3-2000 setup.

bofh.fromhell wrote on 2020-09-23, 02:29:

Cleaned an absolutely filthy (but cheap!) ASUS A7M266-D. Looked like its been up a chimney for a year or so. Soap and water then […]
Show full quote

Cleaned an absolutely filthy (but cheap!) ASUS A7M266-D.
Looked like its been up a chimney for a year or so.
Soap and water then dried in oven (60-70C or so) for a few hours.
Looks great now.
Also recapped it while i was at it.
Havn't tried it yet tho, giving it a few days in case there's some moisture hiding somewhere.
Looking forward to adding another dual to the collection!

Have you tried using some CRC QD Electronic Cleaner? This stuff is great for breaking apart dust, cleaning out sockets on motherboards, and dissolving thermal paste.

Today, after some prolonged troubleshooting, I've finally experienced Quake on original Intel Batman board with Pentium 60. It was horrible, as expected.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-09-24, 18:51:

Today, after some prolonged troubleshooting, I've finally experienced Quake on original Intel Batman board with Pentium 60. It was horrible, as expected.

After how many hours? six?

Making a PC/104 to ISA riser, it might work, it's cheaper than buying an old stock one and this one has an ATX power connector 😁 Much easier than trying to solder one up. Honestly whoever made the PC/104 16-bit connector, I dislike them, it's so bad to route to a 16-bit ISA slot.

After how many hours? six?

I've been fighting with that cursed Intel board around 2 hours.