My e-waste guy let me take this for free. I cleaned it up as best as I could.

Maybe I should start legislating some new laws for New York, hehe. 😀

for a rubber dome, those are nice keyboards.

Recently got this from someone who wanted to throw it away.
Still have to open/test it though when I find the time.

A PCI-express HD4830 512MB GDDR3 videocard and a Huyndai XT, complete with monitor (not on pictures), keyboard and mouse from 1988 😀

That Hyundai is in great shape!

Got given two Compaq Presario CQ62, the equivalent to the HP G62. They where were first released in 2010. One doesn't power on, monitor panel was broken but it had 12gigs of ram and 360gig Hdd. The other one has a broken lcd panel, no ram and no hdd. Both lcd lock like someone had jumped on them. Transferred the 4gig ram stick and hdd to the one that powered up. After fitting an ancient 17" 4: 3 external monitor a few attempts and finally forced the Bios set up routine to fire up, save settings and reboot into Windows 7. Not wanting to few anyone else's personal data and try password guessing I had it do a complete system restro back to it's original configure of the restor partition. Worked a treat. Sourced a new replacement lcd panel with 3 year warranty for just under $nz150 including shipping from Australia.

I love this x86 stuff. These systems are easy to pull apart as well as put back together and have great documentation that is readily available to users.

Edit 1-Win7 refreshed to new and hdd pulled. Fitted a 80gig hdd in it with Linux Mint Debian Edition 4 on it. LMDE4 picked up ALL the hardware without a glitch. Networking , external monitor, touch pad, etc etc functioning as it should. Battery is charging. I'm posting from the good CQ62 now. very happy indeed. Got a few tidying up jobs to do and wait until the new 15.6" lcd panel arrives.

Got a call and picked up a 386 from a building that was being demolished at the same time. It really felt wrong to walk around there without helmet...

Looks like, it's a Am386DX-33, 4MB ram, Trident 8900 VGA with both CGA and VGA output.
It's weird in some parts as well: Turbo, Reset and Case lock are switches in the back, Keyboard and (Bus?) Mouse ports are in the front.

Gonna clean it up, set it up with CF based hard disk, add some kind of sound card and network card, and hopefully find someone, who will appreciate it a lot for retro gaming and other stuff like that. 😀

GigAHerZ wrote on 2020-12-02, 14:21:

Got a call and picked up a 386 from a building that was being demolished at the same time. It really felt wrong to walk around there without helmet...

a nice save, sounds like an old works PC of some kind and sounds like you'll give it a nice new role

It's not really a recent find, but something I had an eye out for for a while and literally saved from a dumpster.
It's an old terminal used at my workplace. It was under AC and haven't been turned on I think in the past 20+ years.
But a couple of weeks ago it's time had come to be thrown out.

It was a little dusty, so I gave it a quick cleaning. It was stored under AC which probably saved the motherboard from battery leakage. It's dead anyway so I removed it for safety. The hard drive seems to be dead, but otherwise boots up nicely. I have a 50MB Maxtor or a larger capacity, but maybe less reliable IBM WDA-L80 as a replacement.

Thinking on adding a sound card and a 5.25" disk drive. A coworker offered to sell me an Aztech Sound Galaxy BXII which should probably be a good fit.

Huh. 386/486 motherboard. The battery used on that looks like the older Mac style (3.6V lithium 1/2 AA).

Salient wrote on 2020-11-16, 15:55:

Recently got this from someone who wanted to throw it away.
Still have to open/test it though when I find the time.

A PCI-express HD4830 512MB GDDR3 videocard and a Huyndai XT, complete with monitor (not on pictures), keyboard and mouse from 1988 😀

I have the exact same system. It was part of an old medical imaging machine, and all ISA slots were populated with controller cards. Great little rig, just wish I had a working XT compatible keyboard for it.

RandomStranger wrote on 2020-12-03, 09:33:

It's not really a recent find, but something I had an eye out for for a while and literally saved from a dumpster.
It's an old terminal used at my workplace. It was under AC and haven't been turned on I think in the past 20+ years.
But a couple of weeks ago it's time had come to be thrown out.

Cut that poisonous (for the board) battery as FAST as you can! Hopefully it hasn't do still any damage... Doesn't look like is leaking.
Also, looks like you have a board with MR.BIOS. People likes to collect these here.

hyoenmadan wrote on 2020-12-03, 17:09:

Cut that poisonous (for the board) battery as FAST as you can! Hopefully it hasn't do still any damage... Doesn't look like is leaking.

Judging by the colors, that is a Tadiran Lithium 3.6V battery. I have seen them occasionally on 486 motherboards, the nice thing about them is that they are not likely to spill their guts into the motherboard like their Ni-Cd counterparts.

It's probably dead by now though, so it should be removed in either case.

GigAHerZ wrote on 2020-12-02, 14:21:

Got a call and picked up a 386 from a building that was being demolished at the same time. It really felt wrong to walk around t […]
Show full quote

Got a call and picked up a 386 from a building that was being demolished at the same time. It really felt wrong to walk around there without helmet...

Looks like, it's a Am386DX-33, 4MB ram, Trident 8900 VGA with both CGA and VGA output.
It's weird in some parts as well: Turbo, Reset and Case lock are switches in the back, Keyboard and (Bus?) Mouse ports are in the front.

Gonna clean it up, set it up with CF based hard disk, add some kind of sound card and network card, and hopefully find someone, who will appreciate it a lot for retro gaming and other stuff like that. 😀

Very nice find ! Thanks for saving it. Hope you find it a good home !

hyoenmadan wrote on 2020-12-03, 17:09:

Cut that poisonous (for the board) battery as FAST as you can! Hopefully it hasn't do still any damage... Doesn't look like is leaking.
Also, looks like you have a board with MR.BIOS. People likes to collect these here.

TheMobRules wrote on 2020-12-03, 18:14:

Judging by the colors, that is a Tadiran Lithium 3.6V battery. I have seen them occasionally on 486 motherboards, the nice thing about them is that they are not likely to spill their guts into the motherboard like their Ni-Cd counterparts.

It's probably dead by now though, so it should be removed in either case.

As I stated in my comment, already removed it, since it was dead and needs a new one regardless if it's likely to leak or not:

RandomStranger wrote on 2020-12-03, 09:33:

It's dead anyway so I removed it for safety.

I'm planning to replace it with a battery bay like this.

Hi there

I just got myself one of the same model Tiny Pcs with the MSI MS-5158 board. Have you any of the drivers for the video card, sound card and system board you could share with me? Either for Windows 95 or 98?

Many thanks

Dave

brassicGamer wrote on 2020-09-10, 18:17:

Nice story behind this one. In the UK we have household waste recycling centres, where people take their trash. When I was a kid […]
Show full quote

Nice story behind this one. In the UK we have household waste recycling centres, where people take their trash. When I was a kid it was all landfill and is still called the dump or tip informally. There are strict rules preventing people from removing items from the tip - I was shouted at for trying to save an Olivetti PC some years ago. The loophole is that if you can acquire something from someone before it leaves their car, it's fair. I'm always on alert, now.

So I walk past this guy's car and see a chunky yellowing case in the boot with the 'Tiny' logo clearly emblazoned on the plastic. I'm not a fan of big manufacturers' PCs normally, particularly when they are of PIII or P4 era (usually a bad Celeron). Passing the car again I was able to see two stickers: 'Intel Inside' with MMX and Windows 95! That's the kind of era that makes me happy. So I politely spoke to the guy and he was very happy for me to take it from him if I could use it.

Turns out he was in one of the biggest World of Warcraft guilds back in the day, had originally programmed on a ZX Spectrum in the '80s, and his first console was an Atari 2600. Everyone has a story of nostalgia, it seems. Haven't looked on the hard drive of this one yet but it's a proper time capsule.

IMG_20200910_123528.jpg

IMG_20200910_123552.jpg

IMG_20200910_123605.jpg

Specs are unspectacular, but classic:

Motherboard: MSI MS-5158. apparently late era socket 7 Intel TX board, PnP BIOS, UDMA/33 ATA, 2x USB + header, 2x 72 pin SIMMs (EDO & FPM), 3x SDRAM up to 256MB, 4x ISA, 4x PCI, 512KB propelling burst cache, up to 83MHz FSB and multiplier from 1.5 to 4.5 and Vcore from 2.0V to 2.8V.

CPU: Intel Pentium MMX 166MHz

RAM: what looks like very early 32MB SDRAM.

Sound Card: generic ESS 1869F chipset, providing capable SB Pro compatibility and some OPL3 extensions used by a few games.

Video: S3 ViRGE/DX by Lung Hwa with 1MB on-board.

24x CD-ROM, 230W PSU, Rockwell modem, 3.5GB Fujitsu HDD completes the specs.

This is a perfect DOS gaming PC that would benefit from wavetable audio and 3Dfx graphics upgrades. Very clean and tidy inside, surprisingly.

Not today but two days ago I found this rather nice A4Tech AM-5E serial mouse next to a dumpster. The sticker was already gone but after looking on Google I found a image of a identical mouse and tracked down some generic A4Tech mice drivers. (although CuteMouse or Amouse would also work as substitute drivers)

Initially it would not work very well, but after cleaning the rollers (which seem to be metallic..? Well that's better than most ball mice that I have seen with plastic rollers) it seems like it's working just fine, not as responsive as a good laser/optical mouse but it's still usable.

Interestingly this mouse has a switch to toggle the mouse from three-button (Mouse Systems) or two-button (Microsoft Mouse), although this switch's placement is rather inconvenient (at least from me as I'm left-handed).

Vynix wrote on 2020-12-17, 17:28:

Not today but two days ago I found this small A4Tech AM-5E serial mouse next to a dumpster. The sticker was already gone but after looking on Google I found a image of a identical mouse and tracked down some generic A4Tech mice drivers. (not that CuteMouse or Amouse would also work as substitute drivers)

Initially it would not work very well, but after cleaning the rollers it seems like it's working just fine, not as responsive as a good laser/optical mouse but it's still usable.

Interestingly this mouse has a switch to toggle the mouse from three-button (Mouse Systems) or two-button (Microsoft Mouse), although this switch's placement is rather inconvenient (at least from me as I'm left-handed).

That mouse originally came with a holder to hang on on the side of the monitor. I had one back in the day, don't know what happened to it. But I came across another one not too long ago.

Vegge wrote on 2020-12-17, 20:50:

Vynix wrote on 2020-12-17, 17:28:

Not today but two days ago I found this small A4Tech AM-5E serial mouse next to a dumpster. The sticker was already gone but after looking on Google I found a image of a identical mouse and tracked down some generic A4Tech mice drivers. (not that CuteMouse or Amouse would also work as substitute drivers)

Initially it would not work very well, but after cleaning the rollers it seems like it's working just fine, not as responsive as a good laser/optical mouse but it's still usable.

Interestingly this mouse has a switch to toggle the mouse from three-button (Mouse Systems) or two-button (Microsoft Mouse), although this switch's placement is rather inconvenient (at least from me as I'm left-handed).

That mouse originally came with a holder to hang on on the side of the monitor. I had one back in the day, don't know what happened to it. But I came across another one not too long ago.
IMG_2329s.jpg

A friend of mine had one of those, AFAICR . He liked it so much that he actually repaired it when the cord failed .

RandomStranger wrote on 2020-12-03, 09:33:

It's not really a recent find, but something I had an eye out for for a while and literally saved from a dumpster. It's an old t […]
Show full quote

It's not really a recent find, but something I had an eye out for for a while and literally saved from a dumpster.
It's an old terminal used at my workplace. It was under AC and haven't been turned on I think in the past 20+ years.
But a couple of weeks ago it's time had come to be thrown out.

It was a little dusty, so I gave it a quick cleaning. It was stored under AC which probably saved the motherboard from battery leakage. It's dead anyway so I removed it for safety. The hard drive seems to be dead, but otherwise boots up nicely. I have a 50MB Maxtor or a larger capacity, but maybe less reliable IBM WDA-L80 as a replacement.

Thinking on adding a sound card and a 5.25" disk drive. A coworker offered to sell me an Aztech Sound Galaxy BXII which should probably be a good fit.

Board is dataexpert exp3406 http://www.win3x.org/uh19/motherboard/show/5531

If you can dump this bios it'd be nice ! (If you need help, I can give you some tips)

Deksor wrote on 2020-12-18, 08:49:

RandomStranger wrote on 2020-12-03, 09:33:

It's not really a recent find, but something I had an eye out for for a while and literally saved from a dumpster. It's an old t […]
Show full quote

It's not really a recent find, but something I had an eye out for for a while and literally saved from a dumpster.
It's an old terminal used at my workplace. It was under AC and haven't been turned on I think in the past 20+ years.
But a couple of weeks ago it's time had come to be thrown out.

It was a little dusty, so I gave it a quick cleaning. It was stored under AC which probably saved the motherboard from battery leakage. It's dead anyway so I removed it for safety. The hard drive seems to be dead, but otherwise boots up nicely. I have a 50MB Maxtor or a larger capacity, but maybe less reliable IBM WDA-L80 as a replacement.

Thinking on adding a sound card and a 5.25" disk drive. A coworker offered to sell me an Aztech Sound Galaxy BXII which should probably be a good fit.

Board is dataexpert exp3406 http://www.win3x.org/uh19/motherboard/show/5531

If you can dump this bios it'd be nice ! (If you need help, I can give you some tips)

Sure, give your tips.
However I'm in the middle of moving or on a break from it because of the holidays and I left it at my new place so I probably won't do it until at least early January.