Edit: apparently Photobucket is being a butt. You can view all the photos that go with this post --> here <-- for now.
It’s waste disposal time on my campus and that means there’s quality goods to be had. Now granted, this is a university office so most of what gets tossed is pretty boring. Corporate-grade Dell workstations, dead LCD monitors, etc. However sometimes you get lucky. Last year I scored a fully-kitted out Tandy TRS-80 model 100 with a ton of accessories. The year before that, two loaded G5 towers.
This time around -
First up: a pair of laptops! These were right at the top of the pile & I also left them for several days to see if anyone else was going to grab them. No one did, so mine.
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The Thinkpad is kind of neat, it’s a Celeron 433 with 64MB of RAM, an ATI Rage Mobility and ESS sound chip (not sure if it’s one of the DOS-compatible ones yet.) Big, bright TFT screen. Unfortunately it got a bit butchered by whoever took the hard drive out, they went at it HARD trying to find it rather than taking 10 seconds to look up which two screws to undo to get it out. They even pulled the front panel LCD/play/volume controls off (why?) and cut the ribbon cable (WHY??) It is complete though, except for the HDD caddy, and is otherwise really clean, so I’m thinking I’ll try to restore this one.
The Dell on the right is a score; it’s a Pentium-M @ 1.5 GHz with 768MB of RAM and a full complement of serial & parallel ports (and a dock connector; I have at least two docks that will work with this already.) More importantly it has a fantastic crisp 1400x1050 display and a 64MB (dedicated!) Radeon 9000 chip to drive it. Absolutely nothing wrong with it, even still had the HDD (wiped.) Came with three batteries, at least one of which works well enough to get through an ENTIRE Bodhi Linux install from DVD, although it got kind of hot while charging.
I’m just gonna keep this one at my office and use it for work when I need to get away from the desk. 1400x1050 is a great resolution on such a compact laptop, it’s a huge amount of screen real-estate and feels liberating to work in when you’re used to 1280x800.
I also grabbed this early HDD-based MP3 player (no charger unfortunately) and a USB TV tuner stick (good for old consoles using RF.) The MP3 player is SOLID, all metal construction & really high-quality materials. It feels like a high-end minidisc walkman rather than some cheap plasticky thing. Interested to get that one working.
Digging deeper into the boxes, underneath all the PS/2 keyboards & dead wired routers is when the real fun stuff started to emerge. Components!
First up is this dirty-but-complete 440BX board which has 4 IDE ports for some reason (8 devices!) Looked fine aside from the dust bunnies, no bulging caps or anything. Get.
Came with a PIII/700 under that grime-cake heat sink.
A few PCI Sound Blasters that I don’t really need, another video capture card, a PCIe Radeon HD3850 (might be fun to compare to my AGP one) and a GeForce 4 Ti4600 with a magnificent hack-job of an aftermarket cooler install.
Seriously, when you have to use a piece of cardboard and twist-ties to keep something high-tech going and you know it’s hacky but damn it, you’re gonna do it anyway because you KNOW you can FIX it that way, I applaud you.
Also found one of those USB->DVI display extender things and a dirty but OK-looking 600MHz Cyrix III.
You know the Cyrix is gonna end up in that BX board, because P3s are boring.
And then there’s this absolutely disgustingly filthy Kinesis Classic key…board…thing. I had to look this up. I don’t know if it’s sought-after or rare enough to warrant restoring, but I might give it a go anyway. It does seem to work (and yes, I did type on it with my bare hands, haha.) These actually have Cherry MX switches in them so I’m sure some keyboard snob out there thinks it’s the cat’s meow. Or the dog’s bollocks. Or whatever.
It’s sadly not a DataHands DH200 but it’s the closest I’m likely to find in a random local junk pile, so there’s that. 😜
All in all, a great haul! I’m sure more stuff is going to get put out before they recycle the lot, but I’ve got enough to play with for now. The Dell Inspiron will be immediately useful & stuff like the BX board and video cards are always nice to have around for spares. It took a bit of digging to get everything interesting out and not leave a mess, but it was worth the effort.
...there was also half a Quake III cookie tin. For some reason. I wish the other half had been there.
Edit: apparently Photobucket is being a butt. You can view all the photos that go with this post --> here <-- for now.
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Oh yeah, I forgot. There was also this.
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WELL THEN. At least one of you noticed something sneaky I put in the pic of the Core 2 Quad I bought on the same day. Here it is. Yes, it’s a real goddamn Gravis Ultrasound MAX. It was buried in a random box of junk being thrown away. In an office. In an office where the oldest PCs still lying around are Pentium 4s & Core 2 Duos. I don’t even. I DON’T even.
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I pretty much made this noise when I found it.
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It’s even been expanded to 1MB. Haven’t tested it yet but it looks fine. I’m really hoping it works. This is actually my first GF1-based card ever, I’ve had a bunch of PnPs though. This will go in my 386 alongside the ATI Stereo FX/CD in there for ultimate red-PCB ‘90s sound goodness. I really need to do a thread on that thing.
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Speaking of red PCBs… I always found Gravis’s reds to be exceptionally pretty. There’s something about the design & deep cherry color of these that is just stunning to me. Same goes for the GUS PnP. I left this pic huge so you can click through and bask in it. 😜
