Thanks, I might try that! This board is quite unstable unfortunately, and the onboard video flickers (on two LCD screens I tried it on). I put it aside right next to the recycle bin, but maybe I will need to give it another chance :) You may wanna check for bad solder joints or bad capacitors, I …

The Packard Bell was also a bit uninpressive, the motherboard was a MSI MS6147 with onboard ATi Rage (Pro?) and Creative sound chip and a Pentium II Slot 1 350MHz. They did some sort of 'upgrade' with a PCI SiS 305 based PCI video card. http://i.imgur.com/4NC2WzQl.jpg?1 I used the same motherboard …

Here's the archive I used when I rescued the same motherboard from the trash. There's a bit of documentation, some advices for upgrading to a K6-2 and a couple of BIOS dumps. I hope that helps 😊.

I did plenty of pretty bad screw ups with old hardware, mostly when I was a kid, so a few friends of my parents gave me old computers and some hardware instead of seeing me damaging the familly computer :D. Dropping HDDs on the floor, about 10 killed HDDs in 15 years, surprisingly, a 250MB Seagate …

I saw this NIB Hercules card on eBay and threw in the minimum bid of $5. No one else bid, and I ended up winning. I don't read German, but as far as I can tell, this is a proprietary EGA-like card that needs to be specifically supported by applications. I don't have an EGA monitor or cable, so I …

Hi, Most likely, there's a switch under the sticker. This was quite common for AT and early ATX PSUs. The only way to be sure about it is to open the PSU and check its layout between the bridge rectifier and the switching transistors. If there's only a couple of capacitors, then, there's no PFC. But …

I also had some trouble running DOS on laptops newer than 2000. Most of that was due to the APM and ACPI power management, or the multiple outputs display. On my Toshiba laptops, there was a TSR program required for running DOS (and also installing Windows). I also tried an HP laptop that would …

Video will be 13w3 connector and possibly require sync on green compatible display 13W3 cables are quite a mess, not all of them have the same pinouts and the same signals wired. I've built a 13W3 -> VGA cable for a Sun Ultra1 station, after some trial and error (FIY, the TurboGX and a couple of …

I had a look at my MSI 6147 (ATX, Slot 1, BX, 1 ISA), the -5V rail is wired directly from the ATX connector to the ISA slot. There is no reg in case of a missing -5V rail (that was out of the current ATX specs). But I had a look at an older machine (Compaq Deskpro 386s), the proprietary PSU does not …

The mainboard. The CPU is an Intel 286 8 MHz. I also see an Intel 80287 coprocessor. Can somebody identify this for me? How much memory does it have (I assume the standard 640K, but you never know) and how do I upgrade it with more? For instance, if I want XMS or EMS, is there an add-on card for …

My first RTC battery mod :) http://i.imgur.com/PIccevAl.jpg I also did the same the day before, but with a saw and a file. I didn't took pictures this time, but I have some from a more uncommon RTC/NVRAM chip from ST (mainly found in Sun SPARC stations): http://reho.st/monorailc.at/data/oldies/sun_ …