Machines in good working order are definitely overpriced on the auction sites. I haven't built up the trust to purchase "Untested - no power adapter - AS IS" listings because it is too easy to 'lose' the power cord for an unrepairable machine so you don't have to admit it isn't repairable. If the …

I have recently acquired a Datavue 25 Lunchbox PC (8088). It has no hard drive or hard drive controller and only a 360k 5.25" floppy drive, an Epson SD-521. After getting the machine working again (bought it as a derelict), I want to boot DOS. But I have no 5.25" floppy disks. The drive has a very …

I believe most modern ATX power supplies will immediately shut themselves off if they detect a short. First thing I'd do is pull out all expansion cards, disconnect hard drives and floppies, everthing. Just bare mainboard with the speaker attached so you can get a POST beep. If it still doesn't seem …

I have just acquired one of these. I bought relatively cheap as a derelict. It arrived yesterday and I got it working last night. No hard drive and only a 360k floppy drive is going to make it interesting to use.

"New" 486 arrived for my birthday yesterday. Epson ActionNote 650 (Epson branded Compal TS30A). Cyrix 486DX2-50. It fills the vacant slot in my wishlist for a 486 and is up and running with the least amount of effort of any retro PCs I've done lately.

I have not done the Dallas RTC battery modification yet as I have been able to work around the dead battery. The CMOS configuration is only 64 bytes. It turned out to be quite simple to make a Turbo C++ program to download those 64 bytes to a file after using the Compaq tool to update the …