Cleaned out the HP Pavilion 7955 that had seen better days inside and out: dust and cat hair everywhere, put on new thermal grease on the CPU, installed the GeForce 6200 card, an additional 256MB SD-RAM, pushed the power button after hooking up the keyboard and mouse combo, and it booted into Windows XP Home Edition with SP2, and the last time it was used was back in early November of 2014.

Has personal data on it, so recovering the drive won't be a challenge, but I don't have any spare Ethernet cables or wireless cards. Should I still stick with XP? It'll also be used as a video editing computer since I believe it comes with special software.

bjwil1991 wrote:

Cleaned out the HP Pavilion 7955 that had seen better days inside and out: dust and cat hair everywhere, put on new thermal grease on the CPU, installed the GeForce 6200 card, an additional 256MB SD-RAM, pushed the power button after hooking up the keyboard and mouse combo, and it booted into Windows XP Home Edition with SP2, and the last time it was used was back in early November of 2014.

Has personal data on it, so recovering the drive won't be a challenge, but I don't have any spare Ethernet cables or wireless cards. Should I still stick with XP? It'll also be used as a video editing computer since I believe it comes with special software.

So, the mandated question: how much of that personal data was porno?

Finally salvaged my mother's old Pentium 4 PC, which had been sitting under her desk gathering dust for the past 3+ years. Needed a good cleaning out, which I promptly did, but is otherwise still working as fine as it was when last used.

It was a PC I built back in 2009, with parts salvaged from an earlier 2007 build whose PSU, HDD & Motherboard self destructed with a loud bang at some point in 2008. Wasn't exactly a "new" build even in 2007, done on the cheap with older parts (opting for Socket 478 over the newer 775) and purely also because I just fancied adding a Pentium 4 system to my collection, even though it was much reviled.

Spec:
ASRock P4i65G, Socket 478 Motherboard
Intel Pentium 4 HT 3.0E, 3.0GHz
1GB PC3200 DDR RAM
20GB IDE HDD
Nvidia GeForce FX 5700VE 256MB AGP Graphics Card
C-Media CMI9761 Onboard 5.1 Sound
RealTek RTL-8139 Onboard 10/100Mbps Ethernet Adapter

Currently running: Windows 7

This PC was originally built as a home server and then rebuilt in 2009 as a simple office pc, so not exactly well specced for any kind of gaming. Not sure what I'll do with this at present, but I'll probably start by changing the OS to XP and upping the RAM, as well as potentially looking at a different graphics card as I think I have a couple in storage that would outperform the 5700.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

bjwil1991 wrote:

Cleaned out the HP Pavilion 7955 that had seen better days inside and out: dust and cat hair everywhere, put on new thermal grease on the CPU, installed the GeForce 6200 card, an additional 256MB SD-RAM, pushed the power button after hooking up the keyboard and mouse combo, and it booted into Windows XP Home Edition with SP2, and the last time it was used was back in early November of 2014.

Has personal data on it, so recovering the drive won't be a challenge, but I don't have any spare Ethernet cables or wireless cards. Should I still stick with XP? It'll also be used as a video editing computer since I believe it comes with special software.

So, the mandated question: how much of that personal data was porno?

None of it was disturbing photos. It was a family computer (photos and stuff).

Repaired a "broken" IBM 300PL. The device didn't start, and the root cause turned to be the microswitch popped out of its socket, so that the power button rod couldn't press it 😀
Opened a broken C64 "pedal" power supply and soldered some cold joints.

luckybob wrote:

Testing the Apple IIe parts I got last month...

Found 2x speech synth cards for said Apples. Dicking around ensued: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvOB9n_kgeI

If you're too young to get it... http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/all-your-base-are-belong-to-us

I like the version with a heavy beat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-41ve90rks8

Finally fixed my EGA CRT 😁

The green died after a first inspection/repair to replace some old cheap chinese caps.

Then I did spot this :
Two joint solder points ...
After separating them, this is what the CRT displays ^^

Finally the colors are back 😁

However now that the electronics of that CRT are fixed, now I can see some picture defects :

The left has a red-ish tint and the right is slightly incurved towards the center of the screen. I guess I'll have to play with the magnets on the back of the CRT ...

not only that, but all the text is garbled.

Nah that's just French language photographied by a potato camera from a chinese phone

Nice, Deksor. Recapping arcade monitor PCBs always brought a lot of satisfaction for me back when I owned machines.

Hopefully purity and convergence adjustments are minor if needed.

I found a little metal swing arm in the trash so now I don't have to lug the hot air rework station out of storage. It just hangs next to my bench. 🤣

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsa … ed/IMG_8978.jpg

Now I can resume harvesting various types of memory of junk cards! 😈

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsa … ed/IMG_8982.jpg

Found an old case beyond repair a while ago. The mobo mounting sheet was just slightly damaged, so decided to keep it and make a simple test bench of it.

Just cut away the damaged parts and sanded down sharp edges. Here's the result:

The power- and reset switches from the case were broken, but had kept some really cool A-bomb launching button style switches from an old radar control panel we scrapped at work a while ago. I do love those lids 😁 Printed custom power and reset decals. Soldered on the cables from the case, and built them into a small enclosure. The LED to the left of the switches is the HDD activity one. Should also try to find a small PC speaker to put in the enclosure:

Also modded one of the telephone socket bulbs found inside the switches, replaced the bulb with a suitable LED:

Didn't end up all too shabby if I may say so myself. Perhaps I'll expand the project to building an extremely compact ATX case around it at some point 😀

Most amazing test bench I've seen bar none.

kaputnik wrote:

Found an old case beyond repair a while ago. The mobo mounting sheet was just slightly damaged, so decided to keep it and make a […]
Show full quote

Found an old case beyond repair a while ago. The mobo mounting sheet was just slightly damaged, so decided to keep it and make a simple test bench of it.

Just cut away the damaged parts and sanded down sharp edges. Here's the result:
<snip>

The power- and reset switches from the case were broken, but had kept some really cool A-bomb launching button style switches from an old radar control panel we scrapped at work a while ago. I do love those lids 😁 Printed custom power and reset decals. Soldered on the cables from the case, and built them into a small enclosure. The LED to the left of the switches is the HDD activity one. Should also try to find a small PC speaker to put in the enclosure:
<snip>

Also modded one of the telephone socket bulbs found inside the switches, replaced the bulb with a suitable LED:
<snip>

Didn't end up all too shabby if I may say so myself. Perhaps I'll expand the project to building an extremely compact ATX case around it at some point 😀

Nice work! That looks great! I want to build one myself too, just waiting for a suitable donor case. I would like a two-story design, with PSU(s?) and FDD/optical drive underneath.

Just finished putting my time machine together. Case arrived today and is brand new. Will do a new thread in show your systems. Really pleased with this build.

Specs as follows

AMD K3 III+ 450 @ 550mhz
128mb Ram
Gigabyte GA-5AX Rev 4.1 Motherboard
3DFX Voodoo 3 3000 16mb
Sound Blaster 16 CT2230
Music Quest MPU401 Card
Pioneer Slot Loader DVD Drive
WB 80gig Hard Disk
Roland MT-32
Roland Sound Canvas SC 155
Korg NS5R

that is one slick machine.

That case looks familiar, like one of the 2nd tier manufacturers used it, like Elonex or Viglen or someone.

Got an AMD K6-2 400 in the mail, and when I took the heat sink off of my 300 to replace it, what did I see, but 500 engraved on it. Money wasted, as I only have one Socket 7 board, my first computer. The board (Biostar M5ATB) seems to only support up to 450 without causing chaos on the PCI bus, so this is borderline Gift of the Magi. Ordered some more RAM for it, but I have no idea what else to do with it, since I don't really play games anymore, and I've already made icons that will work in Win9X and 2K+, although that was over a decade ago.

Did some work on the Toshiba Satellite Pro 430CDT today.

Wiped the failing Win98 install. The floppy drive is super picky with disks - as in I've got one so far it'll reliably read. Still, that was enough to get data to it.
Installed Win95C, set up the video driver, set up the DOS configuration, installed a couple of DOS games. The ESS688+OPL3 setup works really well for DOS games so far.

So far, it works great. The CD drive reads burned discs, it's got a likely upgraded 6 GB hard drive and 32MB of RAM. The pointing stick is missing it's rubber and the left-click button is pretty mangled, but they both work. The battery was removed, and I also removed the Resume battery as it was leaking. Haven't tested all the ports just yet, but that will come in time.

Picture below - I still have some cleaning to do, but this is how it currently stands.

Finished my "Project Red" retro gaming PC based on RetroArch on old server hardware today. Took me ages, since neither WinXP, nor Win7 32/64 bit, nor Win10 worked well with RetroArch (either it didn't start at all, or N64 crashed with every game). Now it's running with Zorin OS 12.2 and works flawlessly. 😀