Lukeno94 wrote:

Well, I've ordered a pair of Celeron M 370-powered Advent 7094 laptops which need work - it cost me £15.50, and both at least power on, and have good screens. Should be a fun project. (Does these count as retro?)

Depends on what era you consider "retro", the Celeron M 370 is from '2004... I don't consider anything after the year 2000 as retro [yet], but thats my opinion on what I feel is retro.

Now as for what you ordered, great price! What are you planning to do with them? 😁

Lukeno94 wrote:

I've never had anything beyond a 10k RPM in my possession, and I've only ever run up to 7.2k RPM drives in my systems so far. SSDs have all but taken out the market for high-RPM drives now (well, those and hybrid drives.)

Except of course that the hardware-raid-controller-capable enterprise SSD's are expensive as heck still (consumer-tier SSD's usually fail fast in hardware-raid, if they work at all, or flat out don't even function at all in hardware-raid), and 15k mechanical drives are dirt cheap today, and all designed exclusively for hardware-raid systems. This is kinda getting off topic though.. so we shoulda kinda probably stop this here.

PhaytalError wrote:

Lukeno94 wrote:

Well, I've ordered a pair of Celeron M 370-powered Advent 7094 laptops which need work - it cost me £15.50, and both at least power on, and have good screens. Should be a fun project. (Does these count as retro?)

Depends on what era you consider "retro", the Celeron M 370 is from '2004... I don't consider anything after the year 2000 as retro [yet], but thats my opinion on what I feel is retro.

Now as for what you ordered, great price! What are you planning to do with them? 😁

One of them is definitely getting restored to its former "glory", as it seems like there's very little wrong with it (cosmetically, there's a missing WLAN card door, and one missing key), and it will be used for some of my older games (it's got the proper 1024x768 resolution that they often run/look best in.) The other one seems to be just as functional (with a better CMOS battery), but needs a lot more work (pretty much a full keyboard, it looks like the hinge is bust and there's a few more covers missing). However, both machines power on/POST, both have good screens, and both still have XP COAs on them - hence why I opted for these machines. As to what I do with the second machine, it all depends on the state of that hinge, and if it is easily/cheaply fixable. There don't seem to be many of these Advents, or the ECS 321 stablemate, left - I saw one other on eBay when I ordered my two. I won't get them for a while (sent them to Uni, and it's a couple of weeks before I go back) - but I will post updates in a build thread or something. 😀

Picked up some PPC G5 Macs, a Dual 1.8GHz PowerMac, and a 2GHz 20" iMac. The PowerMac was sold with a note saying "intermittently powers off", and when I got it open, it was obvious why. The CPU modules weren't fastened properly. Screwed them down, added a HDD, installed Tiger (while I find a copy of Leopard), works a treat. The iMac just needed the HDD replaced. Easy.

Also a SunFire V100 1RU server, my first UltraSPARC system. Finally an excuse to play with OpenSolaris.

SquallStrife wrote:

Also a SunFire V100 1RU server, my first UltraSPARC system. Finally an excuse to play with OpenSolaris. […]
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Also a SunFire V100 1RU server, my first UltraSPARC system. Finally an excuse to play with OpenSolaris.

Funny you post this.. I just picked up a V100 myself locally in Texas yesterday for $12.51 from a thrift store. I'm planning to try and put Debian-Sparc on mine though and use it for a light duty linux server. I did some research and they can actually handle up to 4GB ram and 2 x 120GB PATA/EIDE drives. Mine came with just 1GB ram and a single 40GB 7200 rpm hard drive, and I was mostly shocked to see it only pulling 39 watts @ outlet @ USA-120vAC. Sun servers apparently are pretty darn nice in power usage!

Got the iMac up and running!

SquallStrife wrote:

Got the iMac up and running!

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Nothing beats a quick-and-easy fix!

OpenSolaris , Debian, why not directly Solaris 11 for sparc it's a very fine OS. beware you'll have to use the ILO through a RJ45 or a serial connector.

vmunix wrote:

OpenSolaris , Debian, why not directly Solaris 11 for sparc it's a very fine OS. beware you'll have to use the ILO through a RJ45 or a serial connector.

I got Solaris 10 installed last night. Not Solaris 11 though, I tried it and got a "This version of Solaris wont run on this CPU" message.

We replaced a Sun V120 at work (which I think is the same CPU as a V100) as it wouldn't run Solaris 11. We ended up going with an IBM Power7 as Oracle were absolutely awful to deal with and more expensive.

According to Wikipedia, the V120 is indeed using the same CPU as the V100, and seems to be essentially a SCSI version of it.

No really that retro,as both these are around 2006 vintage but a real bargain:
Microstar MSI MS-7188 SKT 939 motherboard with AMD Athlon 64 3200+ and Heatsink and Fan.
Elitegroup ECS RC 410-M Rev 1.03 motherboard with Celeron D 3.2 gig and heatsink and Fan.
2x Hynix 512mb DDR2 PC2 4200 dimms.

Tested it all already and it all works, whole lot cost me £6, well worth getting up early this morning 😀
I already pulled the Celly D and replaced it with a Pentium D 930 I already had, ready for a bit of dual core Netburst action!

£6 for that lot is great value. And with a Pentium D fitted, you no longer need a kettle!

Picked up a boxed stb voodoo2 for $5. The box says its a 12 Mb card but its lacking any chips on the back so I'm thinking its actually an 8mb card.

I have two 12mb cards; 3dfx and Diamond. One has chips on the front and back, the other front only. I think it's just a question of when it was made.

soviet conscript wrote:

Picked up a boxed stb voodoo2 for $5. The box says its a 12 Mb card but its lacking any chips on the back so I'm thinking its actually an 8mb card.

Most likely those are higher density chips than those used on older 12MB Cards.

that would be great. I was under the impression it had to have chips on the back as well to be the higher ram version. I'll test it later. hopefully it is 12mb then I can sli it with my other stb voodoo and not have to play with mismatched type drivers.

I bought another MPU-401 boxed today. 😀

m1919 wrote:

soviet conscript wrote:

Picked up a boxed stb voodoo2 for $5. The box says its a 12 Mb card but its lacking any chips on the back so I'm thinking its actually an 8mb card.

Most likely those are higher density chips than those used on older 12MB Cards.

hmm, does the ram speed mean anything. my older stb v2 with chips on the back are marked 100mhz, this newer card has 90mhz on the chips

Most likely the performance will be affected slightly. Probably not worth the risk in overclocking the memory to 100mhz though.