Checked the manual for that Video 7 card (I think it's a "VEGA" card) and it says the composite output doesn't work without an add-on adapter 🙁

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

They should call those damn things Heater/Computer combo's. My single core Athlon heated up my room as much as my Core2Quad. Mak […]
Show full quote

They should call those damn things Heater/Computer combo's. My single core Athlon heated up my room as much as my Core2Quad. Make sure to reapply the thermal paste and clean them out. I once had a PC second hand with the cooling design that had which had been left on for basically 8 years straight according the HDD Smart reading and sucked in enough dust as to make the entire inside case, motherboard, and every component earth-tone (the color of dirt) with filth, you actually couldnt see chips on the motherboard or tell what color the PCB was.. It had even fowled the DVD drive bad enough it wouldnt open correctly. When i first turned it on it shot out this huge ass cloud of dust that make me choke and coated the wall in a thin layer of dust. I wish i had pictures. I don't know how that thing could suck in so much dust and still work. I remember the first time i opened the case it made me sick within 30 seconds to the point i threw up. It was basically gas attack in a box..... So on a sidenote wear something to keep that shit of your lungs.

Uses for AMD CPU's:

Processor
Heater
Cooking Device (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTtvA77AtBE)
Keychains

and to think i want to build a 1GHZ Tbird machine.

The Prescott P4's that used the same cooling design are even worse in my experience. Iv had a bunch of E310's come through my hands and they are just stupid hot. Although in Dell's defense the motherboard has a row of 8 small caps that are all blown out all over the place and the dang thing still runs without any issues 😕 basically picked these two up for the matx case. 92mm exhaust and 120mm intake over a full 6 bay HDD cage 😎

keenmaster486 wrote:

Today was an exhausting day. […]
Show full quote

Today was an exhausting day.

I made the half hour trek on foot to the recycle center again (same place I got all that XT stuff) and this time I was once again rewarded richly. I found an AT clone in a horribly bent up case (marked "goof box" for whatever reason - huh), so I removed all of the parts and ditched the case, it being too heavy to carry back anyway. There were some pretty cool parts in there, including a Seagate HDD, but I wasn't allowed to take the hard drive because "it might have user data on it". Darn, oh well. I guess I'll stick with floppies for now.

There was also a humongous AT power supply (the fans still spin up when I flip the big red switch - does this mean it will work?) and two floppy drives, one 5 1/4" and one 3 1/2".

I also found two mechanical key keyboards (woo hoo!), one of which has a switch to go between XT and AT mode, so that solves my XT keyboard problem.

Pictures:

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 that? Sorry, but I just have never learned this stuff since I've never worked with pre-Pentium stuff before.

FullSizeRender_3.jpg

Now the video card, which is very hard to find on the internet but appears to be something by "Video 7". Question: what is Video 7? Is this EGA-compatible or what? I managed to find information on those DIP-switches, and, assuming that info is correct, the card is set to EGA mode. Apparently one of those RCA connectors is for composite out and the other is for a "light pen", whatever that is.

FullSizeRender_6.jpg

And this appears to be some kind of DAC. An audio DAC? I looked up those chips and they're supposed to be 16 bit audio DACs, but this obviously isn't a 16 bit card. What on earth is this?

FullSizeRender_7.jpg

And a 16-bit I/O card. This doesn't look like standard IDE so I have no idea what it is, but at least I know how to hook floppy drives to it so I can at least boot the system if and when I get it going.

FullSizeRender_4.jpg

And finally, unrelated to all of the above stuff, is the piece de resistance. I literally dipped my hand into a box full of random cables and junk parts, and pulled out this beauty:

FullSizeRender_5.jpg

Oh yes! I've wanted one of these for so long, and now I have it. Mwa ha ha ha! This will go into my far-in-the-future planned PIII rig, if and when that happens.

All of this stuff was a royal pain in the rear to haul back up to campus. I managed to stuff as much as I could in my backpack, and put the rest in a file archive box, hauling the whole lot the whole mile and a half back, up a steep hill at the end. Good exercise though 🤣

Is this the United States or elsewhere? Normally, based on what im told, if you want to get stuff from a recycling center you either end up:

1.) Being told no
2.) Being asked to pay eBay prices or they get scrapped
3.) Finding nothing

Number one usually leads to me pulling a Robin Hood and coming back later (think dark) and grabbing shit before they drag it in if its left out to save stuff from being scrapped.

I've never tried any of the recycling centers near me but I've been told in Illinois if its at the recycling center drop off point and it hasn't been taken inside the building yet it would be perfectly legal to say, back a truck up to it and take everything. I've considered doing this once or twice. My area has a really stupid ban that made it illegal to leave PC's on the road side in my nearby college town (Carbondale, IL) that ended up drying up the flow of free PC's. Forget finding an XT, around here the oldest thing I've seen is a water damaged Athlon XP with some shitty low end ATI PCI card in it.

Well, I dunno, I've been to two recycle centers (one in southern Idaho in my hometown, and the other in Boulder, CO where I live now). Maybe I just got lucky, but at both those places they've been very nice and agreeable, and explicitly state that they're happy to see the stuff getting some use.

I forgot to mention that I paid a sum total of $15 for that lot, so they're definitely not asking eBay prices. If they had been, I'd have paid $1000 or something 🤣

Edit: P.S. Get out of my sister's bed or I'll punch your face in 🤣

keenmaster486 wrote:

Well, I dunno, I've been to two recycle centers (one in southern Idaho in my hometown, and the other in Boulder, CO where I live now). Maybe I just got lucky, but at both those places they've been very nice and agreeable, and explicitly state that they're happy to see the stuff getting some use.

I forgot to mention that I paid a sum total of $15 for that lot, so they're definitely not asking eBay prices. If they had been, I'd have paid $1000 or something 🤣

Edit: P.S. Get out of my sister's bed or I'll punch your face in 🤣

I live in a very rural area so people around here use electronics about 20 years longer than they should. My high school of 400 only got rid of there Pentium4's/Athlon64's (Hundreds of the damn things... they filled up the entire library for a school year, including the accompanying CRT's) last year. Lmao the Agriculture Teacher has a whitebox 386 lying in the floor of the Agriculture hallway (I was going to get it off him for free minus one hard drive but then i got expelled for a combination of computer related things, which you could sum up to hacking, for two years before i got a hold of it)

BTW congratz on being the first person to comment on my location joke

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

I was going to get it off him for free minus one hard drive but then i got expelled for a combination of computer related things, which you could sum up to hacking, for two years before i got a hold of it

Well that sucks. Two years? What did they think you trying to do, hack into the Pentagon and steal the nuclear codes?

This message was sucked into the void.

Hmm, sounds like the sort of thing I might have done had I been in high school 🤣
Fortunately, I was homeschooled and didn't have the chance to mess up computers that didn't belong to me.

I'm surprised I never messed up my dad's computer though, considering all the stuff I was downloading on it.

You should write the school a letter saying, "It was this easy for me to hack into your systems, so if you don't want it happening again you should get your rears in gear and be smart about things".

Wait... saw your edit. Two years is starting to sound about right from the school's perspective.

Take that 400 bucks and start a business, become rich and famous and then you can write books about how you don't need to go to high school to make it in life.

Or not. Don't necessarily take my advice 🤣

Edit: saw your new edits. Why should you bother? Why, at this point, wouldn't you just slog your way through the rest of high school, play their game for as long as it takes, and then graduate, go your way and be done with it? If you continue employing your skills in that manner you'll just get expelled again. Your parents won't let you stay with them forever, and if the cycle continues you'll end up pretty darn broke.

This message was also sucked into the void.

keenmaster486 wrote:

Edit: saw your new edits. Why should you bother? Why, at this point, wouldn't you just slog your way through the rest of high school, play their game for as long as it takes, and then graduate, go your way and be done with it? If you continue employing your skills in that manner you'll just get expelled again. Your parents won't let you stay with them forever, and if the cycle continues you'll end up pretty darn broke.

Because I am going to graduate (Im not going to get caught twice lmao) and then im going to get a grant to a technical school. You forget one mans hacker is another security expert/penetration tester. A good demonstration of my skills and MIT I'm sure would take me. 5 bucks says im talking at Defcon before I'm 30.

+1 with KeenMaster ^ heck my current school district Tech Director was "That Kid" with his friends during HS, graduated, went to college, and is now the Tech Director at our school district. He has everything locked down like Fort Knox and keeps on top of things.

ODwilly wrote:

+1 with KeenMaster ^ heck my current school district Tech Director was "That Kid" with his friends during HS, graduated, went to college, and is now the Tech Director at our school district. He has everything locked down like Fort Knox and keeps on top of things.

Lmao yeah Fort Knoxx. I highly doubt he would keep me out. 🤣

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

ODwilly wrote:

+1 with KeenMaster ^ heck my current school district Tech Director was "That Kid" with his friends during HS, graduated, went to college, and is now the Tech Director at our school district. He has everything locked down like Fort Knox and keeps on top of things.

Lmao yeah Fort Knoxx. I highly doubt he would keep me out. 🤣

Heh, maybe. Id actually be interested to see. He is the kinda guy that got me into computing in general. Easy to talk to, informative, and been keeping in constant touch with tech since school 😀 also super laid back. Even hosted an ultra "secret" Minecaft server for the local homeschool kids to have fun on.

Lmao, our tech guy is as technically proficient as a sack of bricks. It took him 5-10 minutes just to figure out a web shortcut on the desktop wasn't working because it had HTTPS twice. Oh yeah and the time he accidentally displayed the password for the grades site on the projector.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Lmao, our tech guy is as technically proficient as a sack of bricks. It took him 5-10 minutes just to figure out a web shortcut on the desktop wasn't working because it had HTTPS twice. Oh yeah and the time he accidentally displayed the password for the grades site on the projector.

OMG ya sadly it seems like idiots like that are prevalent in this field. I mean, im an amateur novice with mostly unrelated primary interests. Yet I know more than some "techs" (our local internet provider for example, how hard is it to identify a bad DSL cable?}

ODwilly wrote:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Lmao, our tech guy is as technically proficient as a sack of bricks. It took him 5-10 minutes just to figure out a web shortcut on the desktop wasn't working because it had HTTPS twice. Oh yeah and the time he accidentally displayed the password for the grades site on the projector.

OMG ya sadly it seems like idiots like that are prevalent in this field. I mean, im an amateur novice with mostly unrelated primary interests. Yet I know more than some "techs" (our local internet provider for example, how hard is it to identify a bad DSL cable?}

And what's funny is its a field where you would expect to find smart people....

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Ok, so my school uses a really stupid format for logins (and this is a Windows 7 Pro Network) […]
Show full quote

Ok, so my school uses a really stupid format for logins (and this is a Windows 7 Pro Network)

Username: [Firstinitial][last name][graduation year]
Password: AJ[student ID][graduation year]

Example: assuming John Doe, set to graduate in 2018

Username: JDoe18
Password: AJ123418

So basically if you have First Name + Last Name +
Graduation year + student iD you could get into someone else's saved computer work on the server and say delete all there work, plant porn, computer viruses (half the computers they let the AV software licenses lapse on so I copied crypto shit and stuff), programs, get on websites you shouldn't etc all under other peoples names and them get in trouble instead of you.

How do you get all required info easily:

Sounds like they are mostly going to get p0wned big time in the future when a real hacker discovers this, especially if the rest of their 'security' is of equal 'quality'. Often such basic information is available on school websites right in the open. If they kept the same unbelievably dumb password policy despite it being misused internally already (and punishing people who point it out), they are just asking for it.

Fixed, easily guessed passwords in this day and age = digital Darwin Award candidate.

A pretty typical Slot 1 Pentium II board.

John Carmack (presumably) paid many thousands of dollars for a 28", 1080p, 16x9 CRT monitor back in 1995. I just got one for free.

Before:

[edit: photob*ck^t hotlink removed, because they suck]

After:

[edit: photob*ck^t hotlink removed, because they suck]

Okay, so John's was 1080p and mine is 1080i but that's just details. 😉 This thing is amazing, the color depth is something else and even SD output on S-Video is rendered beautifully without interlace (it also runs 540p.) The DVI port for the PC into is nice too. It's not a precision CAD display but for gaming it's brilliant.

[edit: photob*ck^t hotlink removed, because they suck]

^^ this pic isn't even representative, the colours & the blacks are even better in person. But it gives the idea.

I should have measured before I picked it up, it almost didn't fit in my cabinet. I had to raise the CD shelf up a little. But planning things out isn't any fun. 😁

xjas wrote:

John Carmack (presumably) paid many thousands of dollars for a 28", 1080p, 16x9 CRT monitor back in 1995. I just got one for free.

If only you found the beast Carmack was using using. 😀 I had a 20" 4:3 in 96 and didn't even know that there were 16:9 CRTs on the market at that time.

I had a Sony 16:9 CRT TV more than 10 years back and it had an awesome picture. Sadly it died on me.