luckybob wrote:

My fans are near silent 90%.....

Not much mail. ay?? 😁 😉

brostenen wrote:

luckybob wrote:

My fans are near silent 90%.....

Not much mail. ay?? 😁 😉

Maybe he simply doesn't have any decent stuff anyone wants from him for cheaps 😢 😜

Im confused. Whats going on?

Tetrium wrote:

brostenen wrote:

luckybob wrote:

My fans are near silent 90%.....

Not much mail. ay?? 😁 😉

Maybe he simply doesn't have any decent stuff anyone wants from him for cheaps 😢 😜

Naa.... It was only a wordplay. Nothing else.
You know... Fans like in fan of someone when you spoke of cooling fans.... 😉

Just bought a card that I never thought I would never get to own, Quadro FX 4700 X2 for a meager $48.01 shipped. Basically a Quadro version of the 9800 GX2 in the older 7950 GX2 style with twice the vram and the next cheapest one atm is $459.95!

luckybob wrote:

My fans are near silent 90%.....

you... kill your fans?? is that it?

Hmmm....
Seems as if the cards I recieved has some wierd issues. The ALS100 card will not work with DMA8 and sometimes the software can not find the chip. And the Mozart card works, though it can not output FM on the right channel. Dang..... 🙁

EDIT....
Seems as if the ALS100/dreamchip card (yes, it has an awesomme kickass midi part), is working after all.
This card DOES NOT like an Asus P2B-S board with 512mb ram and an P-II-350.
As soon as it is running on a 486dx2-66 system, it has no issues at all.

The "dream" chip has somewhat the same name as the one on a Dreamblaster-S1.
Could this be an early MIDI chip from the same company? Hmmmm.... Wondering.

Though the OPL implementation is like the worst I have ever heard. It makes an Vibra16XV sound like heaven.
(Allmost. Just kidding. They sound equally bad)

Just bought an IBM Thinkpad T21 & power source for 25€. It has P3 850MHz, 512mb RAM and 20gb HDD. BIOS battery is dead but that'll be somewhat easy to replace (I already ordered a new one from ebay). I'm pretty excited, this is one of the last Thinkpads (T23 would be last) with natively DOS compatible Sound Blaster clone card integrated (Crystal CS4624 chip). Laptop has a Win2000 Pro serial label underneath but this machine screams Win98SE to me...

I just love old IBM laptops from 386 to P3 era. To me there's something magical about them.

mrau wrote:

luckybob wrote:

My fans are near silent 90%.....

you... kill your fans?? is that it?

Wouldn't want to be in his fanclub 🙁
Makes my head spin 😵

Tetrium wrote:

mrau wrote:

luckybob wrote:

My fans are near silent 90%.....

you... kill your fans?? is that it?

Wouldn't want to be in his fanclub 🙁
Makes my head spin 😵

I think it is Fan'tastic. That I don't know what I am part of here. 😳

brostenen wrote:

I think it is Fan'tastic. That I don't know what I am part of here. 😳

the fan part, of course

Sorry to interrupt you but when a funny joke is repeated several times it becomes less funny. Maybe we could just end this derailing? 😉

brostenen wrote:

I think it is Fan'tastic. That I don't know what I am part of here. 😳

I wouldn't worry. It's just a bunch of hot air blown around. 🤣

So.. these brand new parts.. but they are clones of retro gear, so I guess it qualifies to go here. These are MIF-IPC-B clones from Lo-tech.co.uk. I received all of the parts to build two of them from Mouser a few days ago, and the boards showed up today. Unfortunately, I forgot I ordered three boards.. but only two sets of parts. I guess next time I make an order from Mouser, I will get another set of ICs..

All assembled. Now, I just need to find a backplate that will work.. and a male-to-male DB-25 cable to connect it to my MPU-401.

Received a Thinkpad 770Z http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:770Z from ebay. It was advertised as "for parts" in unknown condition, with a mention that it came from an estate sale and condition was unknown. A bit of a risk, but for $30 shipped I took the plunge.

Plugged a power adapter in it, turned on, it gave me error 0161 and 0163. A bit of googling indicated that the likely problem was a dead CMOS battery. I located it, fortunately it's a standard CR2032 of which I have loads. The battery read 0.22V on a digital voltmeter. So I replaced it, and.. still errors 0161 and 0163 at the first boot; entered setup, set date and time, rebooted... now no errors.

I can't test it any further right now, it has no HDD and I don't have on hand any HDDs from that era (but I do have a couple on the way, probably here on Monday or so). It has no floppy drive either, but I just got one from ebay for $6, probably it will get here sometime next week.

The battery is dead, reads 0% on the small LCD after being plugged in for a full hour. Not unexpected.

All in all, not a bad haul. I have high hopes for making it a viable DOS/Win98 working machine.

(edit) Hmm, the mystery deepens. The laptop as advertised didn't have a HDD. I checked the HDD slot, and it's indeed empty. At boot, the first thing it does is pop out the CD tray if it's closed. To test if it works, I popped in the CD drive a bootable CD, whatever I could find fast (an old Ubuntu installation disk). And, lo and behold, it boots, But not the Ubuntu that I put in the drive. Instead it presents me with the boot menu of Windows NT 4. 😀 I let it boot that, and it seems that it does have a full installation of NT4 SP4 on a 2GB drive labeled C: (seems like a pretty fresh and unused install, quite vanilla except for a few utilities like Norton AV and a few games - Harry Potter and a few card games).

I don't know what this drive C: is. The HDD slot is like I said empty, and as far as I know this model of laptop has only 1 hard disk slot. maybe an internal flash drive somewhere? But given the age of the laptop it would be very unusual. Also, it will not boot without a CD in the drive, but then it doesn't boot the CD. Despite the fact that in setup the boot order is floppy, CD, HDD.

Oh, it has 256MB RAM. And I found a 3COM network card in one of the PCMCIA slots - without its dongle sadly. But I have a few other PCMCIA LAN cards if I ever need one.
(edit2) The network card in fact doesn't need a dongle, it's a 3C575 with Xjack connector. The Xjack pins are pretty badly bent, but may be salvageable with a bit of elbow grease.

Seems like I have a lot to learn about this system. BTW, the computer's name as shown in System is PLAYTHING. 😁

I started my hardware collection today, with a Sound Blaster WavEffects and a Trident TVGA 8900C from the back of some PC store for $5 each. He has a box of untested old parts, I will return next week and see if I can convince him to sell me the whole lot. Once I scrap together enough for a whole computer this will be the first DOS computer I've used since elementary school so I'm pretty excited 😊

The Trident is a little beat up, but for whatever reason he still tests this old stuff and assured me it still worked. The other looks likes it's never been used.

Welcome to the fold! 😎

Artex wrote:

Welcome to the fold! 😎

I think the term your looking for is "the dark side"

Kjoygray75 wrote:

I started my hardware collection today,

I hope you have a lot of space! Once you start, it's hard to stop. Welcome 😀

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Artex wrote:

Welcome to the fold! 😎

I think the term your looking for is "the dark side"

This! Yes. 100%