VOGONS


Bought these (retro) hardware today

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Reply 31080 of 52362, by appiah4

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Grabbed a SB 16 Vibra CT2960 for $7 (Seller's photo). I already had one of these in stock, but I like collecting Sound Blaster cards and SB16s are usually easy to sell or trade off so why not.. I can trade it away for a more interesting ISA card for someone really crazy about having an SB16.

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Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.

Reply 31081 of 52362, by Shagittarius

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Picked up another 9800 Pro today for about 60 plus shipping. Am I the only one that thinks these cards are currently undervalued? What is arguably the best card for Win98SE seems to go for a reasonable price. I just wanted to have a backup in case the one I have now fails in the future.

Reply 31082 of 52362, by GigAHerZ

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HanJammer wrote:
IMG_20191107_170030.jpg

Woah! When i was a kid, our first pentium machine with windows 95 came in this case!

It was Pentium 100MHz, 16MB ram, 850MB hdd.

"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - And i intend to get every last bit out of it even after loading every damn driver!

Reply 31083 of 52362, by blurks

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Shagittarius wrote:

Picked up another 9800 Pro today for about 60 plus shipping. Am I the only one that thinks these cards are currently undervalued? What is arguably the best card for Win98SE seems to go for a reasonable price. I just wanted to have a backup in case the one I have now fails in the future.

I find them properly priced especially considering how delicate they are. It seems half of the survivors are plain dead (just like nVidia's FX5800/5900/5950 lineup) and the rest tends to die quickly while back in use.

The reason, why these cards don't fetch hundreds of bucks is simple: they were sold competitively when entering the market. I believe they started around 399 in Europe and sold like CRAZY. Try finding a reasonably priced 5800 Ultra or a 5950 Ultra nowadays. Not gonna happen, they are a little more rare and sellers know that.

Reply 31084 of 52362, by wiretap

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Decent prices on the FX 5950 Ultra come up every now and again -- here's when I picked up mine several months back. Gatta use those search alerts. 🤣

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Reply 31086 of 52362, by mrgreen

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I've just bought a Creative 3D Blaster Banshee CT 6750, but my near-vintage PC does not support it (no AGP 3,3v support). So I should get a new vintage PC 😀

CT6750-2.png

My first PC had Windows 98 os.

Reply 31087 of 52362, by bmwsvsu

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bjwil1991 wrote:

I have the 380D that is almost similar to the 385D in terms of hardware, or maybe everything's the same. Really nice condition, except for a couple of small marks that are barely visible, DSTN display, and I need to reassemble it as I was cleaning it out of dust and other things. The battery will be under the memory door compartment and might be a CR1220 battery, which can be found at some spots, like Kroger, CVS, Walgreens, or whichever you have in your area. Good candidate to use it as a DOS gaming DOS machine as the sound card is compatible with DOS games (Cirrus Logic audio chip), except I use an external display as the DSTN display is crap when playing games. If I can find a TFT active display assembly for cheap, I will install it immediately before reassembling it as I already have it disassembled ATM. Why I disassembled it was to test the CD drive to see if it'll work in my Toshiba Satellite Pro 410CDT, but there was no leg room to insert the drive. Ah well.

Browsing through the specs, it looks like the only difference between the 380 and 385 line is that the 385 has twice the hard disk size (2gb instead of 1gb). I'll probably put Windows 95 on mine (if it isn't already, I did find the CMOS battery, now I just have to go buy one), so I might also upgrade the ram from the 16 that's in it to the max of 64 (which, is there is also 16 onboard? I see the spec shows a max of 80, so 64+16?)

Reply 31088 of 52362, by bmwsvsu

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wiretap wrote:

Decent prices on the FX 5950 Ultra come up every now and again -- here's when I picked up mine several months back. Gatta use those search alerts. 🤣

I'm tempted to experiment with a Quadro FX 1300 in a PCI-E build. It is based on the same NV38 core. Its core clock is slower (350 vs 475 MHZ) but its memory clock is faster (550 vs 475 MHZ). These can be routinely had on ebay for about $20.

Last edited by bmwsvsu on 2019-11-08, 14:07. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 31089 of 52362, by bjwil1991

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bmwsvsu wrote:

Browsing through the specs, it looks like the only difference between the 380 and 385 line is that the 385 has twice the hard disk size (2gb instead of 1gb). I'll probably put Windows 95 on mine (if it isn't already, I did find the CMOS battery, now I just have to go buy one), so I might also upgrade the ram from the 16 that's in it to the max of 64 (which, is there is also 16 onboard? I see the spec shows a max of 80, so 64+16?)

My system has a 2.1GB HDD that was standard and 16MB onboard, yet upgraded to 48MB with a 32MB stick installed. I believe I can upgrade to 80MB EDO RAM. These systems do have 16MB onboard, however, if the onboard RAM went out, there's no way to disable it, which is pretty sad. My Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus has 4MB onboard, which is disabled since some DOS games do not like RAM higher than 32MB, except I am planning on buying the patched version of those games.

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Reply 31090 of 52362, by bmwsvsu

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bjwil1991 wrote:

My system has a 2.1GB HDD that was standard and 16MB onboard, yet upgraded to 48MB with a 32MB stick installed.

Here is a nice detailed spec book for that entire line of Thinkpads: http://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/withd … book/twbook.pdf

There's a LOT of different variations of the 380/385. Looks like I have just about the lowest-end version of the entire set.

Reply 31091 of 52362, by oeuvre

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Everyone in this hobby should own an older ThinkPad at some point. Even if it is a late IBM one with Pentium M. New laptops don't even come close to what these were.

HP Z420 Workstation Intel Xeon E5-1620, 32GB, RADEON HD7850 2GB, SSD + HD, XP/7
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Reply 31092 of 52362, by ShovelKnight

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oeuvre wrote:

Everyone in this hobby should own an older ThinkPad at some point. Even if it is a late IBM one with Pentium M. New laptops don't even come close to what these were.

I owned an X30 and an X32 and they were indeed unique: none of my other laptops had pieces of the case literally breaking off them for no reason whatsoever 🤣

Reply 31094 of 52362, by ragefury32

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ShovelKnight wrote:
oeuvre wrote:

Everyone in this hobby should own an older ThinkPad at some point. Even if it is a late IBM one with Pentium M. New laptops don't even come close to what these were.

I owned an X30 and an X32 and they were indeed unique: none of my other laptops had pieces of the case literally breaking off them for no reason whatsoever 🤣

Sheesh! What have you been doing to your X3xs? I have an X31 (had one for years, sold it, recently bought one back for retrogaming) and it's been like a rock. Where are you seeing those case breakages (in case I need to reinforce mine before things fail)?

Reply 31095 of 52362, by bmwsvsu

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My first ever Thinkpad was the obscure (and now apparently quite collectible) IBM Transnote

transnote.png

As best I recall I bought one on ebay sometime around 2009 and only paid like $150 for it - it was complete and in mint condition. I used it for about 2 years (even used it for presentation material in a federal court room in a First Amendment case in 2011) after which time I sold it for something like $200. Now I'm really wishing I had kept it. Was a Pentium III, I upgraded it to max ram and a solid state hard drive. Was a surprisingly capable machine even in 2011. I think it had Windows 2000 on it.

Reply 31096 of 52362, by ShovelKnight

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ragefury32 wrote:

Sheesh! What have you been doing to your X3xs? I have an X31 (had one for years, sold it, recently bought one back for retrogaming) and it's been like a rock. Where are you seeing those case breakages (in case I need to reinforce mine before things fail)?

They both developed cracks around the keyboard - as far as I remember, my X30 had cracks in all four corners, and the X32 only had two corners cracked. Also on the X30, a piece of plastic above the keyboard (where the speaker grill is) cracked and a piece of it fell off. I don't have both machines anymore.

Reply 31097 of 52362, by bjwil1991

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I have a ThinkPad 380D, R40, and T42. The T42 needs an OS refresh, yet it works, the R40 has been repaired (fan connector was loose), and the 380D will get a TFT display.

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Reply 31098 of 52362, by Intel486dx33

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oeuvre wrote:

Everyone in this hobby should own an older ThinkPad at some point. Even if it is a late IBM one with Pentium M. New laptops don't even come close to what these were.

Just picked up and old one.
755CD with 486dx4-100 CPU.

I will try to restore it.
I have another one laying around so hopefully I can assemble a working one from these two.

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Reply 31099 of 52362, by dionb

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Ooh, 755CD - that brings back memories. Took notes in class with one of those around 1999-ish. I was the first student to use a laptop in class (history major in a provincial university, not the most high-tech environment), it raised quite a few eyebrows, particularly as I decided that torturing myself and that DX4 with Win98 wasn't a great idea, so I just ran DOS on it and took notes in EDIT.COM. When the lectures were so bad it wasn't worth taking notes I fired up Colonization 😉