havli wrote:

Huge package of very nice HW arrived, this is the first part. 😀

Wow! That can be considered a varied collection, I specially like the Pentiums 🤣

havli wrote:

Yes, the 950MHz Thunderbird is indeed using OPGA package, not the usual ceramic PGA. My first four-star CPU. 🤣 http://www.x86-guide.com/en/cpu/AMD-Athlon/K7-4.html -> ctrl+f AMD Athlon 950 (OPGA)

Nice, never knew that existed. My first AMD cpu was the Athlon MP 1200MHz (Palomino in CPGA package), bought it some weeks before the Athlon XP launch.

Well I happened by a thrift store tonight and checked out their laptop section in the back.. 12 of the things stacked up there.

Most of them were totally in shambles and gutted. Hard drives removed, ram removed, back cover panels off, cracked screens.. keyboards missing keys, optical drives ripped out etc. The reason I look there though is sometimes... sometimes.. I find a gem. Tonight was that night.

It had a white sticker on it for $14.95, and tonight was 50% off (half price) on white tags so I got it for about $8 and some change out the door.

This thing:

Dell Inspiron 8100 12000VT laptop. It actually is very clean (I'll get a better picture later or tomorrow). Came with two batteries even (!!!!) and as you can see in the picture, both are charging up nicely and holding a charge just fine.

Specs are in the one picture, but I'll gloss over it here:
Intel Mobile Pentium-III, full-speed 133 Mhz FSB, 512KB cache Tualatin 1.2 ghz cpu.
nVidia Geforce2 GO! AGP 4x mobile gpu in it (32 MB).
Even has a 30GB hard drive, and came with 256 MB ram, and a good install of XP on it.

As I type this it's just finishing upgrading to XP SP3. One battery is fully charged, 2nd one is at 83%.

Not sure what I'll do with it but at the very least, $8 for a portable DVD player that can run 8-10 hours off AC power. Enough to watch 2-4 movies depending on length.

No internal WiFi at the moment.. but has a little U.FL Hirose connection inside the mini-pci bay, so it has the connection for it, just need to get a card for it later, and a little jumper cable.

These are slow (Little more than 8MB/s at best) but as they will only be hooked up to an ISA BUS, one of which is inside a laptop from the 1980s, I doubt this will be much of a problem. I can see very few, if any, scenarios where anything is going to want to drag more than 1MB of stuff back from the hard drive in one go and one of the machines isn't even going to be running Windows or anything. In short, I imagine these will do fine and for about £12.50 for all three (Including postage) it seems like a steal.

The Inspiron 8100 is a lovely system. Great keyboards, high-res screens and a lot of horsepower for the time - the only downside is the 815 chipset only supporting 512MB of RAM, which does suck. Parts are fairly easy to find (and mostly interchangeable with the Inspiron 8000 and Latitude C800/810 models), and replacement batteries are cheap as well. Please note that if the HDD ever fails or is removed, it will fail to show the existence of the DVD drive on the left, for some bizarre reason.

kithylin wrote:

Dell Inspiron 8100 12000VT laptop. It actually is very clean (I'll get a better picture later or tomorrow). Came with two batter […]
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Dell Inspiron 8100 12000VT laptop. It actually is very clean (I'll get a better picture later or tomorrow). Came with two batteries even (!!!!) and as you can see in the picture, both are charging up nicely and holding a charge just fine.

Specs are in the one picture, but I'll gloss over it here:
Intel Mobile Pentium-III, full-speed 133 Mhz FSB, 512KB cache Tualatin 1.2 ghz cpu.
nVidia Geforce2 GO! AGP 4x mobile gpu in it (32 MB).
Even has a 30GB hard drive, and came with 256 MB ram, and a good install of XP on it.

I have a very similar machine - Dell Inspiron 8200:

Mine is a 1.6GHz P4 Mobile (northwood) with 256mb of DDR, Geforce 2GO 32MB, FDD, and Cobo Drive. Battery is flat on mine unfortunate, and only came with the one battery since it has a floppy drive in the other multibay. I got the machine with no HDD or HDD caddy for that matter (and it uses a proprietary dell connector) but last week I picked up some 8200 parts, including the caddy, a 20gb ide hdd, a spare optical drive, various case parts and a Geforce 4GO 64MB module witch I have yet to test.

I managed to get win98 running in it using mostly DELL drivers for other laptops (the 8200 only has win2k and XP drivers listed on the DELL support page) but all of them sans the video card driver work in win98 as well. It manages to score about 2300 pts in 3dmark01 (default settings) and 2850 in 16bit color (witch is what will be used in games).

Curiously enough I get no sound from it's speakers but it works fine with headphones - I'm thinking defective jack - I've seen this on old dell machines before.

I also have a spare Mobility 9000 or 9600 from a similar Inspiron laptop (8500?) with a dead motherboard - I wonder if it will work in the 8200. It's the exact same form factor.

P.S. - If I'm not mistaking the 8100 is upgradable to a pentium M -> it's socket 479.

P.S. 2 - the crystal sound codec in the 8200 has decent DOS support - I believe the ESS in the 8100 is even better.

Got this nice Gigabyte GA-7IXE4 Rev 1.0 motherboard, AMD Duron 800MHz "Spitfire" CPU, 128MB SDRAM & ASUS Geforce 2 Ti 64MB AGP for £5 form ebay, arrived a few days ago, just go around to testing, all is good 😀 This is my first AMD "Irongate" board, always had VIA Kt133 before.

BSA Starfire wrote:

Got this nice Gigabyte GA-7IXE4 Rev 1.0 motherboard, AMD Duron 800MHz "Spitfire" CPU, 128MB SDRAM & ASUS Geforce 2 Ti 64MB AGP for £5 form ebay, arrived a few days ago, just go around to testing, all is good 😀 This is my first AMD "Irongate" board, always had VIA Kt133 before.

Heh - nice board. I've got the Slot A version. It seems the only functional difference is that you can change the bus speed whereas mine is locked to 100Mhz. Would be interesting to see just how much of a difference the 256k of on-die cache makes compared to the a slot-based 512k Athlon.

kanecvr wrote:

P.S. - If I'm not mistaking the 8100 is upgradable to a pentium M -> it's socket 479.

I'm afraid that you are mistaken. Whilst it is indeed Socket 479, it is electrically incompatible with the Pentium M S479, not to mention that the 815 chipset isn't going to support the Pentium M CPUs.

As for your system's fault; it may be that either the speaker cans have failed (I've seen that), or the palmrest from an Inspiron 8100 or 8000 has been fitted, because I don't think the speakers are compatible across the two sets (I've tried it before). I would be very surprised if the Mobiliy 9000/9600 card was suitable; even if it does fit and work electrically, the heatsink for the GPU is integrated into the keyboard on the 8000/8100/8200, and the 8500 doesn't have that as far as I can see. The GeForce 4 GO should be fine if it's from one of these models.

I've owned the 8100 (which uses Tulatin CPUs) and the 8000 (which uses Coppermine CPUs, and run far hotter).

My second Intel D875BPZ arrived today. The first one was DOA, got a refund, but lost money because of the freight forwarder. This one works great, really happy 😀

Also got a D865PERL, another nice board from Intel. And I also received a Gigabyte socket 754 motherboard with VIA chipset. Excellent condition and it was only A$15.

Lukeno94 wrote:

kanecvr wrote:

P.S. - If I'm not mistaking the 8100 is upgradable to a pentium M -> it's socket 479.

I'm afraid that you are mistaken. Whilst it is indeed Socket 479, it is electrically incompatible with the Pentium M S479, not to mention that the 815 chipset isn't going to support the Pentium M CPUs.

The 815 definetly will not support the pentium M. I tough it might be using the i855 chipset - I recall servicing some IBM/Lenovo laptop with a P3 and i855

Lukeno94 wrote:

As for your system's fault; it may be that either the speaker cans have failed (I've seen that),

The speakers work fine, I checked...

Lukeno94 wrote:

or the palmrest from an Inspiron 8100 or 8000 has been fitted, because I don't think the speakers are compatible across the two sets (I've tried it before).

I don't think that's the case. The machine was purchased from a company that deals with recycling IT equipment and it previously belonged to a company, not an individual. Furthermore, It hadn't been opened before (the 7.5v battery was leaky too). I had that replaced, and I tested the large flexible "pcb" under the palmrest with a continuity checker, so that works as well. That leaves only the headphones jack as a possible culprit - not to mention I've seen this exact fault many times before with other dell machines.

Lukeno94 wrote:

I would be very surprised if the Mobiliy 9000/9600 card was suitable; even if it does fit and work electrically, the heatsink for the GPU is integrated into the keyboard on the 8000/8100/8200, and the 8500 doesn't have that as far as I can see. The GeForce 4 GO should be fine if it's from one of these models.

Heat-wise it will work. The mobility 9000 and 9600 were installed in the HP DV6000 and Comapq N800v, and the cooling system on those models is worse then the Inspiron 8200 - for example the N800 has a simple aluminum block glued to the underside of the keyboard, while the Inspiron 8200 has a small heatpipe as well. I'm just worried the GPU might not allign with the heat-sink under the keyboard.

EDITED: According to this: http://www.anandtech.com/show/1019/4 the radeon 9000 it should work as the 8200 came with it as a video card option as well - (and my spare card is a radeon 9000, I checked).

Scored these for 99p:

My first Zalman. Might use it to replace the stock heatsink on my V3 3000 😉

The alpine 11 pro is missing a fan blade 🙁

kanecvr, whilst you are indeed correct that the Inspiron 8200 offered the Mobility Radeon 9000, it's still entirely possible that your card may not align with the heatsink on the keyboard base. I'll happily concede the headphone port point to you though!

I would be very surprised if any PIII system had the 855 chipset, since the two Socket 479 connectors are electrically incompatible, and the 855 chipset does not support the PIII. It could've been an 830 chipset if not the 815 - that chipset was much better than the 815 for laptop usage, but was rarely used (I'm pretty sure I've seen that the Latitude C400 used it, but dunno what else did).

kanecvr wrote:

The alpine 11 pro is missing a fan blade 🙁

Uh... well spotted. I just found it in the box so maybe it came off in transit. Ah well can't complain. Just moved house so have no money so happy to get whatever I can for that price! When the fan is spinning I probably won't be able to see the missing blade 😉

brassicGamer wrote:

kanecvr wrote:

The alpine 11 pro is missing a fan blade 🙁

Uh... well spotted. I just found it in the box so maybe it came off in transit. Ah well can't complain. Just moved house so have no money so happy to get whatever I can for that price! When the fan is spinning I probably won't be able to see the missing blade 😉

No, you won't see it, but most probably will hear it 🤣

RacoonRider wrote:

brassicGamer wrote:

kanecvr wrote:

The alpine 11 pro is missing a fan blade 🙁

Uh... well spotted. I just found it in the box so maybe it came off in transit. Ah well can't complain. Just moved house so have no money so happy to get whatever I can for that price! When the fan is spinning I probably won't be able to see the missing blade 😉

No, you won't see it, but most probably will hear it 🤣

As it's a fan with 7, well now 6 blades it could be fine if the fan isnt a high revving one. 😀

Fans with 3 or 4 blades never run even close to stable with a blade missing though.

Lukeno94 wrote:

kanecvr, whilst you are indeed correct that the Inspiron 8200 offered the Mobility Radeon 9000, it's still entirely possible that your card may not align with the heatsink on the keyboard base.

That's what I'm afraid of myself...

Lukeno94 wrote:

I would be very surprised if any PIII system had the 855 chipset, since the two Socket 479 connectors are electrically incompatible, and the 855 chipset does not support the PIII. It could've been an 830 chipset if not the 815 - that chipset was much better than the 815 for laptop usage, but was rarely used (I'm pretty sure I've seen that the Latitude C400 used it, but dunno what else did).

It is entirely possible that I'm mistaking... maybe it was same model laptops with different mainboard and/or chipset - it's not unheard of...

brassicGamer wrote:

Scored these for 99p:

coolers.jpg

My first Zalman. Might use it to replace the stock heatsink on my V3 3000 😉

Looks like a CNPS 7000 rather than the VF series, the CNPS series are cpu only and not meant for graphics cards for size and weight reasons. The CNPS 7000 is still a nice cooler and you with a bit of effort can get it onto a modern i5/7 build with good results. Almost silent and amazingly easy to clean compared to modern coolers.

-FANS-

Nested quotes for the win!

Everyone remembers those crappy 60mm fan Athlon coolers right? I once caught a wire in my Cooler Master one and broke a blade in half, it was Sunday, the shop was closed, I had no spares and at the time I had to rely on my mother to get to the shop meaning I had to wait until Saturday rolled around again. What a horrible week. This was a 6000 RPM fan, it rattled enough to put ripples in my glass of water on the same desk and it sounded like a bunch of workmen cutting the road up. It also compromised the fan's cooling capabilities a little as the CPU temp rose by about 20 degrees and had the system on the edge of overheating until I replaced it... Sucked, that heatsink money was meant to go on neon lights and they had to wait a few more weeks. I initially tried to glue the blade back on - with pool cue tip glue - in an attempt to bodge it... Yeah... I wouldn't recommend that, not if you want to keep your sight. If you must try it, please do put the case back on first or put an acrylic sheet between the fan and yourself.

Actually, I seem to think I still have the cooler with the broken fan, but I believe I cut the wires off to use on something else.