TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Going through stuff you find on old computers is half the fun. Over the years i've found: […]
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stamasd wrote:

Received the Thinkpad 380XD I had ordered a few days ago.. It was listed as "unknown condition, does not power up" so there was […]
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Received the Thinkpad 380XD I had ordered a few days ago.. It was listed as "unknown condition, does not power up" so there was a bit of uneasiness of my part. But once I hooked it to a power supply, it fired right up. 😀 Gave me the errors 00161, 00163 and 00192 at boot. Entered setup and set the date, that got rid of the first 2 errors. The last one persisted (CMOS battery is dead) but it continued booting all the same. It has Windows 95 on it, and seems like someone's CVs and job applications from back in 2001. 😎 I'll replace the hard drive of course with a new one, and store the original one after I wipe it, don't want to be snooping through anyone's private papers. Even the main battery seems to be charging fine, I'll leave it plugged overnight and see how much juice it holds.

Now the CMOS battery I can't replace because I don't have the right size tonight. I have all sizes of batteries, but haven't had a use for a CR1220 so far so I don't have any. And no, a CR2032 or CR2025 won't fit because the 1220 is a narrower diameter (12mm vs 20mm). Guess that'll wait a day or two until I find a battery that fits.

Overall I'm very pleased. The laptop is almost pristine. Not a bad deal for $25 including shipping.

Oh yes, specs. PMMX 266, 48MB RAM, 4GB HDD, 12" TFT (800x600), CS4237B audio chip, FDD, CDROM, USB (1 port).

Going through stuff you find on old computers is half the fun. Over the years i've found:

- IBM Confidential Source Code and information (most of it pertaining to 300 series mainframes)
- Various illegal things (basically anything pertaining to 90s era cybercrime ive seen at some point)
- Email logs between various engineers discussing some sort of audio file format
- all the customer data of a 1990s skating rink along with around a decade of logs from events
- a CD containing 3 years worth of patient documents and information from a local clinic
- A bunch of programs im pretty sure i own the last known, maintained, copies of.
- various other interesting stuff the general public can't see

I need to get around to archiving it. I was originally going to send most of it to Jason Scott (runs textfiles.com and the internet archives archive team) but he said most of it wouldn't be publically posted it. Sadly most of this data will degrade before I get access to any sort of mass floppy index'ing tool.
Obviously i wouldnt be publishing the skating rink data or clinic data unless theres snowden level stuff in it but the rest is fair game.

Part of being in this hobby is: You have the potential to be Snowden 2.0

You also have the potential to be a massive creep. Personal communications, customer data, patient data? Most jurisdictions have pretty serious laws pertaining to exactly those things and the destruction thereof. Regardless of whether or not you release it, even archiving that stuff could land you in hot water if it ever gets discovered. Not to mention it's an incredibly skeevy thing to do.

Software and documentation are one thing, but anything with PII should be deleted, full stop.

kanecvr wrote:

overseer wrote:

c0keb0ttle wrote:

Finally got the card I wanted for my Win 98 build:

Voodoo3.jpg

What a treasure you got there...a card much harder to find than a V5...especially a boxed one.

Dunno about that - I found one way before I got a working V5. Also, nice avatar. Homeworld fan?

Here's another Homeworld fan! I hope to play Cataclysm soon, on my Win9X build - great game. A friend of mine told me the very 1st chapter was REALLY difficult.

Rawrl wrote:

You also have the potential to be a massive creep. Personal communications, customer data, patient data? Most jurisdictions have pretty serious laws pertaining to exactly those things and the destruction thereof. Regardless of whether or not you release it, even archiving that stuff could land you in hot water if it ever gets discovered. Not to mention it's an incredibly skeevy thing to do.

Software and documentation are one thing, but anything with PII should be deleted, full stop.

Precisely. At most, I boot once to verify the HD in question hasn't gone full potato, I don't look at any of the disk contents (I don't try to log in or move beyond the desktop), then I DBAN it. Aside from the moral and legal reasons to protect former users' data, people will be more confident to freecycle hardware with you if they know you will protect their privacy.

Update: after being plugged overnight, the battery still seems to be charging... but it started at 80%, and is still at 80%. And the laptop doesn't power up if unplugged. Guess another battery that I have to rebuild eventually.

I completely agree with the privacy issues above, that's why I said I will wipe the drive.

Also I solved the CMOS battery problem without buying a custom size one. I welded tabs to a CR2032, soldered wires from it to the battery holder. There is just enough space in the compartment for the new battery to fit near the holder. I hot-shrink-tubbed it too for good measure. All the boot errors are gone now.

Went on a road trip (~150km) and picked up around 20 PC's from a closed business - so nothing too excited. Left a few as my car was full 🤣

They are a mixed bag from around 1992 to 2004. Most are missing HDD's otherwise should work but aren't tested. Due to time constraints I don't think I'll check them before next year 😐

stamasd wrote:

Update: after being plugged overnight, the battery still seems to be charging... but it started at 80%, and is still at 80%. And the laptop doesn't power up if unplugged. Guess another battery that I have to rebuild eventually.

I completely agree with the privacy issues above, that's why I said I will wipe the drive.

Also I solved the CMOS battery problem without buying a custom size one. I welded tabs to a CR2032, soldered wires from it to the battery holder. There is just enough space in the compartment for the new battery to fit near the holder. I hot-shrink-tubbed it too for good measure. All the boot errors are gone now.

Sounds like a typical old NiMH battery, where it loses all hope of telling what charge it actually has. I had a Satellite 200CDT (miss that thing) a couple of years ago that would last anywhere from 5 minutes to 55 minutes on a single charge, depending on what it felt like doing at a given time. Lithium ions do it as well, but not to the same degree (they just tend to have a massive step in what they interpret, and then fail to work out exactly where the end of the battery's charge is) - and they tend to be consistent in how long they last (or consistently decrease)

This is actually a Li-ion battery.

Hmm, that's probably down to it being a dumb li-ion battery then (which I've never messed with).

Kadath wrote:

kanecvr wrote:

Dunno about that - I found one way before I got a working V5. Also, nice avatar. Homeworld fan?

Here's another Homeworld fan! I hope to play Cataclysm soon, on my Win9X build - great game. A friend of mine told me the very 1st chapter was REALLY difficult.

What a coincidence. I've spend all day trying to get this enormous HW2 map of some protostar system to flatten the map, so it plays more like a more traditional 2D map. Still haven't gotten it to work 😵

Manually editing around 13k lines of text...why am I even doing it? 🤣!

gdjacobs wrote:

Rawrl wrote:

You also have the potential to be a massive creep. Personal communications, customer data, patient data? Most jurisdictions have pretty serious laws pertaining to exactly those things and the destruction thereof. Regardless of whether or not you release it, even archiving that stuff could land you in hot water if it ever gets discovered. Not to mention it's an incredibly skeevy thing to do.

Software and documentation are one thing, but anything with PII should be deleted, full stop.

Precisely. At most, I boot once to verify the HD in question hasn't gone full potato, I don't look at any of the disk contents (I don't try to log in or move beyond the desktop), then I DBAN it. Aside from the moral and legal reasons to protect former users' data, people will be more confident to freecycle hardware with you if they know you will protect their privacy.

In the past I have looked, but mostly for product keys (those weren't easy to get back in the older days) and because I was simply curious.

I never found anything too incriminating (and thank god I never found anything related to erotic material of before some certain age!), mostly just people's work history and a couple odd vacation photographs that looked less impressive then the shape of the layer of dust that had accumulated on the CPU HSF.

Afterwards the drives I found got formatted, no point in keeping the original data around and frankly I'm not in it for becoming a Snowden X, it's mostly some kind of curiosity, kinda like walking outside and looking inside to see how some random family is living for a full 2 seconds.

Lukeno94 wrote:

Hmm, that's probably down to it being a dumb li-ion battery then (which I've never messed with).

Yep, it's a dumb Li-ion battery. I like the dumb ones. They're easy to rebuild.

Luckily scored Philips PCA761AW, an Gus PnP clone,yay finally got something Gus compatible:

My congratulations! In order to make it GUS-compatible you'll have to add a 512Kb SOJ on it.

rein_ein wrote:

Luckily scored Philips PCA761AW, an Gus PnP clone,yay finally got something Gus compatible: […]
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Luckily scored Philips PCA761AW, an Gus PnP clone,yay finally got something Gus compatible:

Nice!! I would try to find an identicle or compatible memory chip and solder it for 1MB goodness! I assume that card only has 512kb.

Nope, it has no RAM thus is not GUS-compatible in stock version. The other chip is a ROM required by the InterWave in all configs, otherwise it won't be functional at all.
1Mb SOJ might be used as well however that would involve additional hardware mods and is untested. The option with 512Kb is very straightforward and has been successfully tested.

Thanks for replies,just finished testing and its fully working,yay again!

Not much... Just a S1 Black edition.

Got these two cards. Maybe they will come together as a dream team (3dfx+nvidia) for me...
My first V2. Never heard about ATC before. I have seen a lot of Diamond and Creative advertising back in the day...

ATC-2455 with 12Mb edo ram.

Hercules 3D Prophet II MX PCI

New Old Stock EPoX 8K3A+ Rev 1.2 Socket 462 board. May not look like much, but this is one of the most stable & recommended boards for the Voodoo5 6000. Getting increasingly hard to come by so I'm really excited to have this additional board.

Some more 3DFX Schwag

Artex wrote:

New Old Stock EPoX 8K3A+ Rev 1.2 Socket 462 board. http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/1024x768q90/921/RYPiM0.jpg […]
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New Old Stock EPoX 8K3A+ Rev 1.2 Socket 462 board.

Two pairs of IDE slots?
I don't think any of my motherboards have more than a single pair.

skitters wrote:

Artex wrote:

New Old Stock EPoX 8K3A+ Rev 1.2 Socket 462 board.
...............

Two pairs of IDE slots?
I don't think any of my motherboards have more than a single pair.

The second set is powered by what is basically a PCI IDE controller with it's own bios that's mated on to the motherboard. It's usually run by Promise on 99% of motherboards. It's really not that uncommon. I have a gigabyte and Soyo boards both with second sets of IDE slots and addon cards. Most boards with this option do RAID via the second IDE ports as well. My gigabyte board supports 4 drives over 2 add-on slots and RAID 0,1,5,6 *(fake software raid of course)