stamasd wrote:

oeuvre wrote:

mmm old ThinkPads

I should pick one up at some point... just never know where to find them for cheap.

Ebay if you're patient and know what to look for. All the ones I posted in this thread I picked for $25-$38 including shipping.

Mind sending me the seller(s) of the ones you bought these from?

oeuvre wrote:

stamasd wrote:

oeuvre wrote:

mmm old ThinkPads

I should pick one up at some point... just never know where to find them for cheap.

Ebay if you're patient and know what to look for. All the ones I posted in this thread I picked for $25-$38 including shipping.

Mind sending me the seller(s) of the ones you bought these from?

I can, but all of the real deals are one-off, usually from people who don't sell items like this on a regular basis. The last few Thinkpads I bought were: one from a guy who sold his old college laptop, one from someone who picked it up from an estate auction together with other stuff, and one from a dealer in antique bottles and dolls who happened to have just that one laptop in his whole ebay store among tons of "memorabilia" junk. I'm generally searching for "Thinkpad" in notebook computers, sort by price (low to high) and then just spend time looking at the thumbnails. It helps if you know what the item you want looks like, as you can quickly scan and eliminate what you don't care about.

Here are links to a few recent ones I got:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/162293312989?_trksid= … K%3AMEBIDX%3AIT
http://www.ebay.com/itm/322334878291?_trksid= … K%3AMEBIDX%3AIT
http://www.ebay.com/itm/191991643570?_trksid= … K%3AMEBIDX%3AIT
http://www.ebay.com/itm/322303723700?_trksid= … K%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

I finally received the cute little Japanese PC I bought a while back (auction pictures):

That's an Epson AT-550L released in Japan in early 1998, with a Pentium MMX processor, 3 Gb hard disk, and 96 Mb RAM.

Turns out that besides the extremely complete package that it is, it also has a motherboard that might be an overclocker's wet dream, as the processor voltage, clock multiplier and bus speed can be set freely (it's this ASUS OEM NLX board, with most of the optional stuff included: SP98-N). The included modem is a PCI faxmodem, which is pretty good for something released in 1998. The floppy disk drive can write the usual 1.44 Mb and 720K disks, but also PC-98 1.2 Mb 3.5" disks. The only bad thing is that the hard disk is mounted in a way that's really inaccessible and I need to check whether the slimline CD-ROM works...

Price paid: 1,000 yen + middleman costs (total about 30 bucks) + shipping (50 bucks or so). Not too shabby.

stamasd wrote:

Also to stop derailing this thread, I won another Thinkpad at auction. A 380ED this time, P166MMX, one with 12" TFT screen (the majority of the 380ED had DSTN screen, save for select few with TFT).

I love it when ThinkPads have that error - it really is easy to fix. Having a TFT means that it's perfectly usable as well, so nice score!

Also, that Epson looks cool yawetaG. My retro purchases are on the backburner due to a decidedly un-retro GPU purchase, but there we go.

Lukeno94 wrote:

I love it when ThinkPads have that error - it really is easy to fix.

Yup, all it takes is about 20 cents worth of materials and 5 minutes.
I've decided lately that I'm more into retro laptops than beige boxes, that's why I'm focusing on that. Thinkpads make such nice retro machines, and support a wide variety of OS. You can even add standard ISA and PCI hardware to them via docks.

Finally got Thinkpad Dock II Port Replicator for my T21. At the same time I ordered a Yamaha YMF724F-V PCI sound card for the dock so I can (hopefully) use it as an MPU-401 port (with SoftMPU) for my MT-32 and SC-55 MkII modules.

Bought yet another NOS 486 CPU cooler. 4,33 US Dollars for the item, plus 4,33 US Dollars in shipping costs.
(not a typo, shipping was the same as the item price)

Ariakos: Such a nice dock you got there. 😜

Lukeno94 wrote:

stamasd wrote:

Also, that Epson looks cool yawetaG.

I've been reading the motherboard manual for over an hour now, and the further I proceed the more my expression goes 😲 Build-in hardware monitor, a BIOS so loaded with features that I am happy I have found the manual, close to a dozen boot order options (including multi-hard disk), separate CD-ROM connector next to up to four IDE devices (2 only in my Epson) and two floppy disk drives, option to boot from SCSI drives on an SCSI adapter card even when a internal IDE drive is present, massive number of options for backwards compatibility with non-PnP devices and legacy operating systems + supports all standards available back then, ZIF Socket 7, wake-on-LAN, onboard VGA with what looks like output modes that can be set using a utility instead of a driver (read: can output SVGA in DOS without a driver) supporting dozens upon dozens of output modes (5 pages in the manual), compatible with MS-DOS to Windows 98SE, NT and beyond, OS/2, etc. The list goes on and on and on. It's like ASUS took one of their flagship motherboards and stuffed it all into a small form factor board. 🤣

pictures of warm innards, please?

Ariakos wrote:

Finally got Thinkpad Dock II Port Replicator for my T21. At the same time I ordered an Yamaha YMF724F-V PCI sound card for the dock so I can (hopefully) use it as an MPU-401 port (with SoftMPU) for my MT-32 and SC-55 MkII modules.

That's a weird coincidence. I received an identical one today. I will use it with my R52.

mrau wrote:

pictures of warm innards, please?

I will do a thread in System Specs.

stamasd wrote:

Ariakos wrote:

Finally got Thinkpad Dock II Port Replicator for my T21. At the same time I ordered an Yamaha YMF724F-V PCI sound card for the dock so I can (hopefully) use it as an MPU-401 port (with SoftMPU) for my MT-32 and SC-55 MkII modules.

That's a weird coincidence. I received an identical one today. I will use it with my R52.

Not really - back in the page 739 of this thread you mentioned this particular Dock and I ordered a similar one immediately. So thanks a lot for the idea! 😀

I must get one of those Dock IIs for my T43. But it seems like they're non-existent in the UK - all look like mini docks that don't have PCI slots in them. Guess I might be waiting a while!

Ariakos wrote:

stamasd wrote:

Ariakos wrote:

Finally got Thinkpad Dock II Port Replicator for my T21. At the same time I ordered an Yamaha YMF724F-V PCI sound card for the dock so I can (hopefully) use it as an MPU-401 port (with SoftMPU) for my MT-32 and SC-55 MkII modules.

That's a weird coincidence. I received an identical one today. I will use it with my R52.

Not really - back in the page 739 of this thread you mentioned this particular Dock and I ordered a similar one immediately. So thanks a lot for the idea! 😀

That's true I remember.
At least yours came with the key. Mine didn't, and of course it's locked. Can't even put the laptop in. I'll have some lockpicking to do later tonight. The lock doesn't look really secure.

IBM era Thinkpads are very well designed and documented so working on them is no big deal, they also used decent screens for their time. The only Thinkpad docks I like are the old 486 era ones with a SCSI CDROM + speakers built in. CMOS batteries are easy to replace in 99% of Thinkpads (The 701 series they are soldered onto the motherboard).

Unknown_K wrote:

IBM era Thinkpads are very well designed and documented so working on them is no big deal, they also used decent screens for their time. The only Thinkpad docks I like are the old 486 era ones with a SCSI CDROM + speakers built in. CMOS batteries are easy to replace in 99% of Thinkpads (The 701 series they are soldered onto the motherboard).

Yeah been looking for a type 3546 dock for ages for my 755cx. Still looking.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/262737887387

Bought this one today. Never tried S3 805i for ISA bus before.

p.s. Is there any particular reason why I am not able to resize my image in this form? I've tried all the phpbb syntax I can find and nothing seems to work.

Today I received mi latest (and biggest to date) eBay haul:
All left to right, top to bottom:

- MSI GeForce GT 440 1GB, nice card with better than usual cooling, small but 1.5 slots wide, it's supposedly silent and cool (two, only one pictured).
- Asus GeForce 8500GT 512MB Silent, relatively small passive cooler, we'll see how it perfoms.
- Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 512MB DDR2 64 bit, usually these cards are 1GB DDR3 128 bit, I wonder how big the perfomance impact will be with such a reduction in memory bandwith, but probably good for a HTPC.
- Asus GeForce 6600LE 256MB, the small brother of the 6600GT, at least it's passive.
- ATI Radeon HD 2400 256MB, it uses a DMS-59 connector for output, fortunately it includes a dual VGA adapter or it will be useless to me.

- Creative /Ensoniq ES1370 PCI, it should be a nice card for late DOS games and also a nice substitution to the on-board sound of some W98-XP motherboards.
- Creative CT4810 (Vibra 128, if I'm not mistaken), more or less same as the above (X2)
- Creative X-FI Xtreme Gamer, a bit ridiculous name but a nice sound card with native drivers from XP to W10 (X2)
-Sound Blaster Live 5.1, nice in it's moment for the EAX support, now a challenge just to make it work in Vista and above, nice for an XP machine.

- Iwill IDE raid card, it can function with only one drive, making it a good way to add IDE support to SATA only machines, althought I don't know what OS it supports.
- Three CardBus network cards, two wifi and one ethernet, my only CardBus compatible laptop is currently 600 kms away, so they'll have to wait.
- A strange Pinnacle card, for what I gathered it's part of some version of the Pinnacle Studio package, it combines two firewire ports with S-Video, composite and audio output (not input, contrary to what some people believe it's not a capture card), i don't know what kind of compatibility I can expect (no drivers at all, if it works it should be with the OS native support).
- Generic Realtek ethernet cards (like four or five, and I already have some...)
- Firewire only PCI cards, three of them.

Now, more interesting pieces for my fellow vogoners:

- Ati Radeon 9800 256 MB with a Zalman cooler (the cooler is going to need some loving).
- Asus Radeon 9600SE 128MB, I found a small socketed capacitor in the box and I'm nearly sure it's from this card, I don't have the equipment to resolder socket mounted components, so I'll try without it and if it doesn't work or explodes, well, that's life.
- Ati Radeon 9550 PRO 256MB, if I remember well the 256MB is the best version, I already have one with passive cooling.
- Ati Radeon 7000VE 32MB, perhaps the lowest form of Radeon, it should made a good sacrificial lamb when I have to test a motherboard with a suspicious AGP slot 🤣 .
- Ati Radeon 9100 64MB, another basic card, this one at least includes a DVI output.

- Gainward GeForce 8800GT 512MB, a little surprise: not only it includes the original box (and althought it's obviously used it's in very good visual shape) but also it's a pretty uncommon one slot card (and real one slot, not one-and-a-bit), althought I'll have to be very pressed for space to include any card next to this one.

All in all about thirty cards, with some pretty nice ones, for a grand total of 65€, in fact 30€ for the cards and 35€ for the shipment (30€ was the initial bid, I put a placeholder bid and I win becouse no one else bid). According to the seller, they're untested but "most or all" should work, we'll see.

All the way from Greece for that card. Might as well get them while you can, especially ones that are better then 1MB RAM.

Most of my ISA video cards are Tseng with maybe a few CL units, not sure what I have in S3.

stamasd wrote:

At least yours came with the key. Mine didn't, and of course it's locked. Can't even put the laptop in. I'll have some lockpicking to do later tonight. The lock doesn't look really secure.

I managed to lockpick the dock open. Only took about 15 minutes. Left a few scratches on the soft plastic cover of the lock - oh well. The dock wasn't exactly pristine to begin with. Now I can start using its PCI goodness.
(it's wonderful what you can do with a paper clip, tweezers and a screwdriver 😁)