finally got those glued on heatsinks off my Pentium 166 and Pentium MMX 166.

Windows9566 wrote on 2021-07-14, 00:47:

https://i.imgur.com/pswQE0Q.jpg […]
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finally got those glued on heatsinks off my Pentium 166 and Pentium MMX 166.

That's horrible crap. I use a small flat bladed screwdriver, using CRC 5.56 for lubricant, to get that shit off the cpu.

If it is too hard I sand it off without getting to close to the cpu surface and do the above.

those BP80502/503 CPUs suck, due to that BS. I usually peel those heatsinks off.

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-07-13, 18:48:

Damn! DamndamndamndamndamndamnDAMN! Got some major monitor suckery going on.

If it is a samsung LCD monitor, inspect capacitor and replace any that are faulty. Common problem with samsung LCDs, and probably other brands too.

Victory number 2 and a half! There's life in the BX-6VP2 ... which isn't a BX... Via chipset, by Ford Lian/RedFox finally realised I'd missed some capless jumpers that I thought were headers, think with all the caps off it was trying to do 133 bus on a PII-266 and PC-66 RAM, finally found the right settings in the manuals here. https://www.elhvb.com/mboards/fordlian/Garner.html because UH 19 only has them for the rev D, whereas mine appears to be rev C (Which actually looks better, the D looks dumbed down) ... anyhoooo looks like I've got some BIOS flashing to do tomorrow... I hope it's good after that and I can have the extra half victory point 🤣

canthearu wrote on 2021-07-14, 01:33:

If it is a samsung LCD monitor, inspect capacitor and replace any that are faulty. Common problem with samsung LCDs, and probably other brands too.

Yes, I think the eMachines/Acer might need caps, that seems typical behaviour, not coming out of standby.

... ... ...

Pic relevant to 1st para...

Well i tried to get my 98 PC to work today, but alas no worky still. The CPU heatsink doesn't want to sit on the CPU (you can literally easily lift it on one side) and the entire PC won't turn on via power button.
On the PLUS side, my lovely Dell Optiplex 740 boots just fine into XP <3

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-07-13, 22:36:

Yah, dis what I wanted to see...

PENTIUM II 133? What kind of pet is it?

That's just PC Chips being special, I think it goes right after you go into setup, save and reboot.

Finally made my Thinkpad 760 series laptop boot form PCMCIA-CF card. Thanks to the tip from someone from forum.thinkpads.com
The PCMCIA boot option is in the BIOS, but never seemed to work. One has to disable IDE2 in the ps2.exe setup program.

You are all so amazing with the projects you are doing! I'm just in the process of gathering the parts to put together several machines to give away on my silly streaming. Nothing as cool as all of the amazing things you are all doing here! Although I would love your suggestions. So the two older machines are an AMD K6-2/500 and a Pentium II-350. My plan is to use some SB AWE 64 cards I have and some Radeon 7000 GPUs as well, but I know that the 7000 is not really a period correct card for either of those machines, being from the early 2000's instead of 1998-1999 or so. So what cards would you recommend? The machines will have Windows 98 SE on them of course as it is the most stable version Windows from that era that I have access to. And it still allows for some DOS usage, hence the SB 64 sound cards.

My CF card died so I bought a new one... currently factory resetting my Compaq Presario CDS 520.

pampilhoso wrote on 2021-07-14, 16:24:

My CF card died so I bought a new one... currently factory resetting my Compaq Presario CDS 520.

217357469_4103502713020897_1630951375512221376_n.jpg

Nice!! I have a 4402 here that has a dead PSU and the CRT tube was damaged because it was left out in the rain. The boards themselves are intact and work, but I am having trouble locating a replacement CRT tube and the High voltage wire for it, because those are both damaged. I wanted to get a CDS 520 as well, but I just haven't found one for a price that I can afford.

nathanieltolbert wrote on 2021-07-14, 16:04:

You are all so amazing with the projects you are doing! I'm just in the process of gathering the parts to put together several machines to give away on my silly streaming. Nothing as cool as all of the amazing things you are all doing here! Although I would love your suggestions. So the two older machines are an AMD K6-2/500 and a Pentium II-350. My plan is to use some SB AWE 64 cards I have and some Radeon 7000 GPUs as well, but I know that the 7000 is not really a period correct card for either of those machines, being from the early 2000's instead of 1998-1999 or so. So what cards would you recommend? The machines will have Windows 98 SE on them of course as it is the most stable version Windows from that era that I have access to. And it still allows for some DOS usage, hence the SB 64 sound cards.

Hi!

These will probably get you started:

Building a good Windows 98 gaming pc

best windows 98 agp card

Best DOS video card?

From newbie to newbie, every search you make in the forum will bring you a Tons of info! Seems endless...

Caluser2000 wrote on 2021-07-13, 19:51:

Mounted the front fascia to cleaned up chassis cage of my K6-2 400 Linux box. Fitted a DVD r/w drive and combo 3.5" fdd/card reader scalped from a horrible plastic case multi media system that had serious cracks and other damage to it.

@Caluser2000, may I ask what distro are you running there and what are your usual activities with that system?

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-07-13, 18:48:

Damn! DamndamndamndamndamndamnDAMN! Got some major monitor suckery going on. So I was testing a load of PII/III boards and wondering why not one came to life, and how come the POST codes all seemed to translate to errors that should be shown on screen, no KB, no boot device, POST finished, without getting anything on screen for any of them... my 19" seemed to be "lighting" in that the backlight came on, but screen still black... when vid activated, but nothing else. So now I think to sanity check the monitor, Thinkpad 400 to 19", no signal...hmmm but it's got a linux running and unsure it's handling the hardware 100% right... Armada 1750... win98 detects the monitor, and it turns it on to backlight lit when monitor is enabled/disabled, but stays black... gah... I think this monitor is buggered.
[...]
Anyway, seems like I wasted the whole of yesterday on board testing without the monitor being functional (Worked fine a week ago)

That sucks! I hope none is too damaged...

Last night I found out the Wife was trying to find a place to setup the Tandy 1000A in the closet. Kind a proud of her. Actually, I'm planning a V20 and 8087 upgrade for the Tandy sometime in the not too distant future....and maybe some home-built/modified gamepads.

The situation has been the closet in the "lab" has been a mystery to her for years, and she never went in there out of respect for me.....surprising to me, I don't mind if she pokes around, actually, I dig that.

Thanks all for the well wishes, sympathy and support as regards the monitor problems. If it was lightning related last time, it nearly got to be again today, we had a storm blow in fast and there was a near miss, or near hit down the street this morning, felt the heat of the flash on my skin through the blinds. So far, touch wood, everything okay.

After that had left me in peace, I got back to the BX-6VP2, just stick the flash stuff on a disk hook up a floppy and reboot.... nah... didn't see the disk as bootable... tried another drive... nope, another cable... nope... double check the disk, all good, try a MSDOS 6.2 boot disk, no-go... well what then you POS??? ... okay... strip it all back down... visual inspection with a magnifier... hmmm floppy header lines go past first PCI slot, is the vid card I'm sticking in there too noisy?... then get to the i/o chip, there's a patch of dust all over it... I thought it had just got missed with the air duster, but nope, it was stuck there, something a touch sticky, okay, cleaner and brush and scrub, get most of it off, odd dust, short fibers, reminds me of some types of wood dust, or what happens to the parcel shelf in a 1970s car when it's had too much sun. That seems really stuck and packed, scraped it out from between the pins on the i/o chip with a sharp point. It's a little humid lately, so if it's an organic kind of dust I wonder if it had swelled with moisture and got low enough resistance tight between the pins to pull pins high or low when they shouldn't be. Get it all out, still looks a bit dull around those pins, which aren't just any part of the i/o chip but are the floppy lines... hokay, give this a try, fire up a micro torch and run it over the pins briefly, see a few orange sparkles as a last few specks of that stuff burn up, and the pads turn shiny instead of dull. Well whatever, that looks better now. Then popped out the BIOS chip, cleaned pins and reseated just in case.

Now reassemble the test configuration, but just to be sure, stick the PCI vid and POST card in the slot furthest from the floppy lines... and fire it up and it boots off the floppy, yay.... but awdflash says the bin file ain't right.. and the keyboard isn't working to manual launch/override... gah... so swap keyboards around retry, retry, doh, there's another capless header I missed, it's the keyboard voltage selection, 3 pin, one or the other, just get some volts to keyboard (Standby or regular 5V) ... yes, keyboard working.... awdflash 7..37 don't like that file though, might be because it saved as a longname ... okay fix that... also, you know what, get the awdflash off the redfox archive since that should be mor guaranteed, turned out to be 7.33 so you thin 7.37 would be fine, but anyhoo, okay. got the flash floppy reconfigured got the kb working, rebooted again, flash chugged away happily, appears successful, is it? YISSSSSS, 3 boards out of 4 now, and what a cool logo, almost worth the trouble 🤣...

Because the mobo on my first full Linux box has turned up it toes I've decided to repurpose it's chassis. Did all the component location and figure out what needs a bit of a trim up for the PGA370 mobo and 155 watt psu has to go last night while whatching the telly. This morning it was straight in to cut n tuck mode with the Fuller rotery grinder. I've never done anything this drastic before but it has be terrific fun.

The mod is coming along very well:

Caluser2000 wrote on 2021-07-14, 23:51:

Because the mobo on my first full Linux box has turned up it toes I've decided to repurpose it's chassis. Did all the component location and figure out what needs a bit of a trim up for the PGA370 mobo and 155 watt psu has to go last night while whatching the telly. This morning it was straight in to cut n tuck mode with the Fuller rotery grinder. I've never done anything this drastic before but it has be terrific fun.

The mod is coming along very well:

Ah took me a moment, forgot images post in reverse, thought you went from neat machine to chaos, now I see pic 2 is measuring up, and pic 1 is fairly neat result.

Been a while since I did similar. "Back in the day" for values of "the day" between about 23 and 19 years ago, the city where I'd turned up, seemed to be living in the relative stone age, as regards penetration of personal computers of any description, at least judging by what was available used. Now I'd got some decent boards but nothing to put them in. I carved up an innocent little NEC powermate 386sx, almost got a board in that, didn't finish the project and it was sitting open for a time, just using the base as it were. Then later I found an AT desktop case with PSU mounted flat and high, so there was room under it to carve out space for an ATX backplate, so that was the machine I had a K6-2 and Voodoo 3 in for quite a while. Cooling in it wasn't exactly optimal though. Probably I still have most of the parts of that powermate come to think of it, but I doubt it will go back together right after I hacked chunks out of it.

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-07-15, 02:41:

Caluser2000 wrote on 2021-07-14, 23:51:

Because the mobo on my first full Linux box has turned up it toes I've decided to repurpose it's chassis. Did all the component location and figure out what needs a bit of a trim up for the PGA370 mobo and 155 watt psu has to go last night while whatching the telly. This morning it was straight in to cut n tuck mode with the Fuller rotery grinder. I've never done anything this drastic before but it has be terrific fun.

The mod is coming along very well:

Ah took me a moment, forgot images post in reverse, thought you went from neat machine to chaos, now I see pic 2 is measuring up, and pic 1 is fairly neat result.

Been a while since I did similar. "Back in the day" for values of "the day" between about 23 and 19 years ago, the city where I'd turned up, seemed to be living in the relative stone age, as regards penetration of personal computers of any description, at least judging by what was available used. Now I'd got some decent boards but nothing to put them in. I carved up an innocent little NEC powermate 386sx, almost got a board in that, didn't finish the project and it was sitting open for a time, just using the base as it were. Then later I found an AT desktop case with PSU mounted flat and high, so there was room under it to carve out space for an ATX backplate, so that was the machine I had a K6-2 and Voodoo 3 in for quite a while. Cooling in it wasn't exactly optimal though. Probably I still have most of the parts of that powermate come to think of it, but I doubt it will go back together right after I hacked chunks out of it.

Fantastic progress today.

Optical drive/ffdd cage trimmed up and mounted. Hdd cage trimmed and secured. PSU has had its' original fan removed to reduce thepsu housing height by 12mm. Altered the psu housing to put a slightily smaller fan from a slot 1 cpu unit. Also added another fan to the back, now right hand side, grill.

Things to do:

Mark out then drill holes for mobo stand offs and attach them.
Lengthen the psu loom and attach to power output socket to the rear of the systems chassis.
Put a fuse holder in the psu for easy fuse fitment/removal.
Put more ventilation holes in the psu housing and system chassis.
And a few minor things to tidy the rear end up.
Need see if I can locate a pci 90 degree riser for the peripherals. Failing that use peripheral blanks to make smaller plates to mount small form factor goodies fitted to the pci slots as is. Manufacture a mounting cage for those if needed.

Take care all...😉