Made some more retro purchases, increasing my debt load even more. 😁

I just finished "upgrading" my NAS storage by about 20%.

On the left are 24 new (ish) 1.2tb, 10000 rip'em SAS hard drives with 128mb cache. On the right are the drives getting replaced. 24x 1tb, 5400 rip'em drives taht have been running 24/7 since 2015. Needless to say, i've put some some serious mileage on drives designed for "light" work only. I dropped $800 on the new drives (new sas controller and cables too). I had 2 of the slow drives fail in 2 months, get replaced and suddenly 2 more go into the yellow. The new disks are re-branded Seagate ST1200MM0129. they might be spinning rust, but they can really haul ass. Even with encryption, data compression, and a very conservative 3x8 zfs3 pool config I can still saturate a 20gb/s ethernet link. maybe I might snag a small used intel optane drive and use that for an L2arc?

In other news, I went totally Office Space on my old Brother Printer. I bought brand new toner for it, only for something in the paper path to screw up. I wasn't having a good day to start with, and truth be told smashing that 100lb monster on my basement floor felt AMAZING.

Side note, I REALLY should have taken the brand new toners out before I smashed it. CMYK toner is expensive.

If I could take a baseball bat to every Xerox and Samsung printer I'd have to service over years, I would. I don't miss that industry in the least.

Finally got around to getting the CT3679 AWE32 sound working in Win 3.1 on my Compaq Presario 460. With that, and my recently acquired Compaq Enhanced III keyboard and Logitech Wingman Extreme 3002 joystick, this childhood setup of mine is nearing completion. Maybe a nice pair of speakers...any suggestions?

I decided to spend some time this morning testing out my “new to me” IBM-branded Matrox G200 PCI video card with Windows NT 3.51 on my Ivy Bridge Core i5-3570. The G200 has a programable RAMDAC which makes 2D-accelerated widescreen resolutions possible in these older operating systems. You just need to modify the monitor definition file (MGA.MON) to specify the correct signal parameters for a custom resolution. This works with OS2 Warp as well.

The card’s 8MB of SDRAM also allows 32-bit color depth at 1080p.

Today I stuck my mish-mash of old and new 486 together for some Sim City 2000 and Doom 2 which I really need to play through to completion.

I've also got my eye on a motherboard on eBay which currently has zero bids !

Almoststew1990 wrote on 2020-11-29, 17:06:

I've also got my eye on a motherboard on eBay which currently has zero bids !

Just make sure that you set a higher bid on top of your current bid. There's always someone out there looking to screw you within the last 30 seconds of the auction.

Looking at the documentation for USB-PD protocol - thinking about replacing the 16v IBM 5.5/2.5mm ThinkPad power bricks with USB-PD equivalents. Especially since the machines have deader-than-doornails batteries and USB-PD power banks will simply get cheaper and more plentiful. I mean, even those vintage machines should get some of that modern hardware love, especially if practicality dictates it.

The problem? The cheap USB-PD dongles from China are seemingly PD version 1.0 and seem to only work with 20v output - trying to determine if it's a good idea to make a 20-24 year old Thinkpad accept 20v, or whether 15v (used in PD 2.0 and above) will yield a stable machine (it...might?). Then I'll have to figure if it's possible to mess with those dongles to only negotiate 15v (or put in some electronics to convert from 20v to 16v).

Also look at SPI for resuscitating my Gotek UFA1M44-U100 (the MiniUSB version). I still want to see FlashFloppy installed/working on it.

Dmetsys wrote on 2020-11-29, 17:12:

Almoststew1990 wrote on 2020-11-29, 17:06:

I've also got my eye on a motherboard on eBay which currently has zero bids !

Just make sure that you set a higher bid on top of your current bid. There's always someone out there looking to screw you within the last 30 seconds of the auction.

People that bid in the last 30 seconds are not looking to screw anyone, they are looking to not get screwed. No one should ever bid prior to the last 30 seconds, If you really want auctions to be fair an reflect real life prices without manipulation all auctions should be blind and everyone should only bid once.

I finally routed the PC speaker through my SB16. It was way too loud. I had to cut the speaker wire and splice it with another, but now I can control the volume. I'd like to add in a switch and volume option though, so that I can use the built in speaker, as its sound is unique.

I also swapped out my CD rom for a newer one I found the other year. The newer one was from a Dell. It's faster and substantially quieter, which is nice. I didn't want to play CD games on my 486, because the drive that came with it sounded like a washing machine on spin cycle when in use.

The only bummer, is that the new CD drive is a dark gray, so it doesn't quite match the black bevel around it on my case -- which is beige with black accents.

Shagittarius wrote on 2020-11-29, 20:24:

Dmetsys wrote on 2020-11-29, 17:12:

Almoststew1990 wrote on 2020-11-29, 17:06:

I've also got my eye on a motherboard on eBay which currently has zero bids !

Just make sure that you set a higher bid on top of your current bid. There's always someone out there looking to screw you within the last 30 seconds of the auction.

People that bid in the last 30 seconds are not looking to screw anyone, they are looking to not get screwed. No one should ever bid prior to the last 30 seconds, If you really want auctions to be fair an reflect real life prices without manipulation all auctions should be blind and everyone should only bid once.

I agree. I usually set a snipe for the last ten seconds with my maximum bid. Nothing to do with screwing people over.

Wasn't happy with the noise from the sleeve bearing fan. So that's where two of my old friends come in, and keep the Palit GF3 Ti200 cool.

Yes, it's a three slot cooler. 😉

drosse1meyer wrote on 2020-11-28, 16:08:

Trying to fix a retrobright that ran wild...

Pics?

What method do you use? I use the hair bleach cream, saran wrap + sun. You gotta get it on there somewhat evenly and apply the wrap tight around it and not let bubbles appear. I've never had a bad turnout, only one was "fair" (still better than the yellowed color it started with) because I didn't apply the wrap properly and I put it in front of a dirty window, so when the sun moved, the dirt eclipsed certain parts of the computer. The solution was to do it again, outside, with an even coat. It markedly decreased the blotching, at first glance it looked great, but some spots were still a bit darker than others. I wouldn't call this marbling per-se.

Other than that, I'm down to 30-40% of the bottle, which I bought probably 2, maybe 3 years ago. Investment has paid off though 😉

PD2JK wrote on 2020-11-29, 21:16:

Wasn't happy with the noise from the sleeve bearing fan. So that's where two of my old friends come in, and keep the Palit GF3 T […]
Show full quote

Wasn't happy with the noise from the sleeve bearing fan. So that's where two of my old friends come in, and keep the Palit GF3 Ti200 cool.

Yes, it's a three slot cooler. 😉

No real estate for cards beside it 🤣!

How was the heatsink attached?

The Zalman 47J is quite flexible when it comes to installing it. You can adjust two little'arms' and then fasten it with two pushpins.

The fan is attached with supplied rubber/silicone pushpins.

Shagittarius wrote on 2020-11-29, 20:24:

No one should ever bid prior to the last 30 seconds.

It's happened to me more times than I can count. I guess we can agree to disagree on the morales of those that snipe at the last moment, especially in situations where only 2 bids were placed in a day. That's why I always choose 'Buy It Now'. There's always some goof that'll come in and do it for no reason.

Dmetsys wrote on 2020-11-29, 23:42:

Shagittarius wrote on 2020-11-29, 20:24:

No one should ever bid prior to the last 30 seconds.

It's happened to me more times than I can count. I guess we can agree to disagree on the morales of those that snipe at the last moment, especially in situations where only 2 bids were placed in a day. That's why I always choose 'Buy It Now'. There's always some goof that'll come in and do it for no reason.

Honestly, I can agree with you there. I prefer "Buy it Now" on ebay for that reason.

Got AA lithium energizer cells and finally found piece of connector with pigtail wires that was cut off from compaq motherboard that I bought while ago, then spliced this connector to 3x AA battery holder, then blocked one of connector's pin with a piece of toothpick for keying. About 5V floating voltage reading then set onto this for CMOS battery, which is typically 4.5V.

Studying the Compaq Deskpro XL power supply to understand this combination of features better to help with my troubleshooting the twitchy PSU issue.

Cheers,

Played some Zoo Tycoon 🤣

Connected again my WinME machine, then played some "Slave Zero", "Crimsonland", "Hexen II", "Serious Sam: the second encounter" "Dark Forces" and then installed "Jedi Knight II: Mysteries of the Sith". I find it interesting to use Windows ME. I never used it back in the day, but so far I've had no issues due to it (AFAIK). Most issues with this machine have had to do with the nVidia drivers, which seem to be finicky for my GeForce 2 MX400.