@Rhuwyn, my eyes immediately gradated towards the Quantum Bigfoot...for some odd reason I have a soft spot for those! Great haul for sure!

FesterBlatz wrote:

@Rhuwyn, my eyes immediately gradated towards the Quantum Bigfoot...for some odd reason I have a soft spot for those! Great haul for sure!

Yeah I noticed there are a good number of people who have a soft spot for them. I never had one in any of my main machines when they were new. I always got the impression they were slower then most 3.5inch drives but I could be mistaken on that. Curious on your experience

Not a dumpster find, but a local listing for free.

Samsung 959NF

I just read a review of 19" CRT's from a 2001 magazine and this model (or rather 900NF) was the best of the bunch. It also beat a Sony G420 they used to compare a more expensive model. 😊

sf78 wrote:

Not a dumpster find, but a local listing for free. […]
Show full quote

Not a dumpster find, but a local listing for free.

samsung.jpg

Samsung 959NF

I just read a review of 19" CRT's from a 2001 magazine and this model (or rather 900NF) was the best of the bunch. It also beat a Sony G420 they used to compare a more expensive model. 😊

I use that exact model, I actually found my Samsung 959NF in the electronics waste dumpster.

It's really a great CRT!

Their access time and rotational latency isn't as good as the 3.5" equivalents, but they offered more storage for the money as a trade-off.

I had one or two in the past that I bought brand new and really liked them. I wouldn't suggest using one as an OS drive on all but the slowest systems, but for secondary storage or to just cram tons of retro games on they're just fine.

Rhuwyn wrote:

Yeah I noticed there are a good number of people who have a soft spot for them. I never had one in any of my main machines when they were new. I always got the impression they were slower then most 3.5inch drives but I could be mistaken on that. Curious on your experience

Sometimes you can't find anything and someday it is spilled on you like from giant truck. Two days ago it happened to me. Our school was scrapping some old electronics and our school building manager told me if I want take a look on what will be scrapped. Of course I did, and wow, it was quite a pile!

First day he gave me some laptops and desktop PCs.

Because of the SUPER STUPID recyling law he cannot give me everything as is, he needs special paper with stamp from ecologic recycling company. But nobody cares, what is inside, so I started disassembling and, well to be honest, hoarding. But to my defence, I had less then two hours for disassembling this pile, so I didn't have the time to think what I want, so I went the route of "Can toss it everytime later".
The PCs were mix of Compaq desktops, which were quite nicely built, and IBM NetVistas, which were utter junk.

Those Compaqs were easy to disassemble, almost toolless design, took me ~3-4 minutes to dissasemble, sort and assemble back what was left. Pretty great quality of everything, sturdy case, neat motherboard.

On the other hand, IBM NetVistas were crap. Fan design, cheap caps, confusing construction, everything. First one needed full 20 minutes to figure out, how the heck it is holding together, how to remove that stupid black CPU shroud, and mainly, how the hell was I supposed to remove CPUs, which were GLUED to the heatsink with some black gooey super smelly resin. Again, I had no time to spare, so I grabbed a hammer and a screwdriver, and knocked them away. They were Pentium 4s, 1.6 GHz, and first one I managed to de-lid by accident. Oopsy-daisy! But I got spares... 🤣
What struck me though were the caps. ALL of them were bloated or bulgy.

Then I continued with laptops. Two types were present, first 11x Dell VOSTRO 1015. Our school bought them and few days after warranty ended more then half of them broke down. Anyway, I pulled out all the HDDs (320 GB SAMSUNG drives), RAM (Hynix 2Gb sticks), WiFi cards and DVD drives. Two more laptops were some Acer from Vista era. Again, pulled harddrives and wireless cards and done.
Then I packed everything in my school backpack and sack for PE stuff and went home. It weighed about 50 kg and I had to carry it on my back 1 kilometer to bus station. That was great 😁
Anyway, this is the result.
All the stuff on workbench minus TV, keyboard and mouse.

On second day I had even less time, about an hour. And this load.
Again, same crap, but this time I found this whatnot.

Seriously? The bracket is too long, so just bend it backwards and fix it to MOVABLE transom with crappy zipties and call it the day? Somebody was drunk there...
Again, packed the stuff, but there was WAY more than the day before. To be exact, I weighed it, 87 kilograms. 😵

And there it is on my workbench.

To be honest, this is the first time I am thinking that I have too much of something. Another 15 floppy drives, 15 SATA DVD burners, 8 Vanta16 cards, 15 harddrives (by the way except two or three drives all of them were different brand) and stuff like that. Also, 10 pretty badly mangled P4 1,6GHz (they need some serious lapping and leg straightening before they could be used, but those were the only victims to this "event"). Also I got a handful of 256MB DDR1 RAM sticks and IDE to SATA adaptors. Pretty neat.

If you have some question to the stuff I got, just tell me. Sadly, now I don't have any free time because I am preparing for my finals on high school and that takes all my time, so I didn't have time to go through it and investigate, what I have. Also, now I am thinking of way how to connect 8 SATA drives to one board in my HTPC. That is by the way also really funny build, I got myself a challenge 4k for 4k (I want to make PC which is capable of playing 4k videos just only for 4k CZK, what is about 160 bucks. It is going well so far, I am missing only GPU and case and I am on 15 bucks right now. 😁 )

Dude you need help.

No seriously, need a buddy to help? 🤣 and what's up with taking all the system speakers?

Jade Falcon wrote:

No seriously, need a buddy to help? 🤣 and what's up with taking all the system speakers?

I have about 50 of these and would grab any that gets thrown out. Dell Optiplex 520, 745, 755 SFF has them for sure.
They are very nice as they already have the amplifier onboard. Useful for microcontroller projects for example.

krivulak, those laptop 320GB drives are sure one thing I'd like to have!

I'm not so sure all those 1.6GHz P4s will be of good use though. Personally I'd much rather have the Vantas 🤣! (especially if any of them would happen to be PCI).
That bending of the bracket, that's pretty stupid...

And how the heck did you lift all that stuff?? 😜
If it were too heavy to carry, I'd drop some of the heavier more useless stuff like floppy drives without front bezel, the SATA optical drives (maybe keep 2 or 3 or so) and anything that takes up room and is easy to find. But very well done!

It's quite a challenge once you find yourself in a goldmine but with very limited time to strip all the carcasses clean 🤣

I don't know, I just grabbed them. Like I said, it was hoard now, think later kind of a deal and I am taking Arduino lessons in school and at this point of my life I am a little bit obssessed with sound so I thought of few projects involving speakers (also searching for something by Roland, like SC-55, wink wink 😁)

Sadly, all of those Vantas are AGP. And for that bracket, I managed to straighten it back with bench vice. Didn't test them though, but I assume they work since the boards were point of failure.
For lifting the stuff, I measure 205 cm (6'9") and weigh 130 kilos and my saying is if you can't carry yourself on your back, you are weak. It was sure very difficult to breath though an the bus leaned on its side when I stepped in 😁

Rescued 3 PCs from the trash, a P4 system, an Athlon 64 socket 939 AGP system and an old Athlon XP system

PC 1 - Working, aparently the PC was trashed just because it couldn't POST due to a BIOS misconfiguration, reseting the CMOS fixed the issue. Scrapped case
Pentium 4 3.0 Ghz Prescott Socket 478
Gigabyte GA-8S655FX
1x 512 MB DDR 400
Gigabyte Radeon 9250 128 MB 128 bit
Seagate 120 GB HDD
400 watt PSU

PC 2 - Working, HDD missing
Athlon 64 3000+ Socket 939 1.8 Ghz 512 KB L2 with a Zalman Cooler
Gigabyte GA-K8V Ultra-939
2x 1 GB + 2x 512 MB DDR 400
Sapphire Radeon 9550 256 MB
400 watt PSU

PC 3 - All parts working, HDD and videocard missing
Athlon XP 1800+ Palomino
MSI KT3 Ultra2 (MS-6380E)
1x 1 GB DDR400
420 watt PSU

i might post some pics of the parts later

Got some stuff for free - not dumpster finds, but still free:

1. Biostar G41D3C - intel G41 LGA 775 DDR3 motherboard + 3GHz E6600 Pentium Dual-Core CPU + 2GB of Team Group DDR3 (2x1GB) + 80GB Maxtor SATA HDD. It would post but was unstable in windows so it was replaced. I had a look at the thing, managed to install winXP and did experience some instability - but then I fired up Aida64 and noticed the CPU was running at 3833MHZ @ stock voltage 😜 - likely the machine had a 1333MHz FSB CPU at one point witch was replaced with the PDC E6600 but the chap that downgraded forgot to reset bios - witch resulted in the machine running at 333x11.5 MHz 😀 Gave it a little voltage boost and it's perfectly stable at that speed - allmost 4GHz on both cores - impressive.

2. Asrock 870 PRO3 AM3 motheboard + Phenom II X6 1090T BE + Asus 8800GTS + 550W chieftec modular PSU. No ram, no HDD. The machine posts fine (with ram). Haven't installed a HDD in it yet.

Picking up a Dell Dimension E520 with 4gb of ram, a q6600, 160gb hdd and a windows 10 license. Needs a psu and gpu. Free!

Skyscraper wrote:

sf78 wrote:

Not a dumpster find, but a local listing for free. […]
Show full quote

Not a dumpster find, but a local listing for free.

samsung.jpg

Samsung 959NF

I just read a review of 19" CRT's from a 2001 magazine and this model (or rather 900NF) was the best of the bunch. It also beat a Sony G420 they used to compare a more expensive model. 😊

I use that exact model, I actually found my Samsung 959NF in the electronics waste dumpster.

It's really a great CRT!

Still got my original one, but haven't tried it in years because of it's size. 😐

Been given some bits and peices for free.

No photo, but a Pentium 4 661 3.6ghz Costa Rica. Probably one of the fastest P4 single cores out there, perfect for my Win98 build.

And then this.

Terratec DMX 6Fire 24/96, soundcard and front panel. Missing it's IDE cable but easy to get. I have no idea what any of the other ports are on the soundcard board or what they do, any ideas?

Asomodai wrote:

Been given some bits and peices for free. […]
Show full quote

Been given some bits and peices for free.

No photo, but a Pentium 4 661 3.6ghz Costa Rica. Probably one of the fastest P4 single cores out there, perfect for my Win98 build.

And then this.

Terratec DMX 6Fire 24/96, soundcard and front panel. Missing it's IDE cable but easy to get. I have no idea what any of the other ports are on the soundcard board or what they do, any ideas?

Pretty cool card, I have one of these. From memory it was tricky to setup and not always stable, but the sound was decent. If you open up the front module it has a Waveblaster header inside and I ran a Korg wavetable module in there, so maybe that was the problem for me.

Manual is here - http://terratec.ultron.info/Audio/DMX6fire249 … 6_Manual_GB.pdf

JidaiGeki wrote:

Asomodai wrote:

Been given some bits and peices for free. […]
Show full quote

Been given some bits and peices for free.

No photo, but a Pentium 4 661 3.6ghz Costa Rica. Probably one of the fastest P4 single cores out there, perfect for my Win98 build.

And then this.

Terratec DMX 6Fire 24/96, soundcard and front panel. Missing it's IDE cable but easy to get. I have no idea what any of the other ports are on the soundcard board or what they do, any ideas?

Pretty cool card, I have one of these. From memory it was tricky to setup and not always stable, but the sound was decent. If you open up the front module it has a Waveblaster header inside and I ran a Korg wavetable module in there, so maybe that was the problem for me.

Manual is here - http://terratec.ultron.info/Audio/DMX6fire249 … 6_Manual_GB.pdf

Cheers for that! The cable connecting them is just a standard IDE right? Cheers!

kanecvr wrote:

Got some stuff for free - not dumpster finds, but still free:
Phenom II X6 1090T BE

Jesus Christ, few months ago I paid 120 bucks for this CPU and was pretty pleased that I got great deal and was happy that I have powerful gaming CPU. Then I read this and I don't think that anymore... 😁

Asomodai wrote:

JidaiGeki wrote:

Asomodai wrote:

Been given some bits and peices for free. […]
Show full quote

Been given some bits and peices for free.

No photo, but a Pentium 4 661 3.6ghz Costa Rica. Probably one of the fastest P4 single cores out there, perfect for my Win98 build.

And then this.

Terratec DMX 6Fire 24/96, soundcard and front panel. Missing it's IDE cable but easy to get. I have no idea what any of the other ports are on the soundcard board or what they do, any ideas?

Pretty cool card, I have one of these. From memory it was tricky to setup and not always stable, but the sound was decent. If you open up the front module it has a Waveblaster header inside and I ran a Korg wavetable module in there, so maybe that was the problem for me.

Manual is here - http://terratec.ultron.info/Audio/DMX6fire249 … 6_Manual_GB.pdf

Cheers for that! The cable connecting them is just a standard IDE right? Cheers!

I would say so, the box says it's a 40 pin cable, the connectors are not specially keyed (unlike the SB Live! cable) and the cable looks standard, but very long and with only one connector on each end. Pics of the connector and cable spec are attached. This cable does carry power to the front unit so be careful about how you connect it.