Con 2 botones wrote on 2021-10-13, 19:52:

EvieSigma wrote on 2021-10-13, 19:48:

This is the textbook definition of an e-waste rescue, as I literally snuck this out from being most certainly scrapped. An AOpen […]
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This is the textbook definition of an e-waste rescue, as I literally snuck this out from being most certainly scrapped. An AOpen branded large tower case with a dual Pentium II 400MHz system inside. Unfortunately it won't power on, so either something's come loose or the power supply is dead. Still worth it though, I've never had a dual Slot-1 system before.

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PXL_20211013_173748806.jpg

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What a find/rescue! Hope it is just the PSU.

It's very clean inside so I don't have any reason to believe there's been any kind of water/liquid damage, and boards of this era typically don't have capacitor problems either. That makes me reasonably confident the PSU is to blame.

EvieSigma wrote on 2021-10-14, 00:07:

Con 2 botones wrote on 2021-10-13, 19:52:

EvieSigma wrote on 2021-10-13, 19:48:

This is the textbook definition of an e-waste rescue, as I literally snuck this out from being most certainly scrapped. An AOpen […]
Show full quote

This is the textbook definition of an e-waste rescue, as I literally snuck this out from being most certainly scrapped. An AOpen branded large tower case with a dual Pentium II 400MHz system inside. Unfortunately it won't power on, so either something's come loose or the power supply is dead. Still worth it though, I've never had a dual Slot-1 system before.

PXL_20211013_173523003.jpg

PXL_20211013_173532558.jpg

PXL_20211013_173748806.jpg

PXL_20211013_173752660.jpg

What a find/rescue! Hope it is just the PSU.

It's very clean inside so I don't have any reason to believe there's been any kind of water/liquid damage, and boards of this era typically don't have capacitor problems either. That makes me reasonably confident the PSU is to blame.

Nice find 😀

Also, assuming you haven't already tried, maybe a dead coin cell is stopping it powering on

canthearu wrote on 2021-10-11, 02:26:

Good for free. Just check the PSU for any bloated caps. Some of the capacitors in these units don't get a lot of airflow and can fail over a longer period of time.

It did have one failing capacitor, a 2200 µF 10 volt, all of the others looked good. I salvaged one from the dead Corsair PSU I have, and everything's working fine. My idea of swapping the PSU cases turned out to be impractical.

The one bad cap could have been the cause of the instability that had the previous owner upgrade to something newer and give this away. I did a test installation of Windows 10 last night, and the system has worked perfectly so far. A little disappointed to find that the Intel H57 is only SATA 300 & no USB 3, but what do you want for nothing?

This is from a while ago. I don't remember if I already mentioned these here btw so pardon if this one will be double.

Found something twice this year. First was some kind of OEM FM2 system which alas used some kind of proprietary connectored FSP PSU (smaller connector, but I'm pretty sure adapters will exist for this), a small amount of DDR3 and even a 1TB WD EZEX HDD!
There were also some speakers there and a small screen but I didn't take those home as having to carry a PC case home on foot was already quite the walk 🤣
The second find was actually a double find. 2 PCs which both turned out to be P4 systems. One had several harddrives while the second had a GF2MX of some sort.
The parts themselves were nothing to write home about (they were just generic P4 systems from the kind that was very common back in the day), except that I did notice the previous owner did mingle with these systems before they were thrown out. Otherwise all these systems contained quite few spare parts alas but I'm happy to have found anything at all of course. Free stuff is free stuff and all 😀

So it turns out that the guys from the office next to us are moving to the recently emptied other office, so out of the goodness of my heart I helped them carry over some stuff. In the meantime I picked up some this and that for myself:

ASUS Ipanel Basic (can anyone suggest a compatible mobo? preferably socket A)
Sony MPF520 floppy drive
Brand new sealed Windows XP Home version 2002 OEM for Gateway
Brand new sealed Windows 2000 Professional OEM
2x brand new sealed Microsoft Word 2000
One mouse driver floppy (you can never have enough drivers)
LG GCE-8520B CD drive with it's setup CD and all its documentations, no box though.
Yamaha CRW4416S SCSI CD drive with cable

You're probably gonna want an A7V of some variety, the KT133 ones support it, but not sure how late the support goes

edit: apparently they rewired the connector for the A7V333 https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/asus-p4b … -deluxe.831447/ which might mean you can figure out an adapter, or if the ipanel was later stock maybe it came with one. Also, get your heavy A7V knowledge from a7vtroubleshooting.com which might give you an idea of which one will suit you.

edit2: the KT333 wasn't all that great a chipset anyway, the KT266A was well sorted though and well regarded.

This system has a slightly complicated history behind it: the case/power supply/drives I acquired a week ago when I visited my college for a homecoming event and raided their e-waste pile, but the motherboard I actually got two years ago and the video card a few months ago. The motherboard that came in the case was a faulty micro-ATX Intel 915 chipset motherboard with a 3GHz P4, but it had several bad caps so it was scrapped. It needs a fresh install of Windows XP but other than that it's a fully functional system.

Specs:
Antec ATX tower case from 2005
MSI MS-7388 Socket AM2 motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ at 2.8GHz
4GB DDR2-800MHZ RAM
Nvidia GeForce 8600GTS
Windows XP

Last Friday I was at work and the it guy was about to throw out five boxes of old computer stuff. He knows I'm into old computer stuff and asked if I could find anything useful.

One of the boxes contained about 120pcs 3,5" floppy disks in five floppy disk containers! That's gonna take a while formatting and cursing at faulty disks I guess.

The other boxes contained mainly rubbish, like tested faulty CPUs and ram, burned CDs, some sas disks with dangerous smart readings and a few routers that were resetting themselves every hour or two.
I did pick out a Quadro K4000 that 'might' still work.

Sutekh94 wrote on 2015-10-17, 18:16:

Another week, another P3 found at the dump...

As the big sticker on the back of the system indicates, this is a P3-667. It had no RAM or HDD when I got it, but slapping a 256MB PC133 stick in it brought it back to life. Gonna have to look through my box of HDDs to see what I can dig up for this system. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that this originally came from the local school system, since these, as well as similar models, were damn near everywhere in the local schools around 10 years ago or so. Some even lingered around right up until the year I graduated, 2013. It's kinda why I like these beige case OptiPlexes. Most of the ones I've seen have been rock solid reliable.

I really like the look of that model. I was surprised when I found out this style of case was pretty common with the PIII. I have been building in mini towers since 1995. I only had one flattie, a KLH 386 until I qot a flat PIII recently for free, a Toshiba Equius with a 600EB. It was apparently a high end model for scientific use. Mine bears a sticker suggesting use as a medical ultrasound head unit. It has some pricey expansion cards that are still relevant today in some contexts. The crackhead who gave it to me had no idea there were valuable parts in it because he didn't even open it up. Just saw PIII and said 'forget it' 🤣
While it came with RAM, it too was sans HDD. Any institutional use computer will be discarded without their storage devices for privacy reasons.
Will be upgrading with a 1000EB and 512MB RAM. For GPU, I procured an 8400GS PCI with a ridiculous 256MB VRAM. I am going to install XP on it and explore the potential of the CPU for gaming, as well as eventually test other CPUs so I wanted something that would not bottleneck. I really want to test a Coppermine T at some point to compare against the Coppermine and Katmai cores. I am working with an intel slot 1 adapter. It has some fun stuff like an early gigabit ethernet card and I will be putting SATA and USB 2.0 expansion cards in.
Luckily, I just picked up 4 other PIII workstations off the curb, right in my own neighborhood. Except for some light dust that accumulated in the week or so they were outside, they were in nice shape. One of the cases had some rust on it but the other three are pristine. They are all the same type case, massive,heavy tower affairs that look to be able to accommodate server hardware (almost got a hernia). There are two separate power supply bays depending on whether it is a desktop or server. Two were 450s and two were 750s, all Slot 1. All intel boards. Two each of two different kinds. 2x100MHz FSB, 2x133MHz. Two of them have ISA slots and all have AGP. Got 2 CAD/rendering workstation video cards, Diamond Stealth II PCI, GF4 MX420. 2 SB16 ISA and 2SB16 Vibra 16 PCI sound cards. It was a truly serendipitous find.
I too appreciate the dell workstations. I have one from Ca. 2009 running Windows 7
Building a PIII 450 tomorrow for my Win98 machine. It will have a 13GB Seagate enterprise HDD, SB16 ISA, 128MB 100MHz RAM. Soon, I will do a 750, overclocked to 1GHz with 512MB RAM and a Radeon 9600 I happen to have found in another free PC recently. I want to set it up with XP solely for playing Star Force and SecuROM "protected" games.
Any idea what you are going to do with your latest find? Which OS are you likely to install and are you planning on using it to play any DOS games? Retrobriting or no?

This Soyo 430HX motherboard with K5 PR133 (I really love those CPUs, great Pentium replacements, and look super cool with the oldschool gold lids) and ExpertColor S3 Vision 868 was in a dumpster find machine. A bit dusty, but in nice, working condition.

A few weeks ago, I bought a USB floppy drive and was dismayed to find that the VST floppy is not supported under Windows 10. I actually built a Windows 7 rig primarily because I needed it to both access the modern internet and write stuff to floppy for older machines. Plus I had like 2 other use cases for the build anyway, playing later XP games and recording music.
Today, I found somebody giving away a brand new IBM/Teac USB floppy drive. And it does work in Windows 10 🤣

I have a Dell variant that works in Windows 10 and 11 (my laptop runs 11, my desktop uses an LS-120 via the IDE to SATA adapter and the SATA port set to IDE mode). Gotta love and despise USB floppy drives. I used to have an LS-240 USB drive until it died one day and that worked well with Windows 10.

HangarAte2nds! wrote on 2021-10-28, 07:14:

A few weeks ago, I bought a USB floppy drive and was dismayed to find that the VST floppy is not supported under Windows 10. I actually built a Windows 7 rig primarily because I needed it to both access the modern internet and write stuff to floppy for older machines. Plus I had like 2 other use cases for the build anyway, playing later XP games and recording music.
Today, I found somebody giving away a brand new IBM/Teac USB floppy drive. And it does work in Windows 10 🤣
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I have exactly the same drive (at least it looks exactly the same) and it looks without problems under Windows 10.
I also have Dell variant which works under Windows 10 as well (and support DD floppies without problems).

Once in a while I'm helping out a friend of mine to disassemble computers for recycling, because he is getting more money for the parts then for the whole systems. For ex. he gets around 25 Euro cents per kg for an assembled PC(it is considered electronics waste), but only for the mainboards he gets almost 5 Euros per kg! 3-4 Euros per kg for expansion cards... That is 15 to 20 times more money!
So I'm disassembling all the systems he collects and in exchange I can keep anything I like.
Here is what I got last week:

- Compaq Deskpro 4000 with Pentium 233 MMX, a nice Compaq branded S3 Vigre GX PCI graphics card, some crappy Crystal ISA sound card, a 2.4 Gb WD Caviar HDD from '97
- Apple Power Macintosh 4400/200. A complete system with I think, a 2 Gb HDD, 8x CD-ROM drive, two SD-RAM sticks and a network card.
I've never had an Apple system, this is my first one! I would like to see if it works, but I have only the system and I've learned that it needs a proprietary keyboard, mouse and display 🙁((( Here the old Apple systems are really rare, I don't know if I will find those in the near future... Ebay prices are to high for ADB keyboards and mice, so it will go to storage for now. I don't even know if there are adapters to PS/2 and also for VGA...

Also disassembled a Siemens Nixdorf Scenic Pro M5 system and took the internals. Now I feel bad about it, but I'll will get the case and reassemble the system. It's a well built system and it would be a same to not save it.
Here is the mainboard with an Intel HX chipset! It came with a Pentium 166, 4 sticks of 32 Mb of EDO ram each for a total of 128 Mb, 512 Kb cache module, Cirrus Logic video with 2 Mb RAM, riser card and some crappy SB128 PCI sound card... Wonder if this mainboard supports MMX CPU-s, or at least K6-s... I tested it only with the Pentium 166 it came with...

Also grabbed a few mainboards I didn't have in my collection and they where interesting:
- ASUS P4P800-X rev 1.02
- ASUS A7V600-X rev 1.00?
- Intel Maui MU400EX

The last one I took because it has an onboard ATI Rage Pro Turbo video, Yamaha 740 sound chip and it came with a Celeron 300A!

Also got some other good stuff but I'll make another post later...

So let's continue...

34 CPUs - if I count the PowerPC 603e from the Mac, too
A few of the interesting ones are:
- 2 socket 7 Pentiums: 166 and 233MMX(not in the picture)
- 2 slot 1 PIII @500 and @700
- slot 1 Celeron 300A
- 3 socket 370: PIII @866, PIII @1GHz 133 bus, Tualatin core Celeron @1GHz
- 2 Bartons: AXDA2600DKV4D 2600+ and AXDA3000DKV4D 3000+
- AMD Phenom II x4 965 Black Edition HDZ965FBK4DGM
- Intel Xeon E5-2620-V2
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 SLACR
- Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 SLAN3
The rest are not that interesting...

A stack on RAM modules, they are always handy:

- 4x32 Mb EDO and a 512 KB cache module from the Siemens Scenic Pro M5
- SDRAM, some DDR(1GB only), a lot of DDR2(1GB only), one 2 GB stick of DDR3 @1333

- 3 IDE removable HDD racks - I was looking for one of these for a long time, of course for cheap
- Creative PC-DVD DVD1241E DVD-ROM
- NEC CDR-1400A 8x CD-ROM drive from May 1996
Also took one or two SATA DVD drives and a few 3.5" card readers

- Zalman CNPS-7700Cu for socket 478
- a huge Intel cooler for LGA775. I think it came with the QX9650. It should have blue LED lights... not sure

- a PCI Intel network card, a PCI USB card with ALI chip(interesting, newer saw one with ALI chip), a PCI Creative CT4810, an ISA sound card with Aztech AZT2320
- an AGP Matrox G400 16 MB(G4+MILA/16/IB2) - not in the picture

Also not in the pictures, because they are not that interesting:
- more than 10 HDDs from 2GB to 500GB IDE and SATA
- FSP Blue Storm II 400W power supply - the fan is not spinning but the voltages are good(30 amps on both 3.3 & 5 V rails)
- ASUS A-55GA 550W power supply with blue LED fan - 30A 3.3V rail and 28A 5V rail - voltages are good

Overall it was a great haul! No fancy voodoo cards or old sound blasters, but there are a few items... all for free! 😀

WOW, can I help? 😁

bearking wrote on 2021-11-09, 12:09:

So let's continue... […]
Show full quote

So let's continue...

20211105_234945.jpg

34 CPUs - if I count the PowerPC 603e from the Mac, too
A few of the interesting ones are:
- 2 socket 7 Pentiums: 166 and 233MMX(not in the picture)
- 2 slot 1 PIII @500 and @700
- slot 1 Celeron 300A
- 3 socket 370: PIII @866, PIII @1GHz 133 bus, Tualatin core Celeron @1GHz
- 2 Bartons: AXDA2600DKV4D 2600+ and AXDA3000DKV4D 3000+
- AMD Phenom II x4 965 Black Edition HDZ965FBK4DGM
- Intel Xeon E5-2620-V2
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 SLACR
- Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 SLAN3
The rest are not that interesting...

A stack on RAM modules, they are always handy:

20211105_223134.jpg

- 4x32 Mb EDO and a 512 KB cache module from the Siemens Scenic Pro M5
- SDRAM, some DDR(1GB only), a lot of DDR2(1GB only), one 2 GB stick of DDR3 @1333

20211105_230439.jpg

- 3 IDE removable HDD racks - I was looking for one of these for a long time, of course for cheap
- Creative PC-DVD DVD1241E DVD-ROM
- NEC CDR-1400A 8x CD-ROM drive from May 1996
Also took one or two SATA DVD drives and a few 3.5" card readers

20211105_224744.jpg

- Zalman CNPS-7700Cu for socket 478
- a huge Intel cooler for LGA775. I think it came with the QX9650. It should have blue LED lights... not sure

20211105_220822.jpg

- a PCI Intel network card, a PCI USB card with ALI chip(interesting, newer saw one with ALI chip), a PCI Creative CT4810, an ISA sound card with Aztech AZT2320
- an AGP Matrox G400 16 MB(G4+MILA/16/IB2) - not in the picture

Also not in the pictures, because they are not that interesting:
- more than 10 HDDs from 2GB to 500GB IDE and SATA
- FSP Blue Storm II 400W power supply - the fan is not spinning but the voltages are good(30 amps on both 3.3 & 5 V rails)
- ASUS A-55GA 550W power supply with blue LED fan - 30A 3.3V rail and 28A 5V rail - voltages are good

Overall it was a great haul! No fancy voodoo cards or old sound blasters, but there are a few items... all for free! 😀

bearking wrote on 2021-11-09, 10:20:

Once in a while I'm helping out a friend of mine to disassemble computers for recycling, because he is getting more money for the parts then for the whole systems. For ex. he gets around 25 Euro cents per kg for an assembled PC(it is considered electronics waste), but only for the mainboards he gets almost 5 Euros per kg! 3-4 Euros per kg for expansion cards... That is 15 to 20 times more money!

Scrapper math. Probably only gets a little over double the money, say 18kg total system, steel cased, as a whole gets 4.50 ... take 2kg of assorted boards out of it, getting a blended 4 euros per kgs, 8 euros, BUT now the case weighing 16kg now is generic scrap steel so is worth probably 0.1 Eur per kg, so 1.6 eur plus 8 = 9.6 Euro

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-11-09, 15:52:

bearking wrote on 2021-11-09, 10:20:

Once in a while I'm helping out a friend of mine to disassemble computers for recycling, because he is getting more money for the parts then for the whole systems. For ex. he gets around 25 Euro cents per kg for an assembled PC(it is considered electronics waste), but only for the mainboards he gets almost 5 Euros per kg! 3-4 Euros per kg for expansion cards... That is 15 to 20 times more money!

Scrapper math. Probably only gets a little over double the money, say 18kg total system, steel cased, as a whole gets 4.50 ... take 2kg of assorted boards out of it, getting a blended 4 euros per kgs, 8 euros, BUT now the case weighing 16kg now is generic scrap steel so is worth probably 0.1 Eur per kg, so 1.6 eur plus 8 = 9.6 Euro

Scrapper math, or not, but it works and it is for a good cause!
Actually the math goes like this:
electronics waste = 0.2 Euro per kg
mainboards + other boards combined = 4.5 Euro per kg

So for an 18 kg PC as a whole he gets 3.6 Euros
For 2 kg of assorted boards he gets 9 Euros
For the rest(case+hdd+optical+psu+...) of 16 kg he gets 3.2 Euros, because is still considered as electronics waste, not just steel scrap. Actually the steel now is more expensive then electronics waste...
So in total, with the boards sold separately, he gets 3.2 + 9 = 12.2 Euros. For only a couple of system it is not worth it, but for 25-30 systems the difference is around 250 Euros!

And I am doing this for two good reasons:
1. all the money obtained goes for a good cause! My friend has an NGO and from the money he obtains from different sources(one being collecting and selling all kind of scrap, not just electronics waste) he takes kids from poor families to short 3 to 5 days vacations in the country. So in this case every cent counts....

2. I can take anything I like 😀

bearking wrote on 2021-11-11, 09:19:

2. I can take anything I like 😀

That's my kind of math.

Found these at work in a dark corner, now to ask the bossman if I can have them for my collection. No chargers are included with them so will have to source them myself but not bad for two little pentiums though. 😀

On the left we have a Dell Latitude LM rocking a Pentium 166 MMX chip, not sure on memory yet could be 8mb or more and an active-matrix display, which I am also not to sure of?
On the right is a more capable machine a Compaq Armada M700 with a P3 700MHz, 64mb Ram with a thankfully TFT display.