OMORES wrote on 2022-06-26, 15:25:
This Compaq Contura Aero 4/25 with PCMCIA floppy. It works and it's in good shape. Also it has a dead Duracell battery pack which looks fitted with 4 x 18650. This type of battery was introduced in 1994.
TabWorks from Xerox it's the default Windows 3.1 interface. (I like it!!!)
Those should be NIMH 17670 cells, might be worth measuring to be sure. I think the Contura pre-dates lithium ion batteries which were first a thing in the Toshiba Portege T3400.
The upside to that is, rebuilding the battery pack if it hasn't corroded all its connectors away is pretty easy! Just put some AA NiMH cells in place of the big cells with solder or welded tabs to have a working battery with period-correct battery life of 'about an hour' 😀
I took a big gamble! I saw a box of 'gold scrap' advertised and looking at it, there was so much ISA stuff I reasoned it must have some 386/486 stuff in there - sadly that didn't pan out. It set me back ~£100 with an ebay discount at the time, pricey for this junk but it was well packed.
Almost so well packed in fact that this 12KG parcel nearly wasn't accepted by the collection place I got it delivered too, 100g more and it would've hit the 15kg limit with packaging.
Some really cool stuff in here, 4x ISA VGA cards one of which is a Tseng ET4000ax made by STB which I Really hope it works. There's also some non-PnP ISA modems, ISA super-IO cards, 4x ISA network cards.
On the PCI front, some relatively nice Diamond S3 cards, a Savage 4, loads of the average PCI S3 / Cirrus cards and one of those Matrox cards with a PCI bridge.
Then on the AGP front, a Ti4200 without its heatsink in unknown state and a couple of TNT2 cards, nothing great.
For motherboards, a FIC VA503+, a PC Chips M919 that has the fake cache and no cache module in sight, with a Cyrix 5x86 100 😀 Then an MS6119 Slot 1 board, a couple of P4 boards and 2x Abit AV8 boards - one of which had a very dirty Zalman CNPS-7500Cu in filthy condition.
Now to figure out how I can store all of this and start testing it - the corrosion / rust on some of these means I can't be too hopeful, but some interesting stuff
edit: oof, I thought I'd have a go at cleaning up the 5x86 and upon light brushing, the A28 pin fell off. I think that's a good indication of how the mainboards were stored. Kinda weird, most of the expansion cards are in much better condition.