So.... the last two weekends at the flea market place have been somewhat interesting and very shitty at the same time.
The very shitty part:
1) I bought a really small PC made by ECS (Elitegroup), thinking it would be something like a 2nd gen i3 or Pentium G or similar, to give to one of my nephews as a PC to mess around on and do a bit of school work. His mom specifically wants it to be really small, because of the lack of space on/around his desk. Te gypsie seller even had a power adapter for it, which is extremely rare with these type of findings. That's what got me too excited and I bought it without further looking up the model. I figured if it uses a small laptop-sized power adapter, it has to be something very efficient and thus newer. The seller also said they put Windows 10 on it, further making me think this is a (relatively) modern (usable in the modern world, that is) PC. Welp.... I should have followed my usual instinct and not impulse-buy it. It turned out to be..................... wait for it...................... a Atom (1st gen) -based build... with an Intel i945 chipset and only 1 memory slot, maxxed out at 2 GB DDR2 533. YUCK!! And to top it off, the adapter wasn't the original one either - the gypsie seller had taken one from some LG TV and spliced the wires to the barrel of the original adapter. The original one was supposed to be 19V 3.42 Amp (65W), but the seller spliced a 19V 2.35 Amp (45W) adapter. Ooops! Well, in any case, that was fine, because the Intel Atom (230) CPU is only a 4W TDP chip. Really, the biggest power "guzzler" in the system was the 320 GB 3.5" SATA HDD - a Seagate Barracudda 7200.12 (meh!) With Windows 10 on it, you can imagine how badly it ran.
But wait, there's more!
- Speaking of the HDD, that one was not original to this system. It was clearly taken out of something else, something with....... roaches!!! --------- FUUUUUUUUuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu! 🙁
Luckily, there weren't any live ones and no eggs either. So after a wipe-down with sanitizing wipes, then a follow up with Lavender-scented 70% IPA (because I find this to be relatively decent at covering up roached-pooped hardware), I deemed it "clean" (enough) again to put back in the system... and that's as far as I've gone with it. I tested this PC otherwise, and indeed it seems to run, with Windows 10, as stated. It's just.... Slooooooooooooooooooow. So slow, that it makes the 2.3 GHz P4 Celeron I tested last week look like a top-dollar PC. I'll probably end up wiping the HDD and putting either XP or 7 on there... or better yet, replace it with a 2.5" HDD to bring down the power consumption... and noise, as the HDD is the loudest part about this system. 🤣 (It's actually not loud per se... but the vibrations from the HDD resonating on the desk do make it seem so.)
Also, speaking of the HDD, I'm puzzled how sometimes we take good care of HDDs and they still fail... yet this roach-pooped HDD with completely tarnished head-amp contacts and poop all over the controller pins still functions just fine with completely healthy SMART readings.
Anywho, I'm pretty regretful of this purchase and really don't know what I'll be doing with it. It's pretty useless for browsing online, despite having Windows 10. And not like anyone will want to buy it if I put it back online for sale. I spent $15 on it, but I can safely say that I wouldn't have spent even $1.50 on it if I knew it was what it was. Goddamn!
2) I lost $15... as in, they fell out of my pocket somewhere, somehow. Normally, I'm pretty good about not loosing stuff... but I guess these last two weekends were just not my good ones.
Now, shitty buys above and loosing money aside, I still did manage to find a few interesting stuff. Can't say it was worth it, but you be the judge...
* ATI Radeon 9100 64 MB purple PCB (forgot the OEM) for $2
* Thermaltake Volcano Mini Orb of some sort (golden looking) for $1 (from same person that sold me the 9100 above, as a deal)
* GTX 750 with detached heatsink and no fan... $3 (probably f***ed, but meh.)
* GeForce 4 MX 440 8x, 128-bit, 64 MB of 5 ns SDR RAM for $2 - looks OK
* 2x PC133 256 MB of SDRAM for $1 total - one is Micron, other unknown... from the same box of scrap PCBs as the MX 440 above.
* ASUS P5N32-SLI Premium with C2D E6600 CPU and full-height cooler - all for $2... I don't see any bulged caps on the board and it's an nVidia chipset, so I bet that's what's f***ed... unless it's the CPU socket pins, I forgot to check, how that I think about it.
* 80 GB 3.5" IDE Maxtor Diamond Max 9 Plus for $2 - spins up OK, haven't tested it in a system yet.
* a GT 740 video card for $1 - absolutely NEED to take pictures of this one (when I get to it) for y'all to see - it's "interesting", to say the least. 🤣
* slim SATA laptop optical drive - free
* 19" Viewsonic LED monitor - free from the dumpster... and perhaps for a reason. Didn't look too bad, apart from being extremely dirty... and if that was not enough, while fetching it out of the dumpster, I accidentally dragged a cardboard box to get to it, which had some thrown away foods and drinks... and as you might have guessed it, the box toppled over and everything spilled onto the monitor just exactly as I was trying NOT to do that. Yeah... talk about bad luck that weekend. Anyways, I got the monitor home and put it outside, waiting its turn for a wash. Glad we had extra cold days before I got to it. When I opened it, I found it was a ROACH MOTEL! FFFFFFfffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu, not again! Luckily, it turned out to have been a *former* roach motel - again, no live roaches in it and no eggs. But this one, even after washing with water and soap and sanitizing wipes and lavender-scented IPA - still fucking stinks! Not near anywhere as much as when I had gotten it, but still enough to give the room an unpleasant smell after it's been running for a bit. Probably need to leave it outside under the sun when it gets hotter. A few days of intense sunlight tends to be good for de-stinking stuff. Hopefully that does it. It's a shame otherwise, as this is a perfectly fine working monitor... or seems to be so far. If there was anything wrong, my theory is that the roach poop on the video board controller probably messed up the video signals or caused other shenanigans. Now with everything washed and cleaned, I don't see anything else wrong... aside from the smell, of course.
And that's about all of the computer-related stuff I found.
As for the highlight of the non-computer stuff I got: 6x 30V 400 Watt incandescent light bulbs, made in the 70's in the USSR. No idea what these are from, but perhaps ship and/or submarine bulbs. I don't know what else uses such low voltage but high power bulbs. Anyone know? They are pretty cool, IMO. I also found a plethora of vacuum tubes - mostly Soviet ones. Already have a box full of them from before. Maybe I'll eventually find enough to build me my own ENIAC computer. 🤣
JustJulião wrote on 2025-03-24, 20:27:
Bonus piece of Art that was stuck in the Floppy drive. I wonder how old it is!
Hah, nice!
A few months back, I bought a bunch of floppy drives for $0.50 each, and one of them had two Yu-Gi-Oh cards in it. Having a college roommate a decade ago who was into collecting this stuff, there were also quite the collectible cards that could fetch a really high price. In my case, though, the two card were pretty bad fakes. 🤣 🤣
stef80 wrote on 2025-03-17, 20:51:
Arrived from Germany few days ago ... unmolested new-old-stock FireGL X1 (FireGL 9700) with full bundle and a box:
Great!
Now get rid of that shitty stock cooler it has and put something proper on there.
Do that, and the card might actually last quite a long time. The cause of Radeon 9700/9800 (and equivalent FireGL) video cards dieing is 100% undersized / inadequate cooler.
PcBytes wrote on 2025-03-23, 17:38:
-2x DEER PSUs more ancient than stinky bones (@momaka - VIVA caps 🤣)
🤣 🤣 🤣
A blast from the late 90's / early millenium, aren't they?
On a related note... THANK YOU! I forgot I have two ancient Deer PSUs that I can borrow primary caps from (IIRC, they were 470 uF units, one set possibly being VIVA too). I need to upgrade the primary caps of a not-too-shabby Turbo-X PSU that's built quite well in all aspects, except for the primary filter caps, where the manufacturer used 220 uF units to cut down on costs. The PSU has everything a basic system would need - adequate input and output filtering (with PI coils and large enough caps), 5VSB PWM chip, a real PPFC coil, 20 Amp rectifiers on all rails (good enough for a 150-200 Watt 12V-based system) and even dual 12V-rails with OCP. So upgrading the primary caps to at least 470 uF should make it good enough.
The two ancient Deers I have, on the other hand, are pretty old, and one doesn't even have feedback / optocoupler for the 5VSB (it uses one of those super-inefficient 5VSB designs with a 7805 linear regulator). So don't think I'll ever fix these up, at least not for PC use anyways. I imagine the ones you got are similar design. They are actually pretty solid 5V-designs... but again, that 5VSB circuit on them makes me a bit nervous. 😁
Alexraptor wrote on 2025-03-19, 10:24:
Scored an Fujitsu Siemens e178! Seems kind of obscure since I couldn't find anything on it. I had completely forgotten that 17-inch monitors could even be this sharp and crisp!
It was missing the base though, so I had to reconfigure my Compaq Deskpro from Tower to Desktop mode.
Be careful when you do that - some CRTs warn that they cannot be used without a stand. Reason being: they need to be a few cm / inches above the surface they rest on so that they can cool through their ventilation holes underneath. If you block that, you risk the CRT overheating. But FWIW, this is probably only very specific to a few CRTs. Most I've seen will have one large PCB on the bottom, blocking air from coming from under the monitor anyways. But a few do have holes in the PCB in certain spots to allow for certain components to cool off. Also, Sony CRTs that use multiple board definitely need to be used with a stand (though I think Sony made it such that it's almost impossible to remove the stand on these.)
