Decided to put together a rolling, continually updated thread for my new and current tech toys and their usage.

Early-2000's through mid-2010's seems to be the sweet spot for super cheap hardware to play around on. In my opinion, its also the peak of what we think of as "computing", where you could expect to customize and hack your hardware and software, before everything started getting locked down into an information appliance. So that's where I've been putting my vintage restoration efforts.

Starting out with few cool finds from that era:

First is this Core 2 Duo era MSI motherboard setup with a very era appropriate Zalman copper heat sink fan cooler. Specs are MSI P45-Neo2 LGA 775 mobo, Intel e8500 CPU and 16Gb RAM.

Next is a very unique circa 2001 Acorp 6A815EPD1 dual-socket 370 motherboard. Came outfitted with 2x Coppermine era Pentium III 1Ghz processors.

Picked this up at a roadside yard sale, along with a Pentium 4 era Dell Dimension 4500, which I grabbed for its parts, which include IDE CD/RW, IDE DVD, floppy drive, 512Mb (2x256) PC-133 RAM, and a surprise video card.

Potential plans are to build a workstation around the dual-cpu ACorp, set up in RAID configuration with Corel Linux as the OS and install the Linux versions of CorelDraw, Corel PhotoPaint, and WordPerfect Office.

Also possibly dual boot into BeOS as well for extra multi processor goodness.

Not sure if it’s even functional, as it looks like the machine was kept in some damp conditions with the case frame being rusted.

Inside the Dell Dimension parts machine was one of my absolutely favorite video cards: The Matrox Millennium G450 featuring dual display support and two separate VGA outputs. This is THE perfect card to pair with the ACorp dual-PIII mobo. If everything goes well, this will be an ABSOLUTE BEAST of a workstation. At least for 2000/2001.