MattRocks wrote on 2026-09-30, 20:56:

BS. It looks like two items are now lost in the post.

I'm not sure what the staff at Royal Mail do with the retro PCBs they intercept, but they are making me angry.

There's a lot of stuff going missing, not necessarily for underhanded reasons, for which I have to refer many people to customer services. It's what happens when your half-decade long staffing retention crisis is plugged with agency workers and hiring the unemployable. It's nearly a minimum wage job now!

NeilKnows wrote on 2026-09-30, 17:21:

Fazeshift wrote on 2026-09-30, 15:28:

Good to hear. […]
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NeilKnows wrote on 2026-09-27, 20:33:

Seems fine. I thought the backlight was a bit dim initially but seems totally fine...
In good shape overall 😀

Good to hear.

I was just curious. It is really hard to assess if the LCD issue is widespread or not, especially secondhand with unknown storage and care.

I got my Thinkpad at a yardsale in my own neighborhood, along with an Austin laptop (Pentium 90), and an external 5.25 Floppy drive still in the shrinkwrap. For $40 total. I doubt I will ever get this lucky with retro hardware finds in the future. Someone loved the Thinkpad - bigger/newer hard drive than spec, and was complete with all accessories, still booted to Windows 98.

However my TP 760EL I just pulled out to compare it with has now got a faulty backliught...arghh!

The joys of vintage laptops 😀 Good luck with getting that working

Hacket wrote on 2026-09-30, 16:01:

Got couple of Vaios PCG-C1 one with whole set with charger pcmcia cdrom and recovery cds and second single unit. Left it's Pentium II 400Mhz and second is Pentium II 266Mhz. 400 machine has a 64 mb ram upgrade. So i think i found my dos/win9x dream battlestation. It's bigger than librettos but it feels way sturdier and it doesn't have a ripping like a chips plastics.

Awesome! I have a PCG-C1XD and just won an auction for the accessory set for it the other day - really looking forward to getting the VGA adapter and the recovery discs. I've already got the CD-ROM for it -- something cool I discovered recently is that if you've got the PCGA-CD51 cdrom hooked up, it can boot from CD if you hold down the left Ctrl key when the VAIO logo shows up.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-09-30, 20:56:

BS. It looks like two items are now lost in the post.

I'm not sure what the staff at Royal Mail do with the retro PCBs they intercept, but they are making me angry.

Would you possibly be around the Bristol area? Someone I sent something to via royal mail had their parcel fail to get delivered, no missed delivery card? It then sat in the warehouse for about a full month before they returned it to sender. Apparently they've got agency staff that aren't covering everything so they're likely falling behind. I had to send it back to them via Evri, somehow they're now better in his area. That was a hassle neither of us wanted.
Around my way near London, RM are extremely reliable and their new tracking system has been great for me.

Hope your parcels turn up soon 😒

Big Pink wrote on 2026-09-30, 21:13:

MattRocks wrote on 2026-09-30, 20:56:

BS. It looks like two items are now lost in the post.

I'm not sure what the staff at Royal Mail do with the retro PCBs they intercept, but they are making me angry.

There's a lot of stuff going missing, not necessarily for underhanded reasons, for which I have to refer many people to customer services. It's what happens when your half-decade long staffing retention crisis is plugged with agency workers and hiring the unemployable. It's nearly a minimum wage job now!

That does not explain physical non-perishable items going astray: they can't put them in the bin in a sorting office and they can't store them on a shelf in a sorting office, so.. they accidentally put them in a lunchbox through lack of training or experience?

Thermalwrong wrote on Yesterday, 00:01:

Awesome! I have a PCG-C1XD and just won an auction for the accessory set for it the other day - really looking forward to getting the VGA adapter and the recovery discs. I've already got the CD-ROM for it -- something cool I discovered recently is that if you've got the PCGA-CD51 cdrom hooked up, it can boot from CD if you hold down the left Ctrl key when the VAIO logo shows up.

I have 2 pcga-cd51 but on other unit a small gear broke i should rebuild it or replace. You can boot from cd even with just chaneging in bios. I wanted to use that cd rom for recover my toshiba libretto ff but it seems it doesn't work out of the box without drivers in dos so no luck. I'm waiting for another tosh cd-rom to arrive. Woha i also need vga adapter for these vaios.

If anyone cares, I bought a Nakamichi MJ-5.16 yesterday.

(That's a 5.25" slot-loading 5-disc CD-ROM changer)

Kind of interesting to watch one work without the top cover: https://youtu.be/crE0MX0qqBg

Pino wrote on 2026-09-29, 19:30:

Bought a socket 478 Pentium 4 Motherboard with ISA slots.

Despite retroweb and Ai search telling me the PCI-to-ISA bridge on it wouldn't support DMA I took the risk and I'm glad to say they are wrong, a National Semiconductor PC87200VUL bridge chip works great with the right BIOS settings, my soundblaster 16 works great with IRQ and 2 DMAs assigned.

It's really unusual for the 478 era... and it has a postcode indicator, if I'm not mistaken. Super cool 😁

Bought a interesting Datamedia Corp XT mainboard.
CPU is Nec V30, FPU is also present. Ram is soldered onboard. Also there is an large 60pin slot, what it might be? I could not find any info or documentation. Power plug is 10 pin, first thing is to identify correct voltages, it is not probably standard AT power connector?

MattRocks wrote on Yesterday, 06:41:

That does not explain physical non-perishable items going astray: they can't put them in the bin in a sorting office and they can't store them on a shelf in a sorting office, so.. they accidentally put them in a lunchbox through lack of training or experience?

All of the above I can cite examples, except for the lunchbox.

Assuming it made it to your local delivery office the most likely explanation, barring theft or dumping, is it got delivered to someone else in error. If the item was Tracked and you got notification that it was heading out on delivery (because it got scanned to core route) then the last person that handled it will be known and they can have their brains picked - the sooner the better before those memories are overwritten by another several hundred packets.

Look at this gorgeous beauty that came my way 😀

Soltek SL-86SPE-L

It has a PCI slot bent I hope I can put it back in place

Never expected to find one of these in my life...

I bought on a local marketplace a not very eventful Pentium II @ 400mhz for 40 euros ... and after a general look I decided to test it
Then turned it on and it booted ... but immediately the 4 GB Maxtor hard drive starting clicking like nuts ... well what a surprise huh ?

Suddenly I look at the POST screen and I see .. LS-120 IDE .. and I was wwwwwwwwwwhhhhhhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaatttttttt ????
My heart started racing, I turned the PC off and looked at the floppy drive .. it was one of those notches included on the case faceplate ...
To be honest I never bother even looking at the floppy drives of the cases I buy and most of the time I just disconnect them and remove the cables... but today I was lazy

Got a screw driver and started disassembling the case but I could already see the "laser" stickers and I was going nuts !
I was thinking well it will be one of those drives without faceplate because the face is the front of the case.

But when I finally removed all the screws and pulled the drive this beauty popped up, faceplate and all ! what a glorious day !

I already tested it with a regular floppy disk and it works ... I have none of those special floppies of 120mb !

Nunoalex wrote on Yesterday, 18:59:

Look at this gorgeous beauty that came my way 😀

Soltek SL-86SPE-L

Another Sexy Soltek, Nice.

Bought an identical match for my Asus GTX780Ti reference design. Gotta look for a third and an sli bridge, to fool a bit around with my Asus P9x79 board 😎

Also panic- bought a lot of 2 floppy drives, a 3.5" card reader and some optical drives from a "that's crazy cheap" point of view 🤣 probably a fine deal, haven't looked much at it yet ..

Nunoalex wrote on Yesterday, 18:59:

Look at this gorgeous beauty that came my way 😀

Soltek SL-86SPE-L

It has a PCI slot bent I hope I can put it back in place

Looks amazing! Never seen these before.

psychofox wrote on Yesterday, 18:23:

Bought a interesting Datamedia Corp XT mainboard.
CPU is Nec V30, FPU is also present. Ram is soldered onboard. Also there is an large 60pin slot, what it might be? I could not find any info or documentation. Power plug is 10 pin, first thing is to identify correct voltages, it is not probably standard AT power connector?

I would guess that 60 pin slot is for extending the ISA bus. 7 slots on-board, the 8th through that 60 pin connector?

Bought a HD4850 PCIe and X1300 PCIe for science.

The part that stood out for me: I initially wanted to use a HD4770 for my testing, as it would be absolutely sufficient. However those go for around 25-35€ on ebay here in Germany, whereas the HD4850 can be had for 10€ . Well, not that I need that much horsepower, but hey, I'll take it.

The X1300 wasn't as easy as I though either. Ideally low profile + DVI + as cheap as possible. But many cards are dell OEM ones with DMS-59, making be shudder at the thought of having a dongle on it. So after some search I found one for around 5€.

Nunoalex wrote on Yesterday, 19:17:

Never expected to find one of these in my life...

...

I already tested it with a regular floppy disk and it works ... I have none of those special floppies of 120mb !

Now you're obligated by law to acquire the 120MB floppy disks that go with it 😎

Nunoalex wrote on Yesterday, 19:17:

Never expected to find one of these in my life... […]
Show full quote

Never expected to find one of these in my life...

I bought on a local marketplace a not very eventful Pentium II @ 400mhz for 40 euros ... and after a general look I decided to test it
Then turned it on and it booted ... but immediately the 4 GB Maxtor hard drive starting clicking like nuts ... well what a surprise huh ?

Suddenly I look at the POST screen and I see .. LS-120 IDE .. and I was wwwwwwwwwwhhhhhhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaatttttttt ????
My heart started racing, I turned the PC off and looked at the floppy drive .. it was one of those notches included on the case faceplate ...
To be honest I never bother even looking at the floppy drives of the cases I buy and most of the time I just disconnect them and remove the cables... but today I was lazy

Got a screw driver and started disassembling the case but I could already see the "laser" stickers and I was going nuts !
I was thinking well it will be one of those drives without faceplate because the face is the front of the case.

But when I finally removed all the screws and pulled the drive this beauty popped up, faceplate and all ! what a glorious day !

I already tested it with a regular floppy disk and it works ... I have none of those special floppies of 120mb !

The attachment ls-1203.jpg is no longer available

The attachment ls-1202.jpg is no longer available

The attachment ls-1201.jpg is no longer available

Careful with that drive, LS120 drives have a rather nasty habit of getting the click of death as they age, of the three LS120 drives I have 2 are no longer functional due to the click of death, no idea exactly what causes it but I suspect its to do with the electronic eject system failing.

Never been able to repair it either as its beyond my pay grade level of skill.

I do love them though as they are significantly faster at reading normal 1.44Mb floppies than your average floppy drive.

tehsiggi wrote on Today, 04:39:

Bought a HD4850 PCIe and X1300 PCIe for science.

The part that stood out for me: I initially wanted to use a HD4770 for my testing, as it would be absolutely sufficient. However those go for around 25-35€ on ebay here in Germany, whereas the HD4850 can be had for 10€ . Well, not that I need that much horsepower, but hey, I'll take it.

The X1300 wasn't as easy as I though either. Ideally low profile + DVI + as cheap as possible. But many cards are dell OEM ones with DMS-59, making be shudder at the thought of having a dongle on it. So after some search I found one for around 5€.

The 4850 isn't much faster than the 4770 in real world use, it does run cooler and use less power though which may be of interest to you if you are looking for efficiency.

Trashbytes wrote on Today, 11:38:

tehsiggi wrote on Today, 04:39:

Bought a HD4850 PCIe and X1300 PCIe for science.

The part that stood out for me: I initially wanted to use a HD4770 for my testing, as it would be absolutely sufficient. However those go for around 25-35€ on ebay here in Germany, whereas the HD4850 can be had for 10€ . Well, not that I need that much horsepower, but hey, I'll take it.

The X1300 wasn't as easy as I though either. Ideally low profile + DVI + as cheap as possible. But many cards are dell OEM ones with DMS-59, making be shudder at the thought of having a dongle on it. So after some search I found one for around 5€.

The 4850 isn't much faster than the 4770 in real world use, it does run cooler and use less power though which may be of interest to you if you are looking for efficiency.

I basically needed "more than 4670" performance in the 4000 series.. and since I had a 5770 back in the day, I thought "Well, why not a 4770" 😁

devius wrote on Today, 11:07:

Nunoalex wrote on Yesterday, 19:17:

Never expected to find one of these in my life...

...

I already tested it with a regular floppy disk and it works ... I have none of those special floppies of 120mb !

Now you're obligated by law to acquire the 120MB floppy disks that go with it 😎

Here are some of the packages to keep an eye out for ... Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today