This upcoming weekend iam going to buy an extra table (just a simple model which doesnt costs to much) And think that i going to put it downstairs in a room where i have some nice peaceful setting and where i can work on my vintage computer parts.. Where i going to test my stuff, doing some solder work and so on.. Iam a little bit in a hurry to find drivers for my hardware ,test them out and put them in antistatic bags for sort them out and doing some storing.

I am currently pimping out a pair of HP's for work. First off is a DC7600 SFF, which has a fresh and fully updated install of Windows 7 Ultimate (had a key handy) and is rocking a low profile 8400 gs. Need a bios update and the final upgrade will be a Pentium D 820 although as a basic web browser the 2.8 p4 that is in it currently seems to perform fine. PC #2 is a Compaq D220MT, swapped the 2.2 Celeron out for a 3.06 HT Northwood (fastest it will take) 2gb of DDR333, upgraded the 5400rpm WD to a 7200rpm variation, and threw a 512mb PCI Geforce 8400 GS that I picked up in a scrap lot a while back. Breathing some new life into these old machines feels good 😀 the D220 was dead due to a bad 200watt PSU, so it now has a Bestec 300 that has been recapped and upgraded with a high airflow fan.

Ace wrote:

Prepping a new take on the PC I had built for me in 2007. The original build sported a Core 2 Duo E6420 on an ASUS P5B-VM mothe […]
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Prepping a new take on the PC I had built for me in 2007. The original build sported a Core 2 Duo E6420 on an ASUS P5B-VM motherboard with 2GB of DDR2 RAM, GeForce 7600GT and 320GB SATA hard drive on which Windows XP was installed.

Now, I'm building a PC that may even be overkill for that time period (some parts may be too recent, but I'd like someone to confirm this), and this is what I plan to use:

-Core 2 Quad Q6600
-ASUS P5K-E/WIFI-AP motherboard
-8GB of DDR2-800 RAM
-GeForce 8800GTX
-320GB hard drive
-DVD burner & floppy drive
-Windows XP

A build like this would likely have cost a fortune in 2007, I'm sure. It's almost ready to go, however, the power supply I want to use for this build (rated for 550W) is missing a 6-pin auxiliary power connector for the 8800GTX, so I will need to sort that out first before I can get this computer put together.

That build looks very similar to what I got in 2007. I only had 4GB of RAM though, but bigger harddrive(s). I had that system untill 2012 when I upgraded the CPU to a Q9650, and that lasted me into 2015 when I finally did a full upgrade. My 8800GTX died quite early, so I upgraded to 5870 in 2011 and 7970 in Crossfire in 2013.

Ace wrote:

Core 2 Quad Q6600

Heh. Seeing this made me check my Newegg purchase history. I paid $280 for that Q6600 processor in 2007. It is still in use today (wife's computer).

Always drooled over a Q6600, had an E6550 (2 cores/2.33ghz) back in the day. Eventually found it at the beginning of this year at a fleamarket for 1 euro, and surprisingly it works pretty well, though I replaced it with a Xeon E5450 on my music-making PC. Will make another build with it soon 😁

The Q6600 is still a beast in the right environment. I have one in my linux file/minecraft server. With 4GB ram it hosts 4 worlds at a time plus file serving for our home. I think the most minecraft players we had on at a time was 6.

Actually had to make a special trip to Goodwill to rummage around for a standard USB A->B cable. I couldn't believe it, but every single USB cable I had turned out to be for mini or micro-USB.

Anyway, I finally got a late 90's Visioneer 7600USB scanner hooked up. The install procedure for Win2k and XP was a strange hack job, but once I found the necessary web page that described how to do it, it worked. The XP machines had some weird issues, but don't know if that's because of the OS or for other reasons.

On Win2k with an Intel 440GX + single P3-600E, the scanner works fine.
On WinXP with a VIA 694X + P3-933, the scanned images are fine at 300dpi and above, distorted at 200dpi, and distorted more insanely as the dpi gets lower than that.
On WinXP with my "modern" Phenom2 system, the scanned images were distorted, the scanner motor started making strange noises, the scanner locked up mid-scan, and the driver reported the scanner had become unresponsive. Try again after a reboot and it went crazy again.

Not sure what was up, but it's almost as if the scanner driver is speed sensitive. The scanner acted up so bad with the Phenom2 that it made me wonder if it had broken the thing. Maybe it just hates USB2.

Donor with fried pcb and bulged battery arrived today and so i swapped hdd and housing on my ipod classic:

It lives!

besides tested few 6800 cards i was suspicious of artifacting

A fellow Rammstien Fan

rein_ein wrote:

Donor with fried pcb and bulged battery arrived today and so i swapped hdd and housing on my ipod classic: […]
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Donor with fried pcb and bulged battery arrived today and so i swapped hdd and housing on my ipod classic:

It lives!

besides tested few 6800 cards i was suspicious of artifacting

Rammstein are great. Even better when one understand German.
Great job on that iPod.

For me, it was finishing up, reformatting 124 used floppy disks.
15% or something like that were dead or had bad sectors.
Some of the disks could be revived through NU in dos.

I remember my brother having an early iPod like that. Cool that you were able to save it.

I fooled around some more with imaging some disks that I knew were bad. I was comparing how well a few different drives could read them.

I was surprised that an Epson SMD-300 conventional 1.44MB floppy drive was really good at reading disks. It recovered more data than a first-gen Matsushita LS120 drive did, and it was almost as fast. It still wasn't as good as a 2nd-gen Matsu LS120 though.
I'm not sure where the Epson drive came from but it's an old model from back when they still had jumpers.

My old Chinon FZ-357 was pretty poor. Hopefully it's just dirty. I think it's the drive that originally came with my family's old 386SX, making it the oldest piece of working PC equipment I've had since new. If I'm right about that then it was heavily used throughout the years when people still used floppies nearly daily, unlike probably every other drive I have.

Took this notebook out of storage. It is the PC that started me down the path of retro collecting a couple of years ago. I found it in a thrift store for $15.

It's a Toshiba Tecra 550CDT. I had a Toshiba notebook like it over 20 years ago, but the 550CDT was near top-of-the-line. It is a great notebook for retro games:

Pentium 266 MMX
96MB EDO DRAM
1024x768 TFT screen
S3 Virge MX 3D video
Yamaha OPL3-SA3 sound

Working on my PII 266 MMX Retro Gaming rig build
Installed new WD 80GB IDE hard drive
Installed MSDOS 7.10
Installed a new fan on the CPU heatsink, put in a Soundblaster Live! PCI card and set up the drivers for that
Installed Duke Nukem 3D, Duke 1 and 2, Desert Strike and Crusader No Remorse for testing
(spent way too much time playing on the games, the sound and performance is awesome in DOS so far)
Installed ATI RAGE 128 Ultra Pro

Now putting Windows 98SE on it.

Next up is work on the Pentium 120 machine

Figured out how to open an HP Vectra VL Series 8 mini tower. Checked its contents (all healthy!). Benchmarking all my video cards in DOS on a P3 933.

I started an Excel document for work using Word 97 on the old Thinkpad 760. Its dying and I lost my document halfway through 🙁 just randomly shuts down after 15-120min of use. EDIT: Ran a system test, motherboard is shot. It now refuses to turn on for more than 20seconds.

Working on a OEM Toshiba Equium 7100s Pentium II 350MHz system, fitted a 10GB seagate HD, installed windows 2000 the drivers for the D-link network card & am all up and running, it's a nice little machine after a good clean up(was pretty filthy). ATi Rage Pro graphics, BX chipset and Crystal 4235 sound chip, Windows found the drivers for the lot witch was nice. This is my first ever Slot 1 machine, finding it a pretty good experience so far. The case is really unique and attractive, I do like the bonnet arrangement to gain access, the top slide off nice and easy too. Just need to change the CPU fan now as it's bearings are totally shot.

Finally put together my retro PCs. After gathering parts, I was able to build two!

PC1:
Asus P3B-F mobo
PII-400
GeForce FX 5200
Canopus Pure3D II (VooDoo 2)
512 MB RAM
80 GB HDD
YMF719 audio card /w Dreamblaster X1
3Com 10/100 NIC
Windows 98 SE

PC2:
Asus P5A mobo
Pentium 233 MMX (Running at 2.5x100)
128 MB RAM
GeForce2 MX400
30 GB HDD
SB AWE64 Value
3Com 10/100 NIC
DOS 6.22 + Windows for Workgroup 3.11

Before that, I was playing around with my Roland SC-55 mkII on my modern daily driver PC (Win 10).

I spent a couple of hours trying to get two PCI SATA cards to boot from an SSD on my Pentium 90 box as well as relearning the quirks, LBA, and partition type incompatibilities between DOS 6.22 and 7.10 (Win 98SE.) One has a VIA chip and it hands during the POST sequence. The other has a Silicon Image chip which is recognized, but refuses to boot.

If I boot to DOS 7.10 using the integrated IDE and try to read certain parts of the DOS 6.22 partition on SSD, I get "Sector not found" errors. I changed its partition type to 0x0e (LBA mapped) and DOS 7.10 reads the partition perfectly. Odd because it was working fine using the 0x06 partition type in VirtualBox.

I also plugged in the Silicon Image card into a dual p3 box and it would not boot, but the VIA card worked perfectly. In fact it booted to DOS 6.22 using partition type 0x06.

A Promise PCI SATA/IDE card is coming in the mail later this week. Maybe it will boot on this old box.

Got my old lte 5400 out to play with, but it was not in good enough shape for me to keep. And anyway I don't need a laptop never really had. Sold it for 30$, and I payed 10$ for it years ago! Got my use out of it and made money off it.
If I'm going to own a laptop it heck better be like new. But 30 years old.

Thinkpad 760EL now refuses to even turn on. Should I sell it for parts?