appiah4 wrote:

Use a hairdryer to warm it?

This^ is what I ended up doing, being careful to warm the heatsink more than the CPU itself. After a while it popped off without much resistance.

It turned out to be an Athlon 64 4000+ E6, with a manufacture date of 47th week 2006... so it must have been a budget build. Single-core socket 939 in the shadow of Core 2.

FesterBlatz wrote:

Perhaps. Although in many cases the mounting mechanism limits or prevents torsional movement of the heatsink, making it impossible to twist before pulling.

Munx wrote:

That's why it's always a good idea to twist before pulling.

Indeed, this HSF is slightly wider than usual and was flush against the sides of the retention bracket. The only way out was up.

Family got wind of me liking old PCs and dumped this crappy HP Pavilion A1650y here. Has a P4 3.06GHz and 1 gig of DDR2. The Windows 7 install on it was super bloated with a ton of malware and other crap, and a ton of family pictures. Decided to mess around and deleted a bunch of system32 files and am currently DBAN'ing it. Not sure what I'll do with it, probably resell with 7 to some kid or guy who wants a basic PC. /shrug

cj_reha wrote:

Family got wind of me liking old PCs and dumped this crappy HP Pavilion A1650y here. Has a P4 3.06GHz and 1 gig of DDR2. The Windows 7 install on it was super bloated with a ton of malware and other crap, and a ton of family pictures. Decided to mess around and deleted a bunch of system32 files and am currently DBAN'ing it. Not sure what I'll do with it, probably resell with 7 to some kid or guy who wants a basic PC. /shrug

Very similar situation as you. Friend dumped a near mint condition HP Media Center PC m7470n (Athlon x2 4200+, 2GB, 300GB HD, Radeon Xpress 200) with Windows XP Media Center Edition installed and hoards of bloatware. Wiped it and reinstalling XP MCE. Have no idea what to do with it. The thing weighs an absolute ton. Probably will donate it.

liqmat wrote:

cj_reha wrote:

Family got wind of me liking old PCs and dumped this crappy HP Pavilion A1650y here. Has a P4 3.06GHz and 1 gig of DDR2. The Windows 7 install on it was super bloated with a ton of malware and other crap, and a ton of family pictures. Decided to mess around and deleted a bunch of system32 files and am currently DBAN'ing it. Not sure what I'll do with it, probably resell with 7 to some kid or guy who wants a basic PC. /shrug

Very similar situation as you. Friend dumped a near mint condition HP Media Center PC m7470n (Athlon x2 4200+, 2GB, 300GB HD, Radeon Xpress 200) with Windows XP Media Center Edition installed and hoards of bloatware. Wiped it and reinstalling XP MCE. Have no idea what to do with it. The thing weighs an absolute ton. Probably will donate it.

hpm7470nfront.JPG

Heh. I kinda want yours just because of how gaudy it is 🤣

Reminds me of those NEVER OBSOLETE eMachines systems.

cj_reha's post made my eyes hurt a little. Then I saw liqmat's and straight up fainted. Did that one come with sunglasses?

Swapped the Aztech Sound Galaxy NX Pro (still works, will be installed again in the system when I set the jumpers on the CT2740 card) with the Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 CT2740 that has the CT1747 bus chipset (FM Synthesizer and IDE bus), DSP 4.11 (Legitimite Hanging Note Bug), and Yamaha DB50XG installed (yes, General MIDI/eXtended General MIDI) and it sounds epic. Had trouble with installing the drivers for Windows 3.11, but I eventually got it to work (had to remove the Jumper for the MIDI channel to go from 330h to 300h since I have an MPU-401 card installed for my Roland MT-32 games).

The other card I'm going to install will be the CT1740 (DSP 4.11 unfortunately, would be awesome to swap the DSP chip to a V4.05) in my K6-2/300 system along with my Sound Blaster 16 WavEffects. The Sound Blaster 16 WavEffects will be used in Windows 9x, while the CT1740 will be used for MS-DOS.

Big shout out to PeterNY from Amibay: Thanks for the cards, man! They work with no issues and look fantastic.

Also, for those who are looking for a manual for the Sound Blaster 16 (non-PnP cards) jumper configurations, here's the link: Jumper Settings of Sound Blaster Audio Cards - PDF

CkRtech wrote:

cj_reha's post made my eyes hurt a little. Then I saw liqmat's and straight up fainted. Did that one come with sunglasses?

HP made some fugly systems during that period. That's the truth.

liqmat wrote:

CkRtech wrote:

cj_reha's post made my eyes hurt a little. Then I saw liqmat's and straight up fainted. Did that one come with sunglasses?

HP made some fugly systems during that period. That's the truth.

Did you take any photos of the inside? I wouldn't mind seeing some details of their analog video capture stuff in case you want to post more photos. Don't want to bore you, though. Haha 🤣

CkRtech wrote:

liqmat wrote:

CkRtech wrote:

cj_reha's post made my eyes hurt a little. Then I saw liqmat's and straight up fainted. Did that one come with sunglasses?

HP made some fugly systems during that period. That's the truth.

Did you take any photos of the inside? I wouldn't mind seeing some details of their analog video capture stuff in case you want to post more photos. Don't want to bore you, though. Haha 🤣

No worries. I did take photos of the inside. The TV/video capture is all centered around a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150 PCI card with the front panel video-in ports routed to the card. Coax cables plug directly into the back of the card of course. The motherboard has an ATI IXP 450 southbridge. Other than that I can't tell you much more. It's SATA 1, so we're not talking screaming fast data throughput, but it does the job.

More on the mobo:

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c00378480

Hey! Thanks for sharing.

I started doing analog video capture in 1998. The appearance of a consumer friendly 7200 RPM IDE hard drive was a miracle.

CkRtech wrote:

Hey! Thanks for sharing.

I started doing analog video capture in 1998. The appearance of a consumer friendly 7200 RPM IDE hard drive was a miracle.

No problem. What I find humorous about this system is the ridiculous HP Personal Media Drive interface which basically has you sliding in and out of the case a ginormous external USB drive essentially which was purchased separately. Data on the go, you know. 🤣 That took up a lot of real estate internally with that massive drive cage. The internal hard drive is hidden behind it. Luckily the case design allows you to slide the entire drive cage out of the front once you undo a few screws so you can get to the internal hard drive.

Got my hoard of Commodore 64 I picked up yesterday and going through it right now. Holy Crap, Commodore 64 jack pot!!!

-Two working Commodore 64s, one with box manual,etc
-One VIC-20, boxed working
-300+ floppy disk programs for Commodore 64, many hand-written. Found Ultima III though, and a few others of note.
-About two dozen or so boxed (some flattened..hmmm) Commodore 64 games/programs
-Six joysticks
-Four printers
-Magazines, about 30 of them, about Commodore
-Commodore color monitor
-cables and cables
-six joysticks
-two cassette tape decks
-and two other boxes full of more crap I haven't gone through.

It'll be interesting to hook this up and actually use a Commodore 64 for the first time.

Finished refurbishing and upgrading my GX110 for good and brought it up to low DX8 level hardware to target 2000-20001 games. Details can be found in my signature.

I was hoping to use this PC as a daily driver to play games from 92-2001. It turned out the Optiplex case was too deep, it did not work on the miniscule work desk I have to do with ever since my study room was repurposed as a nursery. So into the storage it goes.. My retrogaming until such a day when we can move to a larger house and I can have a mancave will have to do with a raspberry pi 3, retropi and dosbox 🙁

appiah4 wrote:

Ooh I built the P133 in my sig thia month so please do tell ehat went into it.

Why does it say 1994 in your signature? The P1 133 was released in mid-1995.

Anyway, I'm using an A-Trend ATC-2000 mainboard (or a Soyo SY-5TF, should the A-Trend not work), 64 MB EDO RAM, and probably some ATi graphics card. Moreover, I'm planning to add both 3.5" and 5.25" disk drives, a CD burner or DVD burner (since I have new old stock of those), a 40 GB Seagate IDE HDD, and an internal IDE Zip100 drive.

derSammler wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

Ooh I built the P133 in my sig thia month so please do tell ehat went into it.

Why does it say 1994 in your signature? The P1 133 was released in mid-1995.

Anyway, I'm using an A-Trend ATC-2000 mainboard (or a Soyo SY-5TF, should the A-Trend not work), 64 MB EDO RAM, and probably some ATi graphics card. Moreover, I'm planning to add both 3.5" and 5.25" disk drives, a CD burner or DVD burner (since I have new old stock of those), a 40 GB Seagate IDE HDD, and an internal IDE Zip100 drive.

That's true, ideally that system I am using to play games from between 1992-1994 would have been a 486 DX4 or a P100 tops. I actually do have a P75 and a P100 to use in the system, but I found an OEM pre-built case from 1996 that came with a P133 so I stuck with it. I actually have the Turbo button wired to an FSB setting header, so I can boot the system up at 50MHz FSB for 100MHz, so I guess it counts? 😀

Not a real retro activity, but retro-hobby related: I have been thinking about ways to set up a nice collection database. After a lot of Googling I decided to try Mediawiki (the software platform Wikipedia and many other wikis run on). So I created a new VM, installed Ubuntu Server 16.10 with Mediawiki and a few extensions for making life in Mediawiki easier. Using the categories in the wiki I can create a database-like structure.

Some of the good stuff with this:
- Web-based so available 'everywhere' if wanted/needed
- Easy upload of pictures/photos/PDF and other files
- The Mediawiki software is well documented and there are many extentions
- Should be easy to transfer the data to other places if wanted/switching platforms (this is a maybe...)
- Free! (except for the time invested)

It is not accessable on the web to share yet, maybe later. (as some sort of ' virtual museum' maybe?)

Spent half of the day disassembling the P1 133 build I'm working on, after noticing that two caps were loose and not original. One of the pre-owners quite f*cked them up trying to fix them in the past. Now two proper Panasonic Gold caps are in place. 😀

Made a composite sync circuit to replace the stock composite sync inside my MSX2+ system. Now the DIN8 connector on the back is good for RGB on my PVM, VGA switcher, and xrgb framemeister.

Finally giving my MSX some intentional love after nearly 10 years.

Been testing CDROM drives and hard drives today. Also helped my daughter play Boulder Dash on my IBM 5150. She's 4, and she hadn't played it in at least 6 months and actually asked specifically to play "the game with the cute little cat, and the boulders fall down and squash you and you have to collect the diamonds". She had only played it once! I wish my memory worked that well still... She had a blast this time too. 😀

The Pentium II 350MHz processor came in the mail today so I was finally able to setup my Optiplex GX1 midtower. Updated the BIOS to support newer processors and the machine works fine other than needing a new CMOS battery. Right now it is 350MHz Pentium II, 256MB RAM, 40GB IDE hard drive, 4MB onboard ATI video, Crystal onboard sound, 3COM onboard ethernet. I've got a slocket + 1.2GHz Celeron on its way as well. Installed MS-DOS 6.22 + WfW 3.11 and NT 4.0. When I get the chance I'll also put 98SE on it.

The 128MB GeForce FX6200 PCI card doesn't seem to play nice with it so I'll have to find something else