Yesterday I worked on cleaning up my workspace and sorting stuff.

Now instead of my desk having a big pile of stuff on it and my top drawer being crammed full, my table that I am supposed to use to work on computers has a somewhat less huge pile on it that I have to finish sorting and putting away.

In the process I found my Nike/Phillips hj080 earphones that I had been missing for months. Love them for travel use as they have adjustable ear clips on them and they don't sound half bad either. They also have a nice rubber case to store them in. Bought them years ago new from a thrift store.

oeuvre wrote:

Made this in Powerpoint from Office 4.3 in Windows 3.11

Fantastic.
Pink polar bear with hot-dogs for feet and a green umbrella, sniffing a cup of coffe on a diamond table? A winner is you!

(No sarcasm intended. 😀)

Finally got around to test my 1 year old Dreamblaster S1.
I promise the others will follow shortly. X-mas break will be perfect to test the Arduino shield.

Thanks!

Now for some frustration; the Matrox G550 PCI came today. Installed it in the GX1, didn't like it. Tried another PCI slot and it worked. But installing it in 98SE made it hang when it got to the desktop. Tried multiple drivers...

Also Matrox does indeed have an NT4 driver for it but I could not get it to install in NT4 either.

Found a few boxes of disks at a thrift store. 2 new packs, one used. Had to break out the eraser and save an old couple from identity theft. There was also 2 disks of images from a Sony Mavica of said old couple... Well, let's just say, I wish that tape eraser worked on brain cells.

luckybob wrote:

Found a few boxes of disks at a thrift store. 2 new packs, one used. Had to break out the eraser and save an old couple from i […]
Show full quote

Found a few boxes of disks at a thrift store. 2 new packs, one used. Had to break out the eraser and save an old couple from identity theft. There was also 2 disks of images from a Sony Mavica of said old couple... Well, let's just say, I wish that tape eraser worked on brain cells.

luckybob wrote:

Found a few boxes of disks at a thrift store. 2 new packs, one used. Had to break out the eraser and save an old couple from i […]
Show full quote

Found a few boxes of disks at a thrift store. 2 new packs, one used. Had to break out the eraser and save an old couple from identity theft. There was also 2 disks of images from a Sony Mavica of said old couple... Well, let's just say, I wish that tape eraser worked on brain cells.

Ah yes, the Sony Mavica floppy disk camera. I would make film shorts with those and call it floppy disk theater. Almost as campy as filming to a cassette tape with the now collectible Fisher Price PXL-2000.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PXL-2000

Had to re-install Windows for Workgroups 3.11 due to no sound coming out of the sound card by deleting the Windows directly entirely, but fortunately, I backed up the Program Groups in the root directory of the Hard Drive, so I copied them back over to the Windows directory after re-installing, and adding those groups back on to the desktop.

All I have to figure out now is how to play Doom within Windows as it locks up the system using the DOS prompt. I did find a link to get Doom to run within Windows and I did the same with other games in the past, and I have no idea if I did put Doom in there or not and I have to look and see.

Bought my own xmas present.... (As usual)

brostenen wrote:

Bought my own xmas present.... (As usual)

That is sad, but please tell us what Santa brought.

liqmat wrote:

brostenen wrote:

Bought my own xmas present.... (As usual)

That is sad, but please tell us what Santa brought.

One of those RaspberryPI 3 Starter-Kit's. Bought it from Germany, as I wanted to be shure it will arrive before december the 24'th. Need to go under the tree, in order for me to have something to open after x-mass dinner in the evening.

Finally got a chance to test 6 5.25" floppies I ordered. All of them formatted correctly and I made 2 MS-DOS boot disks to test. Works fine!

luckybob wrote:

Found a few boxes of disks at a thrift store. 2 new packs, one used. Had to break out the eraser and save an old couple from identity theft. There was also 2 disks of images from a Sony Mavica of said old couple... Well, let's just say, I wish that tape eraser worked on brain cells.

Coming from you it must of been really bad. The thought alone makes me want to forget.

liqmat wrote:

Ah yes, the Sony Mavica floppy disk camera. I would make film shorts with those and call it floppy disk theater. Almost as campy as filming to a cassette tape with the now collectible Fisher Price PXL-2000.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PXL-2000

I've been wondering about whether or not compact audio cassettes have ever been used for video purposes and now I know that they have, guess what's on my Christmas wish list now? 😀

oeuvre wrote:

Finally got a chance to test 6 5.25" floppies I ordered. All of them formatted correctly and I made 2 MS-DOS boot disks to test. Works fine!

Nice! I've always been curious about 5.25" floppies since I've never used 'em before. In fact, I'm actually thinking about getting a 5.25" floppy drive for one of my desktops since I have a dual-floppy cable laying around in my cable bag, sounds like a good idea in case I ever stumble upon a 5.25" floppy somewhere.

Keep in mind that later systems with a floppy connector only support one disk drive type at a time. My A drive is a 5.25" floppy, but when I connect my USB floppy, it gets identified as B. Pain in the butt, when most disk image writers default to A, and don't give you the option to choose B if present.

Finding the 5.25" drive for not crazy prices might be the hard part.

I successfully replaced all capacitors on the planar of my IBM PS/2 L40SX laptop with German branded new ones by using a 1978 soldering "gun" without desoldering braid.. It was debatably too big for the job (5mm nozzle), but by being extra careful (and extra slow) I managed to replace all of them without damaging the planar!

I will -however- NEVER again try to do this without desol-braid, as cutting them to length and soldering them through the filled holes is WAY more complicated than doing this the way you should (remove old solder, stick through, bend to length, solder, cutoff). Lesson learned.

System works, no damage visibble to planar. And more importantly, it doesnt smell of fish anymore and the PS/2 port that was dead before and was not detecting anything now accepts mice again... I mean.... what is a PS/2 laptop without a working PS/2 port 😁 Other ports that were sporadically working if they felt like it as the Serial Port now also work reliably again.

Pictures of the resurrected beauty..:

oeuvre wrote:

Finally got a chance to test 6 5.25" floppies I ordered. All of them formatted correctly and I made 2 MS-DOS boot disks to test. Works fine!

I've never seen an Optiplex so white and bright than this. Where are my sunglasses? 😎

jaZz_KCS wrote:

I will -however- NEVER again try to do this without desol-braid, as cutting them to length and soldering them through the filled holes is WAY more complicated than doing this the way you should (remove old solder, stick through, bend to length, solder, cutoff). Lesson learned.

An even quicker way to clean through holes is with a stainless steel dental pick.

Noticed what could be causing my V3 3000 to artifact

Gave it a vinegar treatment and then a gentle scrub with soda. Still artifacting. I believe the corrosion might have eaten away at the solder enough to not make good contact.

So afterwards I proceeded to give the contacts some taps with my soldering iron, however the solder refuses to soften up (I tried it on a different chip and it melted really quick). The contacts still have that white-grey rough surface from the vinegar treatment, despite the scrubbing.
Is there a good way to clean it so my soldering iron can do the job? Should I continue scrubbing?