I made and uploaded a video of my Pentium 3 system in action. Just posted it in the System Specs section. 😊

looking4awayout wrote:

I made and uploaded a video of my Pentium 3 system in action. Just posted it in the System Specs section. 😊

Your "video camera" seems at least as old as your Pentium III computer! 😁

Two thumbs up for the period correct picture quality.

Skyscraper wrote:

Your "video camera" seems at least as old as your Pentium III computer! 😁

Two thumbs up for the period correct picture quality.

It's free antialiasing! 😁

Still Busy as heck...prepping for the move and fixing up the Gateway....

Went to Computer Surplus, whom previously told me they could watch out for CRT monitors because they can't recycle them anymore for some reason, all I had to do was give them my name and my number, so now I have, looking for a 14-15" SVGA monitor for the Gateway - the guy I'm building it out for I'm wanting to give a full retro setup.

Bought a few more things there
- They had an ISA NIC, 3COM, they were surprised they even had one
- IDE to SATA Converter, more on that in a bit
- An ATI PCI Video Card, I was going to use it on the Gateway, but it turns out it won't work because it's a 256MB Radeon with S-Video/Comp out, I thought it was a RAGE II era card, nope, mid 2000's
- PCI NIC, decided against using it in the end because it's just one more thing to take 100 years to get this build done, plus he's probably not even going top network it anyway, or at least use the network.

Then went to Goodwill
- picked up a used ASUS White-Front DVD-ROM for the Gateway
- picked up 4GB of DDR2 800 for my main desktop for $10 - now I am running on 6GB of RAM - and all my modules are gamer-level modules with a heatsink!

The Gateway.....that thing is one grumpy machine.....

So I tried the PCI Card, of course, did not work, then I looked it up and found out it was something like a Radeon 6250 PCI 256MB card....man, I would have killed for something like that for my Pentium III back in the day. So I put the Oak card back in, which is probably for the better, bumped the res up to 800x600, and setup a few of the Sierra Windows games on it. Also, the DVD-ROM I bought had been sitting in it's original box so long the drive could not spin up fast enough at first, so I decided to ggive it a good long brisk run with multiple CD-ROMs and so fourth to work that motor out, after taking it apart, putting it on it's side, spinning it up, and running it for awhile, it started to work reliably. I'm guessing the lubrication in the motor from the factory had not permeated the entire drive properly as it was not used for over 15 years (I think) because after that sideways turn it quieted down and started transferring files reliably.

While that was going on I finally upgraded the 286 to SCSI which is probably one of the lest problematic upgrades I've done in a long time. Now I have a nice big 1GB HDD and CD-ROM on it. Time to ditch those ZIP Disks, I just don't need them and it's a PAIN to have to have 2 IDE channels in everything just so I can accomodate ONE computer in my collection for large file xfers.

So the original multi I/O Controller was taken out and swapped with one missing the game and 25pin COM ports, allowing me to confiure the card to only work as a Serial/Parallel card (COM1, LPT1). Switched the Adaptec controller to all the defaults and that became the floppy and hard disk conrollers now. Found my 1.44MB drive died, so I swaped the old crusty Mitusmi with a more reliable Epson drive I had laying around. Put the Cd-ROM in the top. Powered on the machine, did SCSI Config on the on-board SCSI BIOS, wham-o, all items came up. Next installed DOS 6.22, setup Microsoft Network Client 3.0 trying to setup for my "Linksys" Ethernet adapter only to pull the card and realize sometime ago I put a 3COM EtherLInk III in there. Setup the EtherLink III for TCP/IP with a Static IP Address, took the original hard disk, popped it into a USB to IDE/SATA converter, and copied the files to my laptop, and then copied the files to the 486 running Windows 95. Then logged in via the 286 - and basically since yesterday it's been one big xcopy party since then - now with twice the capacity so now I can put ALL the stuff I currently have that runs on a 286 on there. Also, the 286 boots faster.

I've managed to install an 8GB CF card with adapter inside my Powerbook G3 (Wallstreet), it was a pretty frustrating experience since it kept doing the hair dryer noise with a green light on all the time when I powered it on after I installed the adapter, which lead to messing with the IDE adapter's jumper block and reseating the RAM and CPU module. I did the OS9 installation with the adapter's jumper set to cable select mode which lead to the blinking question mark floppy icon, once I put the jumper back into master mode, it finally booted properly, but eventually I'll have to mess with the LCD cable because I'm seeing some display artifacts resulting in having to move the screen to make them stop. Old Macintoshes are a lot more frustrating to work with than Windows PCs. 😵

Worked on a new to me and looking almost brand new Sony Vaio PCG-SR5K laptop.

I noticed that it seemed to heat up really fast after getting into Windows.

Ended up taking it apart to see if a 256MB PC-133 Micro DIMM would work in it despite it only officially supporting 128MB sticks. No POST 🙁

Anyway, I took off the CPU heatsink and noticed that whoever the genius was that put the thing together originally had not removed the plastic film from the thermal pad for the CPU. Not the first time I have seen this.
Ended up trashing the old thermal pad, re-bending one of the heatsink brackets so it would be able to hold the heatsink base flat on the CPU, applied some arctic silver Ceramique II TIM and reattached the heatsink.
This helped a lot.

Pretty nice little dual heat-pipe setup, especially since it was from the year 2000.

Also found that the heat transfer pad for the motherboard chipset still had the plastic film on it... oh yeah, 2 fails by the assembler on one machine. Got the film off and also had to file down a piece of plastic that was interfering with the cooling fan so it would mount flush like it was supposed to and so I was able to make the heat transfer plate press evenly on the chipset so it would actually transfer some heat away from the chipset.

I really want to swap out the original fan (regular fan style) with a newer laptop style fan (sucks in air from both sides) because the original design doesn't cool the system near well enough for my taste. The whole left side of the bottom of the laptop gets quite warm after it has been on for some time and there is barely any air coming out the side of the laptop from the CPU heatsink. The little air that is coming out is hot.
I am pretty sure if I can jimmy a newer style fan in there that it will make it run significantly cooler.

The trick is going to be finding the right size with the right voltage.

Oh the joys of software on old hardware. Having pretty much gotten my 486 into the condition I wanted it, I focussed attention on my Tualeron 1400 'support system' which I want to triple-boot with Win98SE, WinXP and Linux.

Originally I wanted to do this with a SATA 100GB laptop HDD on a Silicon Image PCI SATA (RAID) controller, but all the OSs were giving I/O errors with that card (regardless of which SATA device I connect to it), so had to fall back to my 10GB Quantum Fireball. A bit tight, but 1GB for Win98, 1GB for Linux, 1GB swap, 5GB for WinXP and 2GB shared (FAT32) storage should do the trick. Installation went smoothly enough, but then the fun started.

The idea was to have WinXP running basic networking stuff (Firefox ESR, WinSCP), and although I wouldn't actually let it onto internet I'd feel happier with antivirus software. AVG still supports WinXP, so this should be easy, right? Wrong. All of them demand SSE2 instructions, so either simply do nothing on run (AVG installer) or stop with error (FF and WinSCP). Great... well, so much for having actually up-to-date software on XP. Not a major disaster, just means I need to really lock that thing down on the network. Was planning to mess around with VLANs anyway, so this is a good excuse to do so.

Also started child-proofing the razor sharp ATX case I want to build with my boy. Every single edge can and will draw blood, but not if I fold duct tape over it 😉

I refurbished my new ThinkPad 380XD

The wrist pad was made of that rubber material that wears off after a while, so I used some "plasti-dip" to fix that. It looks gorgeous now ! The feel is a bit more rough, but it's much better than the stickyness it had before x). I wonder how long this will last though. I'll take care of it.

Now next problem : turning it on. I still do not have anything to power fire it up X)

IBM 72W power adapter. Genuine ones can be found under $10 shipped on eBay.

As for the stickyiness, I wish you posted about it earlier before plasti dipping. Magic eraser and some isopropyl alcohol work WONDERS on removing the sticky on old ThinkPads.

I tried magic eraser for 30 minutes and it only made it more sticky for me, and it was damaged anyways, I wanted it to look good. Plus I had that can for quite some time now because I wanted to restore my other IBM thinkpad which had rubber in terrible shape, but I couldn't fix it so I gave up and had that can laying around never used.

So even if I had removed the stickyness, I think I'd still have applied the plasti dip (plus I only added it ontop of the rubber, if I'm not satisfied with it, all I'd need will be to remove it and re-try to make the rubber better ^^)

Installed Tiger on my newly acquired $10 iMac G4/800 machine by formatting the HDD. I cannot seem to get the Airport card to work with any Wi-Fi connection, including open networks. Maybe because the OS requirements must be met for better security protocols (WPA2, 128-bit encryption, etc). The SuperDrive works wonderfully as well, so this Mac will be used for archiving the Digital8 tapes onto DVDs via iMovie and iDVD.

The original Apple Airport card only works with WPA and below. You can get USB adapters that support WPA2 and encryption, notably the Edimax EW-7811Un which is cheaply available.

Overclocking the K6-3+ to 600MHz was not the main activity; that - surprisingly - needed VCore raised to 2.1V, but that's not exactly liquid nitrogen overclocking rocket science. No, it was flashing the BIOS. My motherboard is a Tekram P5MVP-A4 rev 1.01 board. 1999/2000 was around the time when BIOSs moved from 1Mb to 2Mb images, and in the transition period sometimes a single board was manufactured with diferent-sized ROMs. That was the case with this P5MVP-A4 as well - there is a 1Mb BIOS and a 2Mb BIOS available. Very relevantly, there is only a patched version with K6plus support available for the 2Mb BIOS (supposedly a beta version exists for the 1Mb, but I can't find it anywhere and I doubt J. Steunebrink is still answering emails for his website that hasn't been updated since 2008). And of course my board had the 1Mb chip...

Fortunately the one part of my old toolset I did not get rid of when moving to a small apartment in 2008 and dumping my retro-hardware was my BIOS EEPROM collection. I still have a pile of the things, including a good number of 2Mb chips. Also, I'm an old hand at hot flashing, so all I needed was a copy of UNIFLASH.EXE and I'd be ready to go. Right? Wrong. Every single one of the EEPROMs I tried failed writing/checks, always in the same places. After far too long I had had enough and tried to boot with one. It booted alright, but into a splash screen for the AOpen AX59Pro, the board the chip had originally come from - and fortunately so similar to my Tekram board that it at least POSTed. So I wasn't writing anything to these chips 😮

After suspecting the EEPROM socket, suspecting a read-only jumper that this board simply does not have and a few other things I figured it out: I'd downloaded the latest 1.47re version of Uniflash from rom.by. On a hunch, I tried 1.40 instead and it immediately worked. Of course, Murphy intervened again - the first EEPROM I tried was dud, but the second went perfectly, with the full K6Plus detection I wanted. No idea why 1.47re was so broken with this board - it detected the motherboard chipset and EEPROM type correctly - but from now on I'm sticking to good old 1.40 again 😀

Took some pictures of the Pentium 4 NetVista I got recently. I'm still waiting for the right IBM power supply to arrive but it does work fine with a typical ATX power supply.

IBM NetVista 8305-W1U
Pentium 4 2.4GHz processor
1GB RAM
Matrox Orion 32MB AGP frame buffer card + Orion adapter
3.5" floppy drive
DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive
40GB 7200RPM Seagate IDE hard drive
Windows XP
Seagate DDS-4 SCSI tape drive
Adaptec 29320LP SCSI card
56K PCI modem

Was used for medical imaging

Spraypainted the top and it looks much better now

Seemed to belong to Olympus at some point for endoscopy

Messy insides

Finally received the AC power plug !

Now I can play 😁

(Sorry for the quality, my phone's camera is a potato, especially at night 🙁 )

Only problem, I can't install PCMCIA for some reason ... so I can't do networking. I hope I'll find a way to fix that !

Hm I recall installing the PCMCIA card in 95 was a royal PITA. You find the original ThinkPad drivers for it?

Yes ... and no ... look at this : IBM ThinkPad 380XD PCMCIA driver issue

Some PCMCIA stuff got installed, and some didn't 😒

Was writing more ADF files to floppy disks. Writing, then virus scanning and finally testing out if the disk was recreated correctly. Suddenly the Amiga just shutted off. I was really nerveous as to what went wrong. Was something dead? Did something blow up? I did not hear anything and there was no smell of burned electronics. Well....

I disconnected both the Amiga PSU and the Television. Then started to seek for the failure. What I found was quite interesting.
I concluded that the heavy a500 PSU was not delivering any power. Then turned on the tv, and there was power on it. Then I reconnected everything, turned on the power with my spare a600 PSU and my heart sank. The picture was distorted, everything danced around and there was wrong colours. Then I tested with my Amiga500, same result. Hmmm.... What was wrong? I reconnected my a600 and used composit instead of scart. Same result.

Then I disconnected the LCD television, and grabbed the old 14inch CRT television. And everything was 100% perfect. I found, that the external PSU for the LCD television was burning hot, and after inspecting the a500 PSU inside, I found that the fuse had blown. I did a quick and dirty hack of the TV-PSU cable, snipping it off and soldering a molex power plug on to the end. Connected an ATX PSU and tested the LCD television once again with the Amiga600. Same result... Bad picture. No sound at all. Television might be dead, yet the Amiga somehow survived. I think the TV-PSU died by shortening out, and blew the fuse in the Amiga-PSU. And as the Amiga PSU is over 30 years old, I simply do not trust it anymore. Especially when the fuse blew. Finally, I tested both Amiga's on my daughters television, wich is an LCD tv as well. No problems with the Amiga's there eighter. To make things up for my son (yeah, it is his tv that I was using for consoles and commodore machines). Then I have already found a "new" television for him.

Anyway...
I have learned my lesson now. Never ever trust old Commodore PSU's. Happy that I have bought a modern replacement for my C64. And I will be reusing the old square Amiga-Power cable to build an ATX-to-Amiga PSU cable.

Did a factory restore from the recovery partition on my Sony PCG-UX280P that I just got.

And the restore installed that piece of absolute trash NORTON AV.

Https and ftp is non-functional even after uninstalling Norton and resetting the tcp/ip stack. At least I think it was Norton that screwed it up. Can't find any other reason for it to not work.

I thought maybe it was something to do with the wireless so I hooked it up wired and it still has the same problem.

Just started to do some quick checking/testing on a lot of retro hardware I bought last week.
Seems I will have some busy weekends 😀

https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipO2hE0s9 … LrvB5XxOW6_Wufg
https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipP2nzlxe … 4EtjxT0nql5vr0k
https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipPkz-n9d … Gufkwjh1pwQva_0
https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipNtgkqck … 6liJjsYcmndasVL

The Compaq Presario 5835 is missing its PCI bracket/cover plate. Anyone knows where to find one or an alternative?

https://imgur.com/m93VAB3