Went to some local estate sale and thrift store warehouses today. Found a tad dirty but mint Gateway P-III tower. No blown caps that I can see. Plan on cleaning it tomorrow and firing her up. Also found a small stash of DOS and Windows 3.1 game CDs that I will use with my Pentium 200 DOS rig that I am currently restoring.

So packed you have to watch out for items falling on you. These are the types of dirt and grime places that I find the best stuff since Goodwill and Salvation Army stores are fairly picked over nowadays.

I nice deep cleaning and she'll be as good as new. P-III 500 Slot 1 CPU confirmed. The rest I haven't looked at yet.

As I was browsing shelves of CDs a nice gentleman who was looking for media server content handed me this. Kind of an interesting piece. Game collection for a new (now vintage) Dell system still sealed. Under "Cool Stuff", Net Flix before there was Netflix? Interesting.

liqmat wrote:

Went to some local estate sale and thrift store warehouses today. Found a tad dirty but mint Gateway P-III tower. No blown caps […]
Show full quote

Went to some local estate sale and thrift store warehouses today. Found a tad dirty but mint Gateway P-III tower. No blown caps that I can see. Plan on cleaning it tomorrow and firing her up. Also found a small stash of DOS and Windows 3.1 game CDs that I will use with my Pentium 200 DOS rig that I am currently restoring.

So packed you have to watch out for items falling on you. These are the types of dirt and grime places that I find the best stuff since Goodwill and Salvation Army stores are fairly picked over nowadays.

thrift1.jpg

thrift4.jpg

thrift3.jpg

I nice deep cleaning and she'll be as good as new. P-III 500 Slot 1 CPU confirmed. The rest I haven't looked at yet.

thrift5.jpg

thrift2.jpg

Nice. Is it equipped with an SE440BX variant?

Also, the technical term for that warehouse is a "heap".

Nice. Is it equipped with an SE440BX variant?

Also, the technical term for that warehouse is a "heap".

the WS440BX, which is a variant of the SE440BX type motherboard, has 1 AGP 2x slot, 4 PCI slots and 1 ISA/PCI shared slot, 3x SDRAM slots, PS/2, USB 1.0, Serial and Parallel. Pretty good motherboard as it was made by Intel.

Disappointing that they went with an AudioPCI variant for the sound chip. 🙁

Actually haven't gone deep yet, but this particular one has a separate sound card and no on-board audio.

gdjacobs wrote:

Disappointing that they went with an AudioPCI variant for the sound chip. 🙁

Yeah but also understandable; it let them tick a lot of bullet points like PCI AUDIO!!, WAVETABLE MUSIC!! etc.

Yep, as predicted, pretty standard. As Windows9566 stated on the motherboard minus the on-board audio. Replaced by a CT4830. Still, $20, I'll take it and clean her up. I have a feeling the HDD was not wiped, but we'll see shortly.

Cleaned up very nicely. Looks like it came right out of a Gateway Country store. Anyone remember those? Nice interiors, comfy couches, but you couldn't actually walk out of one with a new computer. You could just order one in the store.

Oh, the joys of Windows 98SE, FAT32 and wonky drivers...

Was installing my G400MAX on my late Win98 Tualatin system. Suddenly everything froze - and 5 min later I got an "unable to write to C:" message. Yep, whole partition gone. Checked drive with badblocks and it seems OK, so tried to reinstall: errors of missing files before install was even halfway complete. Something badly wrong at a hardware level. Now running Memtest86+ to rule RAM out. Looks good so far, will see the big picture tomorrow morning.

Fortunately have something to take my mind off frustration: some new music. Inspired by Doom and Quake. Composed on a 486DX:

Master Boot Record - Interrupt Request
https://youtu.be/rvYqjBYuq-4

Got sound going on my P166MMX test rig withe a 4gig BigFoot hdd running Turbo Linux from 1999. The card I used was a Sound Blaster 16 CT2190. All I neeed to do in turbosoundcfg is change the IRQ to 5.

The sound card is huge compared to the motherboard, pci nic and pci SIS video card.

liqmat wrote:

IMG_4449.JPG

Did it come with the Zip drive or is that you?

gdjacobs wrote:

liqmat wrote:

IMG_4449.JPG

Did it come with the Zip drive or is that you?

Came with. Doesn't always detect at post though. Working through that. On same cable as DVD ROM drive. I'm sure it's a simple fix. The IBM Deathstar HDD had the clunk of death so replaced it. Windows 98SE install ensued.

Goody gum drops. I need to replace a noisy or figure out why the side panel door fan is buzzing, even though the bearings are lubricated on my main PC.

GigAHerZ wrote:

As my main PC's PSU decided that it will take an eternal vocation from now on, I'm a bit forced to use my old trusty EeePC 1015P […]
Show full quote

As my main PC's PSU decided that it will take an eternal vocation from now on, I'm a bit forced to use my old trusty EeePC 1015PEM.
Intel Atom 2/4 cores, 2GB ram, 128GB SSD, Windows 7

Well... It's good enough to browse the forums and such, but youtube is completely out of the question. 😜 Full keyboard will help the first (as i'm currently posting this post from it) and the second i can do through a phone anyways. Only real downside is the tiny resolution of the screen: 1024x600

Actually, quite a nice little netbook. Back in days, it was my everyday machine at school with battery that lasted the whole full day with wifi turned on. Even today, i can get 5-6 hours out of it. 😜

I've spent weeks at a time just with such a netbook and while 3D capabilities are lacking (Unreal runs @ around 25fps. Even got Crysis running, but @ around 3fps 🤣 ), 2D is pretty good. Stronghold, Red Alert 2 and a bunch of other 2D games run great!

I do recall 480p working fine for Youtube. Looks like they changed up the code in the last couple of years.

Munx wrote:

GigAHerZ wrote:

As my main PC's PSU decided that it will take an eternal vocation from now on, I'm a bit forced to use my old trusty EeePC 1015P […]
Show full quote

As my main PC's PSU decided that it will take an eternal vocation from now on, I'm a bit forced to use my old trusty EeePC 1015PEM.
Intel Atom 2/4 cores, 2GB ram, 128GB SSD, Windows 7

Well... It's good enough to browse the forums and such, but youtube is completely out of the question. 😜 Full keyboard will help the first (as i'm currently posting this post from it) and the second i can do through a phone anyways. Only real downside is the tiny resolution of the screen: 1024x600

Actually, quite a nice little netbook. Back in days, it was my everyday machine at school with battery that lasted the whole full day with wifi turned on. Even today, i can get 5-6 hours out of it. 😜

I've spent weeks at a time just with such a netbook and while 3D capabilities are lacking (Unreal runs @ around 25fps. Even got Crysis running, but @ around 3fps 🤣 ), 2D is pretty good. Stronghold, Red Alert 2 and a bunch of other 2D games run great!

I do recall 480p working fine for Youtube. Looks like they changed up the code in the last couple of years.

I remember, when i had an older netbook, EEE PC 901, and my main pc went kaputt. I attached that to big screen, keyboard, mouse and speakers and used it as main desktop pc. It was about year 2008 then. Worked well for that month or two.

But yes, youtube has probably changed codecs or something, that requires better cpu. (Either in raw power or some instruction sets that this tiny Atom cpu just doesn't have) I remember, the older eee 901 even was very capable with youtube back in days...

But just today, i received a new PSU and everything is working again. Thankfully the old PSU didn't take anything with it. 😀 I wonder, should i soon start posting about my main pc also into retro category, as it is originally built together in 2013 and i have upgraded only storage and graphics card? (+psu replacement now 😁 )

liqmat wrote:

gdjacobs wrote:

Did it come with the Zip drive or is that you?

Came with. Doesn't always detect at post though. Working through that.

Still, gravy!

Took my 486 with window 3.11 and installed:
Video for Windows
WinG
Win32s
Xing player
WinPlay3

While it can play mpeg video files, it doesn't do it very well. 😁

Also noticed that the FM/MIDI sound is very quiet on the left channel. Mixer is fine. Maybe some trace has got damaged on the card?

liqmat wrote:

Went to some local estate sale and thrift store warehouses today. Found a tad dirty but mint Gateway P-III tower. No blown caps […]
Show full quote

Went to some local estate sale and thrift store warehouses today. Found a tad dirty but mint Gateway P-III tower. No blown caps that I can see. Plan on cleaning it tomorrow and firing her up. Also found a small stash of DOS and Windows 3.1 game CDs that I will use with my Pentium 200 DOS rig that I am currently restoring.

So packed you have to watch out for items falling on you. These are the types of dirt and grime places that I find the best stuff since Goodwill and Salvation Army stores are fairly picked over nowadays.

thrift1.jpg

thrift4.jpg

thrift3.jpg

I nice deep cleaning and she'll be as good as new. P-III 500 Slot 1 CPU confirmed. The rest I haven't looked at yet.

thrift5.jpg

thrift2.jpg

Those are my kinda places!!

GigAHerZ wrote:

Took my 486 with window 3.11 and installed: Video for Windows WinG Win32s Xing player WinPlay3 […]
Show full quote

Took my 486 with window 3.11 and installed:
Video for Windows
WinG
Win32s
Xing player
WinPlay3

While it can play mpeg video files, it doesn't do it very well. 😁

Also noticed that the FM/MIDI sound is very quiet on the left channel. Mixer is fine. Maybe some trace has got damaged on the card?

I wonder if it could play the modern MPEG videos with some codec installed? That kept me thinking for a while... probably not.

gdjacobs wrote:

Still, gravy!

Agreed and found a local store with a stack of used Zip media. Probably will snatch it up as it is being thrown away. Also, got the detection sorted at post. Loose cable issue.