My big gripe is sellers using postage as a way of mark up their profit. E.g, on eBay there is a certain seller in Eastern Europe who charges ridiculous postage fees, and I mean ridiculous, think $100USD for posting a sound card kind of ridiculous.

will1384 wrote on 2020-06-09, 21:16:

EvieSigma wrote on 2020-06-09, 20:57:

I forgot a big one actually: sellers who show pictures of a vintage laptop running but refuse to sell you the power adapter. It's not necessarily against the rules but it rubs me the wrong way.

The odd thing is that I see that a lot, and I always think they are going to sell the power adapters separately, but when I look at the other items being sold by that person I don't see the power adapters, and I think a lot of that is because they got the laptop at a government auction, or some kind of auction, and they basically just got a random laptop with nothing else, I used to get laptops like that my self at auctions, but if it was a personal laptop it seems silly to hold onto a power adapter that you will likely never use on anything else.

I've seen sellers do this as well. Some likely keep them because they're sometimes hard to find and may sell a similar unit in the future if they perform testing for their sales. Other times I have seen universal power adapters being used that are probably just part of their test equipment. But yea, sometimes they don't sell with a power adapter because they've tested it and the laptop doesn't work / needs repairs and they are trying to rip someone off via the omission of information method. It's very hard to tell what the reason or motive is, and seller feedback doesn't always tell the story. I'd say 75% of the time I leave negative feedback, it is gone and removed from their feedback score within a few hours or the next day. They call up the marketplace and call you a scammer, then it gets removed.

Currently miffed by a seller locally. He has the usual crappy pics of what looks like a very interesting (i840 dual P3) system without a price or a public auction option. Now, that could be worth a lot if it works, but the state in the pics looks bad, as if system has been stripped of various parts in a none too careful way. Still he lists it as "original and complete". Uhuh. So I ask a few questions (basically: "does it work? I'm interested but what I want to offer depends on the state it's in"). Nothing. After a day I then say "if you don't want questions, here's a sight unseen offer and I'll come pick it up today". Nothing. The ad's still there three days later. No idea what he's expecting but he plainly isn't getting it. Why even bother listing it?

dionb wrote on 2020-06-09, 22:19:

No idea what he's expecting but he plainly isn't getting it. Why even bother listing it?

I spoke to someone who did something like that locally here. He said his wife was demanding he sell some of his 'junk' and that was his way of pretending he was trying. Shitty pics, poor description, high price, on the expectation that nobody will buy it but his wife would see the listing.

I've had my fair share of "no response" on the local classifieds too... funnily enough often after we already agreed on the sale, I sent them my adress and asked for bank details... and then just silence.

I find it funny when you get an item (a video game cart for instance, or a laptop) in really bad condition: dirty, beat up, scratched but you try it and it works perfectly. But then you get another one in pristine condition, like it's new and it won't work and even be non-repairable (it happens with custom chips).

Also, I'd like to rant about the total lack of cool hardware in South America. You simply cannot find cool retro stuff here, and because of that, the few people who have those items try to charge an arm, a leg and a lung for them. And I'm not even talking about hardware that was rare in its days, but general retro stuff. For instance: recently I went to a computer junkyard mall, and asked if they had any socket 7 motherboard. The answer was that those were extremely rare, and that they would get me one for the equivalent of $200, just for the board. I laughed, went to the popular auction site and bought one with a 233MMX and 64MB RAM for like $15 shipped. Another $12 brought it from the US to my home and is now happily running DOS 6.22.

wiretap wrote on 2020-06-09, 22:03:

I've seen sellers do this as well. Some likely keep them because they're sometimes hard to find and may sell a similar unit in the future if they perform testing for their sales. Other times I have seen universal power adapters being used that are probably just part of their test equipment. But yea, sometimes they don't sell with a power adapter because they've tested it and the laptop doesn't work / needs repairs and they are trying to rip someone off via the omission of information method. It's very hard to tell what the reason or motive is, and seller feedback doesn't always tell the story. I'd say 75% of the time I leave negative feedback, it is gone and removed from their feedback score within a few hours or the next day. They call up the marketplace and call you a scammer, then it gets removed.

I have seen that here mostly from the Goodwill scroungers, they find something good (and GW does not include the PSU even if originally included, they sell it separate and it gets lost to the original part) AND main part ends up on Ebay !

CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS SHIP?
Sellers provide a low price for their items, or a low starting bid for their auctions, but charge the generally accepted value of the item as the shipping cost (in the same country). $2.99 for a 36" VGA cable, $9.99 for shipping. $45 for a Pentium 4 motherboard, $70 for the shipping.

BAIT AND SNATCH
Sellers will overbid on their own auctions with a sock puppet account if they don't hit the price they want before the auction is about to end, just to keep from having to sell it, and will then re-list it. They will repeat this until the price they want has been met or exceeded. Sometimes they will keep raising their expected price until they eventually have to walk it back a bit, just to get the most possible blood from the stone.

VEERRRY EXPENTHIVE, DOUGHLATH!
Sites or sellers will eternally list items for insane prices, like $50 for plastic hard drive mounting rails for a specific computer line from a specific manufacturer, or $350 for a Socket 7 motherboard, never updating their prices to attract buyers, or to clear out old inventory.

IT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM
"Worked when I last used it in 1985." "Powers on, I don't know how to test it (Device that connects to speakers/television and plays CDs)"

HULK HATE PUNY BOX!
Item is in amazing condition, like it had just been removed from its original packaging. When it arrives to you, it was in a single-walled cardboard box with no padding of any sort, and has arrived in several small pieces and two large ones. Amazingly, the delivery man didn't shot-put it onto the walkway near your porch.

Just received an eBay shipment I was not expecting. Small bag with two flat cables inside. I vaguely remember ordering female to female IDE cables to extent an IDE cable in a tower case. Start looking in my eBay purchase history, nothing... Go back the whole year since the start of 2020, nothing... Nah, it can't be...? Looking at the purchase history of 2019, at June 9 2019 I made the purchase. Package had to come from China. IT TOOK A WHOLE FREAKING YEAR!!! 🤣

And to top it off, the seller sends me 26 pin flat cables... Facepalm...

Ooooof. Guess it was sent via ship instead of airplane, meaning the seller saved approximately 2 dollars to inconvenience you.
What I hate about collecting is the relatively high end stuff such as Voodoos. It's like there's a cult following around them, because "ooga booga very speshul gpu" when the only feature specific to them is Glide support. Even a Voodoo 2 can cost upwards of $70 on e-bay, and at that point I might as well buy an SSD to make my father's 2012 laptop feel faster. K6-3+'s and 2+'s are also pretty expensive, usually $35 or more. For $35 I can both get a better CPU for my spare core 2 duo rig and get a cheapo SSD to speed it up.
I know old hardware tends to get expensive because it's more rare, but still. Reeeeeeeeee.

I dig through the bins at my local electronics recycling place, so I'm not spending a ton of money. They seem to have trained their employees to look out for certain things, like socket 7 or 370 boards, and keep them behind the counter where they sell for lowest Ebay sold price, and you will never see anything 3dfx, ever. I annoys me a little that I have seen the same stock for the past couple of years. Older AMD sockets (socket A - AM3) are left in the bins to be sold for $5.

Sometimes I browse the "gold scrap" listings on Ebay to see if there is anything interesting, but have only risked buying twice. One I was able to get a nice super socket 7 system, and the other I got a Tualatin/ISA motherboard. Both needed to be recapped. I tend to only buy stuff destined for the trash.

I am one of those people that relies on selling what I find on Ebay to keep my hobby alive, and will put an unreasonable buy-it-now price for things that have no active or historical listings, so I might be part of the problem. I've been burned too many times with auctions. For more common stuff, I list buy-it-now prices on the low end of what has sold.

brian105 wrote on 2020-06-11, 05:25:

What I hate about collecting is the relatively high end stuff such as Voodoos. It's like there's a cult following around them, because "ooga booga very speshul gpu" when the only feature specific to them is Glide support. Even a Voodoo 2 can cost upwards of $70 on e-bay, and at that point I might as well buy an SSD to make my father's 2012 laptop feel faster. K6-3+'s and 2+'s are also pretty expensive, usually $35 or more. For $35 I can both get a better CPU for my spare core 2 duo rig and get a cheapo SSD to speed it up.
I know old hardware tends to get expensive because it's more rare, but still. Reeeeeeeeee.

The original Voodoo Graphics and the Voodoo 2 were very important cards because at the time (late 90s) they provided a massive improvement vs. pretty much everything else that was available. It was literally just plugging the card and a game that was a pixelated slideshow would now run very smoothly with enhanced graphics. Yes, it was only for a few years until 3dfx fell behind starting with the Voodoo 3, but the significance of the first two is more than just "Glide". I remember the first time I saw a Voodoo running at a store I couldn't believe it. So now these are expensive not because they are really rare, but because of that historic value + nostalgia + being king of the hill in the 3D gaming world for a while.

As for the Voodoo 3, any "premium" prices you see are more due to their usefulness since they combine 2D + 3D in a single card (plus Glide support), but generally they're cheaper than the others.

Voodoo 4 and 5 can be considered somewhat "rare", they were produced when 3dfx was on its last legs. But performance wise they were disappointing at the time, so the price is mostly due to rarity and these are mostly sought after by collectors.

If you're purely looking for high-end performance on a late 90's system there are far cheaper options.

babtras wrote on 2020-06-09, 22:23:

I spoke to someone who did something like that locally here. He said his wife was demanding he sell some of his 'junk' and that was his way of pretending he was trying. Shitty pics, poor description, high price, on the expectation that nobody will buy it but his wife would see the listing.

With a wife like that, who needs enemies... 😀

I have quite some collection of vintage hardware and my wife doesn't give me hard time about it. Not that she is into my retro world, but sometimes I actually discuss with her about which computer I have is more easy on the eyes. I also play some DOS games with my kids for the fun of it and to give them something nice to remember and maybe they will grow respect for old technology in the future years.

I buy on eBay very rarely, because of the high prices, so I try to find retro hardware locally. However when I do buy on eBay, I contact the seller, asking him to secure the package, and usually he does.

Resellers are the absolute worst. It might not be a problem now in bigger countries with an abundant supply but in smaller countries it's just impossible to get decent stuff at reasonable prices.
What do these resellers do? Visit local auction sites and buy up everything at a higher price and sell them on Ebay for 2-3x more. Locals can't compete with reseller prices and the limited supply forces them to just abandon the entire hobby. As a result hardware from poor countries moves to rich countries and retro enthusiasts in poor cuntries are left with nothing to play with. Our biggest auction site just allowed foreigners to register and bid so guys from countries with 20x more GDP are killing local bidders and jack up prices like crazy. Another hobby ruined by the rich.

Some ALMANAC telling you you can't do so in so and so in so to your old system because it ain't period correct. Fuckem all..

It's probably been talked about before. There are one or two sellers on eBay who ask really obscene prices for their items, yet can't even be bothered to take a photo or make a decent item description. They look like something from eBay in 1995. Obviously I don't bother with these, but they're always getting in my way and making it hard to find what I want. Some of them are the same item listed 10 times.

there's a seller on the local classifieds here that has a lot of stuff listed, they have almost all items listed seperately, but in every single item listing there's just a list of all the items they're selling... so if you happen to search for any term that happens to pop up in their listing there's always like 50 results just from them, and real results get buried somewhere 😒

Turbo -> wrote on 2020-06-11, 06:30:

I have quite some collection of vintage hardware and my wife doesn't give me hard time about it. Not that she is into my retro world, but sometimes I actually discuss with her about which computer I have is more easy on the eyes. I also play some DOS games with my kids for the fun of it and to give them something nice to remember and maybe they will grow respect for old technology in the future years.

I buy on eBay very rarely, because of the high prices, so I try to find retro hardware locally. However when I do buy on eBay, I contact the seller, asking him to secure the package, and usually he does.

Sounds much like my household. My wife isn't interested in it, but she doesn't give me any grief about it aside from the occasionall comment about the disastrous state of my office. She did enjoy the attention it got from some amused visitors when they saw my kids playing 'Where In the World Is Carmen Sandiego' on my Compaq SLT/286.

I have probably spent more than I should have on eBay / Amazon. I haven't spent a lot on the machines themselves, but on improving my electronics toolkit for repair (better multimeter, ESR meter, logic probe, bulk assorted capacitors, resistors, new soldering iron, tips), buying Gotek emulators, and now on floppy disks having given up on finding 360k 5 1/4" floppies locally.

Yes, beware of fuzzy pictures and sellers who go silent in response to questions. It's a trap!

A two-word rant that will be familiar to collectors in the US: "Media Mail."