That front panel looks like new.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2020-08-17, 00:20:

That front panel looks like new.

Right?! It took a lot longer under those UV lights since I had some streaking to deal with as a result of the plastic wrap + developer cream. The peroxide soaking solution makes things much more evenly covered and that's what I'm going to do moving forward from the start. All of the extra time soaking was to even out the streaking issue, but yeah, an otherwise awesome solution for retrobrighting!

It's really is a great setup I might have to do something similar. I have a few items that can use a retrobrighting.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2020-08-17, 00:35:

It's really is a great setup I might have to do something similar. I have a few items that can use a retrobrighting.

For sure - and something that works year-round which is important. I live in Wisconsin where Winters are absolutely dreadful and seem to last FOR-EV-ER. We don't have the luxury of constant sun+heat so this works in a pinch, even if it takes a bit longer.

It's also nice to not be at the mercy of the weather and random cloud cover that can also cause weird results as well.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2020-08-17, 00:49:

It's also nice to not be at the mercy of the weather and random cloud cover that can also cause weird results as well.

Yes, there is absolutely something to be said for a controlled environment!

Finally got some time to work on my 2 ThinkPad T21s - one is now working correctly (no blink-of-death issue).

What's the blink of death? You press the power button, the power LED blinks, and the machine shuts down. This seems to happen on the Thinkpad A/T2[0-2] series machines equipped with the ADP3421 power regulator chip as they build up years. At first it'll just require more presses on the power button, but eventually any/all button presses will not address the issue and the board must be replaced or re-worked. The root cause was never really determined as some machines with the ADP3421 swap will work reliably again for years to come, while others with replacement ADP3421 chips soldered in...will fail within days of being swapped in, and some conjectured that all DC power electronics will need to be replaced in order to address this. Note that the T23 has a different chip and is not impacted.

I had to strip both machines (800MHz/XGA and 850MHz/SXGA+) down and re-assemble it...looks like swapping the screen from SXGA+ to XGA didn't work - it was the motherboard that needs to be swapped...again. This was rather odd as the BoD issue was first manifest due to me leaving the original machine (850MHz/SXGA+/decent chassis) on AC to charge the battery overnight, and when it was done it refused to boot back up. Bought the spare (800MHz/XGA/crap chassis) cheap on eBay to try to fix the problem, and it arrived working just fine. Swapped the board and both machine shows BoD symptoms...well, the original board with the 850/(now connected to the XGA on the crap chassis) works after a little bit of fiddling, while the spare board on the 800/ SXGA+ on the decent chassis...didn't. Leaving it alone for a week didn't help either. Thought it might be the CPU so it was swapped, which also didn't work. Then tried to swap the screens. Also didn't work. At the end, the decent chassis got the original board with the 850MHz and the SXGA+ screen, and the crap chassis got the spare board 800/XGA back. That somehow did the trick for the original board/850/SXGA+decent chassis machine - - it's now working reliably (well, suspend-to-RAM doesn't work, but that's only relevant in Windows 98).

The 800/XGA/Crap chassis machine still isn't working, and I am not sure why. Maybe it needs a stripdown/rebuild as well? Not that I really need it, it can be used as a battery charge stooge. Considering that the issue stems from the power controller on the T20/21/22 series dying/wearing out over time, at least the stooge can be used to charge the battery and keep the original working for longer. It's also good to have a spare LCD - those SXGA+ screens tend to have CCFLs that age poorly over time (turning dim and red), and swapping LCD assemblies on the series are a pretty straightforward task.

Well, after about 3 hours of stripping the machine and swapping parts and waitng weeks for the opportunity to work on the machines, it's certainly good to see this IBM logo again.

Okay , time for some important stuff to be taken care of, like manhandling the Rebel Alliance...

Started to make a Fileserver/NAS for anything vintage related. Whatever that will be a container for Playstation2 ISO's to load over network or a place to store Amiga/Dos/C64 software and manuals. If I want to, I can store music as well. For this I am using an OrangePI-Plus2 SBC.

Noice.

I had to down-clock it because of the heat. It is still running hot and once it is in it's own case with a fan, then I will SSH into it and set the clock up again.

Well, since my IBM NetVista restoration went so incredibly poorly, I decided to tackle restoring another IBM computer, my PS/1. Not much work so far, I just opened it up, removed the coin cell battery and gave it a quick wipedown inside out. A deep clean will be done in a few days.

Keen eyed among you will notice it lacks the riser card and floppy cage / spine thing that holds it in place. I actually do have the riser card, but not the floppy cage. Thanks to Deksor here, who provided me very good photos of the part I actually managed to get one designed and 3D printed:

It does not have the spine to hold the riser card in place but that is fine. I will be adding a sound and network card to this PC that will secure it just fine.

Excellent use of a 3D printer. A friend of mine printed a new front panel for the tower his first computer was in.

LewisRaz wrote on 2020-08-16, 07:50:

... Seagate ST3660A 545mb HDD. https://i.ibb.co/VQccd3g/IMG-4249.jpg ... […]
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...
Seagate ST3660A 545mb HDD.

...

Does it contain a chip from Creative Technologies on the PCB?

Tested a couple of boards from eBay: Packard Bell PB450 that was cheap and "working" and a PC Chips M326 V5.2 386DX/486DLC board with a 486DLC-40GP installed.

1) PB450 - not POSTing because the board was wrapped in plastic grocery bags and not anti-static ESD bags (third board, but the one was already dead anyway) as always

2) M326 V5.2 - POSTs and it works without issues and got the Cyrix FasMath 8D387-40GP installed and that wasn't working because I didn't install it correctly, but got it sorted out (fortunately, the board has circuit protection in case the CPU or FPU is installed wrong, it won't blow up).

Also installed the Cx486DLC-40GP and the FasMath 8D387-40GP on the LB386DX board (still waiting for the 80MHz Clock Crystal to arrive to get it to 40MHz speed) and will keep the other board with the 486DLC-33GP and C&T 8D387-33 for another future build once I find an AT case that uses a turbo LCD display.

One thing I wish the BIOS had was support for more than 504MB drive space (LBA), but the XT-IDE Universal BIOS and the Promise EIDEPro BIOS work really well, except the Promise EIDEPro BIOS takes 5KB of conventional RAM, which isn't bad unlike the Ontrack DDO software that takes 20KB conventional RAM.

Disruptor wrote on 2020-08-19, 02:02:

LewisRaz wrote on 2020-08-16, 07:50:

... Seagate ST3660A 545mb HDD. https://i.ibb.co/VQccd3g/IMG-4249.jpg ... […]
Show full quote

...
Seagate ST3660A 545mb HDD.

...

Does it contain a chip from Creative Technologies on the PCB?

I cant see one

Today I set up a modern W98 PC.

It's s Pentium 4 Northwood 2.8GHz with 512MB of DDR333 RAM.

I'm using a FX 5900XT and a Crystal 4821 based sound card. It sounds alright in DOS mode for both SB effects and FM Synth using its built in FM Synth emulation.

I use a modern SFX PSU so lots of SATA to Molex adapters. I use a CF card but think i might swap to SD cards. There is a 160GB IDE drive in the case and thinking about it I could remove the whole screwed drive caddy to free up a bit of space.

Tbh it would make a good early XP Pc if I swapped in an Audigy card and dug out some more RAM.

Almoststew1990 wrote on 2020-08-15, 18:23:

I went to my recently deceased Grandad's house to help my Dad sort through his stuff. Sadly he stopped being into tech in the 60 […]
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I went to my recently deceased Grandad's house to help my Dad sort through his stuff. Sadly he stopped being into tech in the 60 so there were no PCs but he did have this Word Processor (Sharp Font Writer FW-760) thing.

It's pretty terrible, I can type faster than it can display text and the keyboard and controls are very different from period MS Office and Windows 95 standard keys. I can't see why anyone in 1996 would buy a new one of these over, say, an Amiga 500 or 386PC. It saves to floppy disk in wordperfect format.

He also had a cookbook from 1913 and his Aeronautical modelling membership card, which sadly expired in 1958. I would put this non PC stuff in spoilers if I knew how...

This is lovely post. I hope someone will look at our earthly possesions with such care when we're gone...

Almoststew1990 wrote on 2020-08-19, 12:03:

Today I set up a modern W98 PC. https://i.imgur.com/1jGS4OYh.jpg […]
Show full quote

Today I set up a modern W98 PC.

It's s Pentium 4 Northwood 2.8GHz with 512MB of DDR333 RAM.

I'm using a FX 5900XT and a Crystal 4821 based sound card. It sounds alright in DOS mode for both SB effects and FM Synth using its built in FM Synth emulation.

I use a modern SFX PSU so lots of SATA to Molex adapters. I use a CF card but think i might swap to SD cards. There is a 160GB IDE drive in the case and thinking about it I could remove the whole screwed drive caddy to free up a bit of space.

Tbh it would make a good early XP Pc if I swapped in an Audigy card and dug out some more RAM.

Don't use more than a 120GB drive in a windows 98 machine, it will eventually corrupt the drive and you will lose everything. Unless of course you don't care about resetting up the entire computer again.

Some further testing on the M326 board. It locks up all the time and I'm not sure if it has to do with RAM timing or the BIOS is having issues.

The other day I came across a µATX Socket 370 board that I received some time ago and put into storage, the AOpen MX3L.
It has AGP, 3x PCI, 1x ISA, and an onboard ESS Solo 1 audio chip that seems to have good DOS compatibility. But unfortunately it uses the crippled 440LX chipset, so it's 66MHz FSB Celerons only. Plus, it doesn't even support the higher clocked Celerons like the 700MHz chip that I have in my collection, but maxes out at 533 MHz. At least it supports some overclocking by raising the FSB to 75 or 83 MHz.

However, I put in a Rage 128, NIC and a 500 MHz Celeron chip (that runs happily at 75 MHz FSB, ~ 568 MHz) and now I am going to do something that I haven't done in many many years: Install Windows ME. Let's see how long it takes until I regret it... 😉 I didn't even have the CDs any more, but Winworldpc came to the rescue. I remember that my brother used to run it on his (Celeron-based) system in 2001 and was quite happy with it, but personally I never got past installing it, cursing a whole lot and then switching over to Win2k.

Edit: Much to my surprise, everything just worked out of the box. Win ME had drivers for the Intel chipset, the Rage 128, the ESS Solo-1 and the RTL8139 - there was not a single unknown device in the Windows device manager right after the installation. Of course I will update some of the drivers to the latest versions, but this was impressive. When I plugged in the Ethernet cable, moving the card a little bit in its PCI slot, the system immediately BSOD'ed, so everything seems to be okay 😄
Check out the Win ME page at Winworldpc, the screenshots say it all 😉