I bought this low-profile IBM 300GL 6282-66U for $100 shipped. It arrived in great shape with only a couple of scratches/scuffs […]
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I bought this low-profile IBM 300GL 6282-66U for $100 shipped. It arrived in great shape with only a couple of scratches/scuffs on the top cover of the case. I bought the case to use as an open-air test bench for LPX-style motherboards, but I’m glad the purchase included a fully functional Pentium 200 MMX, 64MB of SDRAM, a 16x Hitachi CD-ROM drive, working floppy drive, and a Netgear PCI network card.
It worked pretty well as soon as I got it, but I needed to remove and spray contact cleaner on the integrated graphics card’s memory chips to resolve an intermittent BIOS configuration error (it would falsely report 1MB of memory every other boot). Unfortunately, I still get a keyboard error every time I cold start the machine. I figure it’s because I’m using an aftermarket PS/2 keyboard.
I’m also a bit disappointed that the BIOS uses LBA for drives, but won’t recognize more than 8GB of storage. 8GB is plenty for most programs I could run on it, but I wish it could use more. The BIOS does recognize my DVD/CD-RW drive and an IDE-to-SATA adapter, so that’s something. I’m going to use an IDE-to-SD adapter with it since my SATA SSD’s would be a bit of a waste.
I’ve already tricked it out with some turn of the millennium goodness: the DVD/CD-RW drive, an OPTI ISA sound card/wavetable, a Matrox G200 video card, and my DXR3 multimedia accelerator card to watch some DVD’s. I haven’t used the DRX3 in nearly 20 years. Ah, the good old days…