Mitko_DSV

Ohm meter my friend, you can tell what's bridged inside the switch with one.

Oh, and make sure you get the $300 multi-meter, so it won't look out of place next to the $300 soldering iron. 
 
^.^

Little bit of a ghetto monitor repair
the switch for this monitor doesn’t lock toggle, ie you press it, it immediately disengages and the monitor turns off
so who needs a switch anyway?

I don’t know what I’m doing btw
yes I know the danger voltages are in here, I was in fact born yesterday, when they started handing infants the pamphlets on the dangers of tube repairs 

here’s my shitter
at some point when I’m more motivated I’ll replace this with a different switch of some variety 
I don’t know how this works, it has a blue and brown and two grounds, all I’m going to do is bridge blue to ground and brown to ground on their respective sides 

done, glad I bought a $300 soldering iron I use twice a year to poorly do things like this 
it looks like shit but
 
It works fine 
 
I’ll probably get an outlet switch, that’ll probably be the laziest solution 
or I could find a replacement for the switch to drop in, but era switches will have the same problem of ancient brittle plastic 
or I can mount a different switch somewhere on the monitor, which is the easiest idea, if I knew what the wires were for, I don’t know why there’s two different connections or how they work, maybe they’re just two things that turn on and off at the same time? Maybe it switches between them? Who knows, I don’t want to wire a switch into this and just presume I want blue and brown touching 
I am not electrically inclined, and I don’t have a print of this monitors circuitry to figure out what they’re all for
 

Little Coppermine ITX board is up and running in Windows 98 SE.
VIA VT8604 chipset, S3 ProSavage AGP integrated graphics, and of course, Celeron 1000.

I'd forgotten how massive of a difference a good hard drive makes on Windows 98. This 5-platter Hitachi Deskstar ATA is so much snappier than the CompactFlash card in my Compaq Win98 laptop, it's unreal. It almost consistently tops out the ATA interface with its sequential reads/writes.

Finally have a working SS7 board - can see if I killed my old K6-2 500 with the mosfet short, and test my 72pin SIMM.
Had to swap the cooler or the board wouldn't fit. And the Medalist finally died after years of bad sector warnings so that was also replaced, and the Fireball's performance is on point.
Board appears to have great performance as well despite the 8bit TAG (128MB cacheable RAM). Will be getting a K6-3+ of some clock speed (Jan's patched BIOS and 2V support means perfect compatibility).

Those fPGA cards are neat, but they can't run Crysis, can they?

Quadro 2000 (GF106 die, single-slot/75-watt GTS 450) in the radio receiver. Its DVI port nicely screws into one of the many empty DB15 cutouts in the back of the case.

Bus interface is a pretty major limiting factor, seeing as this board does use a laptop chipset it is limited to PCIe 1.1 x1 - 1/32 the bandwidth this card is intended to run at.

I originally intended to install a 9800 GTX+ in this system, but the 180-watt power supply only gives 90 watts on the 12v rail. I didn't manage to get very far with the 150-watt geForce, so instead opted for this Quadro, which performs almost exactly like a 9800GT with a 75-watt power requirement. 

1.8" uSATA (Micro SATA) server drive.
The amount and size of discrete SMD components absolutely blew my mind. The top side of the drive has 54 conspicuously large bright orange capacitors.


200GB drive - because server drives have to be weird capacities because we can't have nice things. Case in point, the first SAS/SCSI server hard drives were 9.1GB and for some reason we stuck with that standard for the next 30 years, scaling to 18.2gb then 36.4 and 72.8 and 143 and etc. Why on earth.
 
This thermal interface material is something I've never seen before - this seems to be a "liquid thermal pad". It has the same consistency as thermal pads - wet, a little sticky, and a little firm. I would think this is quite literally thermal pad material that was squeezed from a tube onto the chips.

Here is my Year round Christmas Themed setup that I have been slowly building upon over the last few months.
The Computer itself is 
Ryzen 5 5600x
32GB 3133MHZ Corsair Vengeance Ram
Zotac RTX 3060TI
6 Corsair LL120 RGB 120MM fans
EVGA 550W PSU
Be quiet 120MM CPU Cooler
 
In terms of the IO 
AOC G27 165HZ 27inch 1080p Monitor
Acer SB220Q 75HZ 1080p Monitor 
Packard Bell 5480 1024X768 85HZ Monitor
Logitech MX ergo white
1993 IBM Model M keyboard
 
And a bunch of Chirstmas Lights and Deer Plushies 

 

Well, here's something incredibly boring with a bit of an interesting history.
This is a prototype Chromebook from 2010. Codename "Mario Fish" or the Google 2330. 
This was the first hardware prototype for the next generation of e-waste; Google showed this off to prospective Chromebook manufacturers to give a general idea of what a Chromebook should be like.
And... well, I actually have nothing to say about it. 
This is genuinely the most boring laptop of all time.

It's like if you searched "Laptop Clipart" and 3-D printed it. Made entirely out of solid black plastic, has no defining features whatsoever, and it has three ports and one of them is the charger. So yeah, it's a Chromebook alright!

Under the battery lies what makes this laptop the slightest bit worth having around, though - the sticker signifying its existence as a prototype unit.

I am not supposed to have this. No-one is supposed to have this. These were never released. 
A few were given to review outlets, who pretty much all said, "So, it's a web browser and nothing else? Who would buy a computer like that?". 
 
I do not have the charger; it uses a different one than I would expect. Despite this being remarkably boring in design and specifications (1.6ghz Atom, 2GB RAM, 32GB storage), I cannot wait to boot it up. The prototype here is not only the hardware, but also in the ChromeOS software.
Of course, I will try to hack it. Maybe see if it can boot from USB/SD or if Google left a drive interface header on the board somewhere. 
 

She lives!
Wouldn't boot with the original RAM, which had corrosion along the slot. Replaced it with another 133mhz stick while I left the original to soak in an alcohol bath.
Also unplugged (probably forever) the system's two incredibly bothersome fans. On the Core 2 Duo unit I replaced the small axial CPU fan with an 80mm radial set on top of the heatsink, will probably do the same here. Cools the CPU just as well but almost silently, and provides enough intake of its own so as not to need another noisy system intake fan.

HDD still works! The system software runs on Red Hat Linux. It boots for a little while then performs a soft reboot after around 30 seconds. The Core 2 Duo unit did this one too; I am not sure why. Probably why both of them ended up for sale in thrift stores. 

These units are awesome but they reinforce my belief that computers should not be forced into places they do not belong, because look what happens! Your $2,000 piece of rack gear is now useless because someone pulled the wrong plug and Linux got corrupted. 
 
EDIT: Got the OS booting properly!
It has a pretty ballin' GUI, seems to run a real desktop environment. I thought it would just be CLI. 
After the GUI loads, an ancient Firefox version opens and loads into a cached website for the Public Radio Satellite System's FTP server management site. It seems at some point this unit was run as a satellite fileserver. Rad.

Well here's another fun thing. Core 2 Quad in a laptop, the closest we'll ever get to dual CPUs on a mobile platform.
Only like 5 mobile C2Qs were released and they are compatible with just a couple chipsets so actually finding one in the wild is very rare.


That's the Precision M4400, pretty remarkable to have essentially dual processors as well as Nvidia graphics and 1920x1200 display in a 15" laptop.

When my friend and I (mainly me lol) built his new PC, we could not get it to post to save our lives so we were both panicking a little bit, him because he thought his 4080, 7800x, or whatever Gigashite board was broke, and myself because I didn't want him to think I broke it.
 
Turns out it just will not post with one specific flash drive plugged in.

It is so funny how old computers sometimes refuse to work for no explicable reason whatsoever.

Picked up a lovely rare Artist Edition Pavilion DV6 a few weeks ago - 2.4ghz Turion Ultra, ATi HD 3200, 4GB DDR2. 
Instant WHEA error in any Windows version - whether booting from an installer CD or HDD with OS on it.
I had tried a good deal of solutions, was on the verge of buying a new motherboard.
As a last resort, I swapped the DV6's Turion CPU with the 2.1ghz Turion Ultra from my DV4 Special Edition. 
 
Not only did the CPU swap fix the WHEA error, but the 2.4ghz CPU which caused the error in the first place works flawlessly in the other laptop.
The two boards use the exact same socket, northbridge, and southbridge. The CPUs have the same FSB speed and cache. There is not a single reason under the sun that a CPU would POST but be unstable in one, yet a near identical CPU would resolve this issue, while the original CPU works fine in a different machine. I would understand if I'd put this CPU in after-the-fact, but the 2.4ghz chip has been in there since 2008!  

That's a fair point, could look for a small toaster oven.

Now I have the mental image of slotting two graphics cards into a toaster and waiting for them to pop up once the reflow is complete.

I was slightly wrong, it's called a PBX. Close enough!
 
Anyway, I now have an Avaya® Partner® ACS (Advanced Communications System) Endeavor system.
- Endeavor Plus processor card (R6.0 generation, but slightly cut down. which is fine by me lol. the full R6.0 has so many features that I will never use)
- 308EC expansion card (3 more incoming lines, 8 more extension ports)
- Two-slot chassis (The 5-slots are big, heavy, expensive, and I don't have room)
 
This is everything (mostly) wired up:
 
Normally houses aren't wired with regular phone jacks - this is because I got a bunch of cables, cut them in half, and then spliced them. I also labeled every single cord (as you can see above) because I don't want to play the "which phone did I plug in?" game again. The big metal terminal block thing is where the wires used to meet. Each post in the corner had one wire color go to it. 
 
I don't have the screws that a brand-new kit for this system would have, so I had to improvise some.
Normally you bolt the processor card to the wall, but it requires very long and thin bolts that I don't have. So I instead bolted the carrier for the cards to the wall (instead of to the cards), and built a little shelf to hold everything up. I unfortunately put it slightly too low and so the cards wouldn't stay socketed in to the power connector properly. The pieces of acrylic force them to be high enough. Is it the best system? No, not at all. But it works
 
It's currently not programmed properly - it wasn't wiped when I bought it, so it still has the old settings. And it is not happy about the fact that it's no longer in a five-slot carrier with more cards. It only sometimes gives you a dial tone (you have to hang up and pick up the phone repeatedly until it gives you one), and it will always call your phone back after you're done. It won't connect you to anyone though.
 
I have a Backup/Restore card on the way so I can reprogram it, eBay says it arrives Friday.
 
EDIT:
In total, I have 11 phones in service at my house. Two share a number though. The three I'm most proud of are my original Trimline, a 500 in brown..??, and a 554 in tan. The 554 I got for a single dollar because the antique store was closing...
It's also a heavy beast. It weighs about 15 pounds, and is dated to I believe 1969? Or maybe 1959.
And the weight isn't even with the wallmount plate, because I couldn't get one! The plate is another big sheet of heavy steel.
 
EDIT 2:
The card arrived but I misread the documentation. The Backup/Restore card only has a 1 megabyte flash chip on it, and you just backup or restore existing settings to it. To program it fresh, you have to get the Remote Access card, which has a 2 megabyte flash chip and a 14.4K modem. So that's on the way.

Bought a piece of satellite radio gear at a thrift shop because the I/O on the back looked suspiciously akin to a PC motherboard. Sure enough, it's based around an ITX board running a 945 chipset and Core 2 Duo mobile CPU with a 667mhz front-side bus. It boots its little operating system from a 1TB RE3 hard drive and interfaces with its FPGA boards over the IDE drive controller (which is admittedly weird as hell - the board has enough PCI lanes for each of the three custom cards so why take this route?) 

There's the MB899 industrial motherboard.

The I/O cards are based on Altera Cyclone II and III FPGA chips, with 8MB on the II and 16MB on the III. They connect to the IDE disk controller with the middle board being master and top/bottom configured as slaves. Manufacturer isn't abusing the IDE connector to send proprietary signals, either - the motherboard recognizes a hard drive plugged into the IDE port.

 
 
So the FPGA cards are sending encoded satellite radio signals over the IDE channel to the disk controller on the southbridge. The Core 2 Duo chip then decodes these digital audio/video streams and repeats them, displays over VGA, or records to the SATA hard drive.
 
 
Edit: It now runs Windows 7

9800 GX2, a very unique dual GPU card.
The bottom card is a mirror image of the top card, with the die and VRAM rotated 180 degrees. The top card holds the PCIe switch chip while the bottom holds more power delivery and the HDMI port. It is a bit odd seeing a full 9800GTX that is literally useless without another card to plug into - with no PCIe slot of its own, the bottom card cannot be used without another card connected over the ribbon cable.

The heatsink fits betwixt the cards like this - a silicon, aluminum, and thermal pad sandwich. 

Interesting to see the large cutouts in the boards for the fan intake, like Fermi cards would eventually implement many years later.
 
A full 9800GTX has a significantly different memory layout, as well as a great deal more power delivery. This EVGA version is a bit special, implementing more MOSFETs than would typically be present, but there are only a few stages of power delivery on the GX2 card while this has... three? Four? And the ring bus style memory controller is very different too. So the board design of the 9800 GX2's cards are significantly different.

XFX used to offer a "Double Lifetime Warranty" on their cards back when they were an Nvidia board partner, meaning the original owner and the next owner would be protected under a full lifetime warranty.
That taken into consideration, I've opened an RMA request for the dead Alpha Dog 8800GT.

The card is at least still in their system, as entering the serial number brought up the model number listed on the back of the card as well as saying it was never RMA'd before.
The build quality is great - has a thicker heatsink and extra metal brace compared to the reference model - and it's overclocked quite high. I would LOVE to get a new card.
I doubt anything will come of it; it seems very unlikely that XFX has any 8800GT cards still lying around. Worth a shot though.

At least the EVGA 9800GTX+ is working great. I paid $12 for the lot that had this card, HD 2600, 8800GTS, and GT 210, and that is still a fantastic price for a perfectly working 9800 GTX+. 
This is the card whose fan would only spin correctly in reverse. I accidentally fixed the problem - I had the card sitting on my desk and I was idly spinning its fan around while eating dinner, and now the fan spins correctly. Must be an Easter miracle, huh? 
As with most 9800 cards it is loud as hell in the BIOS but once the driver is installed, it's whisper quiet. Runs in the high 70s under load, does not really need a repaste but I will still do one for good measure.

On paper the GeForce 9800 should perform pretty close to the Quadro FX 4800, but this EVGA version has a nice overclock on it as I would expect so I cannot wait to test it. 
Also, curse Apple's damn cable spaghetti. I love this Cinema HD Display but, good god, it has the messiest cables humanity has ever borne witness to.
 
 
Edit: It is the 9800 GTX+ V.2 from eVGA, sadly not the Superclocked version with a whopping overclock of..... 2%. 

I was April Fools'd hard with all the graphics cards I bought, most of which were promised to be in working order.
Out of 13, only three output video, two of those have broken fans, and only one is noteworthy. 
The 9800GTX didn't have its plastic sticker peeled yet, I had the pleasure of doing so. Its fan is jammed and only spins backwards (???) but luckily/unfortunately I now have an abundance of dead cards from which to harvest cooler parts. 
I don't know what the little ones are, I'd venture perhaps a 9600 and a 9400GT? Will have to see when in the OS though.

Here's the graveyard. XFX 8800GT Alpha Dog, HIS HD 4830, ATi FireGL V7200, HIS HD 4850, Asus GT 210, Radeon 2600XT, EVGA 8800 GTS, Radeon HD 3450, EVGA 8800GTS ACS, EVGA GeForce 9800 GX2. Most of these POST but give no video out, some (namely FireGL) are so dead they don't even POST.

Of course the 9800GX2 is the saddest card to lose because that's two 9800 GTX down the drain. 
Another sad loss is this EVGA ACS card - the build quality is astounding. That shroud is completely metal. 

It also has a giant backplate, earliest card I've seen (aside from Quadros with their full-coverage shrouds) to include one.

I did get a laugh from this other EVGA 8800GTS though, the shroud of which peeled off in shipping to reveal that the EVGA branding is just a sticker - the original Nvidia-branded shroud is still underneath. 

Hopefully I can get a refund from the guy who sold one particular lot of 8, one of which was working (9600GT?). I don't pick bones with "untested" listings but if you say "most of the cards work", I don't count one working card to be a majority. I bet the seller just tested the cards for POST and not video output, since almost all of them do pass that bar.
 
I couldn't believe I got this many dead cards, every few GPUs I'd swap in a Quadro 2000 or GeForce 6800 (on the table) to make sure the motherboard wasn't the issue. Started out testing on the 775 board up top, then moved to the AM2 board on the floor since I discovered its POST codes were a little more descriptive - it would tell me if a card POSTed but didn't output video; the 775 board would display a POST error on cards like that. Alas the board was not the issue. 

Pretty sad to only get one good card out of this. I will see if I can bring any of the others back to life. If it fits, I'd love to mount the EVGA ACS cooler onto the working 9800 GTX+ since that metal shroud is SOLID.

It's funny when people are surprised to learn that a computer is mostly an empty box.
This has happened a few times now where I pop off a side panel in front of someone and they're like "wait... where is everything?", expecting every inch of a desktop case to be filled. I recently had to explain to someone that I did not steal most of their computer, their ATX Inspiron just didn't have a lot in there to begin with.
 
I guess they expect every computer to look like the z8 workstation line, where the case is so packed with fan shrouds and mounts that you can't see an inch of circuit board with the panel off. 
Sometimes it surprises me a little as well to find a particularly empty case - why even sell ATX computers anymore with no PCI cards, optical drive, or 3.5" HDD? Why have such a giant box if storage, WiFi, and all the I/O fit within the footprint of the board lmao
 
PS nice page number! 

More scummy phone photos of the pristine FX 1800 (G94 die, same as 9600GT/9800m). It still has under 100hr of usage, still the cleanest, shiniest 9000-series card out there. Funny to compare it to the beat-up ones on eBay.



Tomorrow or the next day I'll have a great deal more old video cards to post; 17 untested cards from '06-10 are arriving. Two 9800 GX2, FireGL v7200 (single slot Radeon X1800), and a pair of HIS 4850 cards among others (mostly high end GeForce). Hope I get some nice working cards out of it.

who?
 
does it only come up with certain content?  because im not getting this for vidoegame uploads and as we all know video games look *extremely* realistic nowadays! 🙄
 
 
 
reminds me of when i visited nyc, i had to fill out a form and one of the first questions was "do you plan a terrorist attack?"
y/n ...
 
being a kid i was really flabbergasted as to how and why anyone who does would admit this... followed by thinking "americans are really stupid apparently", "is this a joke...?" and "what happens if i say 'yes'?"  (my mom immediately pointed out that that wouldn't be a good idea tho 😅)

I'm a little surprised this crusty fella is still running. Might hold the record for the longest-lasting 7200.7 drive on the planet - the drive itself is close to 20 years old with close to 12 years of flying hours, and still no SMART errors. 
One of my favorite sounding drives too. Makes a nice purr on the randoms.