BrianTheElectrician

My friend recently got a hold of these from his uncle's shop, are they useful or is it all junk?
 
 

Gather around children! I finally got myself a 286 machine!
 
https://imgur.com/gallery/m3a2tMY
 
well, it started life as a 286 anyway.  
 
Nothing quite as sexy as a monolithic beige tower with a power switch that makes so much noise, you would think you broke a finger.

I upgraded my first-gen Mac Mini G4, with an mSATA to PATA SSD, no more worrying about the ancient spinning drive going bad.
 

Here something for our little "Museum" here...

So back from the shop with some 'D' cells 🙂 needed 6 they only had packs of 4 🙄.
 
First thing i've done is clean the corroded battery contact with some WD40 and P150 sandpaper
 
I cut the tape holding the plastic in it's tube shape and simply cleaned that with some water and a scrubber.  With the new cells in there it's looking good.
 
I placed the top cover on the Multimeter and turned it on for the first time..
 
Life in the old girl yet!!
 
So i buttoned her up gave her a quick clean with some monitor wipes and put a fresh velcro cable tie on the probes 🙂
 
 
Looking and working as good as new 😄 

Dragged my old Compaq portables out of the attic and they both started right up - to a varying degree.  The Compaq II (green screen)  booted DOS 6.0 and worked fine after hitting F1 a few times. New they went for almost $5k.   The 386 (orange screen) hard drive was unresponsive and had some screen artifacts.  New it went for between $8k and $10k.  Not worth much of anything now.  They will make nice nightlights.

Posted elsewhere but I’ll also post here, sue me

MSI K7D Master, dual socket 462 board with two Athlon xp 1500+’s, currently 1gb of ddr 233
Gonna do 4gb of ecc ddr 233 in the future to max out the board and maybe get an ATI FireGL 9700 X1 to utilize the agp pro slot and stay era to 2002
 

Ah yes, the Abit BH6. I have a couple of them and they're fantastic boards. The soft menu in the BIOS for the processor FSB and Multiplier is great to have. They seem to be very stable boards too, at least with my experience with them.

Ah yes, the Abit BH6. I have a couple of them and they're fantastic boards. The soft menu in the BIOS for the processor FSB and Multiplier is great to have. They seem to be very stable boards too, at least with my experience with them.

Abit BH6 1.02 motherboard on freshly painted motherboard tray 😁

 

Well, when I was in town for LTX I had a chance to swing by Disappearing Inc and got my hands on a Thinkpad T23 parts machine with a good screen which I needed for my T22. Got the LCD panel swapped over (Backlight in the old one was dead, swapped with one from another panel and still dead), backlight didn't work, though it did in the T23 when we tested. Swapped the inverter board and still nothing... swapped the display cable and it all came to life, so perhaps the lamp I have in the other display is still OK so I'll still be keeping it for a spare. Have the machine all back together and it's working great now! Good to know that the LCD, inverter and LCD cable are all the exact same between the T22 and T23, and I suspect I could actually swap the motherboard over as well (T23 lower case isn't in the greatest shape) but that's an eventual maybe. I'll be keeping the T22's old LCD, the T23's keyboard and motherboard for spare parts and realistically likely scrap the rest.
 
T22 Specs:
Intel Pentium III - 900Mhz, 256mb SD Ram, 20Gb HDD, S3 Savage IX Graphics (8Mb), Intel Pro/100 Ethernet and Crystal Sound. I've installed Windows 2000 Professional with SP4 on it, as I already have several newer Thinkpads that are all running Windows XP and I really wanted a Win2k laptop. This fits the bill nicely and is really a quick machine with Win2k. I've still got install the last couple drivers but just about all done getting it set back up. Judging by the Windows 98SE COA on the underside, I presume this was originally a Windows 98 system.
 
Maybe one day I'll see if I can find a replacement battery for it, or maybe look at rebuilding the one that's in it. It, not surprisingly, doesn't hold a charge at all haha.
 

Well, when I was in town for LTX I had a chance to swing by Disappearing Inc and got my hands on a Thinkpad T23 parts machine with a good screen which I needed for my T22. Got the LCD panel swapped over (Backlight in the old one was dead, swapped with one from another panel and still dead), backlight didn't work, though it did in the T23 when we tested. Swapped the inverter board and still nothing... swapped the display cable and it all came to life, so perhaps the lamp I have in the other display is still OK so I'll still be keeping it for a spare. Have the machine all back together and it's working great now! Good to know that the LCD, inverter and LCD cable are all the exact same between the T22 and T23, and I suspect I could actually swap the motherboard over as well (T23 lower case isn't in the greatest shape) but that's an eventual maybe. I'll be keeping the T22's old LCD, the T23's keyboard and motherboard for spare parts and realistically likely scrap the rest.
 
T22 Specs:
Intel Pentium III - 900Mhz, 256mb SD Ram, 20Gb HDD, S3 Savage IX Graphics (8Mb), Intel Pro/100 Ethernet and Crystal Sound. I've installed Windows 2000 Professional with SP4 on it, as I already have several newer Thinkpads that are all running Windows XP and I really wanted a Win2k laptop. This fits the bill nicely and is really a quick machine with Win2k. I've still got install the last couple drivers but just about all done getting it set back up. Judging by the Windows 98SE COA on the underside, I presume this was originally a Windows 98 system.
 
Maybe one day I'll see if I can find a replacement battery for it, or maybe look at rebuilding the one that's in it. It, not surprisingly, doesn't hold a charge at all haha.
 

I remember when the first Pentium came out. It was about twice as fast as the previous i486 processor. From what I remember it was a night and day difference using an i486 computer and a Pentium computer side by side. I don't think this made much difference in Windows 3.1, but when Windows 95 came out I think it was a big deal as it was quite easy to have a computer just a few years old in those days that would chug to a grinding halt with newer software. There were games that needed the extra horsepower of the Pentium and wouldn't run on the i486. The original Tomb Raider comes to mind.

I volunteered at ltx2019 and it had a great vibe. I'd def say the vast majority are more like those here on the forum, not reddit lol. Never had an issue with anybody and it was always fun chatting with people. I'll be volunteering this year as well and am very much looking forward to it.

I volunteered at ltx2019 and it had a great vibe. I'd def say the vast majority are more like those here on the forum, not reddit lol. Never had an issue with anybody and it was always fun chatting with people. I'll be volunteering this year as well and am very much looking forward to it.

Woah it's been a while since I've been on here. We're in the middle of Reno's and moving though so have been very busy.
 
A shot of *most* of my old machines staged to go up to the interior. We will be somewhat space limited for the next couple years but we will eventually be building a new place, which also means a new workshop. The container were storing a lot of our stuff in I'll probably be converting into my new computer workshop.
 

Best I can make out is it's a 100mhz pentium, which coincidentally was also our first family machine. Hardware wise ours had 8mb of edo ram, a diamond stealth 64 2mb pci video card (S3 trio64 chipset), a 33.6k modem and sound blaster 16. It was spec'd 16mb ram but my dad downgraded to 8mb because it saved $300. Also had a 1gb Wd caviar 11000 ide hard disk and 4x cdrom drive. Came running windows 95, and we later upgraded to 32mb of ram. The pentium 1s used either socket 5 for the earlier ones (75-166mhz), or socket 7. The very early 5v 60 and 66mhz ones were socket 4. The later pentiums and pentium mmxs are good paired with a voodoo 1, and the earlier are really 2d only for era correctness.

I'd say I certainly do. Whole systems even 🤣

Woah it's been a while since I've been on here. We're in the middle of Reno's and moving though so have been very busy.
 
A shot of *most* of my old machines staged to go up to the interior. We will be somewhat space limited for the next couple years but we will eventually be building a new place, which also means a new workshop. The container were storing a lot of our stuff in I'll probably be converting into my new computer workshop.
 

Woah it's been a while since I've been on here. We're in the middle of Reno's and moving though so have been very busy.
 
A shot of *most* of my old machines staged to go up to the interior. We will be somewhat space limited for the next couple years but we will eventually be building a new place, which also means a new workshop. The container were storing a lot of our stuff in I'll probably be converting into my new computer workshop.
 

Woah it's been a while since I've been on here. We're in the middle of Reno's and moving though so have been very busy.
 
A shot of *most* of my old machines staged to go up to the interior. We will be somewhat space limited for the next couple years but we will eventually be building a new place, which also means a new workshop. The container were storing a lot of our stuff in I'll probably be converting into my new computer workshop.
 

Woah it's been a while since I've been on here. We're in the middle of Reno's and moving though so have been very busy.
 
A shot of *most* of my old machines staged to go up to the interior. We will be somewhat space limited for the next couple years but we will eventually be building a new place, which also means a new workshop. The container were storing a lot of our stuff in I'll probably be converting into my new computer workshop.
 

Cue the swanky "Nerd-Pron" music......

That's a nice collection of chips... I even spy a 486 DX50... those flew for their day if you had cards that would handle the 50mhz bus, if not, then well you had a lot of system instability. A DX2-66 should be similar in performance but far more stable due to the 33mhz bus, though I'd imagine a dx50 would still beat it for memory performance.
 
Definitely a neat collection. I myself only have one each of a 286 and 386... my 386 is a DX33, which I see you have several of.