Show off your old and retro computer parts

[awesomes8wc3]

56K + Text Wall warning!  

 

Here's the retro computing corner i've been working on for a while, since about 2013 or so when I got my first retro machine (that I have now given to a friend). It's pretty ghetto, but it works. It's very tight for space in my small room and using the computers is kind of a pain as the keyboard/mouse/monitor cables needs to be moved to each machine. I bought a KVM but unfortunately the cables are sold separately and are expensive, so i'm still stuck moving cables.
 

Spoiler

These are the gaming machines, the one in the bottom left is not used and is one of two spare parts machines.

Clockwise:

NEC PowerMate V, 1996:

- Intel Pentium 133 (might upgrade to a 166 but it's plenty fast as it is)

- 64mb EDO memory

- S3 Trio64UV+ 1mb

- Creative SB16 (might swap with an ESS 1868, not sure)

- Onboard VLB IDE controller

- 560mb Samsung

- Sony CD-ROM, not sure the speed. I think 48x.

- Windows 3.1 + MS-DOS 6.22

 

This machine was given to me by my school. It was used in a computer class for demonstrating how to take apart a computer, and as you would expect, it was destroyed. It has no reset or sleep switch, all the plastic tabs for the front panel are missing and the frame was mangled. It even had capacitors ripped off of the mainboard! Thankfully I was lucky enough to be in contact with someone who had another NEC machine with the same motherboard, and was able to provide the value for the capacitor and I could replace it. A new Dallas RTC chip was also needed.

 

The frame was bent back mostly to shape, although it is still a bit skewed, it's a damn sight better. New wiring was made out of a CD Audio cable for the IR transmitter and hot glue was used to hold the front panel on. The capacitor and Dallas RTC was replaced and the machine finally booted. It was very unstable to start with, most times not going past POST, however as time went on it seems to have fixed itself.

 

In the future I want to retrobrite the front panel and optical drive, paint the scratched up cover, and replace the switches (though they are an uncommon size for PC cases so sourcing some might be tricky), but those are purely cosmetic. In terms of hardware upgrades, maybe a Terratec Profimedia 16/96 Gold (I do like the ES1868 chip and it's not a very expensive card), and a bigger hard drive. This machine did come with a 1.6gb Conner but it had some issues.

 

The Samsung hard disk was also from my school, but for an older machine that I don't know about. It was used in the physics lab and has some cool physics / astronomy software on it.

 

Pentium III machine, 2000:

- Intel Pentium III 800

- 512mb SDRAM

- nV GeForce 2 MX440

- Creative SB Live 5.1 Digital + AWE64 for MIDI

- 27gb Maxtor

- Teac 48x CD burner, Creative 24x CD reader

- Gigabyte GA-6VXE7+ (VIA chipset)

- 250w? Sparkle Power PSU

- Windows 2000, pretty sure lol

 

Another machine given to me by my school, it was originally built by a local shop, Newell Computers, which has been recently closed and demolished. From what one of my friends told me he had been there since the 1980s and had retired. The motherboard isn't original, it had an MSI i815 Pro, which is probably a better board but I wanted an ISA slot. The hard disk was from my PowerMac G4 500 Sawtooth and so was the Teac optical drive. When I got it it had no memory and a sad S3 Trio3D video card, gross. I think this machine was a teacher's personal machine as it had his name sharpie'd on the inside.

 

Future upgrades include maybe a faster PIII, a GeForce 2 GTS, and a more era appropriate SB Live with the Live Drive (as seen in Fournuts' post).

 

Dell Dimension 8300, 2003:

- Intel Pentium 4 2.8 HT

- 1gb DDR-333

- nV GeForce 7600GT

- Creative SB Live 5.1 (Dell OEM, so it's crippled a bit).

- 160gb Seagate Barracuda 7200.7? SATA

- NEC DVD reader, might burn too, dunno

- Pretty sure a 300w Hipro PSU

- Windows XP Pro

 

Found on the curb, it was a little dirty on the front but other than that it was immaculate. Whoever threw it out also decided to wrap it in clingwrap lol. I had to ruin it though when cleaning it, I accidentally scrubbed off a bit of the Dimension text around the power button, oh well. Also came with the Dell 1703FPt monitor I use as my secondary. A very nice machine, stable, quiet, and pretty quick. All parts are original except the hard drive, memory, and video card. I looked up the service tag and turns out it would have shipped with the exact same 160gb Seagate drive anyway. I forget how much RAM it would have come with but I added the 1gb as it had none. The video card was upgraded from the stock FX5200 by the original owner.

 

Future upgrades include putting a more age-appropriate video card in, like an R9800, but they're not cheap. Also the higher end sound card option, an Audigy 2 ZS.

 

-------

 

In the future I would like an even older machine, like a 286. I've also thought about building an all out early 2000s machine, the Dell is great but it's a little boring at the same time. Probably be an A64 3200+, R9800XT, RAID0 Raptors, something like that.

 

Spoiler

 

The HP tower server is not really part of this setup, it is used for drive imagine/cloning as it has six front-accessible SATA bays and two IDE bays. I call it the DriveToaster, one of youtube user Alfred DiBlasi's many "sayings".

 

The machine at the back is an NT4 Domain controller + Fileserver for the other machines here. It has my old Athlon XP 1600+ and Gigabyte GA-7VRX board. 512 megs of RAM I think, 80gb Samsung IDE drive and I don't remember the rest.

It's just using a random Pentium 4 board I found, with like 512 megs of ram, not really worth talking about. Windows XP and Acronis true image are used on this thing. The original dual Xeon board and 600w Delta power supply were quite nice on the other hand but not suited for my purposes in this machine so they were replaced.

 

 

Spoiler

 

The setup!

- Sony SDM-HS73 monitor

- Linksys ProConnect KVM (with no cables so basically useless...)

- Microsoft Internet Keyboard

- Logitech Optical mouse

- JVC RX-6012V AV reciever

- Random shitty Logitech speaker thing. Don't have room for nice speakers here unfortunately.

 

That IBM monitor is for the DriveToaster machine as getting back there is especially painful.

 

For networking I use this simple Edimax 8 port 10BaseT+10Base2 hub. I want to get a 100mb switch as this is a bit slow but it's all I had spare and it works. I'm upgrading some of the networking gear around the house soon so I will have a couple small gigabit switches to use. Yeah, a bit new now, but whatever.

 

 

For you Mac fans I have a PowerMac G4 500 Sawtooth sitting at my grans house, with the original 17" Studio Display (Trinitro- uhh I mean Diamondtron goodness). Nothing too special but if you want to see it next time I'm down there I'll take some pics. Just let me know.

[Steemax]

I believe I have some SD ram laying around somewhere from an oldddddd build I'll try to dig up, I wish I had kept my xfx 5200 gpu

[Bouzoo]

16 minutes ago, Steemax said:

I believe I have some SD ram laying around somewhere from an oldddddd build I'll try to dig up, I wish I had kept my xfx 5200 gpu

Hands down the worst card I ever had. Just a problem after problem with it. Just wasn't XFX, can't remember which one it was.

[flibberdipper]

Can't remember if I've posted this ol guy before, but even if I did, now it'll be with a better camera.

 

SPECS:

Windows 98 SE Plus!

Cyrix 6x86 MII 333GP with ghetto'd headsink because the PSU fan was not cutting it (plan to upgrade it to a Pentium II at some point)

Integrated SiS video (plan to upgrade to a Radeon 9000 PCI card at some point because that's the major downfall of this PC)

256MB Kingston ValueRAM (133MHz)

4GB Seagate HDD (can't remember the model number)

40GB Maxtor DiamondMax 9

Some kind of CD-RW drive

Integrated ESS + Yamaha synth with SoundBlaster 128 PCI for actually outputting the audio (cleaner audio with lower output so I can hook it up to the line-in on my PC)

 

[Steemax]

2 hours ago, Bouzoo said:

Hands down the worst card I ever had. Just a problem after problem with it. Just wasn't XFX, can't remember which one it was.

Mine was smooth! I just needed it to play Starcraft, Unreal Tournament and some original Red Alert (Command & Conquer)

[Fournuts the Longbeard]

9 hours ago, awesomes8wc3 said:

56K + Text Wall warning!  

 

Here's the retro computing corner i've been working on for a while, since about 2013 or so when I got my first retro machine (that I have now given to a friend). It's pretty ghetto and shonky, but it works. It's very tight for space in my small room and using the computers is kind of a pain as the keyboard/mouse/monitor cables needs to be moved to each machine. I bought a KVM but unfortunately the cables are sold separately and are expensive, so i'm stuck moving cables.

 

These are the gaming machines, the one in the bottom left is not used and is one of two spare parts machines.

Clockwise:

NEC PowerMate V, 1996:

- Intel Pentium 133 (might upgrade to a 166 but it's plenty fast as it is)

- 64mb EDO memory

- S3 Trio64UV+ 1mb

- Creative SB16 (might swap with an ESS 1868, not sure)

- Onboard VLB IDE controller

- 560mb Samsung

- Sony CD-ROM, not sure the speed. I think 48x.

- Windows 3.1 + MS-DOS 6.22

 

This machine was given to me by my school. It was used in a computer class for demonstrating how to take apart a computer, and as you would expect, it was destroyed. It has no reset or sleep switch, all the plastic tabs for the front panel are missing and the frame was mangled. It even had capacitors ripped off of the mainboard! Thankfully I was lucky enough to be in contact with someone who had another NEC machine with the same motherboard, and was able to provide the value for the capacitor and I could replace it. A new Dallas RTC chip was also needed.

 

The frame was bent back mostly to shape, although it is still a bit skewed, it's a damn sight better. New wiring was made out of a CD Audio cable for the IR transmitter and hot glue was used to hold the front panel on. The capacitor and Dallas RTC was replaced and the machine finally booted. It was very unstable to start with, most times not going past POST, however as time went on it seems to have fixed itself.

 

In the future I want to retrobrite the front panel and optical drive, paint the scratched up cover, and replace the switches (though they are an uncommon size for PC cases so sourcing some might be tricky), but those are purely cosmetic. In terms of hardware upgrades, maybe a Terratec Profimedia 16/96 Gold (I do like the ES1868 chip and it's not a very expensive card), and a bigger hard drive. This machine did come with a 1.6gb Conner but it had some issues.

 

The Samsung hard disk was also from my school, but for an older machine that I don't know about. It was used in the physics lab and has some cool physics / astronomy software on it.

 

Pentium III machine, 2000:

- Intel Pentium III 800

- 512mb SDRAM

- nV GeForce 2 MX440

- Creative SB Live 5.1 Digital + AWE64 for MIDI

- 27gb Maxtor

- Teac 48x CD burner, Creative 24x CD reader

- Gigabyte GA-6VXE7+ (VIA chipset)

- 250w? Sparkle Power PSU

- Windows 2000, pretty sure lol

 

Another machine given to me by my school, it was originally built by a local shop, Newell Computers, which has been recently closed and demolished. From what one of my friends told me he had been there since the 1980s and had retired. The motherboard isn't original, it had an MSI i815 Pro, which is probably a better board but I wanted an ISA slot. The hard disk was from my PowerMac G4 500 Sawtooth and so was the Teac optical drive. When I got it it had no memory and a sad S3 Trio3D video card, gross. I think this machine was a teacher's personal machine as it had his name sharpie'd on the inside.

 

Future upgrades include maybe a faster PIII, a GeForce 2 GTS, and a more era appropriate SB Live with the Live Drive (as seen in Fournuts' post).

 

Dell Dimension 8300, 2003:

- Intel Pentium 4 2.8 HT

- 1gb DDR-333

- nV GeForce 7600GT

- Creative SB Live 5.1 (Dell OEM, so it's crippled a bit).

- 160gb Seagate Barracuda 7200.7? SATA

- NEC DVD reader, might burn too, dunno

- Pretty sure a 300w Hipro PSU

- Windows XP Pro

 

Found on the curb, it was a little dirty on the front but other than that it was immaculate. Whoever threw it out also decided to wrap it in clingwrap lol. I had to ruin it though when cleaning it, I accidentally scrubbed off a bit of the Dimension text around the power button, oh well. Also came with the Dell 1703FPt monitor I use as my secondary. A very nice machine, stable, quiet, and pretty quick. All parts are original except the hard drive, memory, and video card. I looked up the service tag and turns out it would have shipped with the exact same 160gb Seagate drive anyway. I forget how much RAM it would have come with but I added the 1gb as it had none. The video card was upgraded from the stock FX5200 by the original owner.

 

Future upgrades include putting a more age-appropriate video card in, like an R9800, but they're not cheap. Also the higher end sound card option, an Audigy 2 ZS.

 

-------

 

In the future I would like an even older machine, like a 286. I've also thought about building an all out early 2000s machine, the Dell is great but it's a little boring at the same time. Probably be an A64 3200+, R9800XT, RAID0 Raptors, something like that.

 

 

The HP tower server is not really part of this setup, it is used for drive imagine/cloning as it has six front-accessible SATA bays and two IDE bays. I call it the DriveToaster, a reference to one of youtube user adiblasi's videos.

 

The machine at the back is an NT4 Domain controller + Fileserver for the other machines here. It has my old Athlon XP 1600+ and Gigabyte GA-7VRX board. 512 megs of RAM I think, 80gb Samsung IDE drive and I don't remember the rest.

It's just using a random Pentium 4 board I found, with like 512 megs of ram, not really worth talking about. Windows XP and Acronis true image are used on this thing. The original dual Xeon board and 600w Delta power supply were quite nice on the other hand but not suited for my purposes in this machine so they were replaced.

 

The setup!

- Sony SDM-HS73 monitor

- Linksys ProConnect KVM (with no cables so basically useless...)

- Microsoft Internet Keyboard

- Logitech Optical mouse

- JVC RX-6012V AV reciever

- Random shitty Logitech speaker thing. Don't have room for nice speakers here unfortunately.

 

That IBM monitor is for the DriveToaster machine as getting back there is especially painful.

 

For networking I use this simple Edimax 8 port 10BaseT+10Base2 hub. I want to get a 100mb switch as this is a bit slow but it's all I had spare and it works. I'm upgrading some of the networking gear around the house soon so I will have a couple small gigabit switches to use. Yeah, a bit new now, but whatever.

 

For you Mac fans I have a PowerMac G4 500 Sawtooth sitting at my grans house, with the original 17" Studio Display (Trinitro- uhh I mean Diamondtron goodness). Nothing too special but if you want to see it next time I'm down there I'll take some pics. Just let me know.

I see that you have two sound cards listed in your Pentium 3 machine, does that work well? I've never done anything like that. I also like the ir creative CD drive, I have a Creative cd burner in my retro computer and the blue and orange text on a beige drive is hideous in a cool 90's way.

[awesomes8wc3]

11 hours ago, Fournuts the Longbeard said:

I see that you have two sound cards listed in your Pentium 3 machine, does that work well? I've never done anything like that. I also like the ir creative CD drive, I have a Creative cd burner in my retro computer and the blue and orange text on a beige drive is hideous in a cool 90's way.

I have the AWE64 in there for MIDI as I like it better than the SBLive's synth, and the SBLive for everything else. The AWE64 line out goes into the SBLive's line input and mixed down there, so yeah it actually does work pretty well.

 

Yeah the infrared port definitely is pretty unique, I think it's just used to control the CD playback back when that was handled by the drive itself. I wonder if anyone actually ever really used it... would have been much more useful imo if it was a full on IrDA port, but even so yeah it definitely is a cool looking drive.

[Guest]

For my older machine, it has a single core pentium 4 running at 3.0GHz, 256MB DDRSD RAM, 80GB HDD, 300W PSU (propiotary), X1 CD ROM drive, integrated intel HD graphics and its running the classical windows XP.

[MEC-777]

Seeing if I can revive an 11 year old laptop my wife's aunt & uncle gave me after I helped them upgrade to a newer one. This is sitting in windows 7 on the desktop doing absolutely nothing. lol. Opening chrome takes a good 2 mins or so. 

 

 

Time to install Lubuntu.  

 

 

[ProjectBox153]

3 minutes ago, MEC-777 said:

Seeing if I can revive an 11 year old laptop my wife's aunt & uncle gave me after I helped them upgrade to a newer one. This is sitting in windows 7 on the desktop doing absolutely nothing. lol. Opening chrome takes a good 2 mins or so. 

Time to install Lubuntu.  

That's not old! My main computer is 10 years old. 

[MEC-777]

1 minute ago, Jamiec1130 said:

That's not old! My main computer is 10 years old. 

Didn't say it was "old", said it was 11 years old.  

[Mitko_DSV]

9 minutes ago, MEC-777 said:

Seeing if I can revive an 11 year old laptop my wife's aunt & uncle gave me after I helped them upgrade to a newer one. This is sitting in windows 7 on the desktop doing absolutely nothing. lol. Opening chrome takes a good 2 mins or so.

Time to install Lubuntu.

This ain't normal. I've put Windows 7 on older laptops and they worked great. There's something running in the background.

[MEC-777]

1 minute ago, dsv1999 said:

This ain't normal. I've put Windows 7 on older laptops and they worked great. There's something running in the background.

Oh, there were many things running. lol. They had AVG and AVG "PC tuner" running, along with many other things. I educated them on those so-called "performance improving" software programs.  No viruses or malware, to my surprise though. 

 

I agree, windows 7 should run fine on older hardware like this and this one's definitely been bogged down with extra bloat. Still, it will run even better with Lubuntu.  

[TheLaserCucumber]

I have a bunch of Core2 Duos lying around, but I don’t think that they’re retro just yet.

[KawaiiRaven]

I can walk to my old high school and show off some ancient windows XP computers with core 2 duos and 2gb of ram (some updated to 4!) 

 

The only place that got new computers is one of the labs but it was because their 20 computers got hacked by some virus (it’s windows XP, kinda expected to happen). They replaced them with iMacs and since they were so expensive, they only have 7 there. With that budget they could’ve upgraded the entire school with decent Windows PCs but instead got 7 i7 iMacs. 

[TheLaserCucumber]

5 hours ago, KawaiiRaven said:

I can walk to my old high school and show off some ancient windows XP computers with core 2 duos and 2gb of ram (some updated to 4!) 

 

The only place that got new computers is one of the labs but it was because their 20 computers got hacked by some virus (it’s windows XP, kinda expected to happen). They replaced them with iMacs and since they were so expensive, they only have 7 there. With that budget they could’ve upgraded the entire school with decent Windows PCs but instead got 7 i7 iMacs. 

We have Core2 Duo machines with 3GBs of RAM in school. But they’re not running XP, they’re running Windows 8.1....

[flibberdipper]

33 minutes ago, TheLaserCucumber said:

We have Core2 Duo machines with 3GBs of RAM in school. But they’re not running XP, they’re running Windows 8.1....

Lots of the PC's at my old school ran Core 2 Duo E7200's with 4GB of RAM, Radeon HD 3450's, and the SLOWEST 160/250GB Barracudas that had been re-imaged maybe twice in the almost 8 years they've been there.

 

No joke, the install of Windows 7 Enterprise takes nearly 5 minutes to boot on some of them, and have fun logging in, especially if your account hasn't been copied to that machine before.

 

(and let's not forget the file server for the media arts class that ran Windows XP Home)

[ProjectBox153]

6 hours ago, KawaiiRaven said:

I can walk to my old high school and show off some ancient windows XP computers with core 2 duos and 2gb of ram (some updated to 4!) 

 

The only place that got new computers is one of the labs but it was because their 20 computers got hacked by some virus (it’s windows XP, kinda expected to happen). They replaced them with iMacs and since they were so expensive, they only have 7 there. With that budget they could’ve upgraded the entire school with decent Windows PCs but instead got 7 i7 iMacs. 

Core 2 Duos aren’t ancient! I run a Core 2 Duo in my main rig!

[MEC-777]

Was doing portable inspections for my local school board a couple month ago. Saw this gem in one of them. Yes, my school board is still using P4 machines... *slow clap* 

 

[flibberdipper]

25 minutes ago, MEC-777 said:

Was doing portable inspections for my local school board a couple month ago. Saw this gem in one of them. Yes, my school board is still using P4 machines... *slow clap* 

 

 

You haven't experienced slow until you use a machine with a Core 2 Duo VPro and 4GB of RAM paired with a slow as balls 80GB Barracuda trying to let 5 students work on multi-media heavy PowerPoints all at once.

[ProjectBox153]

15 minutes ago, tmcclelland455 said:

You haven't experienced slow until you use a machine with a Core 2 Duo VPro and 4GB of RAM paired with a slow as balls 80GB Barracuda trying to let 5 students work on multi-media heavy PowerPoints all at once.

No. An Intel Atom single core working on a PowerPoint on a remote server over a shitty Wi-Fi connection on Windows 7 Enterprise on a Dell Latitude Mini and trying to actually use the trackpad. That was slow. Also, each machine had to download your user profile when I had to use them for work, so it took about 20 minutes just to boot, add 5 minutes to load the desktop. 

[Guest]

3 hours ago, MEC-777 said:

Was doing portable inspections for my local school board a couple month ago. Saw this gem in one of them. Yes, my school board is still using P4 machines... *slow clap* 

 

Hey, My parents still use one of those fine!

[flibberdipper]

3 hours ago, Jamiec1130 said:

No. An Intel Atom single core working on a PowerPoint on a remote server over a shitty Wi-Fi connection on Windows 7 Enterprise on a Dell Latitude Mini and trying to actually use the trackpad. That was slow. Also, each machine had to download your user profile when I had to use them for work, so it took about 20 minutes just to boot, add 5 minutes to load the desktop. 

That's not bad at all. I shit you not that this machine took a good 10 minutes to boot XP and another half hour or so to log each student in. God forbid you open IE8 and actually try to obtain the shit for the presentation.

[mech]

I have a ton of parts... will post them in a bit

[TheLaserCucumber]

On 10/5/2017 at 4:48 PM, tmcclelland455 said:

Lots of the PC's at my old school ran Core 2 Duo E7200's with 4GB of RAM, Radeon HD 3450's, and the SLOWEST 160/250GB Barracudas that had been re-imaged maybe twice in the almost 8 years they've been there.

 

No joke, the install of Windows 7 Enterprise takes nearly 5 minutes to boot on some of them, and have fun logging in, especially if your account hasn't been copied to that machine before.

 

(and let's not forget the file server for the media arts class that ran Windows XP Home)

We don’t have the hassle with logging in. They are all in a domain. The domain and file server is running Windows Server 2012 R2, but I don’t know what’s inside it.

The hard drive in our PCs are actually quite snappy. Takes maybe 2 - 4 minutes to boot and log in.

But they’re often already running from the lesson before.

We also lost 5 in the last 2 weeks because of PSU failure.