Show off your old and retro computer parts

[da na]

8 minutes ago, Bitter said:

I thought everyone knew that? I 'discovered' that like 20 years ago lol!

I thought it at least had to be plugged into IDE to work. First drive I have that has integrated audio out. 

[Bitter]

1 hour ago, Mel0nMan said:

I thought it at least had to be plugged into IDE to work. First drive I have that has integrated audio out. 

I'm surprised.

[da na]

1 minute ago, Bitter said:

I'm surprised.

The drive is 5 years older than me, 2/3 of ODDs I come across are SATA.

[Bitter]

15 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

The drive is 5 years older than me, 2/3 of ODDs I come across are SATA.

I'm old.

[Bitter]

[1NF1N1TY_360]

Hello!

I just saw this forum and thought this would be a good addition:

My Dad's 2007 Lenovo 3000 N200 Laptop a.k.a. "The Big Boi"

Specs: NVIDIA GeForce Go 7300 GPU, Intel Core 2 Duo T7100 CPU, 1GB RAM, a 15" 1680x1050p display & Windows Vista.

The only problem with "The Big Boi" is that when I tried to start it (for the first time in several years) 2 weeks ago, it wouldn't start; My Dad said that the reason is because the hard drive is broken.

Anyways, here's some images of the laptop:

P.S. I would really appreciate if someone sent me suggestions for what can I make use of it now.

[PCturbobutton]

This is a recent addition I spoted boxed in a charit or thrift shop for those in the US priced £60 which is about $75 And I couldn't resist the urge to pick it up.

In really good condition even though I only gave it a wipe down and will need to get rid of the dust under the keyboard

Just need to order a few extra bits to get it working on one of my displays, be able to use a mouse and be able to use an SD card.
On power up though it seems just fine, I joined a Discord to get advice on things to get so I can use it and they say my boot up floopy noise is natural as it looks for a disk before booting into the OS if there isn't one inserted.

[SimplyChunk]

1 hour ago, PCturbobutton said:

This is a recent addition I spoted boxed in a charit or thrift shop for those in the US priced £60 which is about $75 And I couldn't resist the urge to pick it up.

In really good condition even though I only gave it a wipe down and will need to get rid of the dust under the keyboard

Just need to order a few extra bits to get it working on one of my displays, be able to use a mouse and be able to use an SD card.
On power up though it seems just fine, I joined a Discord to get advice on things to get so I can use it and they say my boot up floopy noise is natural as it looks for a disk before booting into the OS if there isn't one inserted.

that's not in bad nick that my man.  You planning on tracking down a 14" CRT for it at some point?  That's what i did with my C64C and it's amazing

[da na]

25 minutes ago, SimplyChunk said:

that's not in bad nick that my man.  You planning on tracking down a 14" CRT for it at some point?  That's what i did with my C64C and it's amazing

Those little 5 inch CRTs you can find on ebay for like $20, a lot of them have AV input. They have a good bit of bloom if you really turn up the brightness but they're surprisingly sharp, 640x480 monochrome, for the price. I've used them with Vic-20s, C64/128s, and Apple IIs. 

[DANK_AS_gay]

9 hours ago, 1NF1N1TY_360 said:

Hello!

I just saw this forum and thought this would be a good addition:

My Dad's 2007 Lenovo 3000 N200 Laptop a.k.a. "The Big Boi"

Specs: NVIDIA GeForce Go 7300 GPU, Intel Core 2 Duo T7100 CPU, 1GB RAM, a 15" 1680x1050p display & Windows Vista.

The only problem with "The Big Boi" is that when I tried to start it (for the first time in several years) 2 weeks ago, it wouldn't start; My Dad said that the reason is because the hard drive is broken.

Anyways, here's some images of the laptop:

P.S. I would really appreciate if someone sent me suggestions for what can I make use of it now.

1. Did you have it plugged in?

2. Did it boot to the BIOS?

3. Did it beep?

4. Try taking out the battery, then testing again, just to make sure the battery isn't causing issues

[PCturbobutton]

7 hours ago, SimplyChunk said:

that's not in bad nick that my man.  You planning on tracking down a 14" CRT for it at some point?  That's what i did with my C64C and it's amazing

 The box was a bit dirty but was really suprised at the condition of the ST being as good as it is.  I only gave the case/keyboard a quick damp cloth wipe, though a clean is needed under the keys and maybe inside (yet to open it up)

I might eventually hunt one of those CRTs down or just grab a CRT in general that would wirk best for retro devices like this, for now I'll be grabbing a scart cable to get a basic output.
Had an Amiga A500 as a kid or rather my dad did making this my first ever Atari computer, so looking forward to playing about with it.

[Beerzerker]

This one goes a ways back and into the obscure too.

It's a Socket 5/7 Premio 219-H board with an SiS 5571 chipset and I currently have a 120MHz Pentium in it.
Note the silkscreened charts for setting it's dipswitches to set the CPU speed for what you have and the fact it supports all three of the major desktop brands of CPU's that were available at the time.

Yes it still works.

[Bitter]

Oh SIS, thank god it's not a PC Chips chipset!

[Beerzerker]

I'm just glad it's not a PC Chips "Anything".......

[JaffH_iii]

Looks impressive. 

[da na]

15 minutes ago, Bitter said:

Oh SIS, thank god it's not a PC Chips chipset!

The Chinese x79 motherboards of the 90s

[Beerzerker]

1 hour ago, Mel0nMan said:

The Chinese x79 motherboards of the 90s

Except this one wasn't made in China.
I believe it's actually a farmed-out make done by MSI for Premio, when I did some research on it I kept coming up with MSI as the make (Via BIOS code ident) even though it's not an MSI by name.
There is still a bit of info on the brand, not much but it's out there.

EDIT: The link I had before is dead but makes sense because it was a link from 2014.
Apparently there is nothing out there on it now but I did download what was there so..... I guess that's a good thing.

EDIT 2:
Found out it is an MSI make, namely this: MSI MS-5146 - The Retro Web

[PCturbobutton]

A retro IBM Thinkpad 760ED I got alongside some Toshiba/eMachine era laptop from family last year, and since I'm the techy I get given stuff randomly.
Now upto 7 laptops though 5 of those were given to me, 1 is my current laptop and 1 my last daily driver laptop .

The IBM Came in a laptop bag with some sealed/unsealed goodies like documentation, win 95...etc although didn't have the power brick so been unable to power it up.
Seen them online but just haven't bothered buying one.

[da na]

Did a lot of imaging last night. IT department lent me this lovely Presario 1655, basically brand new. Info was filled out on the user guide.

Also had this handwritten note of how to turn it off, which I found funny

Not pictured, on the inside cover of the manual there were a few MS-DOS commands written down as well as the machine's specs (4gb HDD, 64mb 66mhz SDR, 266mhz Pentium 2)

Has some generic graphics accelerator by a company I'd never heard of, can't do 3d unfortunately. But it's got a 1024x768 panel with these incredibly thin bezels for its age, looks pretty good. Soundcard is an ESS Solo """Sound Blaster Compatible""" (aka vaguely sounds like a sound blaster if you removed half the capacitors). Speakers don't sound half bad. Has this media panel at the top so you can play CDs with the laptop turned off (has its own power switch). 2 PCMCIA slots too - I don't see that too often. 

Got about 2/3 the score my K6-380 did in HWiNFO32 benchmarks. 

Included also was the original software. Don't want to pull the disks back out so I'll just give you this

A couple of these have made their way onto archive.org if anyone needs restore disks. @BrianTheElectrician? A lot of drivers are similar or same to the later 1600 models.

I wish I could keep this but the head of the IT department is keeping it for using legacy software and backing up floppies. Compared to my Presario 1685, I prefer the design and construction of this one (the 1685 will snap in half if you pick it up by the front half while open as the keyboard and palmrest are separate parts. It's totally repairable but rather bothersome.)

[BrianTheElectrician]

17 hours ago, Mel0nMan said:

A couple of these have made their way onto archive.org if anyone needs restore disks. @BrianTheElectrician? A lot of drivers are similar or same to the later 1600 models.

I wish I could keep this but the head of the IT department is keeping it for using legacy software and backing up floppies. Compared to my Presario 1685, I prefer the design and construction of this one (the 1685 will snap in half if you pick it up by the front half while open as the keyboard and palmrest are separate parts. It's totally repairable but rather bothersome.)

I'll have to hop onto archive and grab the images. If there are a lot of similarities to the 1685 it would certainly be good to have! The software looks like a good collection as well! That's a very clean looking machine, but it's interesting that your boss wants it for old software... I can't imagine they would need access to any files or software that old anymore...?

 

Maybe the old software is games?

[da na]

5 hours ago, BrianTheElectrician said:

I'll have to hop onto archive and grab the images. If there are a lot of similarities to the 1685 it would certainly be good to have! The software looks like a good collection as well! That's a very clean looking machine, but it's interesting that your boss wants it for old software... I can't imagine they would need access to any files or software that old anymore...?

 

Maybe the old software is games?

A bunch of the files on it only worked in Microsoft Works, .WPS files. Didn't open correctly in Word or plain text. I'd think games if it could do 3D. 

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[Beerzerker]

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

[BrianTheElectrician]

11 hours ago, Mel0nMan said:

A bunch of the files on it only worked in Microsoft Works, .WPS files. Didn't open correctly in Word or plain text. I'd think games if it could do 3D. 

  Hide contents

 

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Ok yeah that's pretty garbled lol. Surely an old version of Works could run on a newer system that that though!? Guess I know what I'm going to try this weekend lol.

[flibberdipper]

1 minute ago, BrianTheElectrician said:

Ok yeah that's pretty garbled lol. Surely an old version of Works could run on a newer system that that though!? Guess I know what I'm going to try this weekend lol.

Works 9 actually works just fine on Windows 11, surprisingly enough. If you have any display scaling it obviously doesn't look the greatest with that, but it works a-ok.

[da na]

1 minute ago, flibberdipper said:

Works 9 actually works just fine on Windows 11, surprisingly enough. If you have any display scaling it obviously doesn't look the greatest with that, but it works a-ok.

It's not called Works for nothing, after all.