Show off your old and retro computer parts

[SimplyChunk]

1 minute ago, Mel0nMan said:

I don't often use the degauss button, but when I do, I remember why it exists 

Well that's the thing. My CRT is a TV...it doesn't have one XD

[Bitter]

2 hours ago, SimplyChunk said:

Where you based?  I got a first gen iTX board that'll go in there.  Gigabyte H55N-USB3.  It works a treat.  I was using it with an i7-860 and a GT210 as a main while all my real stuff was away

Chicago area, I'll let you know. It's posting with a temporary PSU, actually the ORIGINAL unit from when this was a P4 system with a 20->24 pin adapter. I'm going to try to get it to boot up some kind of *nix to check it's functional and then shop a PSU if it works OK. Leave it playing a youtube for a few hours or something is good enough testing for now. I don't want to warm it up too much...it's got stink baked into it that comes out when it heats up.

 

This board does not appreciate a 128GB USB drive lol. It makes the board hang on init'ing the usb controllers and then not find the usb to boot from. I don't have a molex to sata power splitter or it's down in the basement if I do and I'm lazier than that right now.

 

Turns out I do have an adapter...I have a whole freaking 350W Seasonic OEM garbage tier unit in the basement I could have been using. Whatever, kubuntu is booted now. I guess I should use the seasonic to boot it with the hard drive in it to make sure that's working still too.

[AudiTTFan]

I still have my Athlon 64 X2 6000+ running in my web surfing box, although I personally don't consider it "retro" as much as I consider it to still be almost usable on Windows 10

[da na]

Just now, AudiTTFan said:

I still have my Athlon 64 X2 6000+ running in my web surfing box, although I personally don't consider it "retro" as much as I consider it to still be almost usable on Windows 10

I use my single core 2 thread Pentium 4 system occasionally for web browsing when I don't want to turn on my main PC... better than you'd think

[Bitter]

3 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

I use my single core 2 thread Pentium 4 system occasionally for web browsing when I don't want to turn on my main PC... better than you'd think

I posted on the forum in this thread with a Northwood P4 last year, @FakeKGB has that system now.

[da na]

2 minutes ago, Bitter said:

I posted on the forum in this thread with a Northwood P4 last year, @FakeKGB has that system now.

I've posted a good bit from that PC, a few of them screenshots such as (part of) this SU from earlier today featuring the XP Firefox bar

 

[AudiTTFan]

2 hours ago, SimplyChunk said:

Well that's the thing. My CRT is a TV...it doesn't have one XD

It doesn't even automatically degauss at startup? All the CRT TVs I've used degauss on their own as soon as you press the power button

[Bitter]

Ah ha, full system specs for @Mel0nMan

i5 750

8GB (2x4) DDR3 1333

MSI H55M-E23

GT 640 OEM edition

A hard drive, haven't spun it up to check but I think 500 or 750GB. Normally I'd have done a SSD in a build like this so it's nice and snappy but it didn't matter. It just needed to run facebook games and weird little bible flash games for her mother.

[AudiTTFan]

14 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

I use my single core 2 thread Pentium 4 system occasionally for web browsing when I don't want to turn on my main PC... better than you'd think

But is it running in the OEM motherboard in a budget pre-built Acer like mine?

Don't even ask why I think any of that (aside from an Acer not going bad before a jug of milk on the counter does) is worth bragging about

[da na]

6 minutes ago, AudiTTFan said:

But is it running in the OEM motherboard in a budget pre-built Acer like mine?

Don't even ask why I think any of that (aside from an Acer not going bad before a jug of milk on the counter does) is worth bragging about

Yep, the 17 year old Compaq DC7600 SFF. Love that PC. It's a SFF system with a beefcake dual heatpipe heatsink, 250w PSU (although proprietary), but has support for 95w CPUs because of those two things. 4 ram slots too, lots of SFF boards/pcs don't have that nowadays. A 16x gen 2 slot that does the full 75 watts. Comes with 3 fans, in a tiny SFF system, cause yeah BTX days baby... CPUs got hot. Case alone is like 10 pounds, not even aluminum, it's steel AFAIK - magnets firmly stick to it. Built like a tank. 

[Tutustigxuxt]

[SimplyChunk]

5 hours ago, AudiTTFan said:

It doesn't even automatically degauss at startup? All the CRT TVs I've used degauss on their own as soon as you press the power button

No it's only a little 14" portable one.  It does, however, display both 50 and 60Hz signals.  I really wasn't expecting that when i got it.  Thought it was a lot older.  I use it via RF from my PAL C64C and RGB Scart from my self modded region swap Sega Mega Drive

[AudiTTFan]

9 hours ago, SimplyChunk said:

No it's only a little 14" portable one.  It does, however, display both 50 and 60Hz signals.  I really wasn't expecting that when i got it.  Thought it was a lot older.  I use it via RF from my PAL C64C and RGB Scart from my self modded region swap Sega Mega Drive

Ah. Never heard of one that does 50Hz and 60Hz before, what brand is it?

[AudiTTFan]

14 hours ago, Mel0nMan said:

Yep, the 17 year old Compaq DC7600 SFF. Love that PC. It's a SFF system with a beefcake dual heatpipe heatsink, 250w PSU (although proprietary), but has support for 95w CPUs because of those two things. 4 ram slots too, lots of SFF boards/pcs don't have that nowadays. A 16x gen 2 slot that does the full 75 watts. Comes with 3 fans, in a tiny SFF system, cause yeah BTX days baby... CPUs got hot. Case alone is like 10 pounds, not even aluminum, it's steel AFAIK - magnets firmly stick to it. Built like a tank. 

My Acer has a completely standard mATX board, so thankfully I was able to replace the PSU when the old POS LiteOn one blew up

[SimplyChunk]

4 hours ago, AudiTTFan said:

Ah. Never heard of one that does 50Hz and 60Hz before, what brand is it?

It's a Bush TV 1484T

[Bitter]

Oh my goodness so much crap on this computer, thank god I set it up so her mothers account is NOT the admin account. Still somehow has SplashtopSOS remote access app installed on it so I sure hope she wasn't doing any banking stuff.

[da na]

1 minute ago, Bitter said:

Oh my goodness so much crap on this computer, thank god I set it up so her mothers account is NOT the admin account. Still somehow has SplashtopSOS remote access app installed on it so I sure hope she wasn't doing any banking stuff.

I occasionally look in the Programs folder of old PCs I pick up that won't boot and wonder how it was even still running at some point. On the final bloatware/virus it finally had enough...

[Bitter]

1 hour ago, Mel0nMan said:

I occasionally look in the Programs folder of old PCs I pick up that won't boot and wonder how it was even still running at some point. On the final bloatware/virus it finally had enough...

Had OneBar installed which puts a bar across the top of the screen with links to an internet browser, search bar, weather, and other commonly used items...that are exactly all the same things on the Windows task bar directly on the bottom of the screen below it!!!!

I just disabled a bunch of startup junk to speed it up but I caved and ordered a SSD for it and I'm going to clone it over so at least when I'm fixing things it doesn't take 3 minutes for settings to open or 40 minutes for an update to fail to install. SSD comes tomorrow, got CloneZilla on a thumb drive ready to go for cloning the disk over. I could have shrunk it to a 250GB SSD but screw it, that's too much work to mess with and potential for breaking things churning the disk that hard for that long. The hard drive is at least as old as the PSU in this thing I think!

 

@SimplyChunk

PSU is....

OCZ StealthXStream OCZ600SXS 600 W

https://hardwaresecrets.com/ocz-stealthxstream-600-w-power-supply-review/

Paid $70 in 2009 for it and it was used in some build for before it ended up in this current PC I'm working on. I'd say it wasn't terrible to have lasted that long before failing and it's probably a repairable failure but I'm not going to bother diagnosing and repairing a 12 year old 80% efficient power supply that's costed down to $5.83 cents a year for it's useful lifespan.

[BrianTheElectrician]

Well, picked up a vintage laptop on the weekend... a Toshiba Tecra 500CDT. It has a Pentium 120mhz, 80mb EDO ram, 1.26gb hard disk and a Chips and Technologies 65550 2mb graphics with a 12.1" tft display. Also has real Yamaha OPL3 with the sound which is ess if memory serves. Came with big box versions of Windows 95 (floppy version) and Plus 95, an old Toshiba branded laptop bag and the external floppy drive, which unfortunately needs some love I can't get it to actually read a disk. I also need to pickup a fresh cmos battery for it.

 

It has more audio jack's I think than any other laptop I've seen before...

 

I think I did alright for $60cad lol

 

 

 

 

[valentinardem]

[Bitter]

[da na]

20 minutes ago, Bitter said:

 

[Tan3l6]

Cat ray tube?

 

I like cathodes!

[BrianTheElectrician]

13 hours ago, valentinardem said:

 

That's a neat old Seagate, I don't have any that look like that... I've never come across one. All of mine are older (about 500mb) or much newer (10+gb). Hang onto that one, at least from what I've seen they seem to be fairly rare.

 

I also spy what looks like a rage 128 in your video cards.

[da na]

Finally finished my retro PC animation... (first large animation project)

Probably the most fun part was recording sounds from 4 old pieces of hardware and mixing them together to create the sound effects.

Spoiler

 

For the CD drive sounds, I recorded from my Pentium 4 desktop and K6-2 laptop drives. About 2 minutes of samples from each, edited so the disk spinup and read matched more with the video. Power button was the power button on my Athlon 64 system. There's a CRT sound, very quiet but it exists, at some point that also I recorded.

HDD sounds were from 4 drives - An IDE Samsung Spinpoint, SATA Samsung from a few years later, and two loud server drives from Seagate and Hitachi. 

I used Cinema 4D to create and render all of the frames. In total there were about 100 keyframes, many from each camera angle (things that didn't have motion, like the monitor logo, I only rendered 1 frame of, but the camera angles with motion such as the CD drives or power button/HDD light I rendered about 30 then arranged them).

Had to compress the video way down to fit on here but at a higher bitrate the black textures don't look so washed out.