best cheap/free scores 1.1

[tmcw]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Anyone ever use Lab-Volt Facet trainer boards? The EE department dumped their collection, and I got what I could. One single "Computer Interface Base Unit" and just over 90 boards! I would have expected multiples of the base unit, but I might have missed that cull.

The base unit isn't USB, it has a 25 pin connector at the back, so I'll need to dig out documentation to figure that out. I didn't get any PC or software either, and after a quick look, it mightn't be easy. There are about 16 different types of board, multiples of each, except for one I think. There are 15 boards of the "Motors, Generators and Controls" board for example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddztoyl5i0I

[peterzilla]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

it dont look too bad - but it needs a speaker soldered in.

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

That's actually a pretty kickass system too!
After all, it is all period-specific stuff, including the matching MS and KB... and CRT!

Clean it well and hold on to it (especially if it's in very good condition.) The slightly older beige Compaq Pentium I/II cases with blue/purple plastic fronts (imitating those of the iMac PowerPC G3's, I think) can sometimes sell for crazy amount of money. With time, I imagine this one would too. Though of course it may be worth looking into the mobo and seeing if you can upgrade anything here or there... possibly the entire mobo with something else. HP/Compaq wasn't known for putting great performance motherboards or with many expansion options. So a more "open" P3 mobo could be nice.

It's going to be today's project. It's a cool dreary day and unless something comes up that I'm not aware of yet, I don't have a lot going on.

TBH though, I've seen that kind of thing fairly often when I used to work at Microcenter - hardware that's no more than 4-5 years old getting tossed with no questions ask. And more interestingly, it doesn't seem to have any correlation to a person's wealth. I've seen both rich and poor folks throw good, perfectly working stuff away - stuff that could have easily fetched them a few $100. Not sure if it's laziness or ignorance... but yeah, it's pretty common. I guess companies are becoming more and more successful in turning us into a consumer throwaway society. :\

I get the whole 'throw-away society' thing; which I find to be absolutely tragic.....but these cards still go for ~$400-ish on ebay.... Beyond disgraceful waste.....of all the things I'm glad I could rescue!

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

I wasted a day on this thing.... Someone paid out the wazoo for this, it has the max specs available for it; P3 @ 850/100 (doesn't support 133FSB) and 512mb RAM; Intel i810 chipset.

I did have to make a few repairs.... Someone roughed up the VGA port and ripped it off the board. The PCB was not damaged, but obviously it had no display output. I tested it with a PCI card, it worked, PSU is one of those stubby's; but thankfully not the bestec...it's a Delta, and the secondary caps are all UCC KY and KZH...no need to recap it.

Thar it be with a 128mb PCI Radeon 9200 in it. Just temporary of course....this thing was made back in the day when you couldn't disable onboard GPU's....so when the drivers load for both (even if disabled in the OS), bad things happen.... I did try....so I had to repair the onboard.



Board out of case....



The culprit....and while I had the iron hot, I replaced an intermittent microswitch in the original mouse (left button)....that's the old microswitch next to the trashed VGA plug.



I scavenged a replacement from some old junk board... Yea, it was a real treat getting that in there....but I got it.



Reinstalled.





It originally had WinME on it.....ick. Yes Uranium, I did explore the drive.... Lots of kiddie games on it and no naked ladies. I DBAN'd it and then a clean install of Win2k.



Firefox 12 and BCN for the win!! A day wasted on this critter, but it is restored in the lowest form.....meaning I just did basic cleaning; air compressor for dust bunnies and gave everything a good wipedown with cleaners....I didn't strip & wash it.... I'll keep it all together, some day it may be some weird classic system....it's already 20yrs old, it was made in 2001.



This post was created from it. The monitor could use some tuning up. Focus needs adjusting and the red gun is a little hot.......but I may let the next owner do that. Max resolution is 1024x768 @ 70Hz. For what it is, it did fine on BCN's antiquated forum software....I didn't try it anywhere else.

Specs are:

HP Pavilion XT923 (motherboard is an Asus CUW-AM)
Pentium 3 @ 850/100
512mb RAM
40gb HDD
MX50 CRT Display
All the rest of its original hardware

[momaka]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

I wasted a day on this thing.... Someone paid out the wazoo for this, it has the max specs available for it; P3 @ 850/100 (doesn't support 133FSB) and 512mb RAM; Intel i810 chipset.

LOLz!
Looks very similar, in terms of specs, to my HP Pavilion 8756c PC that I found many ages ago... except, mine didn't look this good even after a much more thorough cleanup... and it was just the PC box only - no monitor or other hardware with it.

Mine mis-reports the CPU as 866 MHz @ 133 MHz FSB. But it really is running at 850 MHz and 100 MHz bus. Chipset is i810, not i815 as I reported incorrectly in that post above. Funny thing is, member Penitum4 mentioned the same thing about mine - that someone must have paid a lot for it to get it with that proccy, as he said he had a similar machine, but only with a lowly low Celeron. I found mine with 128 MB of RAM (or was it 256 MB, I can't remember), but I quickly upped that to 384 MB. I wanted to do 512 MB, but BIOS started complaining when I tried it and said something to the extent that I can't have ACPI enabled with that amount of RAM. Indeed when I tried it, XP switched to APM mode automatically and I couldn't force it to do ACPI... which meant I'd have to press the power button every time I shut down the PC, after it displayed "it is now safe to turn off your computer". I mean, who even remembers that message? It's like it turned back time to the old days of AT PSUs. Then again, it's an ASUS motherboard (MEW-AM... which I suppose is a sibling or close cousin of the CUW-AM), and the HP-ASUS partnership has always produced weird, locked-down, and buggy BIOSes. I also could not get the HDD on my system to run at anything higher than UDMA Mode 2 (ATA 33 MB/s), despite the HDD supporting much higher.

So overall, mine is a HP piece of garbage... though a well-built HP piece of garbage. I used it from ~2009-ish to 2012 or thereabouts as a main PC (of sorts.) Don't even know why I keep it anymore.

I did have to make a few repairs.... Someone roughed up the VGA port and ripped it off the board. The PCB was not damaged, but obviously it had no display output.
...
I scavenged a replacement from some old junk board... Yea, it was a real treat getting that in there....but I got it.

https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1632260019

Oh fun! I had to do that on a MSI MS-7184 motherboard:
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1499310663
^ Note the VGA port sticking out. I ended up repairing the original one, though, as I didn't have any such spare "compact" VGA port on any junk hardware. Still holds fine, despite using a ton of hot glue and a piece of paper clip soldered to the ground plane behind it to keep it in place. Sounds ghetto (and it is), but it doesn't look like it at all, unless you really take a peek in there.

I tested it with a PCI card, it worked, PSU is one of those stubby's; but thankfully not the bestec...it's a Delta, and the secondary caps are all UCC KY and KZH...no need to recap it.

Yeah, that's the one nice thing about these older HP and Dell PCs - they regularly came with well-built PSUs and Japanese caps inside. The only thing you have to watch out for is if the 5VSB uses a critical cap, and that critical cap is a non-Japanese brand (the small caps aren't always Japanese on these PSUs... though for the most part, they are.)

Thar it be with a 128mb PCI Radeon 9200 in it. Just temporary of course....this thing was made back in the day when you couldn't disable onboard GPU's....so when the drivers load for both (even if disabled in the OS), bad things happen.... I did try....so I had to repair the onboard.

Interesting result.
So the "problem" I was having with my Pavilion 8756c and a PCI GeForce FX5200 wasn't unique to my system it seems. In my case, I thought it just had to do something with the funky HP BIOS again, or perhaps because the original OS was WinME, but someone had installed/upgraded it to XP on top.
What's even more interesting is that while I didn't have good success with the GeForce 5200 PCI to run properly, I was able to get a VisionTek Radeon 9250 PCI to run OK and the OS to switch to it once the drivers were loaded up.
Again, I chuck it down to the HP-ASUS partnership there.

This post was created from it. The monitor could use some tuning up. Focus needs adjusting and the red gun is a little hot.......but I may let the next owner do that. Max resolution is 1024x768 @ 70Hz.

And I bet that was with 24-bit color... because that i810 chipset can't even do 32-bit properly!

and while I had the iron hot, I replaced an intermittent microswitch in the original mouse (left button)....that's the old microswitch next to the trashed VGA plug.

Is it made by Omron?
Probably just has oxidized contacts. Mouse appears to be made by Logitech... and probably a variant of model M/S-34. I have a bunch of these, and the left button regularly goes "bad" after so many years. But like I said, it's just the contacts in the switch oxidizing. I clean mine with 800 grit sandpaper every 2-3 months, and that has kept it going for years now. I've had to do it so many times now that I do it faster than it takes me to shut down the PC and change the mouse with another... so I often even do it with the PC still running.

Oh, and regarding that old broken VGA port - I'm sure you save the hex nuts/bolts from it... but if not, it's always handy to have a few of those as spare. Almost half of the used video cards I've bought (be it eBay or Craigslist) always seem to miss one or two (in some cases, the entire bracket! )

It originally had WinME on it.....ick. Yes Uranium, I did explore the drive.... Lots of kiddie games on it and no naked ladies.

Same with my HP above... though it did come with a Diablo 2 play disc (CD#2) in one of the drives. But more interestingly, there were pictures on the desktop of the owners... and the daughter of the owner turned out to be a student a few years younger that me attending the same university as me.
How I know?
We rode the same bus/shuttle from the metro to the university for a year or two. I think she even sat beside me a few times. Kind of crossed my mind to tell her that I found their PC and ask her if she wanted a copy of any of the data back before I wiped it. But then figured the conversation would probably end up being too weird (I mean, how would I know I found *their* PC - it could only be if I had looked at the pictures on there... which would 100% sound creepy, no matter how you try to go about it, and I'm sure most people won't be happy to know you looked at their files.) So of course I never asked... or even bothered to try to talk to her. Not my type of thing, really. But every time I saw her, I just though this was such a funny coincidence.
Anyways, I did wipe only the sensitive data first from that PC (there were several work-related documents with SSNs, addresses, and things of that nature.) Then later on, I wiped the pictures as well. I kept most of the music, though. Found a few good latino hits that I didn't know existed, but turned out to be really popular overseas.

I'll keep it all together, some day it may be some weird classic system....it's already 20yrs old, it was made in 2001.

https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1632260019

Cool!
And you even got the original speakers!
TBH, it's kind of rare to find a complete retro system like that anymore.

20 years is also nothing for those machines. I reckon they'd do another 10-15 easily. Good save!

[ratdude747]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

It originally had WinME on it.....ick. Yes Uranium, I did explore the drive.... Lots of kiddie games on it and no naked ladies. I DBAN'd it and then a clean install of Win2k.

Better that you found kiddie games than kiddie porn... lol.

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Better that you found kiddie games than kiddie porn... lol.

I've found it before.....like I said; some things can't be unseen....

LOLz!
Looks very similar, in terms of specs, to my HP Pavilion 8756c PC that I found many ages ago... except, mine didn't look this good even after a much more thorough cleanup... and it was just the PC box only - no monitor or other hardware with it.

I'm LOL'ing at the label on it.....in 2001 when that was made, I was well beyond making audio CD's....I was making MP3's interface with car audio systems before you could just go buy them.... I was making audio CD's probably 6 years earlier.

Mine mis-reports the CPU as 866 MHz @ 133 MHz FSB. But it really is running at 850 MHz and 100 MHz bus. Chipset is i810, not i815 as I reported incorrectly in that post above. Funny thing is, member Penitum4 mentioned the same thing about mine - that someone must have paid a lot for it to get it with that proccy, as he said he had a similar machine, but only with a lowly low Celeron. I found mine with 128 MB of RAM (or was it 256 MB, I can't remember), but I quickly upped that to 384 MB. I wanted to do 512 MB, but BIOS started complaining when I tried it and said something to the extent that I can't have ACPI enabled with that amount of RAM. Indeed when I tried it, XP switched to APM mode automatically and I couldn't force it to do ACPI... which meant I'd have to press the power button every time I shut down the PC, after it displayed "it is now safe to turn off your computer". I mean, who even remembers that message? It's like it turned back time to the old days of AT PSUs. Then again, it's an ASUS motherboard (MEW-AM... which I suppose is a sibling or close cousin of the CUW-AM), and the HP-ASUS partnership has always produced weird, locked-down, and buggy BIOSes. I also could not get the HDD on my system to run at anything higher than UDMA Mode 2 (ATA 33 MB/s), despite the HDD supporting much higher.

This one did as well; mis-reported CPU speeds. It has the last BIOS on it from HP (v2.10) and I did try a 1GHz / 133FSB in it, it reported it as 750MHz 133FSB which I knew was BS....I confirmed when booting into diagnostics; it was indeed 750/100. I even tried a Celeron 1.1/100 in a PL adapter, that was a no-go....wouldn't POST.

...Don't even know why I keep it anymore.

If anyone can answer that question, they'll diagnose our 'sickness'.... I have tons of stuff here that should most likely be tossed....but FWIW I scrapped 5x junkers today....but fear not, I kept every screw, SATA cable, PSU, CPU, RAM module, and fan. These all had bad motherboards; mostly modern I-series Dell inspirons in horrible paper thin cases....not worth messing with and clogging up shelf space.

Oh fun! I had to do that on a MSI MS-7184 motherboard:
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1499310663
^ Note the VGA port sticking out. I ended up repairing the original one, though, as I didn't have any such spare "compact" VGA port on any junk hardware. Still holds fine, despite using a ton of hot glue and a piece of paper clip soldered to the ground plane behind it to keep it in place. Sounds ghetto (and it is), but it doesn't look like it at all, unless you really take a peek in there.

There was no fixing this one, it got tweaked bad. The AFT-most line of pins were torn in half.

Interesting result.
So the "problem" I was having with my Pavilion 8756c and a PCI GeForce FX5200 wasn't unique to my system it seems. In my case, I thought it just had to do something with the funky HP BIOS again, or perhaps because the original OS was WinME, but someone had installed/upgraded it to XP on top.
What's even more interesting is that while I didn't have good success with the GeForce 5200 PCI to run properly, I was able to get a VisionTek Radeon 9250 PCI to run OK and the OS to switch to it once the drivers were loaded up.
Again, I chuck it down to the HP-ASUS partnership there.

I've experienced this before.... You cant disable the onboard GPU in the BIOS, so you use it during the install process. Then install the driver for your PCI card, and it'll usually work thereafter and just don't plug anything into the onboard VGA port. This one just wouldn't do it. It's give a screen of gibberish and freeze.....

And I bet that was with 24-bit color... because that i810 chipset can't even do 32-bit properly!

Indeed....

Is it made by Omron?
Probably just has oxidized contacts. Mouse appears to be made by Logitech... and probably a variant of model M/S-34. I have a bunch of these, and the left button regularly goes "bad" after so many years. But like I said, it's just the contacts in the switch oxidizing. I clean mine with 800 grit sandpaper every 2-3 months, and that has kept it going for years now. I've had to do it so many times now that I do it faster than it takes me to shut down the PC and change the mouse with another... so I often even do it with the PC still running.

I didn't look at the maker of the switch....I just knew it was bad and grabbed a spare switch from the bin of mouse parts....yea, I have a little tote full of broken mouse PCB's just to harvest switches.... Yes, it is a logitech.

Oh, and regarding that old broken VGA port - I'm sure you save the hex nuts/bolts from it...

You know better than to ask that!

I kept most of the music, though.

I got a hold of a P4 era Dell about a year ago with ~80gb of high quality complete albums ripped in 256k, a lot of 80's & 90's rock..... I kept it all and implemented it into my own collection.

Cool!
And you even got the original speakers!
TBH, it's kind of rare to find a complete retro system like that anymore.

I cleared a shelf in back where the whole thing can live, so nothing gets lost or misplaced. I don't think it's shown in the pics, but it even came with all the manuals, recovery disks, and so on. It's in 100% original condition, but I did remove the dialup modem (I didn't want to waste any of my super-valuable time trying to identify it and hunting down a driver)....but worry not, I made sure the cover plate was the correct style HP.

20 years is also nothing for those machines. I reckon they'd do another 10-15 easily. Good save!

I hope its worth a bunch someday....it'll help my retirement.....not that I'll ever retire from this....but hey, think positive! Even moreso, I can keep up with your text walls!!

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Today was CRT monitor testing day.......they all worked, Momaka can breathe a sigh of relief!





....and the big rack and some new toys under the bench to fit in it...

[Dan81]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Another freebie from a friend.



Another LuckyTech P5MVP3 (this time with a working IDE controller) with a K6-2+. Was surprised to find it there, and laughed when I saw that whatever retailer sold the CPU, they sold it as a regular K6-2 500, and not a K6-2+ at the same speed. It's been recapped as soon as I got it. Whatever DIMMs it ran, that KV1083 regulator near the EDO slots got so hot I had to replace it, and also replaced the puny Jackon 1000uF 10v caps with a pair of Sanyo 1800uF 16v just so I don't kill the new regulator. Also replaced the Canicon (no, you can't) 1500uF 6.3v caps that they used on the CPU side with Rubycon MBZ of the same size. POSTs fine over ATX, couldn't run it on AT, at least not with that craptacular L&C LC-200C I have.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Today's freebie was a Dell Precision T5400 w/ 2x 5450 CPU's @ 3GHz, 16gb FBDIMM's, 1tb HDD, with a quadro 310. Working condition. Tossed Mint 20.2 on it... For some reason Mint only sees half of the 16gb RAM, but windows sees it all....

Of course this post from it..

But, does Windows falsely report half of it being reserved?

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

But, does Windows falsely report half of it being reserved?

Read the following posts, the issue was found.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Read the following posts, the issue was found.

That "reserved" thing is a stupid "feature" introduced with Vista, most likely.

And that APM thing, where it acts like a 486 motherboard, makes me suspect a BIOS integer overflow bug.

Reminds me of when running ScanDisk on MS-DOS 7, would cause ScanDisk to claim you're not running MS-DOS 5.0 or later, LOL.

FDisk also had a bug of that type, where on an 80 GB HDD, it would report a much lower size!

[Dan81]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Scored these wonderful goodies today:

-2x original Windows NT Wks 4.0 packages, one opened one still wrapped.
-chipped OG Xbox rev 1.1 w/ 120GB WD

[stj]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

nice!
IMO 1.1 version is the best.

[Dan81]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Add to that a Xecuter 2 Lite. Wonder if I can get iND-BIOS 5004.67 flashed on it, along with updating the HDD to a 160GB WD AV series (as I said, it's running a pretty old 120GB WD that I have no idea whether it's still in tiptop shape) and replacing the ages old EvoX dash with XBMC.

[stj]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

i would flash the tsop with evox M8 and remove the modchip for a 1.6 later.
then fit a sata adapter and a terrabyte drive in it.

[Dan81]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

1.6s have been quite scarce in here, but I know what you're getting at. Kinda same goes for SATA-IDE adapters, the only one I found looks awfully sketchy. Doesn't help that the last one I had literally smoked itself despite plugging everything as intended. Ironically, only the adapter smoked itself, the HDD survived and so did the Xbox.

As for BIOS, I have used the EvoX M8 BIOS and didn't really like it (felt a bit lackluster for me, maybe only slightly more interesting above MS' standard BIOS) so that's why I'd like to go with iND 5004.67, if I can find my method of safely flashing it, that is.

[stj]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

M8 is special because you configure it with the pc first - if you have the editor.
as for the sata adaptors,
you need to check something - the adaptor should have a 3.3v regulator or 2 on it.
some of the really cheap ones just run the chips at 5v and they burn after some months!!

[Dan81]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Mine burnt a regulator (it was the 3.3v version, by the way, didn't see any 5v versions yet) as soon as I applied power a third time I powered the Xbox. Before that, it wouldn't get recognized at all, despite the Xbox being TSOP'd.

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Today's big load of freebies was from a rural school that is demolishing their storage building and had to get rid of all the stuff in it......so yea....

Overall view....and a Canon color laser document center with a brother color laser printer at its side....



12x HP Probook 4525S laptops. I've tested a few, all are working so far; licensed for 7 pro and "upgraded" to 10, which slowed them to a crawl...just need the usual upgrades to run 10 (RAM and a SSD). They're in fabulous condition considering they were used by kids!



A sonicwall firewall and below it an interesting rack mount Denon CD & cassette player; appears to be a professional grade.



Towers of towers.



The HP Deskpro is in working condition; 4th gen i5 8gb RAM. A win10 update killed the OS...imagine that.



A nifty beige Gateway2000 P4 system. As I sifted through the boxes, the keyboard & mouse also turned up....system is complete!



Some 'smartboards'....I had to ask the guy what these were....last time I was in school, we had chalk boards. Dry erase boards that can also communicate with laptops/tablets/etc.....but require a projector to use this function....he has the projectors, just not in this batch.... I'll keep the smaller one here and wall mount it somewhere for jotting notes on.....you can use standard dry erase markers on them.



This is another project I'm working on...... I am getting over-run in junk black big-brand (HP, Dell, Lenovo, ETC) cases....even outside, they're all over the place, in the way, and getting on my nerves....so I devised a computer case crusher using my fork lift..... This pile was once upon a time ~8x tower cases.

Very befitting end to cheap black cases!!