Anyone else like buying non working vintage computers from ebay and restoring them...

check the capacitors and the crt circuitry, but be CAREFUL

imagine needing a 555 timer to build an astable multivibrator

2 transistors
2 diodes
a few resistors and a battery, done

Caps look fine which is amazing because this was in a non-temp-controlled warehouse on a shelf for 30+ years.

It also beeps twice when powered on which means it passes POST according to the manual I found online.

accidentally watched this webm like 3 times because i thought something more interesting would happen

well check the caps on the crt's circuitry and measure their internal resistance and capacity, they may look okay but are likely dead

Thanks will do

Some stuff, i dont usually seek out broken things though because a lot of the common issues on old broken comptuers are a pain in the dick to fix.
I have an acer ferrari 3400, an old mobile athlon one, similar to what LGR posted on youtube a few days ago. It all works well, its in good cosmetic shape, except the screen is damaged.
I cannot find a compatible screen for it, there are none. Its a 15" 1400x1050 SXGA with a 30 pin CCFL connector. You'd think thats not too hard to find, except that its slightly thinner, and the screen pcb is a specific size so that it fits into a gap in the back of the lid. Other screens wont fit.
So what do i do with it? Its a really cool laptop and id love to play around with it more, but with a dead screen theres nothing i can do if i cant replace it. Its covered in black lines from where the LCD crystal layer cracked.

So its shelved, i lost the power adapter ages ago, but its sitting there untouched since when i last messed around with it playing Halo CE

Don't have much time for it anymore but I've done it.
Also once saved an IBM-Compatible from a moldy, abandoned school as well as a few k6 chips and a box of 5.25" disks. Didn't have the space in my bag for any other components, so I just took the one computer and some CPUs and the disks.
Really wish I'd taken more of the k6 boxes, there were several identical ones.

and just other shit, i have mountains of old computer parts, and not just normal shit, i try to avoid the really common stuff and go for rare components
like my evga geforce 4 ti 4600, great card, artifacts
Probably a matter of baking it right? no, its a die problem and not the memory somehow, EVGA had this genius design for their ACS2 cooler to
>have it not cover 1/4 of the fucking gpu die
i shit you not, there is no heatsink touching 1/4 of the gpu die, and its the important central circle bit (if you can remember geforce4 dies)
so its fucked, its not bga failure, its not memory failure, its a fault within the actual die of the chip because the cards cooler was so poorly designed that while 3/4 of the chip was adequately cooled by this tiny leafblower, 1/4 was probably reaching temps to rival the surface of the sun

I had a thinkpad 701c as well, a super rare AMD X5 model, and not a mod, an original IBM manufactured AMD board. Theres supposedly like under 100 of these things that were ever made.
And guess where it ended up? In the garbage. Because the 701c is such a poorly designed piece of shit laptop. The plastic has a rubberized coating that gets gooey over time, its a nightmare to remove that coating and repaint the thing because the plastic is also incredibly brittle, like breathe on it wrong and it will break kinds of brittle. It uses the tiniest fucking torx screws for some unholy reason, and the actual boards inside are in this layered wafer kind of orientation and the entire thing turns into a little ez bake oven. The reason why they are so rare these days even though the 701c was a really popular laptop is because of all that, being built like shit, but also that the batteries they used tended to not just leak, but spray battery acid at pressure all over the inside of the thing, randomly too. This shit makes apple with the recent macbook pros seem normal.

I had that 701c working fine for a while, and i once left it alone for about an hour while installing Windows 98SE on it (since it had just regular 98). And i come back and its dead.
Well what happened? It reached thermonuclear temperatures because AMD = housefire, the battery got just warm enough to blow its load like a blueballed teenager on prom night and coated the entire inside of the thing with battery acid.
The battery had been working fine for years before i got my hands on it, it just decided that the right time to die was then.
So in the process of trying to fix this nightmare i had to take it apart, as carefully as i possibly could, and basically every tiny little piece of plastic on the thing cracked and broke apart, i had to go out and buy tiny ass torx screwdrivers because i did not have a torx bit small enough for some of it, get it all apart, get everything out, a pin header on the mainboard that connects it to an i/o board broke when pulling it gently straight up.
Cleaned and neutralized all the acid, waited a few days for everything to dry, and tried to start it all up assembled on a desk. Plugged it in, surprise! The thing was technically "on" this entire time because of its dumb ass power switch, i plug it in, its power delivery at the input jack immediately goes pop.

So at this point i had a dead mainboard, of which there are no replacements, dead power delivery, of which there are no replacements and its a pain to solder together, the chassis is sticky and cracked, the display is fading, the keyboard slide mechanism barely works anymore because of all the fucking chipped and sticky plastic, the one battery i had is no longer functional and had to be brought to a hazmat recycler, im practically breathing in the delicious blue crystal dust.
Boxed it up, tossed it in the trash.

If youre ever thinking about buying a 701c, dont. Theres a reason why nobody sells finished refurbs, you cant refurbish them.

>701c
seething
That's the butterfly/trackwrite one right?
>exactly why it was terrible as an actual laptop
kek ad nauseam. The only redeeming aspect is the keyboard, and even that's a dumb gimmick inspired by kids block toys.
Didn't Cuckt from LGR get one in almost pristine condition except the gummy coating?
> im practically breathing in the delicious blue crystal dust.
>Boxed it up, tossed it in the trash.
I can't fucking breathe. ThinkTards BTFO

Yeah, its the one with the sexy butterfly keyboard.
LGR has one but he didnt talk much about the issues with it, beyond the stickyness.

Its a really cool piece of technology, dont get me wrong. But people forget that it is not like the other thinkpads of the era. The idea of making this light and compact thinkpad meant shitty materials and shitty design. I would argue that it is ironically IBMs worst ever laptop design. My 380ED is more solid in every single way. Smooth, non sticky, slightly flexible plastic, internal design is clean and well spaced, keyboard is nice to type on and doesnt flex, and best of all, the fucking thing doesnt cost two bajillion dollars on ebay.

My 380ED is such an overall good oldschool thinkpad that it is actually the first google image result now, a reddit post i made about it.
I know
>reddit
Im a human being, i use a lot of different websites.

And thats a laptop that was worth buying to repair. It just needed a lot of cosmetic work, but it was like 40$ in "it boots but has errors" condition. Cant go wrong.

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also just for reference

>do not

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take note of that pin header on the bottom left, with the two broken pins
the fucked up soldering on that tiny smd component

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See
Electrolyte could have easily dried out. They won't typically look bad/blown on visual inspection because they weren't in use and went storing a charge.

>buy a 701c

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i have a thinkpad 385xd but some dumbass installed windows 2k on it so it's slow as fuck. don't know what to do with it it doesn't have an ethernet port or wireless.

Install from cd media or get some 3.5" floppies for cheap and a usb floppy drive and find some floppy images for win9x?

and if you don't have an optical drive in your main machine, get a usb one

Yes they have to be fucking non working because otherwise you could turn it on and find out how utterly shit computers were so this works out because instead you can pretend you're part of some internet historian movement like all the shits on youtube

someone sounds mad people have fun with their hobby

you're a fucking idiot, it's not my fault you buy vintage electronics and don't replace the god damned battery you fucking mongoloid. Heat didn't cause anything to explode, those chips are like 25W tops, you're just a fucking retard

I buy old external drives from thrift stores mostly but I've gotten some laptops and desktops too. I do it to just run file recovery programs and see if I can find anything salacious.

Nothing explosive. On one family laptop I've found the daughter was a emo that posted shitty anime art on deviantart and was a first year programming student. The father was a massive bare leg fetishist - not even any normal porn, just hundreds of videos of women's legs.
On another external drive I recovered dozens of raw footage of neurotic jewish cuties being interviewed for some jewish kids charity.
And one bare 2.5 drive I got was owned by some asian cuckey dude working at amazon that was in love with some asian girl. He gave her the laptop the drive was on and I guess they broke up because he wrote her an email about not hating her and that she can keep the laptop. At some point the drive was removed and ended up at a thrift store.

I've been tempted to reach out to the original owners but I don't know how that'd work out.

that's just leftover flux there's nothing wrong with it except that you're an absolute fucking moron

It'll never have a "new life" again, it will be merely functioning but never "work" again in the sense of being useful to anyone. You can at most pretend that it is for your own LARPing purposes.

>>Wasting time
>>Wasting effort
>>Wasting money
What have you gained user?

Yes. I buy ones that at least turn on though because I don't have enough money or know how to fix one that actually is not working somehow, except for something like no RAM. Pic related is one I got on eBay for $20, it's an HP ZX5000 ca. 2004 with a Pentium 4 3.0GHz and 1.5GB RAM (I added a bit of RAM to it when I got it). I have actually used it to record audio coming in from cassette tapes, and it did a very good job at it.

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He learned to service obsolete technology. Might come in handy if the aliens invade earth with intention to destroy all tech newer than his laptop.

Unironically my face when reading this.
To be honest the rubber coating was probably fucking great when it was new but 25 years later it's just bullshit. Torx screws are fine though. Only americans seem to bitch about those for some reason.

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I have two of these bad boys in a cupboard somewhere from 2004, one my dads original and another I bought a couple years ago new in box for like $80 for the nostalgia.

Actually pretty decent, after my dad was done with it I got it, used it for light gaming and 3D modeling until I eventually got my own machine in 2011, gave it to my little sister as a Minecraft machine.
No joke, using optifine mod on low-medium settings it was running pretty decent 40-60 FPS
Absolutely the BEST speakers I've ever heard on a laptop, Harman-Kardon and they still sounded amazing last time I had the laptops out.

I have W7 on them both so what should I do g, see how de-bloat windows 10 runs?
One thing I was wondering though, I got an IDE ssd for shits with some spare cash and wondered if it would speed them up a bit, but never got any windows installer to recognize the drive, any ideas or could it be a dead drive, not that IDE was ever supposed to recognize SSD's anyway

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Can confirm Harman Kardon laptop speakers sound amazing and are really loud if you turn em up

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yeah
restoring and/or upgrading and cleaning old laptops is sometimes satisfying and rewarding, for some reason I like it more on laptops than on desktops

I don't buy off Ebay, but whenever I see one at thrift stores for $10 - $20, I'm in.

>there aren't any thrift stores in my area
for me it's either ebay or bust, that sucks

That's too bad. I've gotten about 7 or 8 older laptops at my local thrift over the last few years. A few desktops as well. Found a NAS with 4 one terabyte drives in it 2 years ago for $7.

Trust me i know. Many a sad tears were wept over this 701c.
But there's only so much you can do, at that point I was looking at full board reconstruction and 3D printing an entire new chassis, and that's just not happening for the sake of a sliding keyboard and rare processor.

Crazy that something so new would be in a thrift store. Whoever gave it away obviously didn't have a clue what its value was. My best find at thrift stores was at a Goodwill last November, I found a Compaq desktop from sometime between 1997 and 2000. Date on the case is September 1997, but the date on the DVD drive is November 1999.

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CD drive, not DVD drive. My mistake.

I think somebody died, because all their data was still on the drives.

Fuck yeah, though I mostly buy my desktops and laptops locally while eBay is where I go for PDAs and other ultra-mobile stuff, I did manage to find an HP 9000/310 and a Visualize C180 quite cheaply, though. Former needs a 9133 disk unit and some expansion blanks and the latter probably needs a power supply rebuild.

Right now I'm just working on random macshit, have a 20'' iMac G4 that needs to be set up and need to finish kitting out my 500DP. Needs a pair of Cheetah X15s and another Deathstar 75GXP or a DiamondMax Plus 40 backup drive, and some random FireWire/USB peripherals to round it out.

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I am building a Pentium 3 rig
I need to replace the 4 RAM stick by matching ones
I need to swap the CPU from Coppermine to Tuatalin
I am wondering if I should switch my ATI 4650 1GB DDR2 for a ATI 3850 or keep it
I will use a SSD and Debian on it, maybe Windows 98 SE for older games

Any recommendations?

Seems kind of like a silly combination overall, but nothing wrong really sticks out to me with that plan.

What's the kind of plastic they used to make all those old cases and keyboards? Not talking about the clear stuff in old apple products, although that's cool too, talking about the off-white opaque parts. It has that unique texture and look to it.

I want the best Pentium 3 rig possible
It was my Quake 3 rig that I've upgraded over the years until I buy a Mac Pro 2,1
Reliable, still works, no ME or other bullshit like that, a safe machine and fast with "Linux"

Same with the Compaq.

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>my ATI 4650 1GB DDR2 for a ATI 3850 or keep it
Either of those cards is overkill for a Pentium 3. Your CPU is going to bottleneck real hard.

Any interesting finds? Data-wise.

I would try for a dual-socket Tualatin board then, if that is your goal.

I'd probably rather go with something newer like an Athlon 64 or Pentium 4-class system if I was just looking for a fast ME-free box, though the novelty of still reliably using Pentium IIIs in nearly 2020 is pretty fun.

Not really, it was probably some grandparents' PC. Here's a link to the original thread: archive.rebeccablacktech.com/g/thread/70071766/
Maybe I'll look more thoroughly next week. I have a Compact Flash card and an IDE adapter coming in the mail that I'm going to put in the PC instead of the HDD because it draws less power, and the PSU is a mere 75w

>Dual socket
I was thinking of that too but I would need to buy another motherboard and they are expensive. Anything exist supporting more than 512MB of SDRAM?
If I recall well, there are Pentium III CPU that are like the Pentium II, right? Not regular CPU but inserted like RAM sticks
I have a Athlon 64 2.4GHZ but I left it to my father (Runs well with Ubuntu)

HDDs really don't draw that much power to begin with. I ran three 7.2K Barracudas, dual 512K cache Pros and a full complement of expansion cards in this thing on just the stock 200W supply.

CF's pretty convenient to have anyway, though.

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Why CF and not a regular IDE/SATA adapter with a Slave/Master jumper? A cheap SSD would be fine

virgin

I'm not a fan of compact flash replacing HDs, but I understand why people do it.

>Anything exist supporting more than 512MB of SDRAM?
Best luck is with an aforementioned dual-socket board. I've come across PIII-S systems loaded with 1 GiB modules in the past, I don't think you'll find many options in the Coppermine/single-socket space that can do that, maybe a Rambus board could, though I think the PIII RDRAM boards were all gimped due to instability problems.
>If I recall well, there are Pentium III CPU that are like the Pentium II, right?
If you want to get autistic about it, the first generation of Pentium IIIs basically were just Pentium IIs and yeah, they were slotted. Intel supported Slot 1 all the way up to at least the 1 GHz Coppermine, I'm not sure if any multi-slot boards could support Tualatins by slot-ket adapters.

So beautiful!!
I want a tower like that!!

I saw a thread where another user did the same thing with one of his machines from the mid 90s. Also, the IDE adapter I got has a case bracket, so I'll be able to easily take the card out and add stuff to it from a newer PC, then put it right back in without opening the case. This case is a bit of a bitch to put back on too.
I just worry too much about the flash cells wearing out because old versions of Windows don't do TRIM or whatever newer OSes do to make sure certain cells aren't overused. I guess it shouldn't be much of a problem with an OS like Windows 95 though.
You're right, I looked it up and that drive only uses 11.6 watts. Oh well, this will still make it easier for me to transfer stuff to the PC. Very nice tower in that pic.

I did not know about the first Gen of PIII, thanks
I was confused for years about them, both are PIII but totally different
I dual socket system later for me then. I will buy it last so I need order 3 Tuatalin then it will be around 200$ CAD without counting new RAM for both

I know I am a bit stretching but is there any motherboard, single or dual socket for PIII with 2 AGP ports or even a PCIE 16X port?
I have a spare X1650 ATI

TRIM is not a problem with newer SSDs, some user has talked of it, the newer ones are safe for older systems. All is done within the SSD now
I use a Crucial M4 64GB for my PIII

That's a real nice tower. Only thing missing is a zip drive. Is that a tape drive above the CD changer?

Thanks. Maybe I'll get one for my P4 system. How new are we talking here, like after what year?

anything past 2015 is fine

>I know I am a bit stretching but is there any motherboard, single or dual socket for PIII with 2 AGP ports or even a PCIE 16X port?
Nah, the PIII on desktops was a few years before PCI-E's time and AGP by nature is a single-slot kind of deal.

I think the other guy's right, I wouldn't worry about getting an overkill graphics set up in there, unless you want to play with the Steam library on Linux or something and just see what you can run.

Just start small, it shouldn't be too hard to find a matched pair of 1.4 GHz PIII-S chips and you can just run one in the meantime if your board supports it.

AGP only functions as one slot, there are no dual agp boards in existence, not even some obscure prototype, just not how the bus itself works.

Socket 370 for the last pentium 3's was also still well before PCIe, there wont be any pcie pentium 3 boards.
Socket 478 is where PCIe can still be found, as there were "holdover" boards that had pcie and 478 together. But AGP died out in the transition from LGA 775 pentium 4's and pentium D's into Core series stuff.

Any GPU newer than like a Geforce 4 card will be overkill for any Pentium 3, no exaggeration. You will notice no difference between a 4650, 3850 or x1650, pick up a Radeon 9800 of some kind off of ebay, theyre fairly cheap and a bit more appropriate.
Sometimes you can snag geforce4 ti 4200's for about 20-30$

Thanks, I am looking on Ebay right now for dual socket boards, a bit expensive for me right now
I think I will keep my current board otherwise I will have 2 Pentium III builds when I need one only
I will buy a CPU first then some matching RAM sticks for stability and performance

>Socket 478 is where PCIe can still be found, as there were "holdover" boards that had pcie and 478 together. But AGP died out in the transition from LGA 775 pentium 4's and pentium D's into Core series stuff.
I know there are a few board or Pentium 4/D/C2D with AGP and PCIE + DDR1 but I missed one on Ebay

What if I buy a Pentium III for laptop? They are 478 Socket if i recall well. I just don't know if they are welded or not
I have a P4 478 (2.4GHZ) tower right next to me
I could have Pentium III + 512MG to 2GB DDR and AGP maybe?
>Sometimes you can snag geforce4 ti 4200's for about 20-30$
I think my GPU is better than that 4200 and I need DVI

I have found these CPUs for 370 socket

ebay.ca/itm/VIA-Cyrix-III-500MHz-CPU-C3-Samuel-Socket370-32-bit-processor-PGA370-Tested/392315061973?hash=item5b57ccc6d5:g:fJ4AAOSwePtdK7eW

ebay.ca/itm/VIA-C3-866Mhz-133Mhz-S370-CPU-Processor-C3-866AMHZ-for-PGA-370-Processor-Only/372287617923?hash=item56ae123b83:g:yoIAAOSwSw5a89iw

ebay.ca/itm/CPU-via-C3-800MHz-800AMHz-PGA370/173767883370?hash=item28755f7a6a:g:uzcAAOSw8U9cUDMZ

opinions? A Cyrix build could be nice since I don't play Quake or run Windows

OEMs back then did a pretty good job of working within stringent power supply limits, plus the hardware wasn't really that thirsty to begin with.

I'd just see you can slave the CF card to the main drive and use it for easy file transfers and backups. I've wanted to do that in a couple systems. Get the best of both worlds, could even maybe partition the CF card and have it mirror the primary disk and be bootable in the event of a drive failure.

Thanks, man. I think it actually did have a Zip drive in it when I got it, but it wasn't bezel matched and looked terrible so I swapped it out for a second floppy drive to fill the hole until I could find a grey Zip drive which is much harder than it sounds, for some reason. The second floppy drive is also kind of useful anyway just for holding the NT 4 repair disk, so I might just get a Parallel/SCSI external instead.

The other drive above the changer is an HP DDS3 drive that was also just filler, I pulled it and shoved it in my Visualize when I found a more matching SureStore Travan drive.

The later III-Ms did use a 478-pin package I guess but I'm almost certain they're not going to be electrically compatible with the 478-pin package used on the Pentium 4, even if the chipset supported them.

>I think my GPU is better than that 4200 and I need DVI
DVI was pretty much the norm by then.
Good for novelty but you'd probably attempt suicide if you were trying to run a modern Debian stack on one, they're Cyrix in name only and even worse architecturally, pretty sure they're just a WinChip 4 with two new logos slapped on.

Might be fun to grab one anyway and shove it in your old Coppermine board when you get the new Tualatin setup. Stick NetBSD on it or something.

>Any GPU newer than like a Geforce 4 card will be overkill for any Pentium 3, no exaggeration.
Exactly. My ti4200 is bottlenecked by my p3.

I have a parallel one. It does the job. I only have the one disk for it anyways.

what is that CPU guys? It is 370 socket
ebay.ca/itm/Dell-PE1550-PGA370-SHNT-CPU-Terminator-2G042-TUA-Processor-Terminator/392024398808?hash=item5b46799bd8:g:6hcAAOSw4WRa8l26

>hardware wasn't really that thirsty to begin with
I guess I didn't realize that. I wasn't around for the era. Even the CPU, a Pentium MMX, only draws like 19 watts. I don't want to push the PSU too far though since it is probably every bit of 20 years old. I used a kill a watt meter to see power draw with the CD drive active, and the system did go over 50w at times.

Where do you guys get PATA HDDs? I can't justify the cost per GB from what I see online. Any experience with PATA SSDs?

eBay...

I got a whole bunch about 4 years ago at my local thrift. They had stacks of them for $3 each. I grabbed everything from 80GB and up. In retrospect I should have grabbed them all.

I've bought 8 things from ebay in the past few months and exactly half of it was the wrong damn thing or didn't work. Getting tired of it.

My local thrift shops never have any interesting electronics. Just old LCDs and a/b routers.

That isn't eBay's fault. I've bought about 100 things off eBay in the past 4 years and only got fucked twice, and both times it was fake SD cards. You do check feedback of people you're buying from, right? And you got your money back?

I've been pretty lucky with my local one. I've visited others in the city and they have been pretty pathetic or overpriced.

>You do check feedback of people you're buying from, right?
yes
>And you got your money back?
Most of the time it's cheaper for them to just send the right thing and let me keep the wrong one instead of paying to ship it back. It makes me feel bad basically taking free stuff.

I'm out in the country so while I have the advantage of picking up cheap or free newer hardware from locals who don't know how to fix them, all the old hardware that they already threw away is gone forever.

I think keeping the broken or wrong thing than you ordered is good compensation for having your time wasted.

They're nice to have when you need them, especially on DOS machines. In fact, you've now reminded me there's some hope to get my XT set back up without eating all of my 360k disks...
I never realized it either until I was in the same situation with that machine. I wanted to add in a third hard disk and figured it would draw a lot of power, after doing some digging around I found that it was surprisingly not the case. Guess those motors aren't very demanding after all even if they're quite audible..
That's just a terminator, some dual-socket systems needed them in single-processor configurations.

When going to eBay I usually do some research beforehand and have a specific model/lineup of drive or whatever other part I'm looking for in mind. I usually only get the wrong thing if I'm ordering generic chinese shit. With the whole return aspect, I always just treat returning the product as the default expectation and if they let me keep it that's great, with larger outfits especially it isn't so big a deal and I usually make up for it by buying from them again in the future anyway, I'll go out of my way for places that have treated me well, too.

never heard of a terminator before, nice to know it exists

>a new life
Literally no one is going to use that thing.

I'd use a nice early Armada if I had one. I like my M700 quite a bit and post here from it sometimes.