Actually found all parts needed for my old camera, these mobile phones are utter crap when it comes to taking pics of hardware components 😵
I hope it will work this time 🤣!

stamasd wrote:

For the past 2 days I have started, and am now part through a project of organizing and sorting my collections (I do collect other things apart from vintage PCs and parts). My basement looks like a battlefield now. I just hope I finish before the beginning of next week.

Looking forward to learning what solutions you came up with 😁

Trying to figure out why my K6-3 wouldn't load windows after installing a 320gb SATA drive for storage

Started working on my WinXP machine today. Very much a work in progress. Installed Windows XP SP3 and will start testing this week.

Abit AN8 Ultra 939 Motherboard
AMD Athlon x2 4400 Toldeo (1mb cache)
1gig Geil PC3500 DDR Ram (2x512mb)
Nvidia Geforce GTX 260
Aureal SQ2500 A3D Sound Card
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS with front panel
36gig WD Raptor HD
Coolermaster 210 Case.

I need to tidy up the cabling, buy a new PSU as the current one is a cheap shit one, and get a new CPU cooler and case fans.

After failing miserably as a teenager to get my head around configuring lan networking for dos games (Google wasn't around to help!) I finally thanks to the internet understand how ipx networking, odi drivers etc work and have successfully configured all my pc's to be able to do lan gaming, already tested with Doom and Rise of the Triad 😀

I even surprised myself getting some pci cards to play ball as well as the older isa ones 😎

Nice!

DOS LAN gaming was quite the thing back in the day 😀

COLORS http://i.imgur.com/PII6SKd.jpg

Yes LAN gaming. That's my next project.

So after recapping the 7600gs pair i got artifacts. Does this mean the cards are screwed fundamentally or is my soldering crap?

The GF7 started using this new solder, right?

It's the main reason I kinda avoid any passively cooled GF7s, as usually only baking will help and I don't feel like buying an already baked GF7 which will likely start having problems (again) after a short while.

I'm glad I added active cooling to both of my GF7's when I got them new, I do really like these cards, very similar to GF6800 when it comes to performance and compatibility.

Attempting to survive a 15 day work week. On day 9 and just about tapped out. Blah

Did some retrobrighting. My original MsMouse USB/PS2 and the front case of my AT case which houses my 486. I forgot to take a before photo of the case
but it was about as yellow as the cdrom drive.
This is 5 hours in the Winter Sun here in Brisbane Australia. I reckon if I tried this in the summer the plastic would all melt.

Played some Half Life on a 3dfx Banshee and A3D sound at 640x480. I forgot how arg these old games. I play on easy and die all the time 😊

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Played some Half Life on a 3dfx Banshee and A3D sound at 640x480. I forgot how arg these old games. I play on easy and die all the time 😊

Awesome game. 😀 I have the original disc and played it awhile on my Win98 install. Plays and installs so much better than trying to make it work on XP!

I've been benchmarking my two DOS PCs with Wolfenstein 3D timedemo downloaded from Ekb's thread. It seems to be the only timedemo that can bridge the gap between 286's and faster processors and is a lot less painful than Doom to run on slow configurations. 🤣.

Finished the evening by doing some grinding on my Lands of Lore game. Really good "lite" RPG.

It is an awesome game. But I'm not used to the difficulty and the mazes 😁 Guess I got used to the modern hand-holding type games 🤣

Tetrium wrote:

The GF7 started using this new solder, right?

Well the bake seems to have worked on the 8800:

And man that needed some baking. So maybe that's the higher temp solder because i did the 7600s at the same temp - all the caps I had just replaced fell out and cooked! I guess i should have waited until after the bake to fit them. The other components that aren't surface mounted also fell off. Ah well at least i know the reflow worked. If the artifacts were caused by the BGA joints i should be in business after resoldering the rest

Spent the entire day rediong the win95 and win98 installs on the P3 V2Sli rig, the Windows 95 setup went corrupt after updating the display drivers too high, my own fault that I made worse trying to figure out why the newer drivers didnt work, the Win98 install had a horrid bug after installing unofficial sp3 which would intermittently prevent explorer from displaying all the icons.

FaSMaN wrote:

Spent the entire day rediong the win95 and win98 installs on the P3 V2Sli rig, the Windows 95 setup went corrupt after updating the display drivers too high, my own fault that I made worse trying to figure out why the newer drivers didnt work, the Win98 install had a horrid bug after installing unofficial sp3 which would intermittently prevent explorer from displaying all the icons.

I wonder if it's better to just leave Win 98 SE unpatched.

GuyTechie wrote:

FaSMaN wrote:

Spent the entire day rediong the win95 and win98 installs on the P3 V2Sli rig, the Windows 95 setup went corrupt after updating the display drivers too high, my own fault that I made worse trying to figure out why the newer drivers didnt work, the Win98 install had a horrid bug after installing unofficial sp3 which would intermittently prevent explorer from displaying all the icons.

I wonder if it's better to just leave Win 98 SE unpatched.

I think it boils down to two different scenarios, if its just for retro gaming from time to time I think unpatched is better, but for a power users who wants to brag about still being on windows 98 and making it do things it was never intended for its better to patch 😀

This is the first major problem I have encountered with the patch tho.

Testing and blanking all my drives with my new USB to IDE&SATA gadget. Works like a charm!

I have found 3 broken drives already, what do you guys do with those? Just throw em out? Rip out the magnets? Any fun experiments?

Cyrix200+ wrote:

I have found 3 broken drives already, what do you guys do with those? Just throw em out? Rip out the magnets? Any fun experiments?

I just Run HDD Regenerator from within hirens, sometimes you can get lucky and its just a few bad sectors, so far its saved atleast two of 120GB HDDs , the ones it couldnt went for recycling 😒

IDE&SATA to USB adapters are a life saver when it comes to working with older PCs... I pre-format the drives and then put the drivers, updates, and program + game installers on there for whichever OS I plan to install on that drive beforehand and then plug and chug into the older machine. Saves a lot of time.