www.theoldcomputer.com

hi everyone. as promised, here are some photos of the computers that i bought at a thrift store last friday.

here they are. these are both Dell OptiPlex GX260 (circa 2003).
both have Intel Pentium 4 Northwood CPUs clocked at 2.00GHz, Intel 845G Chipsets, 1x 3.5in 1.44MB floppydrive, USB2.0 and a chasis intrusion switch .
the tower on the right was missing an optical drive, has 512MB of DDR RAM and an internal speaker. the drive that is in it now is one that i salvaged from a dead computer last year.
the tower on the left came with a DVD-ROM drive and 1280MB of DDR RAM and is missing the internal speaker.
both are missing their HDDs and AGP cards.

here we can see the rear ports. i beileve that these PCs have Gigabit ethernet ports. the video port on the extreme right is an Nvidia Geforce 2 MX-400 AGP card that i added inorder to get better video quality over the onboard graphics.

i LOVE the way these towers open like a clam shell. it makes working on these computers very easy.

and here is an overhead shot of the motherboard with the video card removed so the AGP slot is visible.

i have been able to boot and run both computers with a couple of linux live cd distros, Lubuntu 13.04 and Oz Unity 1.0 Debut(Ubuntu 10.04LTS).
with the onboard video, Lubuntu looked like it was running in either 15/16-bit color or 256 color mode in 1280x1024 screen size @60Hz. Oz Unity wouldn't completly boot to the Live cd desktop with the onboard graphics.
i was able to install OZ Unity on to the tower that has 1280MB of ram using a 16GB USB flash drive after installing the Geforce 2 MX-400 AGP card.
i paid $7.50 for both towers.

Thats a lot of gear for a few dollars. Nice find.

thanks HT. i swear that one long slot is a PCI-X slot. but the extra bit that extents towards the front of the motherboard seems a little shorter than the images that i saw on wikipedia. what do you think HT?

The slot with the Green lock is the display card slot most likely x8. The slot with the extra bit at the back (facking the drives) is a legacy PCI slot for older PCI cards. I think.

you are correct about the the slot with the green lock being an AGP 8x slot. infact, the first thing i did when i saw the slot was install an Nvidia Geforce 2 MX-400 AGP 4x video card in one of the towers. but the more i look at the PCI slot with the extra bit on the front, the more convinced i am that it is in fact a PCI-X slot. here is the Wikipedia article about the PCI-X slot

Code: Select all

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI-X

if i could just find a PCI-X card with the proper looking edge, i could test it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EDIT 2016/12/06 3:43AM U.S CST
i was wrong about the AGP slot being an 8x slot. i have been researching the chipset and it supports upto AGP 4x cards that will fit in the slot.

hello everyone.
yesterday i traded a spare 18.5 inch LCD TV (that i had gotten for free last year in new condition) that i had and a pair of multimedia speakers (i paid about ten dollars for these last year) for a Playstation Vita (Model PCH-1001). the Vita came with a 4GB memory card, a USB charging cable and two games installed on it. Lego Jurassic World and Soul Sacrifice. at the moment its running system software version 3.60. i plan to update it to v3.65 as soon as i can get to a place with good (and free) WiFi

the guy i got it from also said that i could use his PS Store account to download anything that is free.
i have also installed the content manager assistant program on my Win 7 PC so i can swap photos and music to and from the Vita

Hell of a soundtrack on a format I didn't expect. $17, or free listening on Soundcloud.

Code: Select all

https://soundcloud.com/eox-studios/sets/retro-grooves-vol-1

WOW, love the tape, thats very cool. I will have to give it a listen.

hello fellow gamers and MCPs.

yesterday my father and i managed to find some time to look around the Salvation Army thrift store.
after spending some time drooling over some stuff i couldn't afford, i found these Nintendo 64 games

the top cartridge is NASCAR 2000 (which is odd because it uses stats from 1998) and the bottom cartridge is F-1 World Grand Prix.
both games are in working condition and i was happy to get the original manual for NASCAR 2000. and i only spent $10.00 for the both of them. this brings my N64 collection to three games.

well it's been a few years since anyone has posted to this topic. and i've gotten some good retro stuff in that time. but today i'll focus on these nifty nuggets.

these are the Seagate ST1 4GB 1-inch compact flash hard disk drives. i've been wanting some of these ever since i found out about them while researching various portable data storage media several years ago. and these work perfectly. i even got a compact flash to IDE adaptor to use these with my 1999 retro PC.
sadly they report to have an actual drive size of 3.81gb in the disk management programs that i have. still, i thought that these were rather novel and it's nice to have a neat piece of data storage history. i have installed windows 98 SE on one of them and i'm going to test drive it with a few retro PC games and programs.