Another computer...

[sgtfuzzbubble011]

No, I didn't build another computer already. Actually, I found one. As everyone knows by now I'm sure, Hurricane Katrina left this place in shambles. What most people might not know is just how much debris was created. Nobody knows exactly how much, but it's been estimated that just this area alone could have over 80 million cubic yards of debris. That being said, contractors have been working all day every day for the past three months to get this place cleaned up. They're doing a wonderful job, but they've got to haul all this crap off somewhere, right? So needless to say, there are all kinds of temporary landfills around the area. We have one at the southeast end of our equipment stockyard, in fact.

So, this evening, I decided to play on the Water & Sewer Dept's 4-wheeler (they have it to reach the lift stations that are too far in the woods for their maintenance personnel's pickups to reach). I was hauling ass back and forth through the stockyard just for fun (after hours, of course ). I decided to take a little ride down to the temporary landfill site that's just on the other side of our concrete drain pipe stockpile and check it out. And what do I find as soon as I get there? An old Packard Bell Legend Supreme 1600 that someone had set off to the side (electronics have to be separated before being hauled off).

It looked a little dirty, but overall, looked like it was in good shape. So I picked it up and took it back into the stockyard. I took the case panels off and looked inside, and amazingly, I saw no water damage at all. I figured that it was thrown out because it might've been caught up in someone's home that'd been flooded in the storm surge, but that's not the case. It was thrown out simply because it's old. So I brought it home, checked it out a little better, and plugged it in. Amazingly, it booted up.

In this shot, it's sitting on the bottom shelf of the metal rack that's just to the right of my computer desk. I just put it there to test it out.

[sgtfuzzbubble011]

Here's a pic of the sticker that's STILL on the front panel of the case. That's one mean machine, eh?

[hawk606]

EDO ram! turn it on and tell us the many treasures within!

[dlichterman]

looks like you got yourself a linux webserver...or firewall...

[skryingbreath]

Looks like a paper weight
2 Gigs of storage? How do they do it!?!?!

[shakey_snake]

Upgradeable to 128mb RAM even!
Great Firewall!

[S-uper_T-oast]

I have an old HP in my basement with almost the EXACT same stuff in it.

[deeder7001]

i have 2 computers with nearly the same specs.

[beanboy89]

I have an old HP with a Pentium 166, 32 MB RAM, and a 2.5 GB hard drive. It was pretty sweet when it was new. I remember running Windows 95 on it.

[deeder7001]

i have win2k pro on one of my old computers.

[rockouthippie]

You could run windows 95 or slax. Slax would be good. It probably has an ESS audiodrive chip, so that is linux compatible.

You can install slax in a couple hundred megabytes. It should be able to run firefox etc. It would at least run Konqueror.

Probably it would run xmame too, so you could play asteroids and donkey kong.

It would also run Quake 1. If I remember 75 Mhz was enough to play mp3's, so it could make a good mp3 player.

[tuckerm]

@sarge, does that have a soundcard in it?

[ElChevelle]

Sarge?
You've got yourself a tank

[Atmo]

I used to run IPCop on a similar vintage HP Pavillion - P200/32mb edo/1.3gb. It was fine until i decided to use it as a proxy as well, which required an upgrade to a brutally fast Cyrix 333/256mb pc100/4.3gb hdd.

[Vie]

Nice find, keep the sticker and it may be valuable as a collectors item in a few years!

[xzxzzx]

Originally posted by Vie
Nice find, keep the sticker and it may be valuable as a collectors item in a few years!

Erm... probably not. An interesting relic, yes. Valuable? ...

[sgtfuzzbubble011]

@sarge, does that have a soundcard in it?

Yep. Stereo sound card with a built-in 33.6k fax modem.

Looks like a paper weight

Pretty much.

turn it on and tell us the many treasures within!

I booted it up, and it's running Windows 95. I didn't mess with it much, but apparently, it was somebody's kid's computer before they chunked it. The wallpaper is a telltale sign... It's a bitmap with all kinds of MSPaint-ish elipses of varying colors and sizes. And I saw shortcuts to AOL 4.0, AOL 5.0, and AOL 6.0 at the top of the Start Menu. That's when I shut it down... but I forgot to turn it off until I realized that "It is now safe to shut off your computer" was staring at me from the monitor. I forgot that these old computers actually required that the power button be pushed to turn them off.

You could run windows 95 or slax. Slax would be good. It probably has an ESS audiodrive chip, so that is linux compatible.

You can install slax in a couple hundred megabytes. It should be able to run firefox etc. It would at least run Konqueror.

Probably it would run xmame too, so you could play asteroids and donkey kong.

It would also run Quake 1. If I remember 75 Mhz was enough to play mp3's, so it could make a good mp3 player.

The three running computers that I already have in my room can do all of that, anyways. This monster is going into the spare room onto my shelf of computer hardware alongside the four other working computers that I really have no use for. The scary thing is, three of them are Packard Bells. The PB2100 and PB4440 look identical to this PB1600, except that the 4440 is ATX while the 1600 and 2100 are AT. And the Legend 232 that I have (the oldest running computer I have) is a AT desktop style computer (the only non-tower I have). I think I need to carbon date these things.

Sarge?
You've got yourself a tank

...compared to...

[ElChevelle]

Bring it with you.
We'll stuff it full of cool stuff

[sgtfuzzbubble011]

Like gumballs?

[tuckerm]

i need[ed] a soundcard but i was bored so i just ordered one of geeks.com along with an exhaust fan that fits in a PCI slot

[sgtfuzzbubble011]

The soundcard/modem in this bad boy is ISA, and it's hooked to a riser card.

[sgtfuzzbubble011]

And once again, but this time, it's a laptop! I can't test it out just yet because I don't have a power adapter with enough balls to run this monster, but I'll find one eventually. Anyways, it's an IBM L40-SX. I don't really know anything about it other than what I've gathered from looking at it because I haven't taken it apart yet. All I know is that it's OLD. I'll see if Google turns up any results here in a little bit.

[skryingbreath]

wow that looks SO 80's! Where do you find these things?

[deeder7001]

it's probably from before '95. but i don't think it's 80s though as i have a 486 "laptop" that weighs about 20lbs and as thick as a big dictionary and it's from '93 i think.

google is your friend.

http://www.nothingtodo.org/classiccmp/l40sx.htm

[sgtfuzzbubble011]

From what I've seen online so far, this particular model can come with either a 16Mhz or 20Mhz 486 processor, 2MB of RAM, and an 80MB hard drive. 640x480 monochrome screen, and DOS 6.2 or Windows 3.1 are standard, but running the latter in "standard mode" is very slow.

My Game Boy could run Windows 3.1 better.

[ElChevelle]

We need to take a shell like that and go retro.
Stuff it full of modern tech like it was a turkey bird.

[sgtfuzzbubble011]

Hmm... Wonder if I could fit an ATX motherboard in that. Dual s939 X2s with 8 gigs of RAM and a 500GB SATA300 hard drive, yeah baby! Windows Vista would be really hard to use with a 640x480 monochrome screen, though.

[ElChevelle]

Got ya thinking though, didn't I?

[sgtfuzzbubble011]

Yeah, that's like stuffing a Big Block into a Geo Metro.

[ElChevelle]

Hmmm......That's not a bad idea.


NAH, Metro's are ugly as shit.

[sgtfuzzbubble011]

Hey, my dad has a Metro. :P

[ElChevelle]

Sorry to hear he gets 55 miles to the gallon for driving an ugly car

[sgtfuzzbubble011]

And that's on a bad day. :P It usually gets 60mpg or better.

But he's not driving it any more since he bought his truck. The Metro still runs fine, but it's got an oil leak that we need to fix before he can drive it again.


If I can make it by Radio Shack tomorrow, I'll see if I can find a power adapter to run that old-ass laptop, too. I'm not holding my breath, though.

[sgtfuzzbubble011]

I never did find a power adapter with the right size connector for that old IBM laptop... but I now have yet ANOTHER computer. Dad and I went to the movies today to see the new Underworld (I'll post about that in the Movies forum in a few), and on our way home we stopped by one of dad's long-time friend's house. She's going to be getting a new computer soon, and she'll be giving her current computer to her son, so she gave her son's old computer to me. It's got some problems, but the hardware seems to all be in good shape. I think it's in need of a good format and clean install of Windows. Here's the specs that I know so far:

Gateway G6-350
Pentium II CPU, 350Mhz, 100Mhz FSB
192MB RAM (128MB + 64MB, 168-pin)
9.5GB HDD
AGP GPU (Not sure what kind, but probably has 8 or 16MB memory)

It's got a DVD-ROM drive and an internal 100MB Zip drive that look like they've been installed post-purchase, it's got five free PCI slots, and it's got one ISA slot taken up with an internal modem (probably no faster than 33.6K). It looks like it's standard ATX form factor, but it wasn't long after that replaced AT. The HDD manufacture date is 12-24-1996, so this computer is about ten years old. It's got Windows 98 installed, but I can't get it to load in anything but Safe Mode. It throws errors about not having proper drivers for the optical drive, even though I took the DVD-ROM drive out and put in a standard 40x CD-ROM drive. I'm not sure what I'll do with it, but I might try installing XP on it for shits and giggles.

[dlichterman]

I have put XP on a 300 CELERON with 128 of RAM.....just turn styles off and you should be fine

[sgtfuzzbubble011]

Sounds good to me.

[sgtfuzzbubble011]

And.... it doesn't work any more. Woohoo.

Dunno what's going on with it, but when I turn it on, the power LED and hard drive LED stay on constantly. The hard drive makes a few accesses when the power is first turned on, but after that, it just sits there and spins. The monitor stays in standby mode the whole time. It was working last night, so I'm not sure what's wrong. Oh well.

[dlichterman]

Pull out the RAM. If it beeps, the CPU/MB should be working fine. If not.....one of those is bad. If the MB/CPU are fine then looks like the vid card.....under 10 dollars from my work.....

http://www.geeks.com/products_sc.asp?cat=850

[sgtfuzzbubble011]

I'll try exchanging the RAM cards out with some others, and I think I have another AGP video card somewhere that I can try out. I'll give it a shot. Thanks.

[dlichterman]

no not exchanging the RAM, pull it out completely....so there is no RAM at all....then the system *SHOULD* beep if it is functioning correctly