Vintage Computers

airborne said:
I’d be really interested how an old system like that would run with an SSD, it would probably make it very much usable even by modern standards because disk read/writes has always been a bottle neck right up till ssds were released with far more power machines were already the norm.
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I'll let you know soon.

Cause I also want to see :)

Just keep in mind that it is a Compaq D310 motherboard with a PCI card that had its firmware downgraded to SATA from RAID.
Pentium 4, 1GB RAM DDR1.

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So IMO, very close to not working anymore on WIN98SE.
So the board doesnt really know SATA.

My point being, board might be too new still to actually give a valid answer.
 
airborne said:
Is the bottle neck maybe in the PCI card, what CPU's were around when Sata first went native on motherboards?
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CPU was Pentium 4 that time when SATA started.

Seems my drive is 6 Gbps while the PCI card is 1.5 Gbps per channel.

Was just expecting a bigger punch in performance.

But keeping the build oldish, I think we have an answer on how a SSD is performing.
 
On the vintage computers subject, do Cisco switches have any space?

I mean I got my Win98 plugged in to my current network.

Why would someone want/need old Cisco switches?

Or are they museum/training pieces?
 

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I am supposed to be stuck on Windows 98SE on my journey back to my childhood, HOWEVER, testing out XP again and was reminded of the following:

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Good times and good themes.

Then we also had this malware, spyware, adware....

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This thread made me turn on my grandfather’s Pentium 3 running Windows XP for the first time since he passed on. Incredibly it still works and feels responsive as ever, booting just takes a long time. Listened to some music and gawked at the visualisations in media player. All of his emails are still in Outlook so I read through those. After my eyes stop burning from the crying, I’m going to play some Quake 3. It has a GeForce 4.
 
Hi fellow vintage enthusiasts, I am troubleshooting a peculiar issue with an old socket 7 motherboard and a PCI based S3 Trio64V2. PC posts fine without issue and displays the GPU bios info fine (without lines/artifacting), but as soon as it begins to display the POST information it ranges from white blocks/lines and sometimes partial text followed by white lines as seen attached.

Due to the issue being intermittent I can't determine if it's the motherboard/CPU or GPU, I've swapped the GPU into one of my other machines and it will work fine. If I then swap it back into the original machine it will continue to work fine. The only thing I can say for sure is that when the machine is powered off for a couple of hours the issue will re-appear again. Leads me to believe temperature has an impact on whatever the issue is (dry joints perhaps?).

I've tried the following:
1. Swapped power supply from AT to a newer known working ATX (motherboard supports both)
2. Reseated & cleaned both PCI slot & card
3. Swapped GPU to another machine and then back again
4. Swapped from SIMM memory to SDRAM (motherboard also supports both)

I unfortunately do not have another PCI GPU to test with so unable to rule the GPU out as the culprit.

Does anyone have any other ideas or insight of what I can try next? or alternatively, have a PCI GPU of similar spec that they'd be willing to part ways with (don't expect this for free)? Thanks


TLDR; GPU appears to be flaky but unsure if mobo/cpu, tried troubleshooting and now looking for additional steps to try and or purchase another PCI based GPU.
 

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99% chance it's the GPU.
Weird that it's fine in POST, but that might be a different resolution.

If you have some cold spray stuff it might help pin point where the issue is but it's sounding like a dry joint on the graphics card.
 
gregmcc said:
99% chance it's the GPU.
Weird that it's fine in POST, but that might be a different resolution.

If you have some cold spray stuff it might help pin point where the issue is but it's sounding like a dry joint on the graphics card.
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Thank you for the input. I really hope it's the GPU as I can replace that a lot more easily. Yeah it's almost when it changes resolution it goes wonky. I am waiting for a 5pin din to ps2 adapter to arrive so that I can get past the KB error and boot an OS to see if the issue persists into windows.

I am now 90% certain it's a dry join or something similar on the card. I managed to get the lines to change/improve while squeezing the chips which sounds barbaric, but I was curious and I figured I couldn't break it more by doing so :D
 
Morning all,

Are there any regular swap/meets for vintage computing in the Western Cape? It would be great to meet a bunch of like minded individuals who share the same passion for this hobby (if you'd even call it that... If my wife commented, 'lifestyle' would be better suited when looking at our dining room table :P )
 
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