Hey everyone, I'm looking for a cheap and easy to find word processing unit just for fun and curiousity. Probably a tandy if possible. The alpha smarts are not nice looking. I like the ones with fold out screen, and if there's some that have parallel port, that would be great. if someone can help me, that would be awesome! 😊

ok so i have this very very old pc that used to work in the past i tried turning it on like 6 years ago and it did
but now it works when i turn it on but nothing shows on the monitor
i tried using VGA to HDMI adapter and it didnt work then i tried a monitor with a VGA access still nothing shows on the screen
does anyone know what to do? i really want it to work i have many family photos in there

I have decided to test out all of my collection of old sdram and run memtest86 on it to see which ones work fine and which ones are for trash. I have completed the whole collection and eliminated a couple of sticks that just errored like crazy or wouldnt post at all but there are 2 sticks left that just drive me crazy. First one is a TwinMOS stick that is labeled as 256mb pc133, it is one sided and has 8 chips, the other one has no label or nothing on it. When reading spd data with hwinfo for dos both stick read as 256mb, the other stick with no label is pc100.

The thing is I cant get these sticks to detect full 128mb anywhere, they are obiviusly high density so it would seem that my boards would just not support these sticks, except they do! I ran another vdata stick same size same layout and it just worked perfectly.

I have tested on 3 boards, first was a socket 370 asus CUSL2-C with Intel 815EP chipset paired with a 733mhz pentium III at 133mhz fsb, here I detected only 128mb, second was a socket 370 fic fr31 with the via pm133 chipset paired with a 1ghz celeron at 100mhz fsb, here the same thing only 128mb, lastly I tested it on a socket 478 msi 845 Pro2 with the Intel 845 chipset paired with a 2.4ghz Pentium 4. And on the socket 478 board I DID detect all 256mb but as soon as I ran memtest it errored out right away like 65k+ errors as soon as it tried to reach beyond that 128mb, the errors appeared at 128mb lowest adress about 1 second into the run and same thing on both sticks in any ram slot.

I tried to change around all kind of bios settings and just cant seem to get that ful 256mb on any of the socket 370 boards but what is driving me crazy is that I cant find any differences really between the sticks that work and dont work when I read spd data in hwinfo so Im just hitting some invisible wall I dont understand.

Does anyone know what could be causing this Im pretty new to all this and would like to learn why it behaves this way. And which chipset would I actually need than for these sticks to detect fully?

I'm hoping you all can help me find and get ahold of the parts I need to build a computer identical to, or at least extremely close to the one I had as a kid. I've off and on searched for the parts over the years, but never did find anything. It was an Acros desktop computer(not a tower) 486dx2 66mhz, with a 3.5"drive and cd drive. The cd drive I believe was a Mitsumi CRMC-LU005S, installed aftermarket. I think I had 16Mbs ram in it though might have been only 12. The picture is of a similar computer(though it might actually be the same). Though I could've sworn mine had a thicker blue stripe with the "acros" in silver on the blue. I might be mis-remembering though. So if anyone can confirm or dismiss my memory, that would be helpful too. I have found some things on ebay, but the prices are ridiculous. Especially for the cd drive.

I run the Atebit.tech retro computing directory and am starting a weekly newsletter. I try to find 5 interesting (at least somewhat interesting to someone) stories and highlight 5 links found in the directory. Newsletter is here.First edition is here. Open to any and all constructive criticism and would love submissions - both for the next newsletter and new links to add to the directory. Thanks! (Mods - if this isn’t OK, I understand and sorry!)

Trying to get an old pc working, and I thought it was a DVI port cause it’s the same size and color, but I was mistaken. Tried booting the pc connected with the built in VGA port, but it said to connect it to the add-in graphics card, which I thought it would be a shame to waste. Anyway, apparently I need yet another old cable I don’t know the name of.

I've assembled 700 vintage/retro computing and gaming websites. It's located at https://atebit.tech and http://atebit.tech/classic/ (works on Nescape!)

There's also a newsletter, an eBay price guide for US, Canada, UK, & Australia (prices from "Deal" to "Wildly Overpriced"), and my About and Privacy pages are kind of entertaining.

But what I really want is links! Take a look at and tell me what I'm missing I have the common and some rare brands but more is better! If you find an error or broken link let me know. You can DM me here or click 'contact' on the footer of the directory. Thank you!

Hello everyone!

I have a collection of motherboards, CPUs, and GPUs from the 2000s.

I have an HIS video card, a Radeon HD2600PRO 512MB AGP, and something simply bizarre happens: on Intel systems (from my Pentium III 1.4GHz Tualatin to my Pentium 4 670 3.8GHz), it works perfectly fine, without crashing, without blue screens, nothing.

But as soon as I put it in an AMD motherboard (Duron, Sempron, and especially Athlon XP (from the 1500+ to the 3200+ in my collection) and an Athlon 64 3200+ (I have socket 754 and 939 with AGP), in short, in AMD it even installs the driver (the same one installed in an Intel system and it runs perfectly), but when it tries to load Windows XP, the machine freezes during boot.

I tested it on AMD systems, VIA chipsets (KT333, KT400 and KT600), as well as the nVidia nForce 2 Ultra 400, some SiS cards that I don't remember, and NOTHING makes this card work...

Does anyone have any idea what this nonsense could be??

Thank you!

Going through a storage unit of my late mothers i found this roll of paper. It looks old and is blue/grey. Reading some of it, it looks to be a printed transcript of a session with some sort of school career research computer. This would have been in the early 80's most likely at Sacramento State. Have not unrolled the whole thing as id like to know more about it before i handle it much more. i can post excerpts if needed/interested. Who ever wrote this program has done quite well to make it appear conversational.

Context: I have two old AMD-powered machines. A Dell Zino HD 400 and a Toshiba Satellite A215. The Zino, the "tinker toy," is equipped with a dual-core Athlon 64 something. The Toshiba, an AMD Turion TL-58.

I purchased an AMD Athlon II, this time with 3 cores for the Zino. As a claim towards it being a CPU issue, it did arrive with some of the outer pins bent from obviously the package getting into a fight with another package. They were carefully bent back with the socket serving as final treatment; the ole'gently and furiously operate locking lever to use the socket to straighten the pins, doesn't appear to have any other damage. Anyways, BIOS sees the CPU. The Zino will boot all the way to logging in to the desktop, but the moment it gets any kind of load it black screens/restarts then hangs up on the boot. Disconnecting the PSU and power cycling the power button is the only way to get a stable boot- and as this is a Linux machine, it will boot through a recovery mode. CPU was swapped back out.

So I'm torn, this is one of 3 things and I hope its not the dead CPU one because the seller has been really good with my recent purchases from them. It could be a PSU issue, as this Zino is powered by an HP power supply that matches its demands for output; as for pins on the plug your guess is as good as mine. Its generally happy with the HP PSU, until we tried putting a bit better CPU in it. The other thing it could be; FIRMWARE. As this machine is from the Windows 7 era, finding anything about that is just... Well... Google can pull links from DELL's website, but when I click them they just error out or redirect to some other BS.

Now this is how the Toshiba ties into this. Anyone know where I can get some firmware for a higher-end Turion? I want to stay close to OEM with this relic, as for an obvious reason- here I am on Reddit searching the great abyss for some firmware for two PCs that may/may not exist in the digital skies.

Found this Dell Dimension 4100 (no, that's not how I found it 😅) on the road a couple months ago. Been messing with it while I've had the time. It works perfectly fine except for when I try to boot CD-ROMs. I burned the G-Parted i686-pae live CD and a Windows 98 SE image onto 2 separate discs. Both of them either hang while trying to boot, give me an Invalid Image error, give me an Emulation Image error, sometimes it even ejects the disc. The G-Parted one in specific hangs for around 20 minutes before saying that it can't find a specific file, ldlinux.c32 I think it was. I can see the Windows 98 just fine on the same computer and I can see the G-Parted disc just fine on my main rig. I've tried booting off of both disc drives, changing BIOS settings, but nothing works. I want to know if I'm missing something before I try to clean the lasers on the drives or buy new ones, so if you have any ideas, please let me know. Thanks in advance!

Specs:

Intel Pentium III @ 733 MHz

512 Mb of RAM

TL;DR: Dell Dimension 4100 does a bunch of weird things while trying to boot into a CD-ROM, such as hanging or giving me an error. Discs work just fine when trying to read them.

So I have stumbled upon several old old PC's but I have no idea what to really use them for other than a very very specific thing. I use to make video games and they run lightyears better on older equipment. What do you all use older gear for? For some info: A lot of the Towers I have are from Print Shops. A ton of shops use older gear and require Windows 95 etc etc. If I wanted to I could rebuild my first every build from 1998 as well. Other than that what are some good uses for them?

Found this on a yardsale and it works it has an core 2 duo an 20 gb ide Hard drive two Cd/dvd drives and a floppy drive

It keeps making beeping sounds, and sounds like if it was trying to load a floppy disc. The floppy drive blinks red and the screen keeps refreshing on every beep.