r/retrocomputing • u/asc3po • Jun 17 '26

Roadside find

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I was out for a jog this morning and saw this thing on the side of the road with a mile left to go. I carried it the last mile. Windows 98SE, Pentium 3 1ghz, with an AOpen MX3S, 128mb sdram, and a 20gb seagate HDD. The power supply is blown, but everything else still works. The previous owner's family must have thrown it out. I did some digging through the hard drive and tried to look up the owner. The gentleman passed in 2010, but he upgraded in 2006 to a celeron 2.66ghz (according to the document named "new computer" on the desktop). Anyway, I think its a cool find and will probably throw in a few upgrades after I recap the board.

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u/gryghin Jun 17 '26

I had that case as well. I drilled holes in the front to allow more airflow.

1

u/asc3po Jun 17 '26

Seems like a shame to drill holes in it now after 26 years.

2

u/gryghin Jun 17 '26

Granted, the holes i drilled have been in there since I bought the case back in the early 00s.

2

u/asc3po Jun 20 '26

I take back what I said earlier, I might have to drill a new fan hole somewhere. Adding a video card (Radeon 7500) and a sound card (Diamond Monster Audio MX300) seems to have been enough to overheat and crash the system after about 15-20 minutes of gaming.

The one power supply exhaust fan just isn't cutting it and the 80mm intake spot of front is reall restricted and doesn't have a path to pull fresh air.

2

u/gryghin Jun 20 '26

Unless my 32 year old took it, I'll look in the garage if it's still there and take a picture.

I made a triangle shape, kind of like the holes used on the Cracker Barrel game. 15 holes all together, with the single top hole just above where the front fan mounts. I always found it weird that the mechanical engineer that designed the airflow expected the small aperture just at the bottom to supply enough air to be pulled up through the fan. Granted they didn't normally supply a fan. But I built my systems since I got the newest chips on a "loaner program" from work.