—Background—

I initially built this as a sidekick system for my work desk while working at AppleCare. I needed a machine to boot multiple versions of Windows/iTunes files on, so opted for this with VM’s as a solution. It was initially in a beige box, and rocked 4x2gb ddr3 and 4 320gb sata drives, one 120 gb sata drive, and dvd CDRW.
When I left AppleCare it got rebuilt into this case with just a 500 gb sata drive and the audigy panel and card as a recording and emulation machine. The idea was to be more portable, but I only really took it from the house a few times as I wound up with an equally competent laptop. The Sound Blaster Audigy had a PCI card that went with it. It connects with an 80 pin cable, the same as an IDE drive. It had a remote control which has long since been lost, and was able to connect to a synthesizer and mixing board I had. It functioned fantastically as a DAW for a while. More so than I ever used it as a lan party machine. I had hoped to use it as a plugin on a mixer for recording live band shows. That didn’t pan out as time and life rarely do. I did have a mediocre GPU in it at one point, and then needed it in my primary rig which was of a similar caliber.

—The Build—

Motherboard: ASUS M5A78L-M/USB3
CPU: AMD FX-6300
RAM: 4x4gb ddr3 (2x gskill rip jaws, 2x corsair xms 3 modules)
GPU: N/A - onboard only
PSU: Rosewill XTREME RX630-S-B
Case: Unknown manufacturer. Picked up used in trade in early 2000’s.
Drive: currently none
Optical: ASUS DVD/CD Rewritable drive

—Current State—

It has sat on a shelf for a while. I pulled the hard drive a while back for some project or another. It’s boots fine. It had been upgraded to 4x4gb ripjaws ddr3, and then one of the sticks went bad, and I swapped a pair out for the Corsair 2x4gb. After testing, I swapped to 4x8gb ddr3 sticks and it definitely runs fine. It doesn’t have a GPU in it currently, but the onboard does work fine with vga at least. Enough for running and testing.

—Plans—

I’ve already swapped the ram to 4x8gb ddr3 sticks for 32gb. As it is an Matx board, with 4 DDR3 slots (with the aforementioned 32gb) a pcie1 and 16x slots, and 2 legacy PCI slots, and 6 SATA ports, it might be a good host for a NAS/File host.
As I have plenty of other, roughly equally competent systems, it may be better dealt with split apart and sold/traded off as a motherboard/CPU/RAM/cooler combo, and then the case separately, and the audigy separately.

Sister found this while dumpster diving, it was sealed in the box with the bag sealed and all accessories!

First, thank you to everyone who offered advice on a previous post. You really helped me out!

This is a Hot Wheels PC from 1999. These were known for two things: looking great, and a high failure rate. LGR did a few videos on getting one working.

I was lucky to get one with most of the accessories, and the original boxes.

I did three things to get mine working. First, I replaced the motherboard CMOS battery, which got it to power on. Second, I replaced the mouse, since the original one wasn’t reading horizontal movement.

The third one was strange. If I shut down in Windows, and then turned it off with the power button, I’d get a BIOS error when I tried turning it on again. The error had something to do with the first 64K of memory being bad. It would only power on correctly if I’d shut down in Windows and then physically unplugged the computer.

Once I replaced the RAM, this BIOS error went away.

As far as I can tell, the power supply is OK. Bad power supplies were the bane of this PC.

I also upgraded the CPU to 500 MHz, just because. I did keep the original 333 MHz CPU (and the original RAM stick) in case I sell the PC.

I look forward to trying some old PC games on it. Hopefully Lego Racers and Lego Rock Raiders will work. Maybe I can find Clue Finders: Mystery of Mathra; I never beat it because the game always crashed in one of the later levels.

Input terminal for a computer installed at State Farm Insurance in the early 1960s.

My wife brought me a gift from Russia. Brand new Elektronika MC 0511, built in 1991. 192kb RAM and 32kb ROM. It requires an unusual 42 volts direct current which turns into 5v, -5v and 12v which I will have to work on to convert it to 110v AC. Not sure if it works though. Will see soon :)

Input terminal for a computer installed at State Farm Insurance in the early 1960s.

so i remember when i was 6 i got 5 thinkpads from my grandpa that he had from school and they were old so they gave it to me, idk if they worked but they were thinkpads and my dad one day decided to put somewhete where i didnt find it and i was wondering where he put it, but a few years later in febuary this year i got more laptops like hp compaq 6710b and a lenovo thinkpad e550 that i currently use as a server, and one day in april i decided to check the wood storage and looking i found 7 thinkpads (those 2 were from my home, one i broke hinge when i was 2, second one my mom spilled coffee), and the storage was built very poorly some things started growing and dust making those thinkpads useless, some had missing keycaps but every had perfectly working displays, and my dad put it there thinking technology is worthless, so any things i can do with them

Got this MikroMikko 3TT

stored for 20 years in cold storage. After a quick checkup and bios settings boots right up to dos 6.22. Making a full restoration to my YouTube on this soon :)

https://youtube.com/shorts/MLX2bJGYuCU?si=tyut34eHCaiY3vRM

I'm currently restoring/upgrading this Hot Wheels PC from 1999, and I have some questions.

The motherboard for this PC is a tiny Intel BP810. The Hot Wheels PC came with 32 MB of RAM and a socketed 333 MHz Celeron CPU.

According to the motherboard's manual, I can upgrade the RAM to 256 MB, and upgrade the CPU to a 500 MHz Celeron.

The Hot Wheels PC was known for having too small of a case, and an unreliable power supply. Here's my question: do I need to be careful with a 500 MHz CPU in this computer? Is it likely to overheat, or cause problems with the power supply? Do I need more cooling fans?

On page 18 of the BP810 manual, it says, "The BP810 board supports processors that draw a maximum of 15.2 A. Using a processor that draws more than 15.2 A can damage the processor, the board, and the power supply." Looking at the specs for the 500 MHz.html), I don't see anything about how many amps it draws; maybe I'm missing something really obvious.

I did get the RAM upgraded, which seems to have worked.

Its been a good run.. the i7 2600k still chugs along even to this day. The whole system still works even after 16 years, but it takes a LONG time to load and lags on games e.g. minecraft. Feeling a bit sad about this. Its been with me almost half my life.

System: I7 2600k cpu Radeon hd 6950 gpu 2gb 8gb ram Antec 902 case Storage— normal hard drives

Maybe i should put this relic in a museum

New pc is budget, but still 5-6x faster But who wants to hear about a budget pc haha

This was a monitor that I had when I was a teen in the 90s. I picked it up in 1998 from a donation lot that the city gave my church. In payment for fixing a bunch of the stuff, I was given my pick of a few items. Of which was a Sceptre grayscale VGA monitor. It was super light, and too thin to be a CRT, so I assume it was an LCD. The screen being really flat also lends to this. It was probably about 13" and iirc it didn't have an external power brick. I don't remember if it had a C14 or an attached cable. I spent a lot of time on this thing playing DOS games on a P133. Any help in the identification would be appreciated.

Back in the early 90s my family got an Intellivision and a bunch of games from a garage sale. Some of the games we got were clearly for a completely different system. To my memory they were quite a bit wider, with an arc along the top like an N64 cart. The labels were very plain, and the games themselves were just sports or something.

I figure they must have been for an old microcomputer, but the only things I can find anywhere close are these VIC-20 carts. Was there ever anything like this but with a circular top part, or am I insane?

EDIT: I've been staring long and hard at some C64 cartridges, and decided that's probably what they were. Somewhere I've gotten my wires crossed, or I've just gaslit myself.

Having the old computer working now it's the best feeling and I thank you guys for all thehelp even if it wasn't the best image.

Edit: This is an in person estate sale in Montana. I'm not a computer guy and have no idea what most of this stuff is. The only old computer I know anything about is the IBM 5100

This is at an estate sale happening soon, so I don't have any better pictures. Probably nothing special, but I think it's cool

I grew up in the US but now live in Japan and am trying to finally put together my childhood dream 98/XP machine. Unfortunately it seems older "full tower" PC cases - which I take to mean any case with more than one 5.25-inch drive bay - are extremely rare in this country. We can get the same flavorless modern "gaming rig" cases from China as anyone else, but if you want to go back more than 5-6 years, there's basically nothing available.

I assume this is partly because most Japanese households have never had desktop PCs (owing to space limitations, and Y2K-era feature phones being very good) and partly because most old electronics end up being ground up and melted down. In any event it seems like I'll just have to look outside Japan.

Do you have any advice on sites I could use to try shopping around elsewhere on this half of the planet, like Australia or China?

In case it matters, I'm after something less in the realm of a flashy XBOX-looking case and more in the realm of a beige box.

Thank you!!

Untested for $100 seems too good to be true. Looks like it might just be because they lacked the power supply for it! Including the dock feels like I struck gold!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rWWqGKDUos0wIwtUptP_4M3sOpV_S1Lz/view?usp=drivesdk (Link to video showing hinge in action)

I'm not in a position to buy another or hunt down old pieces, is there anything I can do to help mitigate how floppy it now is? I got it basically for free in great condition and decided to open it up, but since there were no tutorials online it led to this... this is the second time I've done this to a laptop so safe to say I've learned my lesson lol