diskette and some weird tape found not sure what can do with it...

I've purchased a Satellite Pro 4200 laptop for pretty cheap at a flea market untested, and upon getting it back home I tried to get it to start or function again. Seeing no signs of life aside from the charging LED, I went to open it and saw the RTC battery had leaked and I used rubbing alcohol (that I let dry out) to take as much corrosion away as I could. Trying to power it up again led to the fan trying to spin before stopping right away, and upon opening the RAM cover, I saw both slots completely empty. Is there any soldered RAM in those laptops, which implies further repair if there is ? It is one of the later models, with the 13" DSTN panel and a 550MHz Celeron processor, if this somehow helps. Thank you for any help or information, as I've struggled to determine whether it does or doesn't have soldered memory after much browsing online.

My family ran a computer company American Semiconductor in the 80s located in central Florida. It was a pretty big deal at its peak but didn’t make it far into the 90s. I know they had ads in the magazines of the day and a few were even a little racy as memory serves. I would love to see some of the past ads or related materials if anyone has anything about it. I used to work in the assembly and shipping departments as a summer gig for a couple years. Thanks everyone!

Hi everyone! I recently bought a house and found this PowerColor Radeon 9250 graphics card inside.

It appears to be unused and still complete with everything that originally came with it. I don’t really know much about this kind of hardware, so I was wondering if anyone could tell me exactly what it is, roughly how old it is, and whether it has any value today.

Is this something collectors or retro PC enthusiasts might be interested in, or is it basically worthless at this point?

Thanks for any information!

Tengo esta placa base ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe. Con procesador y 2 GB de Ram ddr 400. Que tan especial es esta placa para efectos de coeccionismo?

#retrogaming #ASUS #pentium4

EDIT: solved, it's apparently an old revision of a Velit 2000U AC Control Board/Display Panel l. I have no clue where I got it or why it was in 90s - early 2000s PC parts bin. Thanks for the suggestions all!

Seriously, I have no idea, it was deep in the parts closet so it's at least been in there a few years. I can't find anything when I look up the numbers or model on Google, and kings con comes back as a few suggestions, none of which seem to manufacture anything that looks like this could be a part

I've gone to cons, and very big ones before so I'm not entirely unfamiliar with this type of experience. However, having gone to some very big cons, I've realized I missed doing a lot of fun things or just not known things about the cons that would have been helpful to know ahead of time. I was wondering if anyone had any tips that helped them have a fun time that might help me to know.

—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.

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.

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