As with some of my other projects, these machines came from the vintage tech sale in Q1 2020 just before the first lockdown. The sale was absolutely massive ( a few photos below ) and there were bins upon bins of laptops, which at the time had been a big attraction...
This pile was a pickup from work. Apparently, auditors are extremely rough with their kit and these AOC Portable monitors are not upto the task and the USB 3 Mini B connectors all gave up the ghost. Out of the pile, there was 4-5 that were totally dead with smashed...
As another find at the retro computer day I picked up these two AST Premium Exec 386SX's that both looked pretty interesting and being the same machine I figured if I could get one to work out of the two of them then I would be in luck. I was in the zone to try get...
After seeing a video by the 8BitGuy on how an LCD Display works I remembered I had a bunch of 20x4 LCD screens sitting in a box and most of the parts and figured I could use some of these old parts up and make on one these boxes. I basically followed the tutorial in...
After getting stuck with a new internet provider and no router for weeks I decided to get an Asus RT-AC68U off trademe to both have a router and to get better performance and more control. The router was performing great for months until it started having random power...
As part of my want to recreate some of my earliest machines growing up I thought I would go back to the very first one, a 486. It was a hand me down desktop style with Windows 95 on it. I don't think I had it long before I upgraded to a Pentium 100/120. Retro...
$20 pickup After an awesome find on Facebook marketplace I came home with a Pentium 2 and Pentium Pro machine. Both had their issues. This one had a bad bios battery and a dead VRM board, something that wasn't apparent right away. The machine actually booted up at...
After needing getting to a point of upgrading my main rigs to a ultrawide screen and going between PC and Mac I came into the strange need to have a way to switch the 3.5mm audio out to run into my desktop speakers. I tried using the speaker/audio out from my monitor...
This was one of the longest running projects that I have had running. Since forever I have tried to get a proper media storage solution working. It first started with when I had the 4 bay DroboProFS. It was good for years but always had some gotcha's. It was tethered...
This was one of the most frustrating projects that I have done do date. It took me right back to those painful days of installing drivers, blue screens, crashes, hardware incompatibilities and re-installs. I don't think I have installed any OS more than Windows 98. On...