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...
This project turned out to be one of the longest running projects I had for a long time. With part failures, changes and upgrades it just never seemed to be done. Well I finally finished it up and it is going to stay this way now ( except I need to now replace...
After working with an 8 bay Drobo NAS at my old work and being impressed at how reliable it was, I picked up one on eBay cheap and got it shipped over. Loaded it with 4 Seagate 1TB drives and....it was noisy as shit. Pulling it apart I instantly ripped it apart and...
If you ever need a testing rig, rip apart an old PC case and build one. When I was looking at building some "ultimate" rigs based on each era 'Windows 98, Windows XP, Windows 7' I had a lot of parts sitting around that I needed to test together, test if they worked at...