- Fark cliche, typically referring to unattractive females, plus the animal prop influence of ceiling cat. Not mine! If the owner wants props or removal, no worries, leave a comment and it shall be done.
You are currently browsing the daily archive for March 15, 2007.
- we are the female robots
_.,-*~’`^`’~*-,._.,-*~’`^`’~*-,._.,-*~’`^`’~*-,._.,-*~’
The deal went through yesterday evening without a hitch. I met an older guy with “child molester” spectacles, who drove a silver minivan like my brother’s, full of boxes. He apparently sells used computer components for a living, or at least spends a lot of time doing that. He told me he had something like 60 other bundles like the one I bought.
All of the components were as advertised. The RAM is PC100 Samsung brand with ECC (what the seller called “server RAM”). The PII-450 had a silver-colored passive (fanless) heatsink, which I was very glad to see. He even included some IDE cables, SATA cables, and a burned CD with the P2B manual, BIOS updates, etc.
If any of my readers are interested in building their own retro gaming PC, or may be in the future, this is a great, inexpensive foundation, so let me know and I can buy more from him. Other required components would be a hard drive (something like 4 GB should be plenty), sound card (i.e. Sound Blaster 16 ISA), video card (Voodoo, early GeForce), case, monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers.
Last night, I removed all of the components from the Pionex case then brought it outside and cleaned the dust out of it, using the Intex Quick-Fill with the help of a three to two prong adapter and extension cord. Since I didn’t know the history of that P2B board, I didn’t want to swap everything over then boot it up to find out the board was bad, so I first put the P2B in the Pionex case (keeping the original power supply in there) and powered it, listening for beeps. And it beeped, of course, because there was no video card. OK, that’s an easy swap. I put the Voodoo3 in, and listened and only heard that one quick beep, which means “all is well”. Who needs a stinkin’ monitor. Afterwards, I swapped more components, booting up the PC periodically listening for rapid beeps. After I moved it into my room, I updated the BIOS (from 1008 to 1011 I believe) then customized the BIOS for my needs. I initially thought I would have to re-install Windows 98 SE, because it wouldn’t let me boot, even in safe mode (instead, the PC would reboot when Windows started to load). That problem turned out to be due to not having the correct RAM setting (ECC enabled) in the BIOS. Windows 98 happily installed the new motherboard components and peripherals.
If any of my readers have older, DOS/9x games to recommend, i.e. fun ones you used to play, please do so here.
