The Computer Orphanage

Just received this cute gift, it's a mini galaga arcade machine. Fully functional and a great novelty. I love it.

Video in the comments...

Quick post, not much happening at the lab, rather busy with my main job, but found some time for 2 dell 7010 getting reset for their new homes.

Got some more orphans, but that will be another post.....

Busy morning. Another 4 pc's find new home after some short tests to ensure they work.

Another slot 1 p3 500 rescue, nice board with multiple ide channels, 4 in total, seems to have an inbuilt dual controller.

Came with a awe64 gold, and a matrox card. Running xp as found, might downgrade it to 98se.

Hi All, found some time to get into reviving some old machines. This time is a Pentium 3, 500. Donated last week. This machine has a novel motherboard with 2 sockets, 370 and slot 1, so people could use their older CPU's (slot 1) with a newer motherboard.

Its a Jetway J-993AN, a brand i had never heard of before. I installed win 98se immediately as thats the system of choice for an older machine although this could run XP also. Still have a bunch of drivers to install. Its running and FX5200 Gpu, unknown sound card and a usb and firewire card. Put a 200GB HDD in it for the moment.

Till now i have no plans for it, just happy it works, case is a little banged up and the usual yellowing of the plastics has set in.

That it for now, i have another 3 machines lined up for resurrection, stay tuned.

Done..... lots of rgb stuff, now it's a better pc😜😜

Started Installing some games....

Onto the next build.....

Todays fun test, a commodore flavoured linux distro on to a old HP dual core laptop. Runs a bunch of commodore emulators.

Time to look for old games and load it up.....

Its running! Cable management next and iron out some things.

Started the build on the red case, still waiting for some minor items to complete it.

Lots of cable management ahead of me after its running.

Stay tuned.

Fans arrived, got a red base backlit keyboard to match, time to start putting this one together. Updates will follow......

Built another p5kpl I had laying around with a q6600, 8800gt, and a nice cooler master case. Was going to dual boot this with xp and win 10.

All assembled, now to a build it up next so it turns into a pc. Certain scratches have been left alone as the quest to cheaply colour match the red failed.

Waiting for some argb fans, to arrive, then it will get an Asus z170 board, with a 6th gen cpu.

Hope to have this dedicated solely for a cheap sim racer I am gathering bits for.

Case restoration started, deep clean first. Next de rust all the mesh parts and respray. Will try to buff out some of the scratches in the plastic parts, scratches on the painted parts might require a respray.

Another beast of a case collected, this needs some tlc. Hope to restore it and build a nice pc.

Another 2 laptops have been re homed. Stock of laptops now depleted. Only old ones remaining, too slow for win10. Maybe a linux distro will be fine but many people don't like an OS they don't know.

Todays donation, came in a garbage bag, choked with fluf and dust. All ports/case bits are rusty seems it lived in a humid environment, Fires up to bios, just need an hdd and os, plus a deep clean.

It will make a good pc when it's all sorted.

10 orphans slowly finding homes, been a little busy after the new year trying to find working machines out ot the lot.

New (used) candidate for the 9 monitor build.... this at least has an i5 3570, hopefully it will keep up and not lag like the poor q6600.

It was donated as non working, well its seems fine, will see how it holds up.

Update when I get round to swapping the motherboard I to the case.

Time to post up some findings, so got this machine over during the holidays, found some time to dig into it.

It now fires up, just needed fresh ram, it's an i7 3770, came with the gtx670 also in working condition. It's good for a 1080p game machine with a better gpu.

Waiting for the ribbon cable for the front display fan controller, I got it to work briefly before the ribbon gave up on me.

Next Update when I get the ribbon cable, if that fails I have a plan to replace the screen with something more upto date...

This week's rescues. I stopped for a while collecting machines, but these 2 came along, and its difficult to refuse a working or iconic machine. So first up a generic Asus p5kpl, socket 775 machine, in really good nick. 2nd machine has a great quality heavy case, it's a socket 1155, gen 3, should be good for some experiments.

I towerized the towers! Bottom one got a xeon processor in a 775 board, top one is a recased dell 7010.

Hi followers, been a while
Just found some time to prepare some machines for donations. Too hot at the moment to do any projects.

Time for a fresh experiment, I want to try and build a hackintosh with the bits I have at the lab.

So I got this beast of a retro gpu to use..... stay tuned

This week's orphans, all 3 are core 2 machines. Fully functional, one just needs a drive.

Will clean them up, fresh OS, and then set them up for adoption.😉😉

Long time not posting again, I have been rather busy on my job, so the The Computer Orphanage takes a step back.

So next project, got a couple of xeon cpus as they are cheap now from aliexpress. One is converted to run in a socket 775, the other for a socket 1366....

Just for kicks and to boost further these old systems.

Will post once I commence the upgrades.

3 laptops off to new homes, getting a new lease of life.

Any Gamers here? So what is everyone playing??

I am currently playing Classic Return to Castle wolfenstien, modded with hd textures, and RTCW first blood. Then the odd rally game like dirt 3 or 4 (got 5 as well but ps4) when i feel the need my racing fix.

Fire away.......

Dear followers, good evening. Did not post much in last 2 weeks. So had quite an hectic weekend this week, as 3 of my home machines quit in one way or another.

So The common Machine in the house is an old quad core q6700 which has been in service for many years and has been as reliable as can be, running on an ABIT Motherboard Ix38 quad GT, with a GTX 570Ti. Hardware was fine but win 10 decided to freak out on me and throw a tantrum. Anyway many blue screens later i managed to fix it.

2nd machine, my modernish gaming PC i5 7th gen with a GTX 780ti...... GPU decided to have a crap and die while my daughter was gaming. It starting artifacting a throwing a hissy fit till it died (already fixed it once via the hot air gun method). So later that day i said 'no problem old modded dell 755 gaming rig should be good to go'......... hmmmm..........

So switched to the Dell machine (maybe i game a little), power on...... and it decieded to also have a crap and get the infamous blinking orange light of death! Grrrrr..........

So....... Quick search in my stocks and i sorted the 2nd machine and got another GPU i bought used lately, it was upgraded to a GTX970......

Finally resorted to fixing my modded Dell (what started this page going)...... after a lot of research to the cause and 1 power supply later it seems that the MB has done its time on this earth. So back to my stash of machines at the lab, and i knew i had 2 machines, one was a SFF 755 and the other a midi tower (same as my machine). The midi tower turned out to be dead with the same exact problem. Luckily the SFF MB was alive, so swapped the motherboard out and got it back running.

If it dies again it will be the end of the modded Dell as they are a pain with their BTX format. They are showing their age now and becoming a little scarce.

That its for now..... time is approaching to build or cobble another franken machine together from all the donations.

Some more pics while at RMCretro with the kids.

At RMC........ what a collection!