• Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.

Pandoras Box and Celery 2 Ghz (dodgy mobo)

LCGuy

LC Doctor/Hot Rodder
It all started when I got a call from a customer. "Help me, my computer's dead"

Anyway, I went around there, and sure enough, her Celery 2 Ghz is failing the POST. I try reseating the connections, and try booting it up in a barebones configuration. Strange one, this one - when I try booting it up with no drives, the machine goes to boot fine, until it looks for a boot disk. However, as soon as I connect any drive, whether it be a floppy drive, hard drive, optical drive, no matter what, it will fail to POST. I've tried different RAM, a different PSU, different CPU, as well as resetting the CMOS, to no avail. Strange one, that one.

Anyway, one of her friends called, and when my customer mentioned to her that her computer died, she said that she had an old computer kicking around. We get in the car and go and have a look at it. Its a Optima (Australian PC mfr) P4/1.5 Ghz. Not bad, for free, and i'm not a fan of the fact that it uses SDRAM, but for someone like my customer, who used a Celeron 2 Ghz for running Office and accessing the Internet, its plenty. We go back to her place and plug it in. One graphics card swap and reformat/reinstall later (what I spent the better part of today doing, when not waiting for a truckload of photos and home videos to copy over USB 1.1), and we are off and away.

Anyway, when we were at her friends place, her friend also brought out this huge box full of god knows what and told me to take it, in case I could use something out of it. I get it home, and discover that it has:

- 3 Uniden cordless phones (i'm going to test these out, replace batteries as needed, clean them up and sell two, and keep the other)

- one "Audioline" caller ID monitor that is busted

- one classic Sony Discman

- 1 Genuine Nokia car charger, factory sealed

- 1 Genuine Nokia handsfree headset, factory sealed

- a truckload of various power adaptors

- a truckload of various phone cables

- one charger each for Nokia, LG and Samsung phones (no idea what i'll do with the Samsung phone, though I'm keeping the Nokia and LG chargers, since they work fine with my phones)

- a "docking station" type thing for a Samsung mobile

- some RCA cables

- a truckload of phone cables

- several metres of coax cable, used for TV antenna installations I'd imagine. Came with all the attachments and stuff needed, too.

So far the parents haven't killed me. :p I'm going to sell the sealed Nokia accessories, as I don't need them. I really don't NEED or WANT 3 cordless phone sets, so I'm going to test them all, clean them up, replace batteries as needed, keep one and sell the other two.

As for the Celery, i'm picking that up tomorrow. It has:

- 256MB of DDR266 (IIRC)

- a 20GB HDD (from the Optima - the customer's new Optima got the original 80GB from this system)

- FDD

- Mitsubishi CD-ROM drive

- Lite-on DVD+/-RW

- GeForce 4 Ti (most likely dead, it didn't work in the Optima)

- Winmodem

- 350 watt power supply

 

iMac600

Well-known member
- Mitsubishi CD-ROM drive
Yay. :p

Not a bad haul. These Pandora's Boxes are great, never know what you'll find. I found a mixing desk and some phone to mixing desk cables that way.

 

LCGuy

LC Doctor/Hot Rodder
I thought you'd like the Mitsubishi CD drive. ;) Its actually a "Diamond Data", but like it matters. :p

 

iMac600

Well-known member
Actually I couldn't really care less about the drive, thought i'd throw in a "Yay" for humour factor. :p

Never used one before so no idea how well they run.

 

Byrd

Well-known member
Nice haul LC :D

Perhaps you should have a USB 2.0 PCI card in your arsenal to shove in any PC to copy files over more smoothly.

I was also given a pearler of a PC on Friday, it's kept me busy all weekend whilst I have been on hopsital/sick leave. It's a beast, the dirtiest and dustiest PC I've ever come across - it took 5+ hours to clean!

- Abit IC7 mobo (Intel 875 chipset)

- Prescott 3Ghz P4 CPU

- 2GB Corsair RAM (the ones with dozens of LEDs on the top which flash with any HD activity!)

- Radeon 9800XT

- Audigy 2, wireless NIC

- 2 x 80GB SATA HD in RAID

- In a massive *green* case with window, not painted it came like that!

... I kid you not :D Terrible condition though, every fan and heatsink was filled with thick black dust (not smelly though - not from a smoker), and some of the dust must have had moisture and it corroded some of the coloured metal anodising on the heatsinks!

It's still causing problems (I think one of the HDs is hosed), but I'm closer than ever to having a working Hackintosh - never had the right hardware to do this.

JB

 

LCGuy

LC Doctor/Hot Rodder
Yeah, I do have exactly one USB 2.0 card - its in the P3...in retrospect, now that I think about it, i should have temporarily pulled it out and taken it with me. Thats a beast of a machine you picked up, especially for free! :O Thats incredible!

Hope you are ok!

 

LCGuy

LC Doctor/Hot Rodder
Picked up the Celery today! That'll give me something to play with this afternoon... [}:)] ]'>

 

Temetka

Well-known member
Nice score LC.

Great machine you got Byrd. Get a real case for it and you should be set.

 

LCGuy

LC Doctor/Hot Rodder
Thanks. I had a look at it today - I had a bit of a play with it today and got it working. Though for how long I have no idea. The thing has a crappy chipset (SiS 651), so meh, not great, but y'know. So it will replace my discarded Celery 600 as my new hack PC. For the record, the video card was actually an Nvidia Riva TNT, not a GeForce, and its borked.

Had a look at the cordless phones - two of them are borked, although one works, which is being kept. :)

I can't seem to get the Discman to work. I don't need it, just that it'd be good just for old time's sake. It looks like one of the very first Sony Discmans, very retro. Even has a huge power adaptor thats almost as big as my iPod, and much thicker. It'd be good to get it going just since its so retro. :D

So yeah, thats the update at the moment.

 

LCGuy

LC Doctor/Hot Rodder
Put Ubuntu on the Celery this morning and put a P4 in it, after much fiddling. It seems that its like that Acer I picked up a couple of years ago (that is now long gone) - sometimes it works, other times it doesn't. :p Hence, it will be my new hack PC. :p

 
Top