Macinbot’s Acquisitions and Happenings

macinbot

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Decided to put together my new and current tech toys and their usage into a collected post to be updated as things emerge.

Besides the recent (now not booting) 2011 21.5” iMac I got recently, I just lucked into a few PC finds that are pretty cool.

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First is this Core 2 Duo era MSI motherboard setup with a very era appropriate Zalman copper heat sink fan cooler. Specs are MSI P45-Neo2 LGA 775 mobo, Intel e8500 CPU and 16Gb RAM.

IMG_3114.jpegNext is a very unique circa 2001 Acorp 6A815EPD1 dual-socket 370 motherboard. Came outfitted with 2x coppermine era Pentium III 1Ghz processors.

Picked this up at a roadside yard sale, along with a Pentium 4 era Dell Dimension 4500, which I grabbed for its parts, which include IDE CD/RW, IDE DVD, floppy drive, 512Mb (2x256) PC-133 RAM, and a surprise video card.

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Potential plans are to build a workstation around the dual-cpu ACorp, set up in RAID configuration with Corel Linux as the OS and install the Linux versions of CorelDraw, Corel PhotoPaint, and WordPerfect Office.

Also possibly dual boot into BeOS as well for extra multi processor goodness.

Not sure if it’s even functional, as it looks like the machine was kept in some damp conditions with the case frame being rusted.
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Inside the Dell Dimension parts machine was one of my favorite video cards: The Matrox Millennium G450 featuring dual display support and two separate VGA outputs. This is THE perfect card to pair with the ACorp dual-PIII mobo. If everything goes well, this will be an ABSOLUTE BEAST of a workstation. At least for 2000/2001.

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And since I’ll be tearing apart the 2011 iMac, I decided to also upgrade my 21.5” Late 2009 iMac as well. Got the necessary SSD adapter tray for it (and the 2011) in today. 2009 machine will be getting 10.6.8 Snow Leopard and Windows XP installs on a partitioned 256Gb SSD. And if the vintage Apple gods turn show me mercy on the Firmware Lock issue, the 2011 will get Mavericks 10.9 and probably an era appropriate install of Ubuntu.

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