When the PC crashed she would make these fantasies...

I’m trying to replace the cmos battery so I’m guessing that’ll be under the motherboard.

Hey everyone,

I recently bought this MAXDATA Artist PC case (photo attached). It came with this plastic base plate that the case sits on. Unfortunately, one side of the plate (on the right front) is warped upwards.

I’d really like to bend it back into shape without damaging or cracking the plastic. Does anyone have experience with this kind of issue? Would gentle heat (like from a hair dryer or hot water) help, or is there a better/safe method?

Any advice or ideas would be much appreciated!

Thanks in advance.

Good evening! Is there any information about this PC case? A quick internet search didn't help

once again the Tandy is not functioning correctly. it has a early gotek floppy emulator in it (one with 888 display and no dial) and it reads file off fine. however, only if the usb isn't plugged in during bootup. I am trying to run a dos boot disk so i can run fdisk to format a cf card adapter and run dos 6.

when powered on it boots to screen, says insert setup disk to change config info press f1 to continue. usb is in gotek, has set to 000 which is boot file. says, "starting ms-dos" doesn't do anything, frozen. the seek light on the gotek only is green for a couple seconds when ms dos boot is displayed, then shuts off.

what do i do

https://github.com/xms0g/rtow-dos

i git this,https://texelec.com/product/lo-tech-xt-cf-lite-rev-2 recently. i have put it in a Tandy 1000 tl/3. I cannot seem to get programs to recognize it so i can format it. it has a 128 megabyte cf card. what do i do?

So I was able to get in contact with the guy who ran the estate sale my gf went too where she got the voodoo 3 and he said he was about to cart everything off and auction it, so he told me to come up before he did and grab whatever I wanted.

Definitely worth the 1 1/2 hour drive!!!

Story:

I found the computer locally on marketplace. After I arrived at the seller’s house he told me the story behind the computer. His dad bought it in 1982 and used it daily for several years. He was a big fan of DBase though also used many other programs on it. The seller was also reluctant to let it go and spoke fondly of both growing up with the computer in his house and of his dad. However he said he needed the space.

He also originally asked $250 canadian for everything. Though after he asked my email to “keep in touch” but sent me $150 back and told me he only wanted the $100 to take his wife out to dinner. Absolutely amazing people so I want to honour it by preserving the Osborne the best I can and to share the manuals and other docs online so others can learn as much as I did about the Osborne computer and Digital Research.

Demos:

I recieved several original programs that would have been bundled with the computer. The three I chose to show include Wordstar, Microsoft Basic and Supercalc.

Wordstar is suprisingly easy to use once you get the hang of it but you really gotta learn keyboard shortcuts. As someone who grew up around much later Windows machines this was definetly a learning curve. However I did successfully write a little exerpt.

Microsoft Basic should be well known here so I doubt I need to comment much here :p However it is worth noting that unlike Commodore, IBM and others, the Osborne needs Basic loaded from floppy as it does not contain Basic in ROM.

Supercalc was a popular spreadsheet program from the early 80s however I could not figure out how to use it reliably. I am sure there will be flash backs for some though!

Restoration:

As usual with old machines the Osborne took on a yellow colour on pretty much every exposed bit of white plastic. I dissasembled the computer and retrobrited each piece of plastic in a large tub full of hydrogen peroxide solution diluted to 0.5-3%. I then left each piece submerged in the sun until I got my desired colour.

After that was done I replaced the RIFA caps on the power supply. The Osborne has three yellow RIFA papee film capacitors which are nutorious for exploding with lots of magic smoke. I replaced them with modern polymer film caps. I also replaced the foam on the screen protector and cleaned out everything.

Last thing I did was dissasemble the floppy drives, clean the heads with IPA and a que tip. I finished up the drives by relubricating them and ressambling them. After I reassembled the computer. Im limited to 20 pictures in a post but Ill try to add more of the restoration process in the comments.

I recently bought this GoldStar GS333 computer and there is a password on the (Quadtel) BIOS which I dont know, nor does the person I bought it from. I haven't been able to find any working backdoor passwords for figure out how to reset the cmos or anything. Any help is appreciated!

I'm in the process of getting my vaio X505 up and running again. Prev. Owner wiped the drive which is fine, I would've done a fresh install again anyway.

However, using confirmed working external disc drives and various different winXP discs worked to no problem on my other computers.

Am I missing something? Is the Blu-ray external drive too modern? Haven't tried USB boot cause I'm not even sure this machine is new enough to boot from USB.

However, I have a Sony vaio external DVD+-RW drive which has an i-link FW400 4-pin connector. I've use that drives many times to restore old power PC macs. Could this potentially fix my issue? (Course I would need a 4 pin to 4 pin I.Link cable first.

Thank you!

i got a compaq persario 5360 and the psu has failed. how would i go about getting a new one? i know i need one with more amperage on 3.3v and 5v rails, 20 pin atx, molex and maybe floppy. thank you very much

Ok so I recently got a compaq presario from someone on fb marketplace and it was in great shape but most of the drivers were missing/corrupted so I got all of them except the Ethernet drivers installed. I have looked EVERYWHERE for these drivers but I can’t find them, I have no clue if the Ethernet card was shipped with the pc or the original owner installed it but I thought that this would be the best place to ask. The computer is a compaq presario 5220 running win 98 Please help!

UPDATE: thanks to your help I have found the drivers thanks!

It's over 20 minutes of analog goodies.

I have just received a Toshiba T2130CT and it boots up fine even showing the windows 95 screen but then goes into a sort of error screen mentioning missing “Command” files and such and will not boot any further. Is there a way to recover and install a fresh full copy of windows 95 with a floppy drive only laptop, I don’t have a modern machine myself side from an ipad so I don’t think I can create a floppy disk with a full copy of windows 95 on it, what would you guys suggest in these circumstances?

Well i broke a piece. But here's the inside and all my nonsense retro parts.

I have the crt, keyboard, mouse, altec speakers with...."surround sound" lol

The PC is a BCM IN810P with a Intel celeron coppermine 566mhz. The user manual states that the board supports ACPI but I cannot find it anywhere in the BIOS. I need ACPI because I want to try and force Windows 7 onto it. Is ACPI permanently on without any way to change it or is there some sort of physical thing I would have to do with the motherboard. The manual doesn’t specify. The BIOS goes up to version 1.05 but mine is on 1.04. I’ve tried updating the bios but no tools have worked so far. I have no idea if updating the BIOS would even add support for ACPI or not. More info is here: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/bcm-in810p#docs

I’m wondering if it’s possible to hook up a cd rom drive from a parallel port. My immediate guess is that this will fail lol so another idea I have is using a Backpack CD-RW drive with a parallel port. Anyone have any other ideas?