I was made aware of a seller on eBay out of Iowa that has sold 30-something Precision 330s for $300 + $74 shipping with a monitor, keyboard, and the unit itself, containing a 1.4GHz P4, 128MB of RAM and a 16GB CF card in an IDE adapter running Windows 95, touting a Matrox G450 dualhead card. That’s all nice and dandy, but given the datecode of August 2001 on some of the machines, and the absence of a product key on any of them, PLUS a missing OS sticker on one machine used for pictures and the older style 98/NT/2K sticker on the front of another, I’m assuming these were all transitional machines, bought by the same company, that this seller acquired a pallet of.
The datecode of 8/2001 inside also implies these are early XP machines, or late Win2k machines. These were a current model between the two operating systems and could come with one of four versions of Windows at that point, but I think NT4 and 98 were special order by the time XP rolled out, as Dell had incentive to upsell XP.
Either way, I gathered all of the pictures from the eBay auction here, for purposes of example. These are the most complete and highest-res images anyone has of this specific style of case in this color, despite it being exactly the same outer lid assembly as the Dual Pentium III Precision Workstation 420 DT, which I happen to own one of in my collection. Remember – this is still the same motherboard as what’s in the tower cases, and the exact same board that’s used in the Dimension 8100 and OptiPlex GX400. You can mix and match parts between these three models to your heart’s content if you need spare parts in terms of motherboard and the like, but not every part is going to fit.
It seems the seller did their due diligence and upgraded the BIOS as well. I can see for sure they have the cut-down VRM, which, for a 1.4GHz CPU, is perfectly adequate. Once you get past 1.6GHz, it’s time to upgrade it to the part number I mentioned in a previous post. It should be also noted that these are novel in the terms of the family-of-three in that the 330 was the only model equipped with an AGP Pro 4x slot, which can be identified by the extra power circuitry next to the PCI slots at the far end of the motherboard, meant for supplying the 5v rail to the slot for card power. This just means there’s more capacitors to do, but it is in fact a full fledged AGP Pro slot, and, should still accept any AGP 4X compatible card, all the way up to the HD3870/HD4670, which I wouldn’t even bother with due to bus bottleneck limitations. An X850XT is probably where you want to be anyway.
The big thing here to realize is that these DT units are extremely hard to find, and yet here’s a reseller on eBay that just happened to have 30-something of them, and is shipping them at a premium with Windows 95, probably for the same reason all Pentium 4 machines have gone up in price.
At least the seller has the dignity to make it into a complete package with a monitor and keyboard. Good on you, that’s probably worth the extra bit. but the reason there’s 140 watchers and two left that haven’t sold at the time of this post, is clearly a flag saying the price is too high. Knock it down to 175, especially with the cost of shipping being what it is, would bring it a bit above 250 with sales tax. and even then, first generation Pentium 4s such as this shouldn’t even be this expensive. They weren’t any faster than the Pentium IIIs that they replaced until they hit the 1.7-1.8GHz mark, and that’s assuming the Tualatin PIII-S that it was up against wasn’t overclocked up the wall.
Below is screenshots from the eBay listing. The seller’s handle has been removed for privacy, as it won’t be up forever, and will be irrelevant after the machines are all gone. This is not to shame said seller — this is to make a point, and rant a little bit about the current state of things.
I just hope that anyone that has purchased one of these machines goes through the trouble to read the last few posts I’ve made on the subject of the lineage of these machines and their flaws. These might be clean examples, but they’re still susceptible to all of the same problems, due to early 00s cap plague issues and gorilla snot in the PSUs, courtesy of Newton Power doing cost cutting. For what the seller is describing as something for “industrial” use, this is not the machine to do that with, my guy. At least, not without a lot of extra work. This will die in action after three months due to any of the problems that plague these, once again, as gone over in a previous post. Bare minimum is, you MUST re-cap it, you MUST replace the PSU (whilst also properly wiring up an adapter as it’s NOT ATX), and you MUST make sure you have the right VRM for your CPU speed.
That’s all for now. No one is going to be interested that I saved these images now, but in the future, someone is going to be very happy I did.
This was a rather rough year for me for reasons. Figured I’d at least post *SOMETHING* given I haven’t posted anything except edits to existing posts to better reflect findings at that time. The last post had an entire few paragraphs added to it, you know?
I’ve decided I’m going g to give an update on how the GX400 is doing. So far, as a computer from early 2001, it’s doing splendidly. Not without hiccups, but splendidly, all things considered. Some major changes happened, however:
NIC died, took out the SATA card with it, and corrupted Windows on the SSD I was using…
Radeon X700 Pro died sometime later. Cause unknown.
Swapped Turtle Beach Santa Cruz for a Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic after figuring out it worked 100% with the 850 chipset unlike the predecessor Audigy cards. I updated the previous addendum with information relating to this. TL;DR use the final version of the daniel_k X-Fi support pack.
Installed Radeon X850XT 256MB in September.
PSU replacement due to heavily sagging 3.3v rail after being on and running HL2 all weekend on the X850XT at VCF Midwest (That’s right! I went to Chicago!)
motherboard was recapped! All new capacitors! Nichicon PS and Kyocera AVX caps. Also swapped over and fully populated the empty spots where capacitors were supposed to go, to help out the stability of this older revision board with the fastest-affordable Northwood P4.
Stock Dell heatsink replaced with some other Foxconn sink from I don’t know what, was a free pile acquisition.
This gallery has highlights from the above bullet point summary.
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That concludes the GX400 ramblings, let’s get to the everything-else portion.
I’ve also had a hellbound summer like no other. I moved my parents (mom and stepdad) to the Eastern Shore area of Virginia, and during all of this, my biological father had a bad accident at his home and passed away after succumbing to his injuries. on my birthday, no less. It was a shock, and I cried hysterically and had a mental breakdown right in the middle of packing boxes for the move. I feel like I’ve gotten through the brunt of the depression that came with this change of paramount significance in my life, but I’ll never truly be over it, especially considering there was still plenty of things I have questions about I’ll never get answers to.
Moving my parents was a task that was unequivocally labor-intensive, moreso than it was to move across town in 2021 when we moved from a big house into my late grandma’s house, which was half the size. With this move, which was in a completely different state as my mom and stepdad are not living with my siblings and I, we did everything right, but the moving company they went with shafted us at the last second, and screwed everything up. The realtor came out on top and pulled some strings to get us a moving company at the last second and we’re eternally grateful for that. We still had to go back a day after closing (with the new owner’s permission) and filled up a 12-footer with the rest of the stuff from the house, and drove that down to their new house a few days later. 6 months after, the house that was moved out of looks completely different inside and is up on the market for lease, so says the internet.
In February, I made mention on social media that I was looking for a better camera than my 2011 Nikon P500 I’ve had for the better part of 10 years to do photography of all sorts with, as it had become rather obsolete with how good of photos my phones from 2019 on were taking. I wanted a real camera again. I’ve never had a DSLR, I moved from Sony Cybershot to Sony Cybershot making do with the point&shoots I could afford second-hand, and when the H70 died in 2015, finding the P500 for $40 at a thrift shop the month after was a godsend for my creativity.
A little while after posting that, I was poked in a DM and had an email conversation with a mutual follower, and I received, all the way from Australia, a retired but near-mint Canon EOS 6D MkI with three lenses: a 16-35mm, a 24-70mm, and a 70-200mm, all F/4, and all pro glass with image stabilization, and lots of accessories. Also included as a not-mentioned bonus, was a Sony RX100 Mk6.
I about defecated myself when I saw what arrived in the box, which came the day of the big 4.7 earthquake in rural New Jersey, in April of this year. I was about to open the box when that hit and rumbled my house. Was it a sign? only the deity you pray to knows for sure. The prices for some of this stuff used was the problem, going for hundreds to a bit over a thousand or more in some cases. I was assured there was no mistake– use it and use it well… and I’ll be damned if I won’t. Thank you, a million times, thank you, you know who you are. I’ll use these into the ground and make you proud that you paid it forward.
I took these cameras down to the Eastern Shore with me, where they received a proper camera bag plus a second battery for the 6D (a Smallrig branded one with a Type C jack on it for charging!), and they traveled with me to other places in-between, including a park next to a river for some test shots, my backyard for a hopeful glimpse of the Auroras from the CME in early May, VCF MidWest in the Chicago area in September, and upstate New York in the Catskills, where we held the memorial service for my dad in October. The last time I was able to snap pictures up there was 20 years ago, when I was still in middle school, using a Kodak DX3700 owned by, fittingly, my dad.
These are mostly in chronological order… It should be clear where one event ends and another starts.
I haven’t had a chance to take the cameras out of the bag since October for varying reasons of hectic change happening around me at home, but I’m hoping to give them lots of use in the new year. I’ve already loaded Magic Lantern onto the 6D which, only gets used for a convenient battery gauge on the viewfinder, but it will hopefully be more useful later on. The Sony has acquired some over-USB settings hacking to make it never show a region warning at startup, as I switched it to NTSC mode, and it is a PAL camera.
In the future I’m planning on getting an F/2.8 50mm kit lens to mess around with for the 6D, which don’t go for a lot, and for the EF mount, are still sold new for $125.
I’m also working on doing a write-up on a rather obscure-yet-everywhere network card from the mid-00s, which may or may not ever show up here. We shall see. Keep a look-out for that if you want, but it’s not going to be anytime soon.
With that all said, this concludes the update post I’ve been procrastinating on doing since the beginning of this month.
I wish anyone reading this a happy 2025 and beyond.
This is an addendum to the post made a few days ago regarding these models of PCs. I wanted to share this important bit of information in its own post to further help anyone with these machines and installing cards in any of the expansion slots.
The table above should help you choose where to put certain cards, and this is information that is seemingly left out of the user and service manual. As it stands, PCI slot 2 is the only slot that does not have any shared IRQs with any other slot. The AGP slot shares with not only PCI slot 1, but also slot 5. PCI slots 3 and 4 share with other system devices, and shouldn’t be an issue if you either disable or do not use those system devices as described above.
It should be noted that if you choose to use PCI slot 2 for a storage controller, such as a SATA or SCSI controller, you should put your sound card into slot 3 and disable the onboard serial. It should also be noted that installing a USB 2.0 controller is not wise for this machine, as the NEC based controllers (i.e. your typical run of the mill 4-external 1-internal Belkin cards) require two IRQs, one per hub, and these have two hubs inbuilt, one per three slots (as in, three external slots share one hub, while one external and one internal slot share the other one IRQ). The Adaptec 3-port USB 2.0 controllers seemingly do not have this issue as they only require one IRQ and are the safer option in older PCs with limited IRQs on the BIOS end.
This machine does have IOAPIC support in the final BIOS revision, but it is a very rudimentary implementation of it. The system still assigns higher IRQs than 11 in any plug-and-play OS like Windows 2000/XP/7 but slots with shared IRQs will undoubtedly share the same OS-assigned IRQs regardless.
It should also be noted that these systems shipped with a sound card present in slot 4 if you had a cut down early dimension 8100… 330/GX400 owners can also follow this and install a sound card there. In my testing, using the Precision 330 A09 BIOS (use ‘-forcetype’ at update time) you can use a Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic if you simply must have a Creative card, and else, my recommendation would go to the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, as it’s a factory option and a great card in its own right.
On the quick closing subject of VRMs, Part number 12S1560E is the magic sauce for any CPUs over 1.6GHz. This is a 4-phase design over the standard two phase commonplace VRM. The way to identify it is the three screws going through a black heatsink on both sides with a rather meaty thermal gap pad underneath.
Once you ghave acquired this, you’ll have a much cooler VRM overall as it is under less stress.
I wasn’t planning on writing this blog post at all… But, with the way things are going at Twitter and the way things are going with getting used to Mastodon (as my replacement for showing off cool old and new tech stuff I’ve been up to), I feel like I really need to put SOMETHING a bit more lengthy somewhere else. This is about a man, and a fateful encounter with a PC on the side of the road, and the trials and tribulations that happened in-between then and now.
In June 2013, my mother had received a call that her boyfriend at the time had passed away in his backyard from a heart attack. We were mortified. I was asked, at a later point afterwards, if I wanted to be a pallbearer at the funeral service to take place after the wake, to which I whole-heartedly agreed. We loved him. He was a HAM tinkerer and instructor and on many levels, he and I were right on the same wavelength of thought. He taught me many, many things in the few short years he was a part of our lives.
On the way back from the cemetery following the burial service, I took the back-roads home, wanting to stay off the main roads due to my entire state of mind at the time. I was still dazed that this big event in my life which just took place, and wanted to drive just a bit more out of the way to take it all in before returning home to get myself into a mound of comfort food and a well-deserved depression nap. It was during the final leg of this trip that I caught sight of an unmistakable shape on the roadside, but in a color I was not familiar with seeing. I promptly pulled over, got out of the car still in my dress suit, gave it a once-over, and popped it into the back seat.
What I thought I saw was a black-case Dell OptiPlex GX110, an oddity in itself to me at the time. Instead, what I had found was donning a Pentium 4 sticker with a Windows 2000/NT4/98 sticker right beside it, and a Windows 2000 COA on the side cover. It was an OptiPlex GX400. I knew NOTHING about this machine at the time. I didn’t know it existed. But here I was, unloading it from the car not 20 minutes later, and it in fact existed all the same.
So what’s a GX400 compared to a GX110? Nothing. Nothing at all. In fact, very very little is the same about both machines. Instead, the machine this shares more similarities with is the OptiPlex GX300, which itself shares many similarities with the Precision Workstation 420 of the era. the GX110 is an Intel 810E Socket 370 board (anywhere from 667MHz to 1GHz) with two PC100/133 RAM slots, and only PCI for expansion via a pull-out expansion planar at the bottom of the case. Dell got rid of this sometime after to cut down costs. at the GX300 level, you had an Intel 820 chipset with two Slot 1 Pentium IIIs, usually in the ballpark of 800-933MHz, with two Rambus RDRAM slots, AGP and some PCI. The case was redesigned to allow for better airflow across the drive cage, as drives were starting to show up in 7200rpm speeds at a rather quick pace and were running quite warm. Not only that, but SCSI hard drives of the time which may have been even more commonplace in a workstation configuration, would have definitely run hotter. the GX110 was not able to keep the drives cool at all, even with a fan blowing directly onto them. I cooked at least one hard drive because of this fault in my own GX110 back then.
↑This shows a good representation of the case redesign between the GX110 (left), GX300 (center) and the GX400 (right).
The GX400 goes the exact same route, but now you have the good drive cooling, AGP, no onboard graphics, 4 RDRAM slots (PC800-40!), with an Intel 850 chipset… and Socket 423. The first Pentium 4 socket, and quite arguably the rarest to find boards of. These days if you want a Socket 423 system, you’re either paying exorbitant money for a board (Asus P4T, Intel D850GB, etc.) or you get a Dell that had it standard, something I knew nothing about back a decade ago. The models with Socket 423 are as follows, in order of current auction-site rarity: Precision 330, OptiPlex GX400, Dimension 8100. The Precision 330 was not a big seller due to Dual Pentium III and even single Tualatin Pentium III systems easily squashing the performance of these early Pentium 4s. The GX400 seems to be a bit better of a seller, and there are still models available on sites like eBay for about a hundred bucks and up. The Dimension 8100 is by far the most common, and shares a motherboard with the GX400 and Precision 330 but is much more limited in the ports it has. The 8100 is missing the second serial port, the onboard AC’97 audio, and the onboard 3Com 10/100 Ethernet that are standard on the GX400/P330. You still get a single serial port and parallel port, PS/2 mouse and keyboard, and four USB 1.1 ports. Aside from this and a couple of minor differences between board revisions, the OptiPlex GX400, Precision 330 and the Dimension 8100 are all exactly the same computer.
Now that we’ve set the stage, let’s take a closer look at the GX400 as I have it today. When I originally got it, this machine was touting a 1.7GHz Willamette Pentium 4 with 256MB of RDRAM, comprised of two RAM sticks and two CRIMMs to act as jumper-terminators for the memory bus. There was a measley 250W power supply, and no hard drive. It also had an Nvidia GeForce 2 MX shoved in as a graphics card, likely an upgrade. Today, it sits with a 1.9GHz Pentium 4, 2GB of RDRAM comprised of 4 512MB sticks (which I paid a total of $45 for in late 2013!), a 250GB hard drive as boot, and a 200GB drive as a secondary drive. The power supply has been replaced with a 305W unit from an OptiPlex GX280, a nigh-unkillable supply from a machine plagued with bad motherboard capacitors in the height of the mid-00s capacitor plague. Past this, it also has a Dell OEM Turtle Beach Santa Cruz installed, an Intel Pro/1000MT PCI Gigabit card, and an ATI Radeon X700 Pro 256MB AGP card.
Windows XP SP3 flies on this machine, I don’t know why exactly. Obviously this is not with the USP4 patches, as I’ve found that to be counter-productive on hardware older than say, a Core 2 Duo for the sake of craziness with certain updates initially poised directly at POSReady 2009 installs which introduce weirdness into a standard XP install. Under newer hardware, it works fine, but it doesn’t always work correctly on older stuff, especially when it comes to games of the era.
The setup as it exists now can get about 125FPS in Quake III Arena 1.32 with everything on high and the resolution set at 1024×768. It can play a mean game of Unreal Tournament 2004 as well, so long as you turn the graphics settings down a bit to get the average framerate to stay above 60. I’m sure unofficial patches might solve this, but the only game that I have unofficial patches installed for is UT99, which absolutely flies, with framerates hitting over 200-300FPS on average if not capped at 60 to prevent tearing.
So why the extra cards? Why not just use the onboard ethernet and audio? Simply put, they get the job done, but they’re not the best. The 3Com 3C905C-TXB onboard is PERFECT if you’re using this PC for its intended purpose as a business machine, sitting there doing nothing but Word and Excel spreadsheets all day long, the occasional e-mail and not much else in the way of network activity. It gets by. But start transferring your games to it, drivers, music, anything you can think of to load up the drive(s), and you’re in for a world of hurtful wait. Not only that, but while there is indeed offloading baked into the chipset of this 3Com solution, the interrupts needed to make this happen ends up pinning the CPU core at full tilt. at 100Mbit/s. or 12MB/s, whatever you prefer. Instead, we can drop in a known-working Intel Pro/1000 card of any kind, drop on some moderately decent drivers and up the jumbo frames just a touch, and soon you’re pushing 35-40MB/s over the same connection with half the CPU usage. It’s not perfect, and both the Windows TCP stack of the time alongside the drivers can be to blame, but there’s only so much data you can push over a shared PCI bus with other devices.
On to the sound card, then. Why would you not want to use the one onboard? The onboard sound is an AC’97 codec coming straight off the ICH2 chipset. It can use a few different codec drivers, but the one that works the best seems to be the one from Sigmatel. Aside from that, it provides no acceleration at all, and all of the work needed to do something as simple as MP3 decoding is shoved off to the CPU. Not to mention, the onboard audio is noisy. There’s hiss, and if you do ANYTHING at all related to the drive activity or the like, you hear that in the noise as quiet hums and blips. After a while, it gets annoying, but it’s also not the best if you’re looking to have yourself a nice audio experience, especially with headphones.
You can use any sound card you want in lieu of the onboard audio. Sound Blaster Live! cards were popular at the time, if you want a simple solution to the problem, given their abundance. You can also get an Audigy card, or an SB Live! 24-bit, which is a cut-down Audigy card without the acceleration like mentioned above. This is also the case for the Audigy SE, which I believe uses an Audigy 4 chipset.
In my testing, all of my Audigy 2 ZS cards provided subpar results in this machine, going anywhere from being absolutely stellar one moment to crashing the system the next, and no difference to this did any one party’s drivers make. You’ll get the same results with the stock Creative driver pack that you will with the daniel_k pack. These are also re-capped cards, so I doubt this is the problem, but the more likely solution is that the Intel 850 chipset just seems to hate these cards for some strange reason. These work much better in Socket A boards with Nvidia nForce chipsets anyway, and my suggestion continues to be to keep them in that era of computing onwards, given there’s Windows 11 support for the cards still through the aforementioned daniel_k drivers.
The best card that seems to work in this system based on what I have, goes to the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, but I’ve also tried a Catalina as well with varying results. With the latter, you can use the Catalina drivers which are available from a number of sources, or you can use the MadDog Entertainer 7.1 drivers, as it’s 100% the same card down to the board markings. The MadDog drivers are older, but they still work a treat, as do the Catalina drivers. The latest VIA Envy24 drivers are not something to really look at unless you’re using Windows 7 or higher with one of these, as I noticed a lot more glitching and popping with that version than with the prior two.
With the Santa Cruz, you want to use the absolute latest driver, provided in the SC-4193.exe file, also found in various places on the internet. I would not use the version provided by Dell, as it’s older by a few build revisions and has the tendency to slow the system down a tad with regard to framerates in games.
Let’s move onto the PSU. Why replace the working OEM PSU with another? Due to age? No, dear reader, the answer to this one is simple: Gorilla Snot.
Gorilla Snot is the name given to a few makeups of contact glue used in things like power supplies and on circuit boards to prevent components from vibrating or shaking loose. These days it’s been replaced by silicone-based elastomers and hot glue, but in cheap devices and electronics made on a budget, it can still be found lurking in the shadows. The problem with these compounds is that while they do a magnificent job of holding stuff in place, it completely dries out after a given time between months to years if exposed to a number of hot/cold cycles, and will eventually become hygroscopic. This means that it will wick up moisture from the environment in which it resides, in order to equalize back to where it used to be. This leads to anything it touches also getting that moisture on it, and the compound can become quite conductive and corrosive. Below I’ve placed a couple images of the inside of the power supply I pulled from this machine.
This damage ended up blowing the fan control board in my supply, so the fan was not running, but the PSU was still returning a green on a working fan. This is dangerous both for the supply, but for you as well, if something catches fire, you won’t know it until it’s too late.
a replacement supply is still something you can get in the here and now, thankfully, but it will take some work to get there. You’re going to need an adapter from the 24-pin ATX12V 2.x standard to one that breaks out to both a 24-pin and a 16-pin plug to use it on this motherboard. This will also work with the aforementioned like-PCs, the Dimension 8100 and the Precision 330, but it will also work with other machines, like the PowerEdge 2300 server, another machine I have sitting here. The adapter you can buy today isn’t wired up correctly however, with just the 16-pin plug having the correct voltages. the 24-pin to 24-pin is straight-through, and this should not be so. Below I’ve listed out exactly how you should rewire such an adapter. You’re going to end up with an extra +3.3 and an extra +12v lead at the end, and these can be snipped off as needed. There is also a single missing +5v line from a modern supply, which you can substitute by either splicing a wire into an existing +5 lead, or leaving disconnected. I would recommend the former over the latter, assuming you’re good with an iron and heatshrink. Using one of the spare leads from the +3.3 or +12v lines would be recommended as it already has the connector end on it.
You want to do this ON THE ADAPTER and NOT at the power supply. Any changes made on the power supply end would then translate into the 16-pin, which should be wired up correctly and should not be touched. just plug, and play.
At the end, you should have something that looks like this:
When choosing a supply for a Socket 423 machine like this where there is no dedicated 12v connection to the voltage regulators based on Dell’s own stubbornness to follow spec, it’s important to lay down a couple of ground rules:
– Your +5v rail should be a MINIMUM of 22A.
– Your 3.3v rail should be a MINIMUM of 18A.
– Your 12v rail should be a MINIMUM of 14A, and having more 12v rails is overkill, but welcome.
– your 5v Standby current should be a MINIMUM of 1.5A but 2A is preferred.
– You do not need negative 5 volts. There is no ISA on this board which requires it.
On to the motherboard. You should CAREFULLY remove the heatsink off the 850 chipset and replace the thermal compound with something better. I used Arctic Silver Ceramique 2 as I’ve been able to get it in 25-gram big-boy syringes for under 10 bucks from eBay, but any compound that’s not too viscous should do the job. I would not recommend using Arctic Silver 5 due to the contact surface being aluminum, not because it doesn’t work, but I’ve noticed it doesn’t work as well, unless the contact surface is copper. In this case, ANYTHING ELSE that isn’t AS5 will do the job. I’d recommend the same for the CPU heatsink as well, but you can again, use any paste you deem fit. MX4 and MX5 are fine, if you want to be fancy about it, but Ceramique 2 does the job, and provides predictable results after over a decade on the market. It’s not the best, but it’s far from the worst, and it’s also non-conductive!
As further proof that I need to shill this wonder compound harder, I used the same application on an i7-2600 from 2016 until late 2022, under a Cooler Master Hyper T4, without any issues aside from needing to dust it out every so often. The contact surface in this case is mostly aluminum with copper heatpipes. Kept the CPU nice and cool at around 30-31C idle and 55C under full tilt load.
While you’re in there doing that, you may as well pop the board off and take care of a couple capacitors that either will go or have already gone. Inspect the board for bulging or popped capacitors. This machine was made at the butt-end of 90s era capacitors and right at the beginning before the great capacitor plague of the early 00s which “ended” somewhere around mid-2008. To the bottom-right of the CPU socket near the chipset, there should be a couple of Nichicon HM(M) capacitors. These are not present on all board revisions, but if yours have them, it’s advised to replace them, especially if the machine you have in front of you has been off for a long period of time. These should be the only Nichicon capacitors on the entire board, with everything else being either Sanyo or Sanyo OS-CON capacitors of which are hybrid low-ESR polymers, around the CPU socket.
I had these two Nichicons threaten to blow their tops on my board, and it’s surmised that other boards in the main three models here which have been heavily used in the past may also have these needing replaced. Replace them with 16v 2200uF, not 6.3. In fact, anything marked 6.3v in these systems should immediately be replaced with a 16v capacitor.
As far as a graphics card, you’re free to use whatever you want under the sun within reason. Don’t expect to throw in a fancy newer AGP card like an HD2400/2600/3650 or the like and expect it to do everything you ever dreamed of. The limit I wish to impose on graphics cards here is all down to your budget and your use case, within reason. The max you should go in one of these is an Nvidia GeForce 6000 series or their Quadro counterparts, and on the ATI side, the X series up to the X850XT Platinum. You can go the extra mile and get a better card in the X1xx0 lineup, but the wonkiness of some of the chipsets in this family may be detrimental. Not to mention, most of them are AGP 8x cards, and most are natively PCI Express with an AGP to PCIe bridge chip from the likes of ATI themselves or PLX on the cheap end, later only PLX in the HD series.
RDRAM is expensive, but the stuff you want is PC800-40. don’t go for PC600, it’s too slow, and PC1066 won’t work half the time. In higher capacities, it’s easier to get it with ECC, and the Intel 850 chipset supports this fully. I got my set for $45 off eBay a decade ago, but finding a full 2GB set these days is rather expensive. The best course of action is to get them in pairs as you’re able to, but you definitely want 2GB if you’re going to be messing around with Windows 2000/XP/7/Linux on these boxes.
I’m not going to cover hard drives and optical drives too much, in this instance you can use what you like, be it a SATA SSD hanging off a silicon image card or an IDE to SATA adapter or whatever.
These will completely run Windows 98, 2000, XP, and 7 just fine. I haven’t tried Linux but I’d guess it’ll be fine too. I’d stay away from Vista, and I’d try to stay away from 7 if you can due to drivers for legacy GPUs not being the best with it. XP is where I’d like to say this machine shines, and it’ll be way too fast for 98, making it the perfect overkill machine for that, if that’s your fancy.
With your CPU options, all three base systems are capable of taking anything in the range of the base Socket 423 CPUs, assuming your BIOS is up to date, from 1.3GHz to 2GHz. I’d suggest getting the fastest chip you can get your hands on without your wallet screaming. I paid $3 for my 1.9GHz chip at a swapmeet, but they go for much more on the used market online. 2Ghz chips tend to command an extremely high price, because they’re the fastest for the socket, and that ends up being a seller’s market. If you MUST have the fastest, you’re choosing with your wallet to do that. This is especially the case if you want a Socket 423 to 478 adapter, as one of these can net you HUNDREDS of American Dollarydoos just for the privelege of owning one in the current market. But, you can comfortably shove a 2.8GHz/512/400 Northwood onto such an adapter, and get an egregious speed boost in the process. The problem is, the amount you’re paying for the adapter can buy three to five Socket 478 machines (on the current market). It makes absolutely no sense unless you’re a collector and not an enthusiast. And at that, if you’re a collector that thinks your socket adapter PCB is worth the gold on the pins, I’d like to have some not-so-nice words with you regarding artificially inflating prices in an already-been-screwed market in which no one is allowed to have nice things.
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With this, I bid thee Adieu. Hopefully the information posted here helps someone out in the future, because I’m expecting an uptick in the interest of Socket 423 systems as parts become even harder to get a hold of. We’re right on the edge of that timeframe, believe it or not. The Pentium M turns 20 years old in May of 2023, this year, and after everyone does their bit about it on that there red-play-button site, prices for such systems are going to skyrocket, and anything below them in performance is going to have an uptick as well.
The Dell Kace M300 is an asset management appliance for small businesses meant to ease the burden of three key areas of an IT manager’s job: inventory, licensing, and software policy enforcement.
When it was released in 2011, Dell was only about a year into the ownership of the Kace brand. Before this, the Kace software ran on PowerEdge servers already. The M300 was not met with the fanfare that Dell imagined, because it only worked for Windows-based clients, with promises that updates to support Mac and Linux systems would be on the way.
What ended up happening instead was this: the M300 was inexplicably pushed to the side. Dell pulled out of the inventory management market for small businesses FAST within 5 years of releasing this product. Dell Software Group, and with that Kace, were sold off to Francisco Partners and Elliot Management Corporation in 2017. This led to Kace becoming Quest Software, and Sonicwall became its own company again in the process. Still, the Kace M300 was left to the side to rot.
This post is written in the hopes more people will come to understand the abilities of this glorious aluminum slab and hopefully push others to give it a second lease on life as I have.
Here’s a run-down on what’s inside a Kace M300:
Marvell Armada 300 SoC running at 2GHz. This is a Kirkwood core masquerading as something more bourgeois. It has all the usual amenities of a Kirkwood-family ARM chip, but what’s available to the end user in this hardware config is limiting.
2GB of DDR3. Running at 533MHz (1066 in the eyes of double-data-rate of DDR memory) what you’re really getting is a 667MHz (1333MHz) part, in the form of 4x Micron D9LLF chips. (5-character naming scheme for Micron’s parts. there’s a matrix somewhere.)
SATA II interface. This supports port multipliers if you’re so inclined, but that’s a bit more out-there than this document is going to go into. Installed is a 16GB Transcend-branded SSD fitted as stock, but this has implications you’ll want to avoid, as while a new-in-box unit has virtually no hours on it, the Silicon Motion controller chip it uses gets BLISTERINGLY HOT. It is advised to NEVER use this as the main boot device (by me!) to save yourself some trouble later. While the part may be well within spec to run at those temperatures, it will eventually wear out from advanced age and heat damage. TL;DR, get ANY new or used SSD to shove in this thing made within the last 5 years.
USB 2.0 x2. This is pretty self-explanatory. You can hook USB things to this. These are both coming off a shared hub controller chip connected directly to the Marvell SoC.
Gigabit Ethernet. By way of a Marvell branded PHY connected via an RGMII bus to the SoC.
Serial interface. Kindly populated for us with a 4-pin header! 3.3v TTL, either to hook directly to a Raspberry Pi or a MAX232 based converter or the like. This write-up assumes you’re using a Raspberry Pi to follow along.
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The basic how-to, or “doing it the easy way”
Step 1: Acquire a Kace M300.
Ideally free, you can do this either by happening to come across one from your workplace and taking it home (with permission of course!) and following along, or, alternatively, getting your head out of the clouds and just purchasing one from eBay. Don’t let any stupid high price listing fool you, there is no need for this appliance any longer in any workflow. it’s running Debian 6.0.1 with an ancient web interface out of the box for Pete’s sake… it is so riddled with security holes that cybersec AND PCI compliance reps would have a field day.
At the time of this write-up, eBay user Ascendtech based out of Cleveland, OH has about 100 or so new-in-box units left in stock for anywhere under $35. Do note the “Make Offer” button on the listing, as it allows you to offer a price (somewhere in the $20 range seems to be ideal) and bam, it’s yours. Currently I’ve purchased one in March of 2022 and am now awaiting the second one purchased just a few days prior to this write-up. This was intentional, as while I can’t say this blog post is going to cause a TechMoan or LGR level effect and have everyone buying up every single last one of these, I want peace of mind that I do have a second one standing by for other uses. They’re not common, but they’re not rare, at least at this point in time.
Step 2: Open the unit and insert your cables onto the TTL serial header.
There are 4 philips-head screws under each of the stick-on corner feet, which may or may not put up a fight. The best method I’ve found is to poke a hole with a thinner screwdriver through each foot and unscrew, it saves the adhesive on the feet and as you move between feet to open it, raises the bottom of the unit up for you to grab once they’re fully unscrewed. Go slowly, so you don’t accidentally unstick the feet which will now keep those screws captive. If you do, you’re either going to need to use double-sided ahesive tape to stick them back on, or superglue in a worst case scenario if that’s all you have.
There’s a 4-pin header on the back-middle of the board if you’re looking from the front. I’ve made a handy pinout reference diagram to help you as there is no real proper image aside from one marked with pencil, and that just won’t do. Remember to ignore the +3.3v line, we do not need it and having it connected may cause problems. If you’re using a Max3232 to serial adapter instead of a Pi or the like, you MUST have the +3.3 connected because otherwise the adapter does not work, as it gets its power from that line and not the serial end.
Aside from connecting up your cables there, a recommendation would be to replace the CR2032 in the right corner with a new one. The only use for this is for the real-time clock and nothing else. If you feel you can wait the extra time for the system to grab the current time from an NTP server (which can take anywhere from 5 minutes to half an hour in my own testing) then you’re welcome to do that. On my Pogoplug v4 and E02 which are of the same Kirkwood family and have no RTC, I have the rc.local script set up to kill the NTP service, run ntpdate, and then start the NTP service again. You can also use Chrony to do everything instead and remove NTP from your box altogether as it makes more sense.
Supplement the rootfs mentioned with whatever the latest is in this thread which at the time of writing is Debian Bullseye with kernel 5.13.6, plus an added-on 5.17.4 kernel to upgrade to later on at your discretion with instructions in the same thread. Ignore the supplementary part regarding the updated DTB and 2GB RAM enablers, this no longer applies and all kernels now support 2GB of RAM+.
UPDATE 2023-02-19: Current information in the rootfs/kernel thread on doozan lists the necessity to change the u-boot initramfs load address to something other than stock to fit bigger kernels in the memory space. This is not needed for the 2022 version of u-boot available for this device as described below.
Likewise, also update u-boot before continuing with the instructions in this post and follow it to the letter. Otherwise you’ll need to kwboot uboot onto your unit to unbrick it over the serial port, and kwboot is known to be rather finicky on this to begin with.
My rigging of a cable at hand to hook up GND/TX/RX to the Pi.If that Pi Zero looks familiar, it better. See previous 6 year-old post. It now sports a full pin header assortment and a 64GB SDXC card. The VT510 has gone to a new home in loving hands prior to my moving house 6 months ago at time of this post.
After all is said and done, you should have a functioning system. I suggest doing a first install onto a flash drive inserted into the USB port to boot from, and then hotplugging any SATA SSD (even the original one) to then do the same instructions in the kernel/rootfs release thread to that SSD. From there, I suggest then proceeding to do the same to the SSD you plan on keeping in the unit. In my case I chose a SanDisk Ultra II 240GB SSD as de-cased, it fits almost perfectly in the same dimensions as the old SSD.
SanDisk Ultra II SSD installed using a single screw as the other is off-center enough that it does not allow the use of that post.
Remember that after you create your ext4 boot partition that you will need to use e2label or tune2fs to change the partition label to “rootfs” or elseu-boot will not see the partition as bootable and will ignore it. Additionally, make sure you have your MAC address set in the u-boot parameters, otherwise you are not going to have a good time getting it networked later on.
Lastly, the fun bits, package manager cruft. Due to a boo-boo in /etc/apt/sources.list on the rootfs install, you need to replace the contents of your file with this:
deb http://debian.csail.mit.edu/debian/ bullseye main non-free contrib
#deb-src http://debian.csail.mit.edu/debian/ bullseye main non-free contrib
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security bullseye-security main contrib non-free
deb http://debian.csail.mit.edu/debian/ bullseye-updates main contrib non-free
#deb-src http://debian.csail.mit.edu/debian/ bullseye-updates main contrib non-free
deb http://debian.csail.mit.edu/debian/ bullseye-backports main contrib non-free
#deb-src http://debian.csail.mit.edu/debian/ bullseye-backports main contrib non-free
That will guarantee your updates go smoothly. In here is the debian source repos as well, but you can uncomment those if you need them, they’re commented out to save on update time. The repo chosen is the MIT CSAIL (Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) repo, which is, without a doubt, one of the fastest HTTP repos in the United States.
Recommended packages I suggest you install after you’ve run ‘apt update’ and ‘apt upgrade’ as root, is:
and that should get you started well enough to do most things on the system itself.
git for getting repositories from github or another git repo,
screen/tmux for virtual terminal screen sessions,
htop for system monitoring,
build-essential to install all the essential compiler packages,
sudo for superuser access as a standard user,
logrotate/cron/syslog-ng to bring in proper syslog capabilities and schedule a weekly log rotation to keep file sizes down,
locales as the rootfs does not come with it and should,
and popularity-contest, aka Popcon.
That last one is very necessary, in my own personal opinion. It sends a unique identifier and your installed packages list to a server run by the debian package maintainers and tallies up who has what installed on their system. It doesn’t collect any other information past this. These days it’s mostly referenced for figuring out how popular a certain Debian Port is so development time can be allotted to working out and quashing bugs that come up in the compile and test phases between releases… and in this case the number of armel systems is drastically low. By allowing your system to participate in Popcon, you’re adding a number to the list of tracked known-running systems for the Debian maintainers to eyeball and decide “yeah, we should keep this port going.”
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In the mid-2010s SPARC64 was dropped as an official port from Debian’s releases immediately preceding the release of 8.0 Jessie due to issues. As I was running a Sun Ultra 10 as my servermachine at that time, this hit me hard as I worked to figure out if it was plausible to make a script that scanned the Wheezy-LTS repos for package changes to grab the sources for and compile so as to keep the box secure as it was technically production. This ended up being a waste of time that could have been solved before it got to that point if there were people willing to volunteer time to getting the port stable again.
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With that waffle out of the way, let’s continue. Once you’ve installed all those packages, the next things you’ll want to do is to reconfigure locales and tzdata to match your native locale and time zone.
dpkg-reconfigure locales
In my case the proper choice is en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 for both the main locale and the default locale for the system environment on the next page. it will then generate the locale and exit to prompt.
dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
Choose your appropriate timezone from the list, can’t get any simpler than that.
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Next you’ll want to add a user with the adduser command, set a password, and then once you’ve done this, add them to the sudo group if you intend for the user to be able to use sudo.
and that’s it! you’re pretty much done. At this stage you can upgrade your kernel to the latest in the kernel/rootfs thread, or you can use it as-is. I’d also like to recommend installing lm-sensors and cpufrequtils to enable the ability to read the SoC’s thermal diode and enable CPU speed governors to drop the clocks when idle for power savings and reduced heat output, not that there’s much to begin with. In the main Kace thread there is a post on page 16 which outlines a modification I made to replace the thermal pad between the SoC and the steel plating inside that it thermally transfers to. In my case I went with a 0.5mm copper shim usually used for laptop shim mods. it worked out amazingly and the SoC runs 10-15C cooler on average.
I was going to do a how-to of running a Minecraft server on this hardware, as I am currently, but there’s too much to go into that it is best left as its own blog post for another time… not to mention that the openjdk packages for armel are busted from the get-go and do not function, so you need to use the arm32 softfloat version from Azul to get anything running. Plus, as all that’s available is OpenJDK 8 or 11, you’re limited to Minecraft 1.16.5 or below, with PaperMC being the recommended way to run that given the single-core slow nature of the box compared to other offerings.
Update 2022-05-29: Second M300 is here and running. the SanDisk SSD Plus SSDs have no cache onboard but the board, once shucked, is a super exact fit compared to the Ultra II SSD in the other box.
Pi Zero to the rescue once more, but with actual proper cabling this time! and that silly USB hub I had connected to the Pi for hooking up the SSD for formatting and enumerating the rootfs.Showing the SanDisk SSD Plus shucked board perfectly mounted in the second M300.Two of them. There’s two of them.
As im not active on my WordPress account here like I should, any comments you may have might get lost to the abyss… However, if you want to follow along with any of my other escapades, you’re more than welcome to follow my sorry soul on Twitter @Sun_Ultra10.
The Pi Zero with the 2GB MicroSD card has become the brains for the VT510 at last! it’s messy, but it’s the best I can do until I can find the pinout to the ROM expansion port on the back of the VT510 and figure out if that could be a viable connection path to go with in the future.
As you can see here, the Pi Zero has been connected to, and successfully works with the VT510. but that’s the finished product, until the null modem gender changer comes in as well as getting a short enough straight cable to not be obtrusive during use.
We start off first with the dremeling of the plastic. I couldn’t find my box of dremel bits, so I had to use the rough cheapo chinese metal pointed burr I had on hand. hence, most of the cuts and holes made with this to a point, aren’t the cleanest, but the point wasn’t to make it look clean, but to get the project done. when this is 100% complete and I feel I can do it better, I’ll get a proper enclosure 3D printed for me by a friend with a Microcenter Makerbot clone.
This is the last, unused Pi Zero next to the other of the Max3232 boards I purchased from eBay, alongside the Ralink RT25xx-based 802.11g “Plus MIMO” (Ha!) Belkin dongle I used for this project and an ADMtek Pegasus II-based USB Ethernet adapter (Natively supported in the Pi’s kernel without any need of firmware, unlike the Realtek USB Eth adapter I tried), which was originally used to get the system up and running via a wired connection to the internet:
and This is the enclosure, these pictures having been taking during the dremeling process with my old Moto Droid X running LiquidSmooth 4.4.4 KitKat. it’s slow, but it takes really good daylight photos, in my honest opinion.
Once the null modem adapter gets in, it’ll cover up the disgusting cut of the RS232 port from the Max3232 up quite nicely, and I won’t have to deal with people saying “oh, that looks like crap, why didn’t you do a better job with it blah blah”
because that’s the point. it’s not supposed to be pretty and elegant. it’s supposed to do a single job, and when I feel it needs to be revised, it will be.
So, here’s what it looks like inside now.
Yes, there is only one screw holding the Pi in place. the USB cable coming in has the shielding soldered to the now unused MicroUSB power input port. 5v is provided through the +5v on pin 2 and ground on Pin 14, while the Max3232 uses Pin 2 +3.3v, Pin 6 Ground, and Pin 8&10 for BCM14/15 TXD and RXD for TTL Serial. The thinger there in the MiniHDMI port is just a port blocker to prevent it from mushing in on itself somehow when I was building this all, but I’ve decided to leave it in. it came from a video card, and I don’t remember which one it was– I think it was a Gigabyte GTX 570.
on the 5v positive rail is a switch I pulled from something ages ago and never found a legitimate use for, so it sat in a box until just yesterday when I put this all together.
This isn’t a guide for you to build your own, but hopefully this is some good insight into how to probably (or not) go about it, hopefully with a bigger or purpose-built enclosure. the enclosure dimensions I used for this project were 100x60x25mm. it just barely fit everything I needed it to.
That’s about it for this. Have a good one!
Stay tuned for Part III where we go back to 1885 using 1955 technology to re-build the time circuit supply and stuff the Pi Zero into a ready-made purpose-built handheld game console.
Look, it even does cmatrix!
And, for the sake of sanity, here’s what it looked like for the first bit while I was testing it out and making sure everything was good and stable before dropping it in the project box. this is a bit neater than how it looks now.
Edit: Thank you to Hackaday for doing a small piece on this project! There’s still lots left to do, but it’s getting closer! The Pi Zero is now on and underclocked to 700MHz with a 350MHz GPU/L2 clock. The enclosure is now on the side of the VT510, and is connected to the back serial port through another serial cable found in the boxes of cables given to me by my very good friend Aziz. As of right now, this is how it is supposed to look, albeit with a shorter serial cable in the future, and the removal of the DB9 to DB25 adapter on the back of the enclosure:
A few weeks ago I picked up quite a few RasPi Zeros from my local MicroCenter while they were going for $1 throughout the month of September. After doing a USB port mod to the first one piggybacking off the USB test pads on the bottom, I was able to get a couple of them going properly. the last one pictured below has since been populated with a 2GB MicroSD card to get an install of MiniBian on it for messing around with, but not much has been done in terms of actually making it do something.
Past this, I was still looking for something for one of these to do, be it one of the Zeros or my trusty Pi 1-B 512. Fortunately, I saved a wonderful new toy from getting scrapped at my buddy’s place yesterday to possibly do just that:
a DEC VT510 hailing from around 1998 in manufacture. There were also VT520s there, but they all had scratched-to-hell CRTs. Had I known at that point that I could just swap the board into the VT510, which seems doable, I’d have done it. Here’s an image of the VT520’s logic board, which includes a second MMJ jack, whereas the VT510 only has one. Else, the two are, from my perspective, rather interchangeable so long as all the cables aren’t cut.
At this current point in time, I don’t have a MAX232 board handy to pop a Pi to it, but I did modify a DB25 male to female cable that was given to me last year in a box full of wires (Thanks Aziz!) to get that working and happy with the SPARCStation 5. At the current moment I’m researching the pinout of the ROM port on the back of the VT510/520 to see if one can tap into it to use that as the insertion port so the rear serial ports don’t have to be messed with, but in the event that this isn’t doable, I’m going to see if I can get a case printed up with the right dimensions to fit a DB25 connector, MAX232, and a Pi Zero or Pi all inside to at least make the end product less messy. it’s goign to be hard, and will probably take quite a number of weeks to have everything happen, including either learning CAD myself to design such an enclosure or having someone else I know that DOES know how to do CAD give me a hand in that, and then having the case printed up in DEC Red.
the SS5 has seen a bit of action in the past couple weeks for things like this, though. The other thing I did find in that box of cables was the correct 50-pin SCSI cable to connect up a lunchbox SCSI enclosure encapsulating a Seagate Elite 9 hard drive from the mid-90s, originally with an install of what I believe to be SunOS for a SPARCStation IPC I once had.
and, before I forget, the SS5 also did have to have its NVRAM tended to, as it died back in March. Finally took care of it in July. I may have also killed the Happymeal card at that point too, but hopefully I’ll be getting a replacement soon to use instead, and some other cards to putz about with inside, including an S24 framebuffer to stick in the AFX slot…!
And for anyone wondering about the Ultra 10 and how it’s doing, I did clean up the insides a bit. as an update from the last post I made about it on here, it has quite a few new things now, including a Radeon 7000 (AKA the XVR-100.)
I’ve been putting off putting an image of this up here although it’s no secret to those that are subscribed to my youtube channel. This is essentially what you get when you have a computer case from 1998 that used to house a top-end dual Pentium II workstation/server motherboard, a couple 400MHz Pentium IIs, 512MB of RAM, and some miscellaneous cards and stuff. This is what happens when you have to gut the case in question because the PSU suffered a lightning strike and had scorch marks.
this is what happens when you get a full-size LGA1155 ATX motherboard off eBay for $40.
This is what happens when you get an i5-2500k and 16GB of RAM given to you at christmas time from your father’s old computer build after he upgraded to Haswell.
This is what happens when you’re given a free 6970 reference card that used to be in a bitcoin/litecoin/dogecoin mining farm in your friend’s basement in Wisconsin.
This is what happens when you get a Hyper T4 in exchange for your 212+…
This is what happens when you get a free 1000W BFG PSU and use it “just because you can” and for no other reason, despite it being a collector’s item at this point in working condition.
This is what happens when you get really lucky and all those things fit inside said computer case from 1998, after making a couple modifications.
So uh, remember how I traded my old and busted Ti PBG4 500 for the HR 1.67 G4? well… I kind of regretted that a bit. so I decided that if I ever found another Titanium G4 for a good price, or free, I’d get it and hold it dear once more.
It has happened, finally! 10 months after the fact. I found it on Craigslist for $30 locally.
the pictures are blurry, but do you see what I see? that is totally not OSX. that’s right– this baby came pre-loaded from the factory back in 2001 with MacOS 9! and, upon my finding out when I went to go and try it out before buying… it’s the factory install, on the factory hard drive (which sounds like it has rocks in the bearings, I’m going to have to remedy this somehow) with a factory-installed AirPort card as well!
I have to see what the deal is with the battery, though… needless to say, it’s getting replaced, because… well…
Yeah. The owner was an old guy that used to do computer things as a hobby with IBMs and such, but he was sort-of inept when it came to Macs… and decided it was a good idea to see if he could repair the battery himself because it stopped working! there’s also a PRAM battery I need to replace in the unit now too. I’m hoping the one I have out in the garage is still good, else I’m going to be paying a premium for a replacement.
Without further ado, here’s the rest of the pictures when I got it home here, and checked it out some more. there’s still files in the Trash I have to go through for any programs of any use to anyone to drop on the MacintoshGarden website.
I’m not sure what’s going to become of this one yet… but I have a few ideas. first, however, I need some RAM, and a couple batteries. oh how fun.
I’m not sure if it works yet. but it does have a SunPCI card. if only someone got it working under Linux, I could run a second copy of Linux off of it. that’d be sweet… or Windows. wow.
There’s also a 1978 Space Invaders cabinet taking up space in my garage, now. I’ll make a posting about that later.
I Forgot I Had A Wordpress Account 