64HDD Machines

[Guest]

The wife and I were at an auction about two weeks ago. There was a skid that had some dusty small cased computers on it. As I was looking them over, my wife said, "You're not going to bid on that are you? Don't you have enough of that junk?" I said, "There might be something good on here." She rolled her eyes and walked off. I decided to bid $50 on the skid and to my surprise, I got it.

There were 11ea. Compaq Deskpro SFF , 7ea. Touch Dynamic Global PC and 1ea. Sony VAIO Digital Studio Computer. All of them had their hard drives removed. But everything else was there. From the stickers on the computers I could tell they had Windows XP installed at one time. Two of them had NT installed. It looks like some company updated their equipment and discarded the old.

I cleaned the dust off of one of the Compaq Deskpros, hooked up a monitor, keyboard and mouse, slipped in an MSDOS boot disk, turned it on and it came up. I grabbed a 1.2 gig hard drive from the junk box, hooked it up and installed Windows 98se and everything worked fine.

So, I cleaned up the rest of them and checked them out too. I ended up with 9ea. Deskpros and 5ea. Global PCs. The Sony works too, but I'm going to keep it for myself. It's a sweet machine.

My better half asked what I was going to do with them. I told her I was going to offer them to the Commodore 128 Alive people for $10.00 apiece + shipping and if no one wants them, then I'll do what someone did with their spare 1541's. Stack them up and make a printer stand out of them.

Here are some of the specifications for them:

7 ea. Compaq Deskpro SFF (small form factor)

Case dim. 15" deep x 12.5" wide x 3.5" high
Weight- 20 lbs
1- 3 1/2" floppy disk drive
1- 24X CDROM drive, thin type
No hard drive, can use any IDE ATA 1 gig or bigger
CPU- Celeron Processor, clocked at 466 MHz
Memory- 128-MB DIMM (ECC and non-ECC), PC-100
Embedded Intel video graphics

Connections on the back:
1- PS/2 keyboard
1- PS/2 mouse
1- VGA Output
1- Parallel interface
2- Serial interfaces
1- Embedded 10/100 NIC controller
2- USB 2.0
Integrated Compaq Premier Sound system: 16-bit full-duplex audio

2 ea. Compaq Deskpro EN series SFF (small form factor)

Case dim. 15" deep x 12.5" wide x 3.5" high
Weight- 20 lbs
1- 3 1/2" floppy disk drive
1- 24X CDROM drive, thin type
No hard drive, can use any IDE ATA 1 gig or bigger
CPU- Pentium III processor, clocked at 700 MHz
Memory- 256-MB DIMM (ECC and non-ECC), PC-100
Integrated ATI RAGE PRO Turbo AGP 2X graphics controller with 4 MB, exp to 8 MB

Connections on the back:
1- PS/2 keyboard
1- PS/2 mouse
1- VGA Output
1- Parallel interface
2- Serial interfaces
1- Embedded 10/100 NIC controller
2- USB 2.0
Integrated Compaq Premier Sound system: 16-bit full-duplex audio

5 ea. Touch Dynamics Global PC

Case dim. 11" deep x 11" wide x 3" high
Weight- 11 lbs
1- 3 1/2" floppy disk drive
No CDROM drive, can install a thin drive (laptop type)
No hard drive, can use any IDE ATA any size, not picky like Compaq
CPU- Celeron Processor, clocked at 1.2 GHz
Memory- 128-MB DIMM, PC133
Embedded VIA-8601T AGP w/shared memory from 2MB up to 8MB

Connections on the back:
1- PS/2 keyboard
1- PS/2 mouse
1- VGA Output
1- Parallel interface
4- Serial interfaces
1- Embedded 10/100 NIC controller
2- USB 2.0
1- PCI Sound card w/game controller
1- Multimedia card w/TV Tuner

The machines are perfect for a 64HDD hookup if you have the extra hardware lying around and the price is right.

If you have any questions or want more information, you can PM me and I'll send you what information I have.

Dan...

[airship]

Sweet score. It always feels good when you get a whole LOAD of computer stuff for almost nothing, and save it from the scrap pile.

I'd be tempted myself, but I just picked up a 1GB Celeron a few weeks back to use as my 64HDD system. Small form factor is definintely the way to go. Mine fits nicely under my 1902A. But to me, the TV tuner is the big selling point on the five Touch Dynamics Global PCs.

Good luck!

[Guest]

But to me, the TV tuner is the big selling point on the five Touch Dynamics Global PCs.

Two of the Global PCs had bad CPU blowers. If you have a spare PCI slot, I'll pull the tuner and send it to you.

Dan...