In my haste yesterday, there are TWO THINGS that I forgot to do and post about for this "eMachines" system. One is more important than the other! Let's talk about it in a brief 🧵 here! First of all, before we get too far, recall that this isn't actually an eMachines. The original motherboard failed, and a Pentium III Biostar motherboard was put in to replace it, in what I am calling a "reverse sleeper"

https://x.com/RetroTechChris/status/1949660599153041482

I recently picked up this "eMachines" from my friend Bill to bring to the next local meetup and plop on the "free" table. I thought I'd spruce it up a little bit in the meantime, since, well, I enjoy doing just that 😂. Let's talk about it in a 🧵 here! So, first and foremost, this isn't actually an eMachines. The original mobo died and it was replaced with a Biostar M6TWL and a Pentium III 600 MHz CPU. Does that makes this thing a "reverse sleeper"? 🤣

I recently received this Dell Inspiron 700m from my friend Bill. Originally a Windows XP system. I thought "maybe I could make this a mean DOS/Windows For Workgroups 3.11 system." Let's give it a shot in a 🧵 here, I bet we can get pretty close!
First thing I did was to look in the BIOS. This system is a Pentium M 2.0 GHz with 512MB of memory. The optical is a CD-RW/DVD. Okay, this should be more than adequate for what we want to do here 😂. Oh... and look, we can boot from a USB floppy drive! Okay, let's do that.

I got a few items in the mail for my Compaq LTE 5000 laptops! A power adapter... and a bunch of Cisco Aironet 350 wireless network cards from a friend who bought like 50+ of them 😂. Let's test out the network cards and go through how to set them up in MS-DOS!! Time for a 🧵

Before I get into the setup procedure, I wanted to inform that I do have a setup procedure for this on one of my old "crap film quality" videos (not that the newer ones were better 😂). If you want a video walkthrough, hosted by a younger RTC, go here!

Memory testing, final round! Mostly good news, but some bad news too. What happened? And... just how many memory spares did we end up having? Let's find out, 🧵 time!
First, let's talk about the cliffhangers from last time. Both the CompUSA custom and the eMachines T2341 finished their round of testing, and are good to go!

Memory testing, round 3.. fight! 🧵
So, first of all, the Pacman PC passed its tests with flying colors! Woot! I'll leave it at 1GB for future fun.

Memory test round 2: fight! Let's talk about what we are up to today, in a 🧵here!
First, some good news. After running for 9 hour or so, the Abit PC in the basement passed multiple times! I didn't snap a picture, so this one from yesterday will have to do 😂

I went to visit my friend Bill yesterday, and he gave me "just a few" DIMM and RDRAM modules 😂. Shall we explore a bit and upgrade some PCs? Methinks yes. Time for a 🧵 The first order of business was to sort a bit. I looked up a fair number of chips to get this far, and also got a little lazy and "guessed" on a few. But we can see we have PC100/133, DDR, DDR2, and Rambus modules here, in varying capacities!

Last week, I took my ISA to USB card out of my Tandy 1000 TX. Today it finds a new home in my 486 DX4/66. Let's get it installed and talk about it briefly in a 🧵 here!
And before I get into that, recall that if you purchase one of these ISA to USB cards, they are pretty much good for mass storage devices only. Also, I did design a bracket for these a few years back if you need one!

A few weeks back, I picked up this X10 home automation system for $5 at a thrift store. Who wants to explore some home automation using Windows '95? Let's have a look in a 🧵 here!
First of all, what is probably most fascinating is that you can still buy this stuff from X10's website... in 2025. Go figure!

I recently picked up another AST Premium Exec 386 laptop... but not so much for the laptop, but really in search of some spare parts for my other Premium Exec 386 laptop. Let's talk about it and explore it in a 🧵 here!

First of all, unlike my Premium Exec 386SX/25 Color, this Premium Exec 386SX/20 is greyscale. It's still really nice though! I imagine that the color variants of these laptops was pretty rare, given the cost at the time.

I got my $50 HP LaserJet 6L in the mail today, and here it is. Let's have a closer look... oh.. wait a minute... oh no. Yea, not good. Let's talk about it, and some fun I had with it, and my NEW PLAN, in a 🧵 here So, yes, the plastics on this printer were brittle, and it unfortunately wasn't shipped well. As soon as I saw the box, and the size of the box, I thought we might be in trouble. And, yes, we were. Just look at all of those glorious plastic pieces.

I think it's time to consolidate a few more retro PCs 😅. Going to start with my Tandy 1000 TX which already has a new owner! I did a little bit of consolidation into my 1000 SX in preps for sending it packing. Let's talk about it briefly in a 🧵 here!
My 1000 SX had an XTIDE card in it, but the 1000 TX had a Silicon Valley ADP50 "hard card" with a 540 MB HDD. I decided to move that over to the 1000 SX. It takes up a fair amount of space, fortunately my 8 bit ISA network card is tiny 😂

I got some 20MB Bernoulli disks in the mail today. Some of them are Tandy branded! Let's check them out and see how many will actually work... time for a 🧵
For the first disk, I decided to try one of the "older logo" Iomega disks. And... well... good old General Error decided to visit. This means that the disk has too many bad sectors to recover... and, yes, each disk does have reserved sectors, I covered that in a past post!

I have a few things to test! A CD-ROM drive and an ATI All In Wonder Pro video card. Let's explore these in a 🧵 there!
First, the CD-ROM drive. It's a Universal Buslink Corporation drive, never heard of it! Unfortunately, it powers on, the light lights up, and, well, that's about it.

Let's test out this recent acquisition of mine, a Xircom Credit Card Modem 56T (PCMCIA). I'm not optimistic, more on that in a minute. Time for a 🧵
First, some context. I picked this up at L&Y Electronics last week since I was excited to see a PCMCIA card that actually had a dongle that hadn't been lost! I paid $10 for it, despite what you see:

https://x.com/RetroTechChris/status/1936494543245107360

I've been meaning to make it back to the ReStore to pick up an item or two. And I wasn't disappointed! Looking forward to setting up some home automation, and checking out this ATI All in Wonder card. What else did I find? Time for a 🧵
The Altec Lansing subwoofer was still there, but we know the story on that from before, so I left it. I don't have compatible speakers.

I decided to do a little Retr0briting on my thrifting finds. I think it turned out ok given how little effort I put into it! Let's talk about it briefly in a 🧵 here.


So, for the speaker, I wanted to retr0brite the knobs and the upper portion of the grille. Disassembly was pretty straight forward. Look at the size of that speaker, pretty beefy!

Time to "unbox" and check out this Logitech Trackman Portable. Will it be as expected? Well... no. Does it work with my AST Premium Exec just the way I want? Yes. Am I happy with it? YES!! Let's get into details in a 🧵 here!

Okay, well, let's start at the beginning and unbox. I took the "shrinkwrap" off, and this is the box. I always love having the box for cool devices like this.

During my travels to different thrift stores in the Northern Virginia area, I did pick up THREE different parts to create an Altec Lansing setup. Or, so I thought I had what I needed for a setup 😂. Yeah, not quite. Let's talk about what I learned in a 🧵 here.

When I was at one one of the thrift stores, there were a set of speakers and a subwoofer on a rack. I thought they would pair together since they were on the same shelf. These were the speakers. And I think this was the subwoofer (not my picture).

Going through my thrifting photos for the past few days, and I didn't get to posting a few, so here we go. Time for a 🧵

First, we have some optical drives and some media I found at one of the Goodwills. Glad I waited, I found a much better deal on media at Savers today!

At a Savers in Woodbridge, VA, Justin found a modem he wanted. I also saw a few computers (not too interesting), and this cool boombox!