In seriousness I appreciate the vid-maker's enthusiasm but some pieces of vintage technology just aren't worth being nostalgic over.
Those machines were released when I was still learning to tie my shoe-laces and I don't think my parents knew what a "PC" was, first PC we had in my family was a "Leading Edge" 386SX-class machine. I see Leading Edge originally was a US company in the 80s based in Canton, MA but by 1990 when this machine was from I think it was just a re-badged Daewoo machine imported direct from Korea.
Still a budget machine and the design was probably only 4 or 5 years older than that Tandy but you got a maybe 8x faster processor and ten times as much memory for the same price. plus a 44 MB hard drive and VGA (SVGA?) color.
It still served as an email machine for my parents well into the 2000s when they sold the home and empty-nest down-sized; by then it had been maxed out on RAM (2MB), larger HDD, Soundblaster card and internal CD-ROM and ran Win 3.1 okay. Only repair it ever needed was a new PSU sometime in the late 90s
May I suggest that we leave that judgment to the collector. For what it's worth, I collect:
LED HP calculators (and a few HP LCD calcs).
Technical books published between WWI and WWII.
K&E slide rules.
eJunk (not intentionally). If I had to appraise the value or "worth" of collecting the first three categories, I would dispose of my collections and switch to collecting throw away products. The eJunk collection has become a serious problem for me and will soon need to be dealt with, probably by a visit to the local recyclers (after they re-open) and to the county dump. I don't really collect HP, TEK, and other test equipment but I have enough to keep me entertained for a long time. I disposed of most of my old computer hardware by declaring anything less than a dual core processor machine was not worth saving.
I bailed out of high tech in about 1983 and decided that computers were more fun. There were several local computer stores, one of which was Radio Shack. I had purchased the original IBM PC 5150 and therefore had some experience. When Radio Shack began selling computers, I helped them with various details in trade for after sales consulting referrals. The Tandy 1000 was the bottom of the Radio Shack barrel with pricing and performance to match. However, it had several big advantages. It was quite small, was not ugly like many of the other machines, and had 16 color graphics. As I barely recall, my biggest customer was a company that made a paint color matching computers based on the PC Jr and Tandy 1000. I probably wouldn't want to collect such old machines today. However, I do have some oddities from the past which are in the same class. HP Portable Plus, Compaq "lunchbox" with orange plasma display, and various palmtops (HP 95LX/100LX/200LX).
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Yup, and usually Windows 10. The ones with no OS often have more memory.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
http://electrooptical.net
http://hobbs-eo.com
Thanks for the good news. I got a nice one with Win7 for $150. I don't want win10 so this fit my goal perfectly.
There are a lot of speedup tricks for win7 like turning off fading fonts. I'll have to find the list I used on my desktop. I also posted them here, but that was a long time ago.
How can you be sure the seller hasn't installed some keylogger or other malware on it? You're better off buying one and installing your own OEM OS on it from scratch (preferably Linux).
With a used laptop, I observe all the necessary precautions. I wash my hands for 20 seconds, sanitize the cover, keyboard, and mouse with bleach, wear a face mask, use latex gloves, self isolate by using wireless, and distance the laptop from any other computers by at least
3 meters lest they also become infected. With these simple precautions, you can be fairly certain that any malware on the laptop will not become contagious.
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Most of the older laptops I found on eBay had Win10 reinstalled even if the re were no updated drivers. My lighted keyboard won't stay lit, it fades out after 5 seconds, so much of the time when I need to see it - it ain't l it. When the touchpad driver hasn't crapped out touching that will light u p the keyboard again. Oddly it does this even when the touchpad is turned off to prevent palm swipes. But I'm ok with that!
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Rick C.
--- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
--- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19): Summary of assumptions
Contamination of surfaces
COVID-19 viruses can survive on surfaces from several hours to days depending on several factors. This may vary under different conditions such as surface type, relative temperature or humidity of the environment. The virus has been detectable up to four hours on copper, up to 24 hours on cardboard and up to two to three days on plastic and stainless steel.
There are probably people who collect Macintosh pizza-boxes from the late 80s to mid 90s, if one wanted to get really pathological. I lived thru that era in high school and college those machines were the definition of "nothing to write home about." and massively overpriced.
I don't recall Apple making any pizza-box computer enclosures or 1RU servers. Pizza-boxes are more commonly associated with Sun Microsystems: Perhaps you mean the patented by Apple circular pizza boxes for real edible pizza? However, you refer to these as "machines" which suggests a computer enclosure. I'm confused.
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
OK, let's assume that fixes the keylogger issue. Now pray tell us what you do to protect yourself from the possibility of a rootkit having been installed?
Ok, I grudgingly stand corrected. That was from a series started with the various Macintosh LC flavors, which sorta look like a pizza boxes. It's been a long time, but as I recall, the fan was good for vacuuming the dust off the table and into the machine, and they were depressingly slow.
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
p hinge was loose, almost to the point of bothering me. Our ever lovable J eff suggested I should attack it with implements of destruction like screwd rivers and such to tighten the hinge screws. See, that's why Jeff gets the big bucks, he knows stuff like this.
y time I attempt to do work with screwdrivers and other implements of destr uction, I am as likely to permanent destroy something as I am to fix it. S lightly less so if I turn off the power first.
hilips head screws (is that capitalized? My spell checker seems to think s o) on the sides of the top. Prying plastic from metal is always the hard p art and this was no exception. Not having an adequately large crowbar I us ed the very sharp points of a pair of fine, wire cutters (the flat, very sh arp, stamped kind, not the forever blunt forged kind) and pried it apart bo th gently and when still not succumbing to my efforts, not so gently. Ulti mately the ends of the top were only slightly marred and the touch screen w as laying on my keyboard revealing the assorted screws.
ed the hinge screws with glee. Several were quite loose along with some sc rews holding the LCD to the heavy part of the lid. All were tightened, but one was missing! Well, maybe not actually missing, more like broken off. I guess that is why this laptop found its way to eBay, it had already been opened for repair and someone even more ham-fisted than myself managed to sheer a #4 screw! (btw, ham-fisted seems be spelled with a hyphen rather t han one or two words, but the verdict is not unanimous, rather the weight o f the Google first page hits say so).
the disassembled array of parts and only had one left over. Well, three if you count screws. They aren't back in yet mostly because they seem to be window dressing. I could have sheered the screws more easily than prying t he plastic open. That and the plastic one screw holds is broken off. But I guess I'll put the screws back in to attach the broken piece of plastic s o I'll know where it is when I want to show it to my friends as an example of shoddy workmanship in US made products... or Chinese made products depen ding on whether I'm showing it to my American or Chinese friends.
he shift key on that side (not so easy) and to press the ELL key I have to press a little rubber knob sticking up, but hit is just right (I just had t o poke one pinky in the hole and press the rubber knob just right to type E LL, hey! I did it again!!!)
to read you would have had to video tape and freeze frame. This spiel rem inds me of one of those. Now with the miracle of Hulu I can freeze frame D &G with my space bar. Watch, that will be the next key to go!
o
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ks
ut
o poor!
My Levono arrived and works fine. But how do you charge the battery? Mine i s stuck at 66% and nothing I do changes that.
The only way I could find that works is to boot into Windows and run Lenovo's battery charger control program. I found several notes on the web about Linux device drivers giving access to that functionality, but I never got that to work.
Which model Lenovo laptop? Which Linux mutation? Lenovo certifies that some of their laptops will play nicely with Linux, but not all of them. Here's the list:
For Linux, the usual fix is to install TLP. To set battery charge thresholds: I have it working for a customer on Mint 19.3. I think it was a T570(?) but I'm not sure.
However, I was not able to make TLP work on some other Lenovo laptop, mostly because the Linux installation was rather weird and I was afraid of breaking something. So, I followed this ceremony (method
2), which worked:
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
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