Would anyone wish to trade old computers or parts?

[vc]

Pollo Loco recently posted the following question, regarding an 'old' Pentium II machine:

http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,69130.0.html

However; his question seemed to spur an interest in trading old computers and parts, instead.  My own particular wish, for instance, would be to obtain any of the following 'AT'-formfactor motherboards, should they be in good working order:

Asus P2B-B, and/or P2-99B;
GigaByte GA-6BA;
Tyan S1830S ('Tsunami').

Along with certain associated parts, such as:

nVidia FX-5500 AGP video cards;
Creative SoundBlaster Live! PCI sound cards;
Micron/Crucial PC-100/133 256MB 'low-density' CAS-2 SDRAM;
'Slot-T' Socket-370 ('Tualatin' series) - Slot-1 'slotket' adapters;
etcetera.

My reason lies in the twin facts that I do have a number of 'classic' old 'AT'-formfactor cases and power supply units in good condition, and also that the particular parts listed are indeed capable of running PCLinuxOS 2010 surprisingly satisfactorily - even with KDE4, and with compositing enabled as well!

So.  Does anyone else have a similar desire, then, to startle the unwitting 'normal citizenry' into fits at seeing antique beige boxes being dragged headlong, kicking and screaming all the way, straight into the twenty-first century?    ;-)

[Village Idiot]

Well I have no shortage of parts here in all sorts of condition. Lately tho, I have had a bit of trouble with the stock standard PSU fans with that annoying bearing noise they get. I've been replacing the fan with an exact part from our local electronics store but those fans a so noisy now with wind flow it sounds like a jumbo taking off.

So I've been buying up brand new corsair PSU's to replace the old psus altogether. The latest one give almost twice as much power as the one installed previously and -is- dead quiet.

I have cases too because as a board dies you rip it out and you're left with a shell. In the last few years though I've found it just easy to go and buy a nice new board with gig network, on board vga, more usb ports sata, fairly good onboard sound and most importantly more memory.

The biggest problem I have in Australia with second hand computer parts is they are quite powerful but have small amounts of memory if any. Quite often the original larger memory has been 'ratted' and been replaced by something smaller and probably incompatible. When I ring up for prices for memory the dealer almost always points out the value of a whole new board given the price of scarce older memory. And also the difficulty of finding some that works properly.

Whilst a few years ago I was a believer, nowadays the price of laptops and netbooks has really forced down the price of desktop hardware. I just cant justify the effort. Even stand-alone firewall/router distros are demanding fairly recent hardware. 

There are some good mid range brand-new boards around. Find something that's been around for a while(end of life) and is supported by the newer kernels. Old boards seem to be a time bomb anyway especially ones with that old capacitor problem.

[vc]

Well I have no shortage of parts here in all sorts of condition.
<snip>
There are some good mid range brand-new boards around.

Not in 'AT'-formfactor, however - the motherboards I listed in my previous post are rare now, as they were specifically the last series of motherboards made for that formfactor, as well as being the only 440BX/ZX-based motherboards that were ever made for such anyway.

Find something that's been around for a while(end of life) and is supported by the newer kernels.

The motherboards are still supported by modern kernels - it is far more the adapter cards that are not, particularly in the cases of both video and SCSI cards.

Old boards seem to be a time bomb anyway especially ones with that old capacitor problem.

The capacitor issue is really not so much of a problem though, as the capacitors involved are all easily replaceable.  The real issue which caused mortal failure for many of those old motherboards was overheating of the 'northbridge' chip due to over-clocking, as over-clocking the 440BX/ZX chipset was quite popular back then - and of course, such ball-grid-array-mounted chips are very difficult to replace, thus making the afflicted motherboards useless.

[Hootiegibbon]

There is a potential route for selling parts, which has been set up by one of our admin members

Make sure all rules are understood. The forum is not the place for potential transactions.

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This thread now locked

Jase