unknown old PII motherboard

[dood]

This was a relative's machine. She called one day and said that her monitor wasn't working. So I drove over with a new monitor and found that the computer wouldn't POST, and both the power and HDD light were on solid. Opened it up on-site and said "You're going to be buying a new computer". This was back in early November, but I forgot that I had taken some pics once I got it back to the shop...





Who knows how long this board was dying a slow death, and she just never realised it. It was time for an upgrade, anyway . So there you go, it's not just relatively new Athlon-era and up boards that are effected. I'm guessing this thing was around 10 years old.

[Newbie2]

Re: unknown old PII motherboard

Pentium II didn't exist 10 years ago, back in 1995 the Pentium I was still around. You were guessing, and I know guesses aren't always right. You are right about the newer boards that aren't just the ones that have bad caps, older boards have them too.

What is the brand of the failed caps?

Are you planning to recap this motherboard?

[dood]

Re: unknown old PII motherboard

That's right... I wasn't thinking. I'd place it closer to 6 to 8 years, then. Plus it has USB on-board... and I don't think USB was even proposed until '95.

Man time flies.

All I know about the board is what you see in those two pics. I figured it wasn't worth recapping a P-II board with 64mb of SDRAM included, so I scrapped the whole setup after taking those pics.

[Rainbow]

Re: unknown old PII motherboard

I fix boards like this - they're very reliable. It's probably not worth it if you use expensive caps but I use cheap ones (they will last at least 2 years anyway).

[Newbie2]

Re: unknown old PII motherboard

If you recap the board and it boots up maybe you can gather some more info about the board.

Do you still have all the parts of the setup you scrapped?

Since it's a Pentium II motherboard what was the speed of the Pentium II CPU?

[dood]

Re: unknown old PII motherboard

everything went in the trash. motherboard, processor, ram, psu, case... everything but the hard drive, which I still have as a backup of their information. it wasn't worth the time, money, or effort to do anything with it. The last thing I need is yet another old computer laying around. I've taken 3 truckloads of old comps to my local recycling center in the past year!

I've gotten past my "cant throw that out, it might be useful sometime in the rest of my lifetime" stage, and now realise that some things are just better left DEAD.

[AK0R]

Re: unknown old PII motherboard

Almost positive it *was* an Abit board; looks like BX6 rev. 2

[Spacedye69]

Re: unknown old PII motherboard

"It's OK, your grandma is old and useless, she's better off dead." geez! Waste, waste, waste.

[Chris1992]

Re: unknown old PII motherboard

;_; you threw away a prefectly good PII board?! why.... And Spacedye, good point.

[dood]

Re: unknown old PII motherboard

"It's OK, your grandma is old and useless, she's better off dead." geez! Waste, waste, waste.

Doesn't work, my grandma is dead, thanks...

Care to make any cracks about my mother? She's dead too...

In this time of CHEAP computer components, I see NO point in keeping Pentium II class motherboards. Hell, anything with SDRAM is just about pointless anymore. It's getting to the point where the price of standard SDRAM just doesn't make it worth buying new to resurrect some old relic when you can build a whole new system around existing parts for under $200 and have it be 10x faster. You have to draw the line somewhere, and I've chosen where I draw the line. Don't like it? Sod off.

[linuxguru]

Re: unknown old PII motherboard

You can make perfectly good routers, fileservers and print servers with P1/PII class machines, and they'll be more reliable than almost anything more recent if you got (or recapped) a good PSU and MB.

I would certainly prefer a 440BX with a PII/Celeron over anything that came later for most infrastructure applications.

[dood]

Re: unknown old PII motherboard

I don't want them, I throw them out... cry yourself to sleep tonight over the loss of a potential router, for all I care. I prefer to use a little $20 box for my router that does the job just fine and takes up an nth of the space.

[Spacedye69]

Re: unknown old PII motherboard

The reference to "your"(quoted to be a phrase, non specific) grandmother was used to show what some would think is useless is not necessarily so to all. I am sorry if I offended you. The posts I have seen on this forum are geared not only to the repair of high dollar equiptment but also for us "old geeks" who like the old stuff and are tired of this throwaway cheap society. The bad cap issue is still around because people would rather throw away cheap electronics than pay more for good products. I guess the industry is giving us the caps we deserve.

Again, I'm sorry.
Mike

[willawake]

Re: unknown old PII motherboard

HAHAHAHHAHA

take it easy guys. both opinions are valid and debate of such issues is good.

[Rainbow]

Re: unknown old PII motherboard

The bad cap issue is still around because people would rather throw away cheap electronics than pay more for good products. I guess the industry is giving us the caps we deserve.

Exactly - it's easy math for the manufacturers - the bigger crap they made, the MORE they sell

[dood]

Re: unknown old PII motherboard

The posts I have seen on this forum are geared not only to the repair of high dollar equiptment but also for us "old geeks" who like the old stuff and are tired of this throwaway cheap society. The bad cap issue is still around because people would rather throw away cheap electronics than pay more for good products. I guess the industry is giving us the caps we deserve.

Mike, just so you know, I wasn't really that offended. People make off-the-cuff remarks all the time, and you just never know who's listening in. I realise it was meant to be a joke... no harm done.

As for the above quote, I do agree with you. But I'm not talking about throwing away recent components. I'm simply talking about throwing away components that _I_ feel have passed through their useful lifespan, and don't really merit any time spent to try to get them running again. On the other hand, I have two relatively recent AthlonXP boards at work that I'm waiting on caps for from Topcat. I'm certainly not going to throw those out if I have a chance at getting them back up and running for $10 in caps.

I'm new to this whole recapping thing, and haven't yet completed a motherboard, but I can still see for me where the line of usefulness can be drawn. Not that it matters, because the board that this thread is about is GONE, and there's no getting it back if you were actually sucessful in changing my mind :p

[Per Hansson]

Re: unknown old PII motherboard

As was said by "Dood" already if it's of no use to him why keep the crap...

I've got an old ancient AST 133mhz computer running, I've upgraded it with 128mb EDO RAM and just today got an Intel overdrive 200Mhz CPU plus a Pipeline Burst cache module, is it worth it? Hell no! But I like playing around with old stuff... And mind you, that machine, that I use as a server running Windows 2000 Server with DNS and WINS plus management of my small Riello 6KW UPS is pretty stable

(I'm sure it will crash today just because I posted that though )

I threw out two old IBM PS/2 machines, 8mhz, dualheight bigfoot harddrives etc, I could probably have sold the things on eBay (the harddrives atleast) and gotten a few bucks for it... But why bother... It was fun playing around with though, ran Winnt 3.51 on it, minesweeper even lagged

[kc8adu]

Re: unknown old PII motherboard

there is a limit to whats worth saving.
i keep old crap that works to fix cnc stuff for my customers.
everything from 8088 to p4.
but its high quality stuff.no pcchips junk ect.
i am typeing this on a box i built from junk.
a free vp6 a gig of free ram.6 free 146gb 15k drives.a free ami megaraid card.a free 350w fortron psu.
sure i had to recap the vp6 and psu.
came with 2x p3 1ghz chips too.
the o.s was free too.
the marantz 140 amp hooked to it came from the curb on trash day.
my neighbor tried this box and he now throws rocks at his new dell!

[arneson]

Re: unknown old PII motherboard

Everything, cars, tv's, appliances, they are more and more like Bic lighters.

[Rainbow]

Re: unknown old PII motherboard

I fix PC Chips too - most of them work fine if you know what to do and what not. And they're very popular here because of the price.