[Sheflug] Anybody want some kit?

[Matthew Collins <matthew [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A cautionary tale for you all.

My machine (that I leave on all the time) started hanging recently. It
went from uptimes in the months range (with me rebooting it being the
only reason they were shorter) to uptimes of days.

After the most recent of these hangs I thought to have a look in the
BIOS at the hardware monitoring. The fans were running at < 3800 rpm,
and the temp on CPU1 was about 75 degrees. Whoops. I thought it must be
time to clean the insides.

Now, this machine is on the floor. A bad place I know, but there is
nowhere else to put it. It does collect a lot of dust. You should have
seen the fur that came out when I opened it up.

A short bit of work with the vacuum cleaner and my lungs and I had a
dust free computer again!

However. I've also broken it.

When I took the CPU fan off CPU1 to clean it, a tiny, itty bitty peice
of plastic broke off the socket. This meant that I couldn't reattatch
the CPU fan! Argh.

So, I've got a dual Pentium III 850mhz system, with 512MB of ram. That I
can't use anymore because of a tiny little bit of plastic. I actually
found the bit of plastic, and used the strongest glue I had to glue to
back on, but it just snapped off when I tried.

I have managed to reattatch the fan, due to there being a little bit of
plastic left, but I'm not confident enough to leave it running all the
time.

So, I've upgraded my machine with a new Athlon & motherboard.

So, I've got spare a Dual PIII 850mhz machine with 512MB of ram with 2
Ultra Quiet CPU fans (from QuietPC.com).

It's still fully in working order, so I'm wondering if anybody wants to
buy it.

I'm asking for 50 pounds. Why so low? Well, it would be a bit of a risk.
You might need to do a bit of surgery to make sure that the fan stays
attatched. The other CPU is fine, but you can't run the board with just
CPU2 running, you have to have a CPU in the CPU1 socket.

So, do you want it? Specs follow.

512MB of PC133 DRAM. (The memory speed is only 100Mhz though, because of
the CPU bus speed, but the memory is PC133 ram).
2 PIII 850Mhz CPUs (FC-PGA form factor)
2 QuietPC FC-PGA Ultra-quiet FC-PGA cpu fans. 
  See http://www.quietpc.com/uk/cpucool2.php for details.

The motherboard supports ATA-100 drives, has 2 onboard USB sockets, with
a further 2 that can be plugged into a back plate. The Socket cover is
also supplied, along with an 80 wire IDE cable. Floppy support is built
into the board.
There is no onboard sound or ethernet on the M/B.

This system has been running Linux for some time. the VIA chipset is
fully supported, so no trouble running the ATA-100 drive. The USB works
fine as well. Dual processors is really nice to use.

If you want it, for 50 quid, let me know.

Also, of historical interest to some people might be another board I
have laying around.

It's a 486dx2 66. The oddity is, the board has got both VESA LB slots,
and PCI slots (I think a couple of those slots are BUS-MASTERED as
well). It comes with a couple of sticks of memory, I don't know how much
It could be 16MB or 32MB altogether.

If anybody wants that (I'm giving it away) then let me know.

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