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Recycling Rescue: Hewlett Packard Vectra VL2 486SX-33 PC
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- Опубліковано 31 лип 2013
- Oh YEAH*! Another vintage computer to play with!
This came from the same thrift store and recycling depot where I rescued the PS/2 Model 57SLC2 computer and Model M keyboard. In recent times they'd refused to sell me any computers, even with the under the table, cash-in-hand method I'd used before. I didn't expect just offering them $20** would have any chance of working! Wonders never cease.
Though this didn't look too promising at first, with the case being incredibly greasy and the sound of something ratting around loose inside, a little cleaning and a new hard drive have this thing working great again. It is amazingly clean inside.
Lots of people ask what I do with this stuff, and while I usually don't know for sure until I actually start doing something, I have got a plan for this system, involving OS/2. Right now it's running Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and MS-DOS 6.22 for testing purposes. When I actually get around to what I have in mind, there will be a video.
Points of clarification: Cirrus Logic was not the first to produce a graphics accelerator for VGA/SVGA. I believe that honor actually goes to S3. Cirrus Logic was the first to produce a fully integrated, low cost SVGA graphics solution with a built in RAMDAC. To my great amazement, this computer's BIOS does support LBA translation for large hard drives, so the 1GB Seagate drive I put in works fine.
There is 1 megabyte of video memory on this motherboard, thus making it possible to run in a high color video mode (16 bpp) at up 800x600 resolution. A lower color depth (256 colors, eventually dropping to 16) can be used at resolutions greater than 1024x768. HP (somewhat annoyingly) customized the video BIOS to output only certain refresh rates and to override refresh rate selection by most other software. The Cirrus CL-GD5428 chip is capable of any refresh rate that doesn't exceed its built in RAMDAC's specifications and bandwidth. I can't explain the strange video memory packaging, since 512 kilobyte ZIPs did exist. (I really expected that there might be 2 megabytes worth of video memory, although 1 megabyte was pretty darn luxurious at the time!)
Cirrus Logic (and many others) left the graphics market during the early days of AGP graphics adapters, when the competition heated up, ultimately leaving just two big players, ATi and nVidia. I miss the days when there was actually competition in the graphics market. Rather than doing the right thing and keeping support for their former graphics products available, Cirrus Logic dumped all of that onto a company known as Integrated Software and Devices. ISD produced an embedded Linux product and was in turn swallowed up by the "Embedded Software Group". Somewhere along the line, everything pertaining to support for Cirrus Logic graphics products disappeared.
The CL-GD542X series graphics ICs consume 1.5 watts of power at most. 1.5 *watts*. Compare that to modern graphics cards, which despite doing a lot more, also utilize power sufficient to run a small country. :-P
I suspect that expansion slot artifact on the opposite side of the riser is possibly for a local bus video adapter or disk controller card. I don't know if such a thing was ever produced by HP, or if the slot was ever populated with its connector.
One of the read/write heads inside the hard drive has clearly been "snagged" by something. There is also a totally unused platter in place on top of the active one. I've seen that before in Quantum hard drives...maybe it was a way to salvage what had been a larger capacity drive with a dead platter? It has no read or write heads extending to it.
* It's probably sad just how stoked I am about this.
** It's a lot better than the 7¢ per pound that they usually get.
I have been binge watching your computer videos.. somehow lots of them had slipped by me. They relax me with all the little trivia you add .. and little jokes too. You could have a much bigger channel like LGR etc with your wealth of knowledge... I'm a tech geek but I'm at awe with all you know.
I am not looking to be "big" on UA-cam. I really am just some guy who makes videos. That they've been as popular as they have, has been something of a surprise.
@@uxwbill don't cut yourself short... Your videos are really good. The world needs more people like you
I love the sound of the old Harddrives
My old Dell XPS from the 1990s sound like a nuclear reactor starting up.
I just love those cute little beeping sounds that hard drive made :) Those old drive sure do make interesting noises when they have a bad sector or head. But still love them old Maxtor and Quantum drives.
Wow a Vectra! Brings back memories when I used to deploy these to remote sites in the mid 90's.
nothing better than booting up your computer going to you tube and seeing that uxwbill's uploaded another computer video.
TheDvdod 3 years later, still the best feeling!
I enjoy your videos very much. Your descriptions make even a plastic expansion card holder thingy sound very intriguing!
what a lovely old computer! brings back memories! Thanks for showing it.
It took me longer to read the description than to watch the video! :-P
The thrift stores I frequent do accept and sell computers, but the prices vary widely. One day you might find a nicely kept Dell Dimension Pentium 4 for $7.99 and the next day you might find no-name beige box Pentium-133 with missing parts for $29.99. Used LCD monitors are becoming more common, although most have scratched display panels, and the ones that require external power supplies are almost always missing them.
"I found these (mouse & keyboard) sitting in the laundry room", that was incredible! I love your house! Thanks for the video!
Nice! I love old vintage stuff like this! I'd be picking them up like you all the time if only I had space for them LOL. And even the new hard drive that you inserted is very audible.
Ahhh, feels good to hear your voice again, Bill! I really enjoy this video and I've always been a bit of a fan of the older Vectra machines. It *seems* in the rear where the ports are, a little piece of plastic actually telling you what each port does fell off. There's not much holding them on and hence why you have little bitty holes here and there in the back. Very great video as always!
One of my favorite channels on UA-cam, as well as one of my few Subscribes! I kind of feel bad because both of my favorite thrift stores sell computers. As well as my recycling shop in town. XD
wow how did i miss this treat! I used to work at a computer chop shop (used computers) and we used to get these by the truckload by certain companies. i used to hate getting cdroms to fit in the Vectra's. we had a local shop make the rails for us (since most didn't have them) now i think back, i wish that company was still going.. I miss it so much. but hey, thanks so much for the memories!
Love these videos
Oh yeah I'd say that hard drive is dead. Nice Dell monitor! I have one a little bigger than that and it weighs a TON! I love your "Recycling Rescue" videos! Their very interesting!
This is uxwbill at his very best. Really enjoyed this video and would love to see this PC set up if at all possible please.
Got a 20-gig Fireball from an ABS computer made in 2000 that still does fine. A friend of mine has several old computers and one had another Fireball (possibly also 20 GB) and it still works... and I think we have at least one in the HDD bin at work ready for emergency service.
yes more old PC Videos I love them manly because my The PC I made is so nice I love to see some of the older PC's and see how far we have come in tech and to learn about them.
Cirrus Logic did the audio microprocessor for the iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad's.
Awesome! I'll get around to it eventually. I believe it has the same Quantum hard drive as this one. It makes that same awesome hard drive noise when it starts up. The hard drive in the computer works fine, surprisingly. Someone had disconnected the hard drive when I found it. I reconnected it and all is fine.
I remember that Zoom sticker! When I built my K6-2 550, I installed a Zoom 56K modem in it and put that same sticker on the front of the case! I went with a modem with the built in UART as I was triple booting Windows 98SE, SuSE Linux 7, and BeOS 5. :-)
Boy, I sure commented a lot on this video in the past.
I got ahold of a Vectra VE 5/120 series 3, and it seems that an artifact for a PCI slot would have been on the rear of the backplane underneath the hard disk. It's odd, I wonder if anything would happen had it been populated and had a card installed?
Sadly, PCI Express was completely unheard of at that time since it wasn't even invented yet. XD
That, err, "burp", was so funny!
We have Goodwill computer stores here in Calif, they only sell used working computers. Everything else however is just thrown out onto the shelves and you don't know if it works or not but you can return it and get store credit. I found some stereo receivers that were not working, showed them to the manager and offered to give them 30 or $35 for each, but they would not accept that, they wanted the sticker price.
I argued that they are just going into the recycle bin but they didn't budge on the price.
When are we gonna have fun with L2 cache? ;)
I don't know if you have covered the secondary memory in a later video, but the on board video memory look like the DIPs (dual inline package) memory chips. Those were used in a small window between direct memory DIMMs and ZIF sockets. These used a row of female sockets in the memory package and hard wired male pins upright on the motherboards.
Good stuff, I think you and I think alike.
i have a hp vectra i just picked up but can't figure out what button you press to save settings in setup? nevermind, looks like it is F3
BTW you remind me of my childhood with this machine, I knew someone who had the exact same machine (it was slow as hell with Windows 95) and the POST took almost 10 minutes ... when the machine want to POST ^^
Although not a Vectra, I also got a new 486DX2 from a thrift store recently: an IBM PS/1 "Expert".
This Vectra reminds me of the old PCs they had at the library many years ago, but I think they were Pentium PCs.
My school was pretty awesome to me and I have gotten a few computers from them. An HP Vectra XM which shares this case style but was a little newer and an HP Vectra VLi8 mini tower which I still use daily with Windows 98 running on it. I was able to purchase a newer Pentium III 850MHz processor for it and surprisingly, the computer needed no DIP switch reconfiguration. It was listed to only support up to 550MHz but it recognizes the entire 850MHz, it's pretty sweet.
i like picking these up and trying to fix them, i have some good basic computer knowledge but of course it dosen't compare with your know how. Thx for the video.
The harddrive-sounds at the test sounds just like those in the old computers in the gun shops in Far Cry 2, is it a standard "test"-cycle that old harddrives do? I think so
I remember getting an old computer off of some guy and this did the same thing. Turns out the hard drive got corrupted and popped up as Unknown in Disk Management. Fixing it with Disk Management and formatting it made it work again.
This hard drive was unable to pass its self test and bring itself online. If that doesn't happen, there is nothing you can do in software.
It's always a shame for vintage items of any sort to be lost due to misinformation. You'd have thought by now, since computers have been in reasonably regular use for 20-30 years, that this sort of thinking wouldn't be so widespread! :)
Also, that hard drive really was knackered - it definitely had plenty of hours on it.
I really wish that modern computers had that kind of BIOS instead of the graphical crap we have now. I especially how it tells you if everything passed or failed the POST on this computer.
I recently picked up an HP Vectra XM 5/133 system from my workplace. Took it home, works perfectly fine. That slot you mentioned on the reverse of the ISA expansion card, my XM has this populated and came with a 10/100 ethernet card. Unlike network interfaces today that have the 10/100, and even 1000 if you're lucky enough, are integrated into one port, this card has separate 10 and 100 ports. The card did function for a little while, however after a few reboots the BIOS started giving me "LAN error" warning messages so I decided to pull the card and install a spare gigabit ethernet card in to it so I can transfer data from my file server to it and vice versa. I know that the PCI slots it has won't be able to go that fast (heck the IDE channel probably can't even do 100Mbit/s) but it's what I had lying around. :p
Once again I must say that I enjoy your videos because I find them educational, and entertaining at the same time. Gee, you don't hear that being said too often now do you?
L2 Cache with Pentium Overdrive? That sounds cool!
I was given a bunch of those from a friend many years ago (ancient already back then). I used one of them to power my PlayStation 2 that had a broken power supply :)
That's cool. I was never into this stuff when this computer was new; I would have been, oh, maybe seven? LOL!
This was my first computer bought with my own money. It looked the same, but was a Pentium 166 Mhz processor. No MMX :)
That extra expansion card slot was attended to be a Ethernet jack but it never was added
That solder pad slot was a proprietary expansion bus connector. HP would have network and/or SCSI cards and such that would go there.
nice vintage pc there bill
I was waiting for someone to say that!
Recycle? Geez. Many laboratories across the country still use Vectras to run their analytical test equipment. I still use these Vectras just about every day.
Yeah! Another vintage computer video.
The rattle of a hdd thats departed from the world of the living R.I.P hdd.
Its a shame that once upon a time that machine would have been so usefull and now its pretty much a dinosaw :-(
I know the feeling ha ha :-)
I got a free Pentium III HP Vectra - fortunately, it came with the keys. It's a slot 1 unit, with a 450 MHz powerhouse, and 192MB of RAM - and a 8GB Maxtor hard drive.
Great video as always bill,
I was going to offer a 1,7 gb HDD i pulled from a dead parkard bell, but then i saw the snippet you added to the end of the video and now i'm just to lazy to hit the delete button it seems :)
I've used a few HP Vectra PC's with the same case style, I think most of them were Pentiums. I remember one particular feature of at least 2 of these PC's, was that even if the computer was completely powered down, you could turn it on by pressing the spacebar on the keyboard, is that the case with this particular PC?
In my area the Goodwill has 2 locations where they sell computer stuff. The other stores don't accept them. They have a lot of neat stuff at those stores, parts and of course good used computers for sale.
Holy shit a warrior :-)
if i can get me a windows 98SE i will i love them but i don't know if they will work with a built in WIFI in my XP
I have a Vectra N2 4/50 with a 486-DX CPU Clocked at 50 MHZ. Got it for free at an electronics recycling facility. It looks a little bit like this one. The motherboard in the 4/50 looks very similar to the board in this one. If you want me to, I can make a video response about it. Loved the video as well.
The only modern desktop I can think of that is similar in power usage to that HP is a modern mac mini. I remember picking up a huge load of old computer parts, and included were some full length expansion cards... there was a 14.4K modem that only just fit in a full tower AT style case. That thing was huge. The cards built-in speaker was also massive.
Hey ubxwill do you know of a place to get pentium 3 motherboards.
I kick myself in the rear every time for this, but I had two old computers at one time. (Good working order & all original) When I was younger & before I knew any better, I took it upon myself to rip apart both an early 90's IBM laptop & a SAMSUNG S 300 DOS desktop computer. (Not sure what models exactly)
Sounds like that HDD had a head crash.
I do too! It has a Pentium Pro processor in it clocked at 200MHz and is used on a somewhat monthly basis and runs Windows NT 4.0 Workstation. :D
What OS did it have on it?
On another note, upgrading a 486 machine to a Pentium overdrive can be difficult because older 486 mobos have a 5 volt processor and socket. Therefore, the pentium overdrive is an 3.3volt processor, and though it could fit in the socket, the extra voltage would let the magic smoke out. Apparently you need a vrm modification to correct the voltage
Are you going to replace the HDD and put either windows 95 or 98 on it?
I have a similar computer but in an older revision acutally. Mine is the HP Vectra 486/33 VL. Yours has someking of COAST slot, but mine just uses regular sram chips. However mine is a socket 1 computer so this is not really good for upgrades ... but since this computer was given to us years ago (~15 years) and since I'm quite young for a retro computing enthusiast, as far as I can remember, to me that computer always existed, so I can't leave that computer even though it's not the best.
It originaly came with a 486 DX33 with 8MB of ram, no cache, no expansion cards and a 170MB HDD. The HDD died unfortunately ... at some point I upgraded it to a 486DX2-66 CPU with 32MB of ram, a 10GB HDD, a sound blaster vibra CT4170 and I added a CD-drive (but it didn't have brackets so it was just hanging there and it didn't look good at all) but now that I have faster old computers, I put it back roughly to it's original specs ... though I made some other upgrades such as installing L2 cache, adding 512KB of VRAM for a total of 1MB and finally, I found a 270MB quantum HDD so it's close enough.
I also installed a sound blaster pro 2 and a 3com etherlink III. For a "slow" 486, I'm actually quite proud of that computer ^^
I have one of these but a another model an Vectra Xm series 4 that i got from my school since i fix all there old computers the psu died so my teacher said i can keep it It has a Pentium cpu in it and has windows 98 it a very good since there where 4 other computer that where the same model still working great today and love the video
Dear Uxwbill!
Could you backup the bios and send it to me? Pleeeeeeaaassssseeeee! I had a Hp vectra like this, but probably the bios is corrupted. I searched everywhere, but i couldnt find a bios file. :((((
My school threw away a bunch of HP Vectras from the Windows 98 era. I offered to take them as I told them throwing perfectly useful machines away is a waste of history and perfectly working machines. They told me that "would be looting of school property". I even suggested that they at least recycle them, and they refused. They tossed about 30. I was so mad.
I may have a key that fits that case. I have a few HP Vectra Pentium 2 PCs and I remember there being keys. I think on mine they stored them inside the front bezel which is removable as it comes off first to open the case.
You need to get a lock pick set. Then you won't have to damage the computers to get inside and I bet most of those computers can just be raked. Running a ball shaped tool over the pins with pressure on the lock body. That is how I got my trucks tool box open because it had no key with it.
22:48 is that dell going to be in a future video?
A good old 8-bit ISA CGA card would fit the bill nicely though. ^_^
I believe Zoom Telephonics purchased the Motorola name from Arris.
I'm not understanding why they wouldn't want to sell old PCs (yeah personal information from 1992. Oh my!) but how did you even approach the store about selling you a computer if they don't sell computers?? lol
Laptop chargers are in the range of 75W - 120W. Though on PC, the smallest ATX PSU I've found currently on market is 250W.
funny I suddenly had the song called "takin care of buisness" in my head
also my intel sticker is on the top of my HP, which is fairly new.
Nice video, you're lucky because those old computer are realy rare to find now (in France i've see some 486 machine sold for more than 200€ recently, and people buy them ...)
As for the LBA you coud always use a drive overlay software.
These old Quantum hard drive are not realy reliable, i've also had a lot of trouble with those ...
Gah, that disk has farkled bearings, I'll bet.
Either way, that choocher's not choochin' anymore!
can you make a video of an 1989 good star vcr ?
Same is true around here (California). Lots of 2nd hand computer stuff, it's fun to visit the thrift stores.
But I'm worried this paranoia could spread to our own backyards someday. I recently got a mint PC from a local lawyer's office, loaded with case documents. No way would I ever tell them about it, because I'm sure they wouldn't take responsibility for not wiping their own stuff. They're in the business of spinning blame on others, so I'm sure they'd try to harass Goodwill over it.
I used to have that same machine but with a 486DX2/50.
It has been many years… and I’m still waiting on that Pentium OverDrive + L2 write-back cache video! ;)
I forgot all about it. It is rather unlikely at this point that I will revisit the subject, at least for the foreseeable future. (The computer I had planned to use for this demonstration needed to be cleaned up after a basement flood. I did that, but I haven't put it all the way back together.)
@@uxwbillWell hey, more than anything, I just wanted you to know how formative of a memory this video is for me. I must’ve been in middle school at the latest when I watched it, and now I’m out of college and working as a systems administrator for a small company. Still into old PC stuff, too!
I'm glad the video was a formative moment for you, and I also appreciate that you've been watching over the years. To try and give some sense of closure, while seeing how badly I remember what's in this video already...the story basically goes that external cache management on the Pentium Overdrive was a mess. Intel reportedly kept changing the specifications while manufacturers were bringing hardware to market.
Write-through caching generally worked fine with the Pentium Overdrive. If your system supported and used write-back caching, that's where things could get really interesting. Some systems would run perfectly no matter how things were set up. Others were stable until you did some very specific thing and then the whole shebang fell down. The remainder of systems were unstable no matter what you did to try and get it working. You could see all of these outcomes even across multiple examples of the same hardware, with the same BIOS revision and the same software stack. I did! I had several identical "Lacuna" PS/2 Model 77 systems with POD CPU upgrades.
Of these, one worked perfectly no matter what. The other would crash only running the reference disk or system configuration programs. I believe it failed with a "217" error code, which sometimes it would not do until after leaving the configuration programs and rebooting. The last example just crashed constantly if one dared to run a POD CPU and cache model in write-back mode. It was uselessly unstable.
I believe I was going to demonstrate these on video, and compare them to an HP Vectra XA with a POD83 and 256KB write-back cache module.
Could there have been some kind of difference in chip revisions that wasn't readily obvious? Absolutely. (I have a "Lacuna" board PS/2 Model 76 whose S3 graphics chip is marked as a prototype. That S3 graphics chip is also another case of a component being stitched into a design with a really hot needle. It was designed for VL-bus or PCI systems, but IBM put it in a Microchannel bus computer. Some of the resources used by that S3 chip also occupy those used by other hardware in the system, such as COM4. There were also timing problems that IBM tried to solve with numerous graphics driver releases, particularly under OS/2. They also tried different RAMDACs to resolve the issue.)
While not really a fault, cache memories took on all manner of different package types and layouts...various vaguely SIMM shaped modules, plug in modules, and even loose chips for direct insertion to sockets. I'm sure some manufacturers did a better job of their board layouts, and that some cache controllers were better than others.
I think that should cover it, unless of course, I've forgotten some detail or another. That's certainly possible.
@@uxwbillThank you! I’m glad to finally know the story. :)
I think I once tried to research the topic a bit myself, but finding any amount of useful info on the web, especially obscure content from decades ago, has become increasingly difficult lately. Your anecdotes are far more informative than most of the crap I tend to find on the web these days.
I was about to ask if it was a Quantum hard drive based on what it sounded like but then the bit at the end came up... You know you've been messing with this stuff too long when you can recognise drives by the sounds they make.
I have an old PC that i thought had an Pentium processor (because Windows said it was so) but it actually had a AM486 DX-100 processor. Took a picture on my instagram.
Those Quantum HD's of the day were junk! A hard sneeze would send them into the click of death.
The onlky Quantum fireball that I own that still works is a 3.0 Gb IDE Fireball, you can see it on the video about the Microspot 166 Mhz Pentium PC on my channel
237 contacts on that CPU socket. And here I am watching this video and my CPU has 2,011 contacts. I bet bent pins were a lot less common back then.
Strange, i've also start realy getting into old computer stuff when I was 12 ... that's was 8 years ago ... Oo
Does anyone have the manual for this machine. I just acuired a VL2 4/50 running a 486 SX2 50Mhz chip 5volt 168 pin socket (no socket 3) and want to upgrade and need some help. Please Help!!!!!!
Your best bet may be to nose around the HP FTP site. Sometimes you can get lucky. If not, I'd suggest a forum of some kind that caters to vintage computer enthusiasts.
Simple answer to the yellowing and greasy feel to it. The person who had it last was a heavy smoker and that was nicotine
That and it happens to aging plastic
As for the unpopulated slot: I have a HP Vectra that has a PCI slot there.
good computer.
They might have used the ZIPs or whatever they were to save space on the motherboard instead of using a single chip for memory.
I thought you was going to use one of your IBM Model Ms like you usually do. I've spent the last couple of weeks searching for one at just about any shop that I think might have one. So far I've come out with nothing.
ha ha same for me i've a PILE of old Macintosh Quantum hard drive ranging from 5.25" 40 Mb up to 3.5" 1 Gb Prodrive (Ide and SCSI) ...
Old Quantum drive that still works must be hard to find now !
the hard drive sounds like the heads have touched on the platters causing a head crash and is not allowing it to run it's seek test properly, hence the drive powering on and off
It might have a password on it, I think this computer might just be a tad too old to deal with that.
a password will not cause the drive to crash the heads on the media surface. thats a mechanical failure.
Nope, full tower desktop, an HP Pavilion P2-1110. It did used a laptop power supply though. :D Pretty peppy little machine too considering the sub-$200 price I paid for it.
If you need any suggestions on what to do with that old hard drive, might I suggest this? ;)
/watch(question mark)v(equals sign)QN7r2OXmUPw
SAME HERE!
I'm looking for people my age that share the same love.
You better keep your promise and wipe this hard drive with a nice big hammer!