@@TechBaffle I have a retropie setup in a mini Nintendo NES style case. Mine hooks up to a TV via HDMi . I tried it out on a 3.5" touchscreen RP but I prefer being able to play on a larger screen TV, though I do have a cheap Sega licensed Genesis handheld clone with like 50 built in games and a similar sized screen that works OK, despite a screen size even smaller the typical 1980's/90's era 13" secondary CRT TV typically used for game consoles back then.
Man, you just can't beat that feeling of opening up a brand new never used product that's 15-20 years old. It's just like opening up a brand new Hess truck that's over 20 years old and everything works on it.
same here it was a thoughtful gift, but total junk quality & badly designed. If you pull the funnel piece out you can put it & the attachments into a normal vacuum cleaner hose where you can get some decent suction but then your vacuum will run at super high RPM due to the air restriction. You're better off using compressed air to clean out small crevices
I've worked on a thousand PC's and hundreds of servers and never have damaged any machine from static electricity, yet I do ground myself first. But.... I have seen two computers wiped out from users using a USB drive sparking on the front USB ports of a computer though. I've seen that with my own eyes.
Also I remember when the docking bases for Palm PDAs were prone to blowing out the serial ports on Dell motherboards due to static electricity. My boss at a real estate agency blew out both serial ports on one PC and one on another with his Palm docking base. But otherwise the computers kept running fine and didn't lose any data.
I've never had any parts suffer static electricity damage, even though my 10-year-old self routinely placed motherboards directly on the carpet in my bedroom for a test run.
@@vwestlife - I never had PC issues from static electricity, but my PS4's disk eject "button" got a tiny static shock once and no longer functions. I can still eject from the menu, but whatever makes that "button" function was compromised.
Static electricity depends on your house if it is carpeted or not, the type of carpet, your clothes you are wearing, plus ambient room humidity and temperature. I never wear shoes in my house and i never wear shirts with sleeves. My house has wood flooring and humidity is always on around 52% I never had static problems.
I remember those "PC style" radios being everywhere in the late 90s, so it's pretty nostalgic to see one again. That vacuum was truly atrocious though :P
As weird as it sounds I just got a huge, unexpected nostalgia hit when I saw the mouse, keyboard slot in plastic (not the actual keyboard lol) and that volume dial on the side. I now very vaguely remember playing with a thing like that as a kid if not the exact same product. Still not sure if it was this exact product but boy do I recognise that mouse design for sure. I just dont remember it being a radio, or maybe I was too dumb back then to figure that out.. weird how recognising the most random thing can trigger memories Anyways if you say it was very abundant back then what I had was most likely the same thing
G'day, VWestlife! Great video! Agree, the monitor storage was pretty cool! By the way... Don't forget muffler bearings are used when you have to borrow the muffler to warm your neck in cold weather. Just unscrew the left-hand nut by the blinker-fluid reservoir, holding the horn onto the cow's head, being careful not to trip the buckle on the fan belt. While in there, check that your car is street-legal, and doesn't have an air-filter bypass. Lol! 🤣 Thank you! Cheers! ✌🏼📺❤️
Those PC-shaped accessories are really cool novelties. I have a calendar shaped like a '90s PC, you have to change the date manually but I think it's really cool.
I got one from eBay and when it didn't work, I opened it and found that the blades on the fan were completely vertical slats that don't create any suction at all. 🤦 Who designed that garbage? 🤨
You have a really unique channel and show us content that few would think is of interest to anyone. But some of us ARE interested and appreciate your eclectic show-and-tells. Thanks - great stuff!
I recently fried the motherboard to my Graphtec FC-86000 vinyl plotter with a static electricity discharge. I was using it just like I normally have done for the last 10 years; i touched one button...POP! I got to go home early from work that day. love your videos!
~97 or so, I was handing a 3.5 floppy to a co-worker, and our fingers touched at the metal protective cover part. We got a nice big zap between us, and the disk was dead afterwards. :)
1:46 I'm pretty sure that's made to look like a little door that covers analog controls (before everything became 100% digital, when we still had a bunch of knobs to twiddle with...)
Truly enjoy your old tech reviews like this. Honestly I subscribed to you because I was/am a big fan of Westlife even though I live in the USA. Seems like we have very similar tastes 😉. Keep up the good work!
I remember my a job I worked in the 90's gave out a bunch of those PC shaped radios to our users as part of a Y2K audit we did, I think the radio was a reward for scheduling with IT for their machine to be audited and for being present and ready for us when we arrived at their desk.
Awesome, new old stock gadgetry! I was amused that you actually tested the grounded anti-static brush on a CRT. I actually remember those AA battery vacuum devices. If the Techvac actually worked, you could have vacuumed the dust off the anti-static brush.
Either those Techvac things came in colors or it didn't take long for knockoffs to show up. Someone gave me one in silver and grey. While it never screamed like that one did, it was equally useless. I never got, nor would I have guessed, that it was supposed to have a little bag.
On the topic of those PC radios: I saw one at a computer museum this summer that looked like a miniature iMac G3, which included a clock, calculator, and calendar. The included keyboard even had real buttons on it (hence the calculator function). As much as I really want one, I can't find any on eBay, and all of the completed listings have gone for such insane prices that I wouldn't be able to bring myself to use it even if I did buy it.
Finally! Someone that knows the proper way to use "a" or "an". "An FM radio" is correct. The vowel is not what dictates whether you use "a" or "an". Don't believe me? When's the last time you ever heard anyone say they bought "an used car"? Most teachers (rather instructors) in school are so lazy, they'll teach you out of the book but never go into actual depth.
Back when I worked at the computer shop, we had a crapload of those PC radios in stock, wouldn't surprise me if 15 years on, they're still there in stock, nobody ever bought them again for retail outside of the 90s... :P
I remember seeing like 8 of those mini computer radios in a secondhand store in like 2010. I thought they were the cutest thing!🤗 then I remember imagining how cool it would be if they were real working mini classic desktop computers! More in a novelty sense of course. I mean even I wouldn't replace my smartphone with that if such thing existed!!🤣
~smiles~ I think that is the first review I have ever seen for an anti-static brush. Anyway, I like watching your videos, so who cares? "I am not feeling any suction" said the bishop to the actress. Or should I say actor? You are younger than me, so we never did show and tell.
oh man used to have the exact same monitor disk holder and i loved that thing i would put paperclips in the base and in the monitor part i removet the plastic springs and stored exactly one disk with phone numbers adresses and birthdays from friends and family and other paper notes
I remember the Techvac in Skymall and The Sharper Image catalogs. It’s one of those gadgets I’ve always wanted and thought I’d use a bunch, but never took the plunge to buy.
I had one in 1998 when family got our first PC. It was always a pile of crap and nothing on it says "suction" when you understand how a vacuum cleaner works. It was something so a chinese importer could make $10,000 a day selling garbage that was not returnable.
I still have that monitor style diskette holder. In mine that "disk drive" part is a tray. I think on mine the lid opened more, since I don't remember my diskettes getting stuck on the lid.
yeah I have that exact tecvac vacuum, it was given to me as a stocking stuffer in the 1990s and it never worked just wasted batteries and made a horrible grinding noise.
I used to have one of those techvacs too. When it did actually suck something up all the dust would just get all over the batteries and it was a real pain in the ass.
The front face that blocks the disks from coming out easy would be excellent for keeping the disks from flying everywhere if you accidentally knocked the case over.
I'd like to find one of those PC radios. I know the autoscan type radios are not great at tuning but I'm sure I'll find a use for the amp and speaker. I used to modify those radios into little amps. I've had the little USB powered vacuums and have a ladybug style vacuum but both of them don't work well. That squealing brings back memories when I'd hook small DC motors to my electric train transformer and they would run real fast and sometimes squeal.
I was once again expecting you to use a clip from another UA-camrs video, that being Linus tech tips :D. As for the vacuum, yeah, I didn't really expect it to do too much for a small little thing like that.
They use to have FM scan radios in the dollar store that worked much the same way. Also, FM stations are usually in stereo but it's a single mono speaker. I had (and might still have) one of those vacuums and they're completely useless. The motor is no where near strong enough to produce a proper vacuum. If any cleaning at all occurs, it's from the brush on the tip. I recall seeing one used in Gattica.
I have the same diskette holder, also from a drift store. You can use the base to hide a 'secret' diskette. Bought it to make it a raspberry pi project some day with a real screen. ;-) It is very fun to see how much high tech stuff, even a whole computer with a screen, fits inside a floppy storage container from the past. Also wonder how many micro SD cards you can stuff in this container. You can also put an USB laptop drive in it and the screen flashes when reading or writing to the disk :-D.
LGR Blerbs just did a video on the monitor-shaped floppy disk holder. The door swung down fine on his, but he also discovered a little pull-out drawer under the door; maybe yours has that drawer too, and it was in the way?
@@8_Bit This version does not have the slide-out drawer, although you could use the empty space in the tilt/swivel base as a hidden (and difficult to get to) storage compartment.
•The Diskette Holder should've had the lid open from the bottom up •I wish at the time they were popular, FM radios would've been shaped like technology products and other weird combinations, lol - and also put subwoofers in them too!
Ahh that era in the 90s where designers thought the only way to let the consumer know their product was designed for a computer was to have its appearance resemble the product its an accessory for.
Haha, I also have that PC radio (hope I didn't throw it away...), bought it on a holiday in Europe somewhere in the early 00's. I only bought it back then because I thought it looked comically horrendous. But in hindsight, it indeed was quite detailed for such a cheap device. Quite fun silly device. I remember mine having green text on the monitor, but could be that my internal memory is corrupt.
Honestly I would only buy that PC Radio if it's LED illuminated and has a functioning radio tuner. At least it's more vintage than the Dashing Fine Gifts Mini Retro Radio that you reviewed that day.
The motor was squealing because its bushings are dry. A tiny amount of 3-in-1 oil (does that even exist anymore?) will quieten the motor and make it run faster. I'm sure, though, that it still won't be fast enough to actually pull a usable vacuum.
2:40 Well, to be fair, it is intended for spine-label floppies. Would also work on 8cm CDROM cases. As an aside, it is asking to be modded into a real computer (with a 640x480 LCD screen) running dosbox and an xbox360 chatpad (modded into a keyboard) or bluetoothed Blackberry keypad. Maybe all done by a pi4. And it could play videos for cats (as it is that size). Floppy drives should be SDCard slots.
You asked about static electricity and electronics damage, so I have a story from the 90's to relate. While I can't be certain that ESD was the definitive cause but while I was findings inside a custom built budget Windows 98 PC I had built back in the late 90's, I touched a graphics chip on a budget Diamond Multimedia graphics card (I think that was the brand) without taking any ESD mitigation steps and the after that the card which had worked fine before no longer worked. I even had a weird thought at the time after I touch the GPU chip that I had done some wrong and low and behold, when I tried to boot the machine, no working graphics card was detected. Maybe it was all coincidence and the card had just suddenly failed for other reasons but I can't figure any other explanation for the failure. Unfortunately, the card was cheap enough that I was able to replace it without too much loss. Had it been a like a modern $500-$1000 Gaming GPU card from NVIDIA or AMD then I would have been much more upset with myself.
I've touched the memory chip inside a usb flash drive without grounding myself and the data was gone after that. Seems like touching the actual chip is what does the damage? I always handle circuit boards by the edges just to be safe.
I've killed the USB port on my MacBook Pro due to static from the MagSafe plug in my hand. The outside edge tapped my USB, sent a small spark, and it's never worked properly since. And shortly after, my internal SATA drive stopped working. I can put the same hard drive in a sled for the DVD drive port, and it works there, but nothing works in the main HD slot. I suspect the spark killed that too.
Man I freakin' love old junk like this
That radio is the kind of thing you used to get your little sister when she says she wants a fancy computer just like you
The Techvac that Techmoans. 😂
@@TECHNOGEEK20000 It's Kevin's joke, though.
What if the user named Techmoan sees this?
They get along fortunately. Kevin has even been caled the "Ghetto Techmoan"!
3:36 Would be pretty cool to put an LCD screen inside, make a hole for the VGA input and turn it into a mini monitor 😃
You could probably fit a Raspberry Pi inside of it with one of the many mini touchscreen LCD's they sell for the RP attached.
@@Charlesb88 Play a few games with Retropie or DOSBox 😀
@@TechBaffle I have a retropie setup in a mini Nintendo NES style case. Mine hooks up to a TV via HDMi . I tried it out on a 3.5" touchscreen RP but I prefer being able to play on a larger screen TV, though I do have a cheap Sega licensed Genesis handheld clone with like 50 built in games and a similar sized screen that works OK, despite a screen size even smaller the typical 1980's/90's era 13" secondary CRT TV typically used for game consoles back then.
That Techvac really sucks. And not in the way its supposed to either.
lol
Man, you just can't beat that feeling of opening up a brand new never used product that's 15-20 years old. It's just like opening up a brand new Hess truck that's over 20 years old and everything works on it.
I was given that exact Techvac by a well-meaning family member in the late '90s. Unfortunately it was just as useless back then.
Same for me, a noisy piece of useless c&#€@, which scared my cat quite a bit.
same here it was a thoughtful gift, but total junk quality & badly designed. If you pull the funnel piece out you can put it & the attachments into a normal vacuum cleaner hose where you can get some decent suction but then your vacuum will run at super high RPM due to the air restriction. You're better off using compressed air to clean out small crevices
You had me at vintage PC accessories.
14:56 “I do not have high hopes for this.”
Don’t worry, we don’t either. 🤣
If the base of the "monitor" wasn't all the way in, maybe that was keeping the door from opening all the way. Nice little bunch-o-baubles, thanks!
This! It looks like the base isn't snapped in all the way, keeping the lid from opening more.
I've worked on a thousand PC's and hundreds of servers and never have damaged any machine from static electricity, yet I do ground myself first. But.... I have seen two computers wiped out from users using a USB drive sparking on the front USB ports of a computer though. I've seen that with my own eyes.
Also I remember when the docking bases for Palm PDAs were prone to blowing out the serial ports on Dell motherboards due to static electricity. My boss at a real estate agency blew out both serial ports on one PC and one on another with his Palm docking base. But otherwise the computers kept running fine and didn't lose any data.
I've never had any parts suffer static electricity damage, even though my 10-year-old self routinely placed motherboards directly on the carpet in my bedroom for a test run.
@@vwestlife - I never had PC issues from static electricity, but my PS4's disk eject "button" got a tiny static shock once and no longer functions. I can still eject from the menu, but whatever makes that "button" function was compromised.
Static electricity depends on your house if it is carpeted or not, the type of carpet, your clothes you are wearing, plus ambient room humidity and temperature. I never wear shoes in my house and i never wear shirts with sleeves. My house has wood flooring and humidity is always on around 52% I never had static problems.
I remember those "PC style" radios being everywhere in the late 90s, so it's pretty nostalgic to see one again. That vacuum was truly atrocious though :P
As weird as it sounds I just got a huge, unexpected nostalgia hit when I saw the mouse, keyboard slot in plastic (not the actual keyboard lol) and that volume dial on the side. I now very vaguely remember playing with a thing like that as a kid if not the exact same product. Still not sure if it was this exact product but boy do I recognise that mouse design for sure. I just dont remember it being a radio, or maybe I was too dumb back then to figure that out.. weird how recognising the most random thing can trigger memories
Anyways if you say it was very abundant back then what I had was most likely the same thing
That Techvac's squeal legit made my teeth hurt.
Really sounds like a dentists' drill!
I was barely bearing the noise of that noisy bearing.
G'day, VWestlife! Great video! Agree, the monitor storage was pretty cool! By the way... Don't forget muffler bearings are used when you have to borrow the muffler to warm your neck in cold weather. Just unscrew the left-hand nut by the blinker-fluid reservoir, holding the horn onto the cow's head, being careful not to trip the buckle on the fan belt. While in there, check that your car is street-legal, and doesn't have an air-filter bypass. Lol! 🤣 Thank you! Cheers! ✌🏼📺❤️
Those PC-shaped accessories are really cool novelties. I have a calendar shaped like a '90s PC, you have to change the date manually but I think it's really cool.
I had the Ashten PC Radio growing up, it got us through a lot of Severe Storms and Tornado Warnings.
I'm sitting here in my bedroom on the north shore of Oahu at 8:19pm watching a guy from Jersey vacuum dust.
That PC radio brings back some memories. It sounds about as good as I remember :P
Totally forgot I had the PC radio when I was growing up!
I love how he included 2000's linus
5:11 Vwestlife confirmed for Animal Crossing.
That CRT disk holder is adorable!
I think that monitor storage is pretty cool, regardless of how clumsy it is
Hahahaha, besides the squealing motor the techvac is exactly what I expected of every mini computer vacuum I've seen! Kids toy for 5 minutes.
I got one from eBay and when it didn't work, I opened it and found that the blades on the fan were completely vertical slats that don't create any suction at all. 🤦 Who designed that garbage? 🤨
that vacuum cleaner needs 6 volts or higher to run well over clocked
I love it when you have old retro electronics like this.
Three minutes into this video and im already amazed that you've got more than one floppy disk in the house.
You have a really unique channel and show us content that few would think is of interest to anyone. But some of us ARE interested and appreciate your eclectic show-and-tells. Thanks - great stuff!
I really want the FM radio ❤️❤️❤️
I recently fried the motherboard to my Graphtec FC-86000 vinyl plotter with a static electricity discharge. I was using it just like I normally have done for the last 10 years; i touched one button...POP! I got to go home early from work that day.
love your videos!
~97 or so, I was handing a 3.5 floppy to a co-worker, and our fingers touched at the metal protective cover part. We got a nice big zap between us, and the disk was dead afterwards. :)
1:46 I'm pretty sure that's made to look like a little door that covers analog controls (before everything became 100% digital, when we still had a bunch of knobs to twiddle with...)
You should open up a museum in summer and see if people come and watch all your weird tech :D
I would love to see a teardown of that Radio PC in general...
Nothing particularly interesting - just one small primitive PCB with tons of hot glue in a PC case and speaker in an empty CRT enclosure.
I guess what we'll see is just a single chip radio PCB and a 60s pocket radio style speaker. Still interesting though.
Truly enjoy your old tech reviews like this. Honestly I subscribed to you because I was/am a big fan of Westlife even though I live in the USA. Seems like we have very similar tastes 😉. Keep up the good work!
I remember my a job I worked in the 90's gave out a bunch of those PC shaped radios to our users as part of a Y2K audit we did, I think the radio was a reward for scheduling with IT for their machine to be audited and for being present and ready for us when we arrived at their desk.
"It sounds pretty bad, but what do you expect?"
Can we all just get VWestlife to 100k by Christmas? Well deserved.
Awesome, new old stock gadgetry! I was amused that you actually tested the grounded anti-static brush on a CRT. I actually remember those AA battery vacuum devices. If the Techvac actually worked, you could have vacuumed the dust off the anti-static brush.
Either those Techvac things came in colors or it didn't take long for knockoffs to show up. Someone gave me one in silver and grey. While it never screamed like that one did, it was equally useless. I never got, nor would I have guessed, that it was supposed to have a little bag.
That FM radio that looks like a PC replica would be even more amazing if it could double as a PC speaker.
I wish every youtube video had subtitles this great
Nowadays I put subtitles on all of my new videos.
I love old stuff like that.
On the topic of those PC radios: I saw one at a computer museum this summer that looked like a miniature iMac G3, which included a clock, calculator, and calendar. The included keyboard even had real buttons on it (hence the calculator function). As much as I really want one, I can't find any on eBay, and all of the completed listings have gone for such insane prices that I wouldn't be able to bring myself to use it even if I did buy it.
I have a few of these , this makes you the Richest man on Earth :) QC
Finally! Someone that knows the proper way to use "a" or "an". "An FM radio" is correct. The vowel is not what dictates whether you use "a" or "an". Don't believe me? When's the last time you ever heard anyone say they bought "an used car"? Most teachers (rather instructors) in school are so lazy, they'll teach you out of the book but never go into actual depth.
I had that PC Radio as a kid! Different branding as I lived in Europe but otherwise identical.
I swear either myself or someone I knew had that PC Radio. Enough to hit the recollection cylinders, but faded enough to not recall fully.
I had the PC radio. Wow thanks for this video snoring these accessories that served weird or had odd functions etc
That radio is cool!
Love that pointer!
Back when I worked at the computer shop, we had a crapload of those PC radios in stock, wouldn't surprise me if 15 years on, they're still there in stock, nobody ever bought them again for retail outside of the 90s... :P
I remember seeing like 8 of those mini computer radios in a secondhand store in like 2010. I thought they were the cutest thing!🤗 then I remember imagining how cool it would be if they were real working mini classic desktop computers! More in a novelty sense of course. I mean even I wouldn't replace my smartphone with that if such thing existed!!🤣
~smiles~ I think that is the first review I have ever seen for an anti-static brush. Anyway, I like watching your videos, so who cares? "I am not feeling any suction" said the bishop to the actress. Or should I say actor? You are younger than me, so we never did show and tell.
oh man used to have the exact same monitor disk holder and i loved that thing i would put paperclips in the base and in the monitor part i removet the plastic springs and stored exactly one disk with phone numbers adresses and birthdays from friends and family and other paper notes
I remember the Techvac in Skymall and The Sharper Image catalogs. It’s one of those gadgets I’ve always wanted and thought I’d use a bunch, but never took the plunge to buy.
I had one in 1998 when family got our first PC. It was always a pile of crap and nothing on it says "suction" when you understand how a vacuum cleaner works. It was something so a chinese importer could make $10,000 a day selling garbage that was not returnable.
I still have that monitor style diskette holder. In mine that "disk drive" part is a tray.
I think on mine the lid opened more, since I don't remember my diskettes getting stuck on the lid.
yeah I have that exact tecvac vacuum, it was given to me as a stocking stuffer in the 1990s and it never worked just wasted batteries and made a horrible grinding noise.
I used to have one of those techvacs too. When it did actually suck something up all the dust would just get all over the batteries and it was a real pain in the ass.
ohhh!! i had the diskette holder and the PC Radio when i was a kid!!
The front face that blocks the disks from coming out easy would be excellent for keeping the disks from flying everywhere if you accidentally knocked the case over.
Buying junk so we don't have to. Thanks Kevin! :D
I had that PC radio as a kid!
19:20 Show and Tell!
I'd like to find one of those PC radios. I know the autoscan type radios are not great at tuning but I'm sure I'll find a use for the amp and speaker. I used to modify those radios into little amps.
I've had the little USB powered vacuums and have a ladybug style vacuum but both of them don't work well. That squealing brings back memories when I'd hook small DC motors to my electric train transformer and they would run real fast and sometimes squeal.
Everyone and their grandmother had one of them PC Radios! lol
I got one of those pc radios at a church rummage sale last year.
I'm know I had the diskette holder and the tech vac. The radio seems familiar too. Must have been common desk junk in the 90s haha.
Kinetronics sells a grounded brush called Staticwisk. It’s also recommended for optics and scanner beds.
I was once again expecting you to use a clip from another UA-camrs video, that being Linus tech tips :D. As for the vacuum, yeah, I didn't really expect it to do too much for a small little thing like that.
That little vacuum cleaner sounds like it's screaming. 🤣🤣🤣🤣
that radio started playing and i almost assumed it was pre-programed stock late 80's rock music.
I have that exact Ashton PC Radio laying around somewhere!
They use to have FM scan radios in the dollar store that worked much the same way. Also, FM stations are usually in stereo but it's a single mono speaker.
I had (and might still have) one of those vacuums and they're completely useless. The motor is no where near strong enough to produce a proper vacuum. If any cleaning at all occurs, it's from the brush on the tip. I recall seeing one used in Gattica.
I have the same diskette holder, also from a drift store. You can use the base to hide a 'secret' diskette. Bought it to make it a raspberry pi project some day with a real screen. ;-) It is very fun to see how much high tech stuff, even a whole computer with a screen, fits inside a floppy storage container from the past. Also wonder how many micro SD cards you can stuff in this container. You can also put an USB laptop drive in it and the screen flashes when reading or writing to the disk :-D.
The lid really should have been made to open towards left or right
LGR Blerbs just did a video on the monitor-shaped floppy disk holder. The door swung down fine on his, but he also discovered a little pull-out drawer under the door; maybe yours has that drawer too, and it was in the way?
Or maybe LGR's is a slightly different design.
@@8_Bit This version does not have the slide-out drawer, although you could use the empty space in the tilt/swivel base as a hidden (and difficult to get to) storage compartment.
**Screams in Colorado noises**
Love ya work VWestlife :3
LOL'd at Ashens pic. That radio's neat, I'm going to look for one on ebay right now!
I'm back, and I'm not paying £10 for one!
Somewhat charming in their tackiness.
pretty good now days you can use an SDR stick and get real FM on the PC with far more options.
That monitor radio would make a nice Bluetooth mod project
i could see parents in the 90s making their kids vacuum the living room with the techvac as punishment
•The Diskette Holder should've had the lid open from the bottom up
•I wish at the time they were popular, FM radios would've been shaped like technology products and other weird combinations, lol
- and also put subwoofers in them too!
Ahh that era in the 90s where designers thought the only way to let the consumer know their product was designed for a computer was to have its appearance resemble the product its an accessory for.
Haha, I also have that PC radio (hope I didn't throw it away...), bought it on a holiday in Europe somewhere in the early 00's. I only bought it back then because I thought it looked comically horrendous. But in hindsight, it indeed was quite detailed for such a cheap device. Quite fun silly device. I remember mine having green text on the monitor, but could be that my internal memory is corrupt.
The vacuum fan sounds like a power drill. Ha ha ha.
I used to love this kind of junk back in the 90s, now all I see is landfill.
cool PC radio
Honestly I would only buy that PC Radio if it's LED illuminated and has a functioning radio tuner. At least it's more vintage than the Dashing Fine Gifts Mini Retro Radio that you reviewed that day.
It was surreal at times seeing that mini PC being operated by giant VWestlife hands.
Got the radio as well... Had to retrobrite it because it was so yellow 🤣
Nice crossover with Ashens and Linus
I have a computer shaped pen & pencil holder. 😏
That tiny tech vac needs the bearings oiled.
The motor was squealing because its bushings are dry. A tiny amount of 3-in-1 oil (does that even exist anymore?) will quieten the motor and make it run faster. I'm sure, though, that it still won't be fast enough to actually pull a usable vacuum.
2:40 Well, to be fair, it is intended for spine-label floppies. Would also work on 8cm CDROM cases. As an aside, it is asking to be modded into a real computer (with a 640x480 LCD screen) running dosbox and an xbox360 chatpad (modded into a keyboard) or bluetoothed Blackberry keypad. Maybe all done by a pi4. And it could play videos for cats (as it is that size). Floppy drives should be SDCard slots.
Young Linus was such a QT
You asked about static electricity and electronics damage, so I have a story from the 90's to relate. While I can't be certain that ESD was the definitive cause but while I was findings inside a custom built budget Windows 98 PC I had built back in the late 90's, I touched a graphics chip on a budget Diamond Multimedia graphics card (I think that was the brand) without taking any ESD mitigation steps and the after that the card which had worked fine before no longer worked. I even had a weird thought at the time after I touch the GPU chip that I had done some wrong and low and behold, when I tried to boot the machine, no working graphics card was detected. Maybe it was all coincidence and the card had just suddenly failed for other reasons but I can't figure any other explanation for the failure. Unfortunately, the card was cheap enough that I was able to replace it without too much loss. Had it been a like a modern $500-$1000 Gaming GPU card from NVIDIA or AMD then I would have been much more upset with myself.
I've touched the memory chip inside a usb flash drive without grounding myself and the data was gone after that. Seems like touching the actual chip is what does the damage? I always handle circuit boards by the edges just to be safe.
I've killed the USB port on my MacBook Pro due to static from the MagSafe plug in my hand. The outside edge tapped my USB, sent a small spark, and it's never worked properly since. And shortly after, my internal SATA drive stopped working. I can put the same hard drive in a sled for the DVD drive port, and it works there, but nothing works in the main HD slot. I suspect the spark killed that too.
Never saw a use for a diskettes holder a pile of disks on my desk work for me