Rustbucket 1999 Celeron Book PC resurrected 

its sad that SFF systems seem to be dying off, I really like them for their compact nature, but the problem is that people aren't exactly creating upgrade solutions for them, which is sad as not everyone has space, or necessarily wants a huge desktop tower.

I used to love mini-itx systems for that sort of thing back in the day, for years I ran a talker and a webserver out of a mates desk drawer because he had better internet than I did. Didn't get too hot, didn't use much power, didn't make much noise, didn't need to run Crysis.

@@RealEpikCartfrenYT That's only because you look at enthusiast computers. Sub-tower (DT/SFF/USFF) computers are pretty much the majority of corporate desktops (ThinkCentre, Optiplex, Elite), towers are the rarity. Look at used off-lease systems, I picked up a i5-8600T USFF for $150. For anything that doesn't need a gaming GPU, that's perfectly adequate.

SFF still has seen a lot of innovation with cases over the past decade. Its main drawbacks are more expensive components (motherboard especially) and challenge building in them.

Yeah we hated on desktop cases in general for being outdated but they sure were practical

Check with e-waste centers. I've got a little joint I like to go to with a really good resale shop...

I've seen parts. I even got a hard disk which ended up sounding louder than my brick grinder. I get the odd 4:3 LCD now and again, and sometimes even a beige keyboard. In June I found two rather nice serial mice (Microsoft, ball type). Rarely I'll see beige CDROMS, once even a 4x, I couldn't help to think where the rest of it was :( It has been a minute (or 10 years) since I've seen an entire, unmolested PC with the hard drive still in it.

Found a discarded mini HP tower in the thrift store discard pile a few weeks ago. They didn't even bother to destroy the HD since it was so nasty inside. Took a few...days...to clean all the cigarette tar and smoke damage out but now it's hooked up to my desk TV as a retro emulator. Found a metric ton of personal info on the hard drive also, lol 😂

@@cs8712Yikes. Lol

Lately I've been grabbing the cheesiest 25 cent records, tapes and cds just for fun because anything a normal person would collect is gone in 60 seconds.

Also the nice thing about those is there's solder pads over each of the connectors anyway, thus making a solder adapter conversion job easier

What the heck were they using it for? A 386 was near useless in 1999. Maybe it would be useful for some really mundane tasks, but other than that it was fairly useless especially if it only 4 megs of RAM, which was a rather decent amount of RAM for a 386 to have. Running Windows 3.1 and Word 6 and Excel 4 (IIRC) would have been painful for anything but the smallest files.

@@christo930 Believe me, I remember the pain of trying to use that machine for anything more strenuous than typing up book reports for school. You have to understand, my parents back then would have given Luddites a run for their money. They regarded a PC as an appliance device; you bought one and used it until it didn't run anymore. I didn't convince them an upgrade was necessary until 2001, and then they chose a Northwood Pentium 4 PC... *shivers in disgust*. There's a reason I built their PC's after that.

@@DynamoNED The funny thing is, this has largely changed. I'm using a 15 year old PC that does everything I want it to do quite fine. I can't play modern games on it or do video editing, but everything else it does pretty well. But it also wasn't a low end PC when new. It started as a core 2 duo and is now a core 2 quad 3ghz. The core 2 quad upgrade was only like 10 bucks.

@@christo930 Yes, there's a certain irony to that. In the 1990's/2000's, upgrading every 2 years was nearly mandatory to keep up. Now, I have 10-15 year-old PC's that are sufficient for daily driving.

@@DynamoNEDDuring pandemic I salvaged an HP Pavilion desktop from the local e-waste bin with Intel Core i7 2600S CPU(4 cores/8 threads), upgraded the RAM to 16GB, put in a 240GB SSD for the boot, the OG 1.5TB HDD for storage, put in my old MSI AMD R7 250 2GB OC GPU, some new system/CPU fans I had in storage, and on a Sony 19in 5:4 1280x1024 75Hz(sudo 720p) VGA LCD it runs the latest Manjaro GNOME Linux as my work PC just fine. Even my old gaming PC from the late 00's with an AMD Athlon II X4 295 OC to 2.9Ghz all core with 8GB 800Mhz DDRII RAM, an XFX AMD R7 240 2GB GPU, 240GB SSD/500GB HDD, and it runs Solus Budgie Linux just fine. So yeah it really is crazy far back you can go these days with some simple cheap as dirt upgrades, and get a usable daily system if you don't need/want the latest, and greatest for things like running new games, or high end 3D/CAD work, as even these old system I have can still edit 720p, and 1080p video using something like KdenLive which is free, but for sure no way you could do the same back in the 90's to mid 00's without struggling, unless all you where doing was maybe basic word processing, and not going online.

Did you get the Lexmark Z31 with it too?

Agreed. It would be nice to see it end up in a museum or something.

Teenager phase? This looks the same as a modern OptiPlex or ThinkCentre SFF. There's a world beyond gaming PCs.

​@@user-fu8pf8ww5uThat's ludicrously overspecced. To the degree that it might actually cause low-load issues.

Perfect preservation of an extremely clean home computer from 00ish... aol, aim, Ms works (and for many students you had to get a copy of word from someone because Microsoft works wouldn't open .doc files).

would make a little bit more sense to use a Pico PSU if I am honest

I have an Ambra with a composite out, as well as an Armada 1750. I think I might hoook it into my 1802, now that I have one ;)

Unfortunately I couldn't get the composite and S-video outputs to work. Maybe they didn't have the driver for it installed.

@@vwestlife See that's the thing, I wouldn't even know where to start for finding drivers this old... I am sure if you look hard enough. ;) Man, I remember growing up my Pap and Dad would bring computers home all the time and would fix em up and resell. Can't do that now, can't even really find them anymore like other's have said. :/ Sucks, I grew up tinkering with these, and was fortunate enough to have a Dad that introduced me to it. I remember one of my first experiments, I kept adding multiple Case fans into a Pentium 2 I think and I kept adding them until I blew the PSU. Had like 10 fans till it went, of course I wasn't pluggin them in like a normal person. I was daisy chaining them from a single fan port. Lmao only can handle so much and ofc I didn't know that I thought I could add as many fans as I wanted. 😂💀

@@vwestlife Ahh yeah, it probably required some specific drivers that are now unobtainable. Oh well.

I used to buy exclusively VIVO (video in, video out) graphics cards like the ATI All-in-Wonder, 3DFX Voodoo 3 3500 TV, etc. Mostly for the video in, so I could use my computer as a monitor to play SNES, PSX, and GC games, but I have also used the NTSC output. It's.... not great. At one point, I even bought an AVermedia VGA to TV scaler. First, unless you're running your desktop at 640x480, there's more resolution on your PC than your TV can display. So it's _always_ going to be a bit fuzzy, making text and details hard to see. Then there's the interlacing of standard definition video... It flickers like mad, because the high resolution graphics generate a lot of single horizontal lines, which is something you really want to avoid on a TV because it appears and disappears every other frame. (Technically, "field.") It can even be difficult to find the mouse cursor because it just turns into a tiny smudge. Also, the gamma curves aren't exactly the same either, so PC graphics tend to look overly contrast-y and dark with blown-out brights. Finally, the aspect ratios aren't a perfect match, so it will often feel a bit squished -- or, depending on how the scaling works, you might lose the sides or top/bottom in the overscan. Or all of the above. Suffice to say, if you use it for something it's suited for -- like playing video content (DivX downloads, for example!), or a PowerPoint presentation that adhered to video guidelines WRT size, detail, color, appropriate luminance range, etc. -- then it would be fine. But it is decidedly NOT the relatively inexpensive big-screen PC monitor you might have been hoping for.

The first thing that came into my mind was that it was porn, but I guess it could just be pics of his girlfriends, lol

@@tomgunton probably...

It was probably actually the XXX kinky porn folder. I would have looked, too, but if it what most computers with that file folder name during that era usually had it was porn that would cost him his account if he posted any of it.

It has an email icon so it was probably just a contacts file.

No BS RU-vidrs are very rare these days.

Yep, that was what I was thinking. A small 12V power adaptor and a Mini-Box picoPSU. I think the 60 W version would fit.

a PicoPSU might be the easiest thing to use in this case, but it would require some soldering as this thing doesn't have an ATX power socket.

*was = way

not exactly face reveal, the real one was over 10 years ago, but technically yes cause he never showed up ever since

Close, but that's not what I said.