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.
@@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.
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 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
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'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.
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! ✌🏼📺❤️
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? 🤨
~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. :)
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.
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...)
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!
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.
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!
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
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.
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 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!!🤣
•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!
~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.
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 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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
I was once again expecting you to use a clip from another RU-vidrs 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
I often wonder who sat down and designed all these products? There must have been factories dedicated to molding cheap ABS as quickly as possible, people making the molds, designing the packaging, etc it's so weird
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.
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.
I really like the radio, but they should have put a mouse wheel on it to tune in the stations. Why the little keyboard has screws is disconcerting. It could have been made to dial in the stations, as well, via the numeric keys. The only thing missing is something to tell you where you are at station-wise. Maybe a little indicator or analog readout. But, it is very cute. I have a USB Christmas tree. Would you ever do a video about useless USB attachments? LOL
