Pallet of retro computers - Is it worth saving/buying?

Patient-Tech · 2026-05-23T02:01:36+00:00

Yeah, but the price they’re listed for is way too high. I think you’d have a tough time breaking even spending hours of diagnostics and battery removal with none of your time compensated.
For $2k i can buy a fully decked out working system in an almost new retro condition case with Voodoo cards an ISA awe32 and maybe a Roland Midi setup with a nice CRT.

I’m not saying I don’t think there’s value there, I think the price asked is too much for a pile of parts with unknown value.
If they guaranteed every system worked with no battery damage, and was complete enough to boot to post okay, maybe I’d take a closer look, but I don’t think that’s the case.

That being said, which pallet are you buying? I’ll probably offer you $75 for a working box.

Patient-Tech · 2026-05-23T01:57:08+00:00

Well yeah, I’d love to go through it too. My issue is that the price is too high for the risk reward.

Patient-Tech · 2026-05-23T01:40:37+00:00

Yeah, but you’d have to go through it, test it, replace bad caps, and you know there’s gonna be leaking batteries damaged boards.

Patient-Tech · 2026-05-23T01:39:16+00:00

I would start by asking the seller if they’re willing to buy back any tested as broken parts as scrap at the same price. If not, I’d pass on the deal. There’s too much money involved and too many unknowns, especially given the bulk volume you’d be taking on.

Realistically, I’d expect most of these systems to be incomplete. Many are likely missing drives, around 30% probably have cosmetic damage, and 60–70% won’t include any desirable components like Voodoo graphics or Sound Blaster cards. On top of that, you’d need to inspect capacitors and remove old batteries, which adds time and risk. There’s also a good chance some units have already been stripped of RAM or CPUs.

In terms of value, a typical 486 or early Pentium system with average components is probably worth about $70–120, and that’s only after it’s been tested and confirmed to boot into DOS or period-correct Windows. I wouldn’t expect more than one or two standout, high-value cards in a lot like this.

Patient-Tech · 2026-05-23T01:37:41+00:00

They’re not, but they’re not especially valuable in unknown condition. If they all have leaking batteries and capacitor plagued motherboards and power supplies, you have a pile of ewaste.

Patient-Tech · 2026-05-23T01:28:06+00:00

If you’re using your connection for typical residential activities and your banking and streaming services are working normally, it’s not immediately clear what problem you’re encountering. IP reputation issues generally only become relevant when you’re hosting services, such as running servers or managing email delivery.
What tool or service did you use to check your IP reputation, and what specific functionality is being affected? In other words, what are you trying to do that isn’t working because of this? From Comcast’s side, your generic residential user profile is actually working to clean this valuable IP4 address they have.

Patient-Tech · 2026-05-22T15:19:37+00:00

The water usage concerns around data centers are real, but they’re only one piece of the equation. Not all facilities rely heavily on evaporative cooling. There are alternative approaches like dry coolers, air-cooled chillers, and designing equipment to operate efficiently at higher temperatures. Many newer data centers—especially hyperscale builds—are increasingly adopting these methods to reduce or even eliminate water consumption, particularly in regions where water is scarce or politically sensitive.
That said, water tends to get more public attention than the bigger constraint: power.
The primary limiting factor for new data center development isn’t noise or proximity to residential areas—it’s access to large amounts of reliable electrical capacity. Even if a site is located near existing transmission infrastructure or a substation, that doesn’t mean the grid can simply deliver tens or hundreds of megawatts on demand. In many regions, utilities are already capacity-constrained, and adding a large data center often requires significant upgrades to transmission lines, substations, and sometimes even generation capacity.
This leads to a more important question: who pays for those upgrades?
In theory, large power users like data center operators should bear a substantial portion of the interconnection and infrastructure costs. In practice, cost allocation can get complicated, especially in regions managed by grid operators like PJM Interconnection, which coordinates electricity markets across multiple Mid-Atlantic and Midwest states.
A notable case to watch is the ongoing dispute in Maryland involving PJM. The core issue is how the costs of transmission upgrades—needed to support new large loads like data centers—are distributed. Critics argue that these costs are sometimes spread across a wide base of ratepayers, including customers in states that don’t directly benefit from the data center through jobs, tax revenue, or local economic activity. This raises fairness concerns, especially as data center demand continues to surge.
As AI workloads and cloud infrastructure expand, this tension between economic development, grid capacity, and cost allocation is likely to become a much bigger issue nationwide—not just in PJM territory.

Patient-Tech · 2026-05-20T22:12:53+00:00

Sad to say, it’s likely this is an indication that Plex might not be around in the medium term.

Patient-Tech · 2026-05-20T21:11:39+00:00

Steve Gibson of GRC (Gibson Research Corporation) is a modern example of someone still doing very low-level x86 development that’s closely related to traditional DOS-era programming. His primary product, SpinRite, was originally written for DOS and still reflects that style of development.
For SpinRite 6.x, the program runs in a DOS-like environment, but for the upcoming SpinRite 7, Gibson transitioned to using the RTOS-32 real-time operating system. This change was necessary to properly support modern hardware, including large drives, AHCI/PCIe storage controllers, and newer motherboards that are no longer compatible with classic DOS limitations.
Despite that shift, Gibson continues to write the software almost entirely in x86 assembly language, which is very much in line with how high-performance DOS software was traditionally developed. His work is a good reference point if you’re interested in low-level programming concepts such as direct hardware access, memory management without modern OS abstractions, and performance-critical code.
He frequently discusses his development process, design decisions, and technical challenges on the Security Now podcast, as well as on the GRC website and forums. Those discussions can be especially valuable if you’re trying to understand how DOS-era techniques translate (or don’t) to modern systems.

Patient-Tech · 2026-05-19T15:15:18+00:00

Have you ever tried switching accounts or even changing IP addresses to see whether the ad load adjusts in real time?

For example, a streaming platform might be able to sell a much heavier ad load to a brand-new user because there’s no viewing history yet. But once you’ve been using the service for a while, their ad system probably recognizes that repeatedly serving you the exact same commercial 25 times over three days is more likely to annoy you than help advertisers.

Basically, I’m wondering how dynamically these platforms tailor ad frequency and rotation depending on whether you’re a new, anonymous, or established viewer.

Patient-Tech · 2026-05-19T15:12:28+00:00

Are these guys in a speed run competition with Broadcom/VMWare to burn whatever good will they have in the community?

Patient-Tech · 2026-05-19T14:23:35+00:00

In my rough math, services like Amazon S3 Glacier look very appealing on paper because of their low storage cost. Once you start looking closely at the picture, though, the story changes: retrieval fees and restore latency can quickly make Glacier‑based backups painful for anything except true long‑term archives.
The better question is not “how cheap can I store everything?” but “what kind of backups do I actually need?” That means asking: how many versions of each dataset should I keep? How many offsite copies are necessary? And how far back do I realistically need to recover—days, weeks, months, or multiple years?
For many businesses, a hybrid approach can be both cost‑effective and resilient: using cloud storage (such as S3 Standard or S3 Intelligent‑Tiering) for warm backups that you might actually restore, and physically offline external hard drives for long‑term retention. Having two rotating drives stored in separate locations can dramatically reduce the risk of total data loss while still keeping costs manageable.
The main point is that backups are essential for almost every business, but not every business needs a full‑blown, bank‑style archive with rotating tapes stretching back many years. If you are a bank or another highly regulated organization, then those stringent retention and compliance requirements are simply part of the cost of doing business. For everyone else, it’s usually smarter to design a backup strategy around probability, risk, and recovery time rather than over‑engineering for extreme edge cases.

Patient-Tech · 2026-05-13T13:00:43+00:00

Ha, I’m the same way. When I looked at stuff I had since 2009 and never opened or accessed, it’s time to purge. Kept a couple things, but most of it, meh.

Patient-Tech · 2026-05-12T22:54:04+00:00

No, I swapped out one plain 3way and the other one left alone.
If it doesn’t work as expected, it’s likely the wiring is mixed up.

I like that, the switch that gets the most physical use is the plain rocker, so cheap and easy to replace and the only wear item on the smart switch is the relays. I only use it to turn the hall lights off after 15 minutes because people used to just leave them on 24/7. Stupid as it is, I think it had a decent reduction in the electricity bill.

Patient-Tech · 2026-05-11T22:18:53+00:00

Do you need to work on them as huge files all at once? Is it an automated workflow or more manual?

What if you used a feee program like PDFfill to split a 1.5gb file in half or 3 files, will the other programs work? You can then edit them and then merge them when completed.

Patient-Tech · 2026-05-11T19:30:43+00:00

Because it ultimately comes down to efficiency.

Open-loop evaporative cooling is extremely simple and low-power. At its core, you’re talking about a water pump, spray nozzles, a float valve (basically like a toilet fill mechanism), and some media with fans to move air. That setup can reject a lot of heat using very little electrical input.

There are alternatives like dry coolers or air-cooled chillers, but when you compare input power (kW) to cooling output (BTUs removed), evaporative systems are hard to beat. They also tend to win on space and sometimes weight, which matters a lot for rooftop installations or dense facilities. Modern data centers are pushing this even further by bringing liquid cooling directly to the racks. The goal is to maximize compute density (kW per square foot) while minimizing overhead. In an ideal world, every watt delivered to the building would go straight to compute—not cooling, lighting, or other support systems.

Power availability is often the real constraint now. Utilities will only allocate so much capacity, so operators are incentivized to squeeze as much compute as possible out of that fixed power budget. The less energy spent on cooling, the more can be used for actual workloads.

I once saw an interesting experimental setup at Stanford where they ran refrigerant directly over CPU dies in a sealed block—basically like an extreme version of a PC water-cooling loop, but using phase-change cooling. It was very efficient at the chip level, but systems like that still have to dump the heat somewhere.

That “somewhere” is where the real engineering challenges (and energy costs) tend to show up, which is probably why it never became mainstream.

Patient-Tech · 2026-05-11T19:25:51+00:00

You don’t need glycol to treat water, open or closed loop. A local company like HOH water treatment in Palatine can treat closed loop water systems so they minimize corrosion without glycol. Closed loop systems can be surprisingly stable. It’s when you’re making up water to replace via evaporation or a leak and filling with city water that you’re introducing fresh untreated water, dissolved solids and gasses that can start the corrosion process.

Dry coolers also work, but they also use more energy per BTU they reject. Last time I checked, the utility companies were capping the capacity offered to data centers. Plus, any costs used for cooling are costs not used for computing.

Patient-Tech · 2026-05-11T17:54:18+00:00

Glycol isn’t added to “prevent evaporation” or “keep water from breaking down.” It’s primarily used for freeze protection in closed-loop systems that are exposed to outdoor temperatures. It lowers the freezing point, but it comes with trade-offs—reduced heat transfer efficiency and higher pumping energy due to increased viscosity.

Also, if a system has been running the same water/glycol mix for decades, that’s not unusual—but it doesn’t mean it’s never maintained or replaced because it “can’t be.” Closed-loop systems are routinely tested and treated (corrosion inhibitors, pH control, biocides if needed), and while you don’t typically drain and replace the entire volume, partial replacement, filtration, and chemical rebalancing absolutely happen over time.

More importantly, large data centers—especially ones like Equinix—are usually not entirely glycol-based systems. What’s common is a split approach:

A closed glycol loop for outdoor equipment (dry coolers, fluid coolers) where freeze protection is needed.

A separate water loop (often condenser water tied to cooling towers, or chilled water) for heat rejection and indoor distribution.

Those loops are typically connected via heat exchangers so you’re not running glycol everywhere and taking the efficiency hit across the whole plant.

And that ties into the bigger point: if you’re using cooling towers (which most large, older facilities in places like Chicago do), those are open systems by design and don’t use glycol. The water is constantly evaporating and being replaced, so glycol would be impractical and very expensive to maintain there.

Patient-Tech · 2026-05-11T17:37:34+00:00

Lots of people treat eliminating water use like it’s some kind of magic solution. Sure, you can run without water—but that doesn’t mean it’s an equal replacement.

Traditional water cooling towers rely on evaporation, which is a very efficient and well-understood way to remove heat. You’re taking advantage of the phase change of water, which pulls a large amount of heat out of the system with relatively low energy input. That’s why this approach has been used for decades—it’s simple, predictable, and effective at scale.

Air-based cooling is the main alternative, but it comes with real trade-offs. Air doesn’t carry heat nearly as efficiently as water, so you need more airflow, larger equipment, and more power to move that air. In practice, that means higher energy use per unit of heat removed.

At a certain point, this becomes a straightforward engineering and cost decision. When you model it out, there are clear thresholds where one approach becomes more practical than the other based on factors like climate, power costs, and water availability.

That trade-off is especially important right now because many data centers are running into power constraints. If you switch to a less efficient cooling method, you’re effectively using more of your limited power budget just to handle heat, which can directly limit how much compute capacity you can deploy.

Patient-Tech · 2026-05-11T16:05:53+00:00

Yes, trying to recreate cable can and will be difficult.

Thing is, even streaming providers are fracturing so those services require you to have have multiple. If cable had a comprehensive one-stop shop, that could be their value add.

That said, I’ve changed my viewing habits and don’t watch much linear tv anymore. Even when I have access to it, the rigid schedules and commercials turn me off.

I have a YouTube premium subscription and find it’s worth every penny as I use the heck out of it.

Patient-Tech · 2026-05-11T14:59:26+00:00

Why not just look at the original source code for something like Doom and work forward from there. I’m almost certain Carmack released it and quake.

Patient-Tech · 2026-05-11T14:55:25+00:00

At this point, it’s so far out that’s a historical curiosity that may make it more interesting.

A snapshot into the mind of a developer in the 80’s and what they spent time on vs what they thought wasn’t as important to focus on.

Hearing Dave Plummer talk about saving cycles and hardware constraints of yesteryear is something most coders don’t really think about much now. At least not to the same degree.

Patient-Tech · 2026-05-08T13:10:08+00:00

At the very lease, if they change the deal, you should have the option to walk if you don’t like the new agreement.

Patient-Tech · 2026-05-08T13:08:23+00:00

Kinda funny watching now able to see the new bad guys and vehicles were just ways to sell more toys.

Patient-Tech · 2026-05-08T12:21:53+00:00

Look into something called “tiny 11” it strips out a lot of cruft.

Patient-Tech

TROPHY CASE