RetroFox

@RetroTechChris I use one now with my 486. Handy for use on the shelf though not wide enough for a mouse. Still, I’d certainly buy a couple more if I ran across them.

Did anyone else use these in the 90s? My high school had them in the computer lab! I'm tempted to go and pick this up!!

Somebody apparently thought putting Vista Basic on this P4 was a good idea. Fixed that last night at least. Seems like the laptop works but the dvd/cd drive hasn’t liked any CDs I fed it so far.

Also the Dell Inspiron 5100 I saw yesterday was still there (other i5 Dell gone) but now only $5 with a charger and bag. How could I say no? -sigh- They do make great portable Win XP PCs. Needs some cleaning and testing.

I might be crazy but picked this Sony SnapLab photo printer at the flea today for $15.looking forward to testing it out (fingers crossed it still works). Hey, at least it is smaller than a Kodak kiosk lol.

@hyrulian Yeah I forget the exact name but it’s the sheet of film on a spool that prints one layer of color each pass.

@RetroFox8Bit What’s the printing technology on this; I’m guessing thermal transfer due to the size?

Kind of gives an idea how far back these things go - one of the driver disks is for Mac OS 8.6 (the other is 9/OS X). I might have to try loading up the software just to see it. :)

Gave the Nomads a try as well. One works perfectly, far as I can tell, the other tries to power on, backlight comes on a moment, but then it shuts off. I'm guessing, given the shipping box and identical pair, that one broke and a replacement was ordered/sent. Still good for $2.

As for pickups today - two Mac power bricks plus a random one all for $2, a pair of Nomad MP3 players for $2 with the box, no SM cards sadly, a Fuji MX600-Zoom Smart Media digi-cam for $1, and a pair of Suncom joysticks that work with Apple IIe/c or PCs...

I had to try out the G3 Mac (Pismo) Laptop I picked up just to see what kind of shape it is in. It does chime and boot up buuuut the screen seems to be borked. Handy you can hook up an external VGA display, so I could at least see it working. Still, not bad all things considered.

As if that wasn't enough, on the way out I passed a box and saw this Mac G3 Pismo just sitting. Got it for $12 - sadly no power adapter BUT I have one at home with the Pismo I picked up last year at the swap meet.

Also saw a ROG gaming laptop with a $40 price, eh - pass. On the same table was an Action Max system, no games for $10. Interesting to see. Another table had this Atari Six-switch lot - didn't ask price, guy is usually reasonable though, just have all the Atari I need.

Flea Market Friday is back and it was an interesting one. Let's start with what I saw - Couple Dell laptops, an older P4 and a less old i5. Guy wanted $20 for both, not bad but the i5 was missing a power adapter and I've already got a Dell P4 like this one (or close enough)...

And while I call these boring, the caveat is they have potential! They all have 5-6 PCI slots and AGP slots. Add some more RAM, slap in a decent era appropriate AGP graphics card, IDE to SATA adapter - you have a pretty solid Win XP build.

While still a boring P4 office computer, this one seems to be the cleanest of the bunch. Still had lots of dust bunnies and someone labeled the front drives with marker. A blower for the dust and some IPA with wipes helped. Booted right up to Win XP.

Returned to the flea market today - browsed around the same pile of office equipment. Saw a HP LaserJet 4000 N that looked in good shape. Tempting. I did see the same beige box and this time the guy was willing to do $10 - one more to that stack.

The guy with a stack of computers had another and a Dell PowerEdge T620 and there was a network rack and other switches/hubs. Pretty sure all from an office. I asked about the one other pc but this time the guy wanted $25 for it, so passed. That vendor is all over the place.

Hit the flea today - saw a few things, starting with this internal Zip drive box that sadly had a Colorado tape drive inside (assume it was switched out with the Zip drive back when new). Guy also had this Visual Basic instructional set. Wanted $5 for both but passed…

Gave the Compaq a fresh DOS 6.22 install and tried some games. Checkit clocks the CPU at 50mhz, also tried the HDD test and that passed. Fun machine, just no sound card - lots of ISA slots though, so could easily add an old SoundBlaster or compatible.

The old HDD was grumpy at first and I had to swap a jumper to disable onboard video - but boots up. It’s some kind of 486 with 12mb of RAM. The video card from the 386 works as well. The HDD kind of works but gave non-system disk so booted from floppy to DOS for now.

Decent day for the flea market - first thing I saw there was this tower of old desktops. Guy wanted $10 each and to me, they all looked like stock PCs from an office. I must be crazy because I bought all six of them. It’ll be a fun(?) project to clean and test them.