I started collecting (hoarding) computers back in the 1990s, although sadly I don't have any of those particular machines any more. These days I often scour through ebay to see if there is anything that catches my eye. Here on this page is some of my hoard. Not all is technically retro, since some things are younger than 20 years old, but can at least be considered to be out of date.

Hoarding is something I've had an issue with for many years, although for a period I managed to overcome it somewhat. That was until I started to think of things "I used to have" (some of which I had actively parted with in order to live more minimally!) and thought of them with regret, like "I wish I hadn't thrown that out/sold it cheap when it was considered worthless... if I'd have kept it, it would be worth something now..." So I probably sought to replace some of those things. There are also lots of excuses when it comes to considering parting with things (the typical excuses of a hoarder), even those that have little or no sentimental value. I hope to use this page to help me work through the things I have already acquired in order to part with them. Listed on the right are some things I have recently parted with.

Apple Mac Pro Another Mac has been added to my collection but this one ticks two boxes; firstly it's a Mac Pro that I like the look of and have been on the look out for at a reasonable price, but secondly it has dual Xeon CPUs and I've wanted to dabble with something of this ilk, I just didn't expect it to be in a Mac format. This system was a pretty good deal since it included, in addition to the main hard drive, a 1TB drive and a 2TB, which I shall sell separately. There are a couple of issues with the system: the DVD drive fails to eject due to the finicky covers, and there is a bend to one of the feet, other than that it's built like a tank and weighs as much as one (25KG). I'm wondering if I can install Linux on it and replace the simple graphics card with something with more grunt?

Cybikos I now have two Cybikos from the year 2000. Both require new batteries and one is faulty. You can read more about them [here].

Mouse Mats I now have two "retro" mouse mats. First the Hagar the Horrible one [bottom] which I bought a while back as new old stock, it has a copyright date of 1998 on it; sadly it has developed a slight crack at the left edge and the backing has somehow shrunk from front to back by about 5mm. I recently gave my niece one of my other mouse mats so I had a quick look online for a replacement and found the Twix one [top] selling cheap. Copyright 1999 it features a slogan from their advertising campaign of the time which I remember well: "Twix, take a break from the norm", but other than that I don't particularly like the overall design here. It also displays the URL for the website www.cafebreak.co.uk which neither still exists or has any functioning backups on the Waybackmachine. However you can still watch one of the TV adverts [here]. To this day I still come out with the line "Grey'll never go out of fashion, because it's never been in fashion!" and I have "Norm's the name, sensible's the game!" ringing in my head.

HP 6735 Laptops I found this pair of laptops on ebay, seemingly identical but one is an older single core Sempron-based system with a 60GB hard drive while the other had a more capable dual core CPU and had been upgraded to an SSD with Windows 10 installed; I'd mistakenly/assumed they were identical and was just going to prepare them for quick resale. However, for the Sempron I might set it back to factory, if only I can determine which version of Windows the COA refers to...

ECS P6BAT-A+ Motherboard with Intel Pentium III This bundle I found cheap on ebay seems ideal for going in the beige case listed below. The PIII is a 500MHz model and the board with its weird name is rev.2.0 (whatever the difference is with the rev.1.0 I don't know). It also includes 256MB of RAM, so it's ready to go. I was also given some hard drives today, one of which is IDE. I'm not sure which OS to install on it...

A Job Lot of Graphics Cards This was a deal for 10 "old" but working graphics cards, and the seller threw in a couple of extras because the heatsink was lose on one. I had fun testing them all and it turned out two were faulty were anyway, but the lose heatsink was easily rectified. One is an AGP card, the others and more modern with 512MB-1GB RAM. I'll either sell them individually or use them to upgrade from onboard graphics in various computers.

A Beige Case I'm not sure why I justified getting another beige case, but I purchased it with the Dell laptop below, so combined it was a reasonable deal.

Dell Inspiron 4000 with Pentium III This was sold to me with a faulty power socket... will it be as simple as that?

iMac G5 This was going for a reasonable price considering it was listed as fully working and included its keyboard and mouse. It will sit next to my G4, and newer iMac... (see below)... until I decide what to do with it/them.

IDE Hard Drives I got my hands on a few IDE hard drives with reasonable capacity (120/160GB) to use in some of my computers that lack SATA.

Creative Sound Blaster Live 5.1 SB0100 Sound Card I recently sold one of these at a reasonable price. I think I acquired it as part of a system that didn't really need a separate sound card. Then I saw another for sale at a low price (compared to what I sold my previous one for) so I bought this one to sell on. I'm not sure why these particular one fetch a higher price than "similar" ones. Perhaps something about the midi chip?

Dell Studio Hybrid 140g Computer (Windows Vista) Current condition: faulty/damaged I'd not seen one of these before, but the translucent case caught my eye. While Dell is quite well known for their boring office boxes, they have occasionally produced some interesting and Y2Kesque stuff like this. Year: 2008? Read more here.

Power Mac G4 "Graphite" with Zip Drive I've wanted one of these machines for a while but had been waiting for one at the right price, and not in too poor of a condition. This one required a hard drive and the OS installing. With that out of the way I also need the correct keyboard and mouse; I have a monitor that should suit it. Released: 1999; Discontinued: 2004.

Sony Bloggie MHS-CM5 I've wanted to try a Sony Bloggie for a while and this is the one I got hold of, complete in original box, but it was potentially faulty as it wouldn't charge/switch on. Thankfully a replacement battery sorted it out. Given that the Bloggie line is seemingly targeted at bloggers (it's in the name, right?) the camera is not great of this as even at full arm length and zoomed right out, you appear somewhat too close.

Apple iMac A1311 I've had a few of these in my possession now, I ended up purchasing a couple to use to repair a client's machine and while I still have one of those I recently purchased another for a low price that included the original keyboard and mouse; these are worth a bit on their own. Sadly the machine has been medalled with and is somewhat faulty with the fans constantly spinning at full speed, this is therefore a work in progress.

Amstrad Notepad NC100 These seem to fetch a reasonable price but I got this one cheap because it was listed as having a faulty keyboard... but weirdly enough it has been working fine for me. I'm just awaiting delivery of a serial cable before I use it more. It may well replace my AlphaSmart 3000 (see below). Update: being largely a muggle when it comes to Serial connections I ordered the wrong cable...

Dan / Dantum Dan has an ASUS A7N8X motherboard and an Athlon XP CPU. The case, whilst lacking a front blanking cover, has a removable motherboard tray. It has a "650W" Q-Tec triple fan PSU (one of which I had to replace, which was quite a task because the enclosure has 12 screws). At present I've stripped the whole thing down, cleaned out the case and reassembled it and installed a hard drive and Windows XP, there are still a few more things to do though.

Blank Media I have a small hoard of blank media, some new old stock, including audio and video cassettes, CDs, DVDs, and floppy disks. My thought is that some of this stuff may (one day) cease to be manufactured, and thus be more sought after.

Toshiba Satellite Pro 420CDT Another one of these. This one was sold to me as faulty... it doesn't power up properly; I've tinkered with it but can still not get it to start up; the power light comes on but nothing on the screen and no sounds of life. I'll probably just sell it on as it is.

Toshiba Satellite M60-132 Laptop (XP) With original recovery discs this is a nice 17" laptop. The only problem is the mouse pad doesn't work. I need to dismantle it to investigate...

Dell Latitude E5500 (Vista) Originally from 2009, although with Windows 10+ on it it doesn't seem retro! I got it for a good price though.

Panasonic Lumix DMC FZ30 I finally re-found the camera that I wanted. I think these are from 2005. I've enjoyed using it so far.

K7T266 Motherboard The motherboard arrived faulty/damaged but includes CPU, cooler, RAM, and graphics card. Plus I got a partial refund.

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"Computer case with power supply" ... I can't remember which one this is and ebay no longer has an picture for the listing... I think it has an Abit motherboard because I next purchased this AGP graphics card to go with it:

Asus CrossFireX M4A88TD-V For some reason I decided I needed another go at a CrossFire system when I saw this board. The downside to my previous one (see below) was that it needed an additional slot between the two PCI-Express slots, as the top card would just cook under load.

2022

Sony DCR-PC5E Camcorder Listed as requiring a battery. It now has a battery (which cost more than I paid for the camera). I have made some recordings on this but I have yet to do anything with those recordings...

Alba Data Recorder Sold as faulty due to "no sound output". It's still faulty... It's also missing a knob (I didn't notice that when I was eagerly buying it off ebay for £6...)

Crown Portable CD Player CDN-73Q I'd acquired a Crown-branded CD player that was having issues so I was looking for another to use as parts. I found this one and when I queried the seller about its fault they just offered it for the cost of postage, being keen to find a home for it. I can't remember where I got to with its issues... I like the style/colours though.

Sony Mavica Camera, and bag Seeing that this Mavica included the original bag I thought it would be ideal to pear up with my first Mavica (see below) or maybe even swap the floppy drive with, if that's possible. I haven't tried that yet...

Toshiba Satellite 4010CDT Laptop I've installed Windows ME on this and it's fun to use. It has been handy to create things like BIOS discs using the floppy drive.

Sony Mavica MVC-FD88 Listed as untested but works. Perhaps the floppy drive is somewhat temperamental, or maybe it's my floppy disks... yes, this camera saves photos (and video clips) onto floppy disks. I have now caught the camera-collecting bug...

Various parts... I can't remember what's here, but some will be useful. Some Athlon XP processors and a graphics card... oh, and a hard drive enclosure.

Acer PC case... I need to do something with this. I think it arrived with just the optical drive, and maybe a PSU, maybe...

AlphaSmart 3000 This is a portable word processor which caught my eye with its early Apple/Y2K aesthetics. It's quirky yet handy to use; it uses 3 x AA batteries which last an age, the data is transferred as text via a standard USB cable as if the device was a keyboard (typing fast), and the dot-matrix display is legible outside. The keyboard however isn't as slick to type on as I'd hoped.

Dell XPS 210 PC (Vista) This is an interesting slim PC from Dell; the door for the optical drive hinges up and open from the press of a button. It's somewhat Alien-esque.

Time Bundle I bought this bundle of things because it included a Time branded keyboard. I had a Windows 98 computer from Time back in the day. Sadly though, while the keyboard is Time branded, it's a later model from when the company went into decline and got too heavy-handed with the cost cutting.

eBox System The seller clearly didn't know what they were selling but this was essentially a working computer. I just need to decide what to do with it.

ATI Radeon R9250 256MB AGP In box. It was a good price and I think I needed an AGP card for something...

Gigabyte GA-K8N-SLI Motherboard with Zalman Cooler Also, an AMD Athlon 3500+ CPU. I'm not sure what I need a SLi board for; I don't have that sense of intrigue as I had for the CrossFire boards, I think because I've had SLi boards before.

ZX Spectrum+ 48K In original box. While it was sold to me as working it ended up having an issue with the keyboard ribbon cables which I was thankfully able to resolve. I used to have one of these systems back in the early 2000s, along with a 128K +2 and +3. I don't have those any more but I do have a grey 128K in need of repair (see below). I also later bought a couple of books to go with this (it was lacking its original manual).

Fujitsu E620 PC Ready and waiting for a fresh install of Windows XP. This system came with a Creative sound card installed (to be used elsewhere), making the whole thing a good deal.

Sony VAIO PCG Laptop I got this at a cheap price as it was listed as faulty. While it does power on, it is essentially unuseable due to battery leakage. This I was able to ascertain by only removing a cover, but complete disassembly will be required to proceed (not straightforward with this model) and even then will likely be beyond my abilities to fix. I do like a lot of the VAIO range of things...

Antec Fusion Media Center I got hold of this system for a good price with the intention of using / reselling the Antec case (from around 2008). So far I've figured out which versions of Windows the drivers for the case work with (the volume control knob doesn't work with all).

2021

Apple iPod Nano 4th Gen A1285 Another iPod to replace the battery in... I can't remember what I did with this...

Aero Cool CPU Cooler This has been a handy and snazzy cooler for one of my Athlon XP systems.

Compaq G750 iPAQ Keyboard Since I had recently acquired an iPAQ (see below) I thought this would be handy if it worked (I think it was listed as "untested"), but sadly I have been unable to get it to work, it also seems fiddly to dismantle without springs boinging off everywhere...

Viglen Genie Motherboard Bundles with Intel Pentium LGA775 CPUs x5... I thought I could resell these at a profit, but I still have the majority.

ZX Spectrum +2 128K (grey) I used to have a couple of the black versions (and a 48K model) back in my school/college days (they were already out of date then), and this one was going cheap, in its original box, but faulty. It's still faulty; I replaced the power socket and voltage regulator but there seems to be a "board/chip fault" somewhere, and I'm not the Adrian Black I dreamed I was.

Compaq iPAQ H3970 I got this complete in box at a relatively low price because the battery was dead. While direct replacements weren't available I was able to find one to work with it, which was a little risky because the original had a BMS board attached to it, but luckily it worked fine and I played many rounds of solitaire on it...

Samsung R510 Laptop Motherboard and CPU I can't remember why I bought this (other than it was cheap)... I must still have it somewhere...

HP Pavilion Media Centre Mini S7610 With XP Media Center... I actually sold this once but when I came to do the final checks before shipping it started having issues so I refunded the seller. It turned out to be a faulty graphics card. Now I just need to sell it again... but I quite like it!

Akasa AK-FC-06SL Fan Controllers I found someone selling some of these 3.5" fan controllers that were around in the 2000s; I assume they were new old stock, either that or they're still manufactured.

EXcool Case An imitation Apple Mac case from the 2000s that I bought to create an imitation Mac... complete with a Linux install that resembled Apple OS... I used the MSI K9N Neo bundle listed below.

iPod 8GB I thought I would have a crack at replacing the battery in one of these... It didn't go well; the case got bent getting into the thing, and then my soldering skills weren't up to par.

ASRock M3A770DE Motherboard and CPU I bought this bundle mainly because the RAM was interesting... the modules have heatsinks for watercooling (I sold those though).

ABit SG72 Motherboard and CPU An old Socket 478 bundle from around 2004. Either I build a system with it or sell it as is...

Winfast K8S754 Motherboard and CPU An old Socket 755 bundle from around 2005. Either I build a system with it or sell it as is...

Gigabyte GA-M68MT-S2P System From around 2011 I think, so not that old. With AMD Athlon II X3 CPU. I need to get this ready for selling...

Shuttle XPC System (Windows XP) It needed some fans and PSU caps replacing... Essentially I stripped it down and put it back together again. It's a nice looking system but not all that quiet.

MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III (CrossFireX) I saw this pair for what I considered to be a good price and had the idea to build a CrossFireX machine...

MSI MS-7260 / K9N Neo Motherbaord with AMD Athlon 64 CPU Nothing special, just a Socket 939 bundle from 2007 that I got cheap. It had an issue where the CMOS would reset without power, even after replacing the battery. I believe it turned out to be a suspect-looking capacitor on the edge of the board near the RAM slots.

HP 6715S Laptop "Designed for Windows XP" with an AMD Turion CPU. Presently it has an SSD installed with Ubuntu Linux, but I may well revert it back to XP.

ASRock ConRoe1333 Motherboard with Intel Core2 Duo 4400 CPU Nothing special, just an LGA775 bundle from 2007 that I got cheap. What to do with it?

HP Compaq DC5800 A pretty boring business box, originally with Windows Vista on it. I upgraded it to Windows 10 on an SSD with a dedicated graphics card and it works well, but I may downgrade it back to Vista..

Advent 5411 laptop parts For some reason I had the idea to buy the motherboard and CPU (and then the necessary top panel) from an Advent 5411 laptop, to construct into a custom-built computer. The parts ended up being unreliable though, but I still have them...

Akasa AK-862 CPU Cooler ...for AMD Athlon 64 CPUs.

Sony eReader PRS-600 This is my second eReader. This one has touch screen although I discovered this makes the screen less clear compared to the non-touch screen versions like my previous one. The touch screen is good for highlighting though, which I do a lot of. E-ink displays are also good for reading EPUB files outside. I also have a Kindle Fire, which in turn is good for reading PDFs in bed as I don't need the light on for that and with the backlight turned way down the battery lasts well.

 

Sold Stuff

Antec Sonata Solo Piano Black. A nice case in its original box. It had a complete PC inside but I removed all that and sold the case on after repairing the power button.

OCZ Flex XLC RAM with water cooled heat spreaders!

Panasonic RC_6099. My dad had a radio alarm clock so as a child I wanted one too, and ineed I had one, a cassette player one. I don't know what happened to it, but for a while I had/used this one, but it went unused for so long and I noticed the plastic was starting to yellow, so I sold it. I kind of miss it...!

ATCS Case

Radio Shack CCR-81 Computer Cassette Recorder. I managed to break one of the button mechanisms on this, so I sold it on as faulty.

CoolerMaster WaveMaster case sold, in original box. A rare find. It just needed a thorough clean.

Bundle of AMD Slot A CPUs, one with a decent Thermaltake cooler making the bundle a good deal and I subsequently sold them all. If I had a Slot A-based system I would have kept that Thermaltake one though!

HP Pavilion DV6 - replaced the motherboard/BIOS and sold! I did like this laptop though.