Retro PC's are they really worth 100's?

[Retro6]

I wanted to create a thread about retro PC desktop computers as many people seem to want an awful lot for them
but are they really worth the money?

With all things to take into consideration like aging electrical components and failing mechanical parts of drives, fans the chances of your vintage PC lasting decreases like a ticking time bomb. Effectively your buying junk for a lot of money. Its the same with old CRT monitors.

Many of these old PC's that people want a lot of money for haven't even been cleaned let alone serviced and the few that have been supposedly serviced normally means they have had just a dust off with Windows 98 chucked on them. They like a ticking time bomb to hardware failure and vintage parts are hard to find and often expensive.

First I'll start with the power supply they are normally one of the first things to go bang or just stop working due to aging electrolytic capacitors and other components, other components can be taken out in the circuits when caps go bad. Its the same with old motherboards and finding the correct value replacements isn't easy.

Drive belts in CD Rom drives always need replacing these days as well as giving the CD drive a good clean, and checking that parts are moving and operating correctly. Floppy drives also need a clean. There is no guarantee that you'll get a machine with a working floppy.

Ram can go bad and replacement Ram can cost a lot

Hard disk drives... hard drives are almost always dead or on there way out in Vintage machines. Its hard to impossible to find a 100% working replacement. Some people use SD cards which fail pretty quickly I've seen it happen so many times. CF cards are better but have to be setup properly and often isn't a permanent solution as Windows 9x systems don't support SSD or have Trim. Maybe ok for MS-DOS. Maybe ok for Windows 3.11

There are a lot of things that can go wrong and often do go wrong with vintage PC desktop computers.

What are your opinions on old desktop computers demanding high prices?

 

[Retro6]

I think its incredible that some hardware parts can last that long. I have a small collection of old computers I've had more that died than ones that have stayed working... all I'm saying is that its a real gamble. Lets imagine somebody just paid 250 quid for an old desktop and then the motherboard goes bad within 2 weeks that would be quite sickening to have to fork out lot of cash for another motherboard. It happens.

I bought a nice old IBM once and it started dying within a couple weeks. I didn't pay much for it about 20 quid. I got a replacement sent of the same type and the same thing happened to that. Maybe I'm just incredibly unlucky if its not happened to anybody else.

I just bought a 486 for 35 quid for my Windows 3.11 project hopefully fingers crossed its gonna be a good one.

 

[Retro6]

I have old stuff and some of them are rare.



This is a Dual Pentium 133Mhz - Asus MB

A Voodoo 3 2000 PCI
https://i.imgur.com/DeAwICd.jpg

My first CDR bought in 1995 if I'm not wrong, it is SCSI.. I think I paid around £1000 for it and each CD was about £10 back then. https://i.imgur.com/TOZbZOA.jpg

A few old CPUs: https://i.imgur.com/qWTfDAk.jpg

I have loads of old sound cards, modems and etc, but I've binned a lot of stuff as they were at my parents taking space.

Thats a nice board.

 

[Retro6]

Stuff doesnt die as easily as your making it out to.

It depends on what it is.

I've had a number of PC's that have died on me over the years.

Pentium III COMPAQ small form factor PC that worked well for a long time until it died in 2012 I used to love that machine.
The two IBM Pentium II computers I got on ebay both died
I've had several Pentium 4 machines that died over the past 10 years.

It is disheartening when you have old machines that fail and maybe all the ones I had were not very good quality but the good stuff is impossible to find now for a good price.Some of the early Pentium 1 & II computers were pretty awful, not all old computers were good quality. Some of the good quality PC's last. a lot of the 486 computers were pretty solid but as time went on from the Pentium Pro's in to the PII era the quality of a lot of PC's started diminishing "not all but a lot". .

 

[Retro6]

There are people who put high price tags on things just because "there vintage" regardless. Pentium 4 for example those computers have gone up to the price you'd pay for a better machine like a PII or PIII. In my opinion I don't see any real use that a P4 would have today because its not old or very compatible to run Windows 98 properly or for playing old games and its not new powerful enough to be an XP machine when there are better systems to run XP. Unless I'm missing something here?

Some P4 machines run pretty well on Windows 98 but a lot just aren't very ideal when a PIII computer from that era can do it better. A lot of these over priced Pentium 4 machines are nothing special but just because they are not current people are selling them as "vintage" with high price tags.

Fair enough if you have one lying around and you want to play about on Windows 98.

 

[Retro6]

It wasn't that long ago like less than 5 years ago P4's were dirt cheap. I had a couple in the attic and couple more in storage all of them worked when they were put away but on two of them, the caps were all bulging on the motherboards and they wouldn't power on the other two were still good so I put Windows 98 on both of them One runs Windows 98 beautifully but the other will do funky things and I get crashes on a lot of games. I repaired the other two boards but I chucked the cases away I only keep old retro white cases and all my PC builds are in old 90s cases even my modern builds.

Dual Core 2 will be next. Another 5 or 10 years and they will be going for big money I have lots of them including boxed unopened due core motherboards / processors and other stuff. They'd make good Windows XP machines. Windows 2000 can run on them pretty well so I've heard but I have never tried Windows 2000 on a dual core machine myself. I have a few iMac G3 computers but the iMac's don't seem very desirable.

 

[Retro6]

It's all a niche market. The majority of people don't care for old computers though. Personally I don't get the attraction of wanting to run old crappy games on Windows 95 or dos.
On the other hand, I have a collection of old computers - Acorn Electron, BBC Master, several Acorn Archimedes machines, C64s, Spectrums etc. Likewise, the majority of people will have no interest in these and won't be excited to run old crappy games on them such as Granny's Garden on the BBC

There was also a version of Granny's Garden for the Acorn Archimedes a later version different from the BBC Micro version but has seemed to of disappeared from history, only the BBC version is well known.

Its not just about playing old games. There is so much more to having an old computer. Yesterday I was looking at the Acorn A5000 wishing I could get one for a decent price even if its a broken one I love how it looks. I was going to see if I could get a AT PC case that looks like one to build a similar looking computer with a grey floppy drive and make some Acorn logos to stick on it.I will be running Windows 3.11 instead of RISC OS

Having at least a 3.5 floppy drive is a must for me on every retro build I do 5.25 disk drives are nice too even if the 5.25 disk drive isn't used it looks nice on the machine but the 3.5 floppy drive is always used. I like using floppy disks and I like old operating systems and old computer cases. I have quite a few Acorn Electrons I was planing on sticking a Raspberry Pi in one and making the Acorns keyboard work with the Pi. I used to get them on ebay for less than 20 quid but they probably cost a lot more now. I've got about 5 of them. I had a few BBC Micros too "one still in the attic in its original box and packaging" I sold the other two but I might just leave the other in the attic for another 5 years or so as the prices go up.

There is a lot of nostalgia in old computers. When I build my Windows 95 PC I will make sure I choose a system that dosn't turn off when you shut down the computer so I can see the message on the screen "It is Now Safe to Turn Off Your Computer" in red text. The feeling of pushing in that quality power button off/on and hearing the hard drive spin up, the sound of the CRT monitor coming on and the feeling of a quality keyboard. I have one of those old IBM keyboards with the clicky keys as well as many others. I'm glad I bought all these old keyboards and mice when they were cheap because they are big money now. I'll be keeping on mine to use on my retro builds.

If nobody was interested in these old computers then they wouldn't be so desirable with high price tags on them.

 

[Retro6]

There is not a lot of them around and there are a good number of people willing to pay for them. It's fine.
A good amount of people in this hobby are more than capable of replacing parts should they need a service of some sort. Quality components from back then were more robust than they are now.
I dont see many people whipping out a soldering iron on current motherboards to replace components like we can on the 90s stuff.

If you are patient and have a pinch of luck there are still great deals and even freebies to have. My storage cupboard currently has 2x P4 systems, a 4th gen intel system and and 8 core AMD FX system (as well as other machines...) that were all FREE from sites like FB marketplace and trash nothing.

Wow an 8 core AMD FX for nothing? mind you I can't say I'm surprised there is a hell of a lot of good things out there that get wasted. My experience with recycling companies is that they don't want to let people have anything because of there health and safety policies. There are plenty of people out there who throw away vintage PC's because they think nobody wants them. Computer Aid International scrap some really nice old PC's some of them rare. I asked them if I could take a few but they wasn't allowed to give anything to people even when I offered to pay them. Its ridiculous. I wont give up I will try again at some point.

The thing with many old PC's is that many were built on the cheap mass produced for business's. I've said this already and I'll say it again. Old PC\s do fail easily and sure there are some good quality machines worth paying a bit more for most of the stuff you see on ebay is not worth it. You can get out the soldering iron and replace some parts on a faulty motherboard but not everything. I've had my fair share of old computers fail on me They are pretty old now. I think its an absolute joke that P4's are now demanding vintage computer prices.