General Stuff(tm)

[stephen_usher]

First day of Retrofest2026 over... Phew! It was busy.

[stephen_usher]

Back from the holiday in the South West... A horde of old PC stuff came back with me from my friends in W.Cornwall, destined to be redistributed.

[HigashiJun]

A horde of old PC stuff came back with me from my friends in W.Cornwall, destined to be redistributed.

Thank you for saving this poor abandoned stuff !

[Hellraiseruk]

Back from the holiday in the South West... A horde of old PC stuff came back with me from my friends in W.Cornwall, destined to be redistributed.

Don't keep us in suspense, what did you come back with - enquiring minds want to know...

JD

[stephen_usher]

Loads of stuff, including an early XT class Packard Bell PC clone, lots of Pentium era motherboards, probably around 30 Pentium/K5/K6/Cyrix CPUs, masses of ISA cards and ISA memory cards, boxes of assorted chips... oh and two US Robotics Courier modems.

Some of this stuff is already pre-allocated to people. The rest I'll have to inventory and pass on.

[stephen_usher]

In other news... Travelled 30 miles to Banbury to collect my Skoda after the garage said that they'd fixed it. On the way home the same error on the parking brake (spurious sensor reading probably) appeared again. Before they said it was ready they said that there had been a spurious air bag fault too but the computer said everything was fine... Methinks either a component on the data bus common to the two sensors or the bus itself has a fault. Probably just needs a connector reseating.

Their original hypothesis was that the 12V battery wasn't being charged and was giving a low voltage due to it not being coded to the car. They thought that after fixing this everything would be fine. Why a battery needs to be coded to a car for it to charge and give power is another question entirely, of course.

Of course, this means that my 25 year old SAAB is far more reliable than the less than 2 year old Skoda.

[HigashiJun]

Of course, this means that my 25 year old SAAB is far more reliable than the less than 2 year old Skoda.

I do agree with this statement...

The all electronic fancy stuff in nowadays cars is getting more problematic than ever.

[HigashiJun]

Loads of stuff, including an early XT class Packard Bell PC clone, lots of Pentium era motherboards, probably around 30 Pentium/K5/K6/Cyrix CPUs, masses of ISA cards and ISA memory cards, boxes of assorted chips... oh and two US Robotics Courier modems.

You found a real Aladdin's cave.

:lol:

[rubber_jonnie]

In other news... Travelled 30 miles to Banbury to collect my Skoda after the garage said that they'd fixed it. On the way home the same error on the parking brake (spurious sensor reading probably) appeared again. Before they said it was ready they said that there had been a spurious air bag fault too but the computer said everything was fine... Methinks either a component on the data bus common to the two sensors or the bus itself has a fault. Probably just needs a connector reseating.

Their original hypothesis was that the 12V battery wasn't being charged and was giving a low voltage due to it not being coded to the car. They thought that after fixing this everything would be fine. Why a battery needs to be coded to a car for it to charge and give power is another question entirely, of course.

Of course, this means that my 25 year old SAAB is far more reliable than the less than 2 year old Skoda.

I have to say my 3 and a bit year old Nissan has been mostly reliable, but it has had two faults, but they diagnosed and fixed the issues very quickly.

First was stop/start not working. Weirdly it was diagnosed as a switch in the seat belt stalk. Yep you MUST have a seatbelt on to use stop/start.

Then, being a mild hybrid the additional lithium battery failed. That was replaced but they then started bugging me about the 12v battery being low. It's been working fine since and hasn't needed a new 12v battery, it was probably low because the lithium battery wasn't doing its thing.

As for coding the battery to the car that seems nuts. I can imagine a secondary battery for the electric motor might be coded, but not the 12v battery.

It wouldn't surprise me if like you say there is a bad connection or water in a connector due to bad seals.

Copilot_20260616_093338.jpg

Oops wrong kind of bad seal...

[stephen_usher]

Loads of stuff, including an early XT class Packard Bell PC clone, lots of Pentium era motherboards, probably around 30 Pentium/K5/K6/Cyrix CPUs, masses of ISA cards and ISA memory cards, boxes of assorted chips... oh and two US Robotics Courier modems.

You found a real Aladdin's cave.

:lol:

Yeah, it's called my friends' house and outbuildings. This is only the stuff I could fit in the car on the way back from holiday in Cornwall, putting all the luggage on the back seat and leaving the boot free for the stuff. This is the tip of the iceberg.