[Irinikus]

I always fancied and B&O. I'd walk past the B&O shop on the way to school in the early 90's and it was another world. Then after school I'd go home and rock out on my $30 Alba cassette deck. It was total dog $h1t but it was mine.

I won't begin to understand what your purchase is but I hope when it's done you'll send an update!

Here's a picture of my B&O Penta's, showing their driver configuration:





Each speaker has 4 bass units, which are in perfect condition. The midrange units are arranged in a "line array" type setup and have foam surrounds which don't age well!

The previous owner of my speakers did a particularly bad job in giving the divers new surrounds, so I've gone ahead and simply ordered a complete set of 8 that have been properly serviced. These drivers do in-fact sound very good! I was looking to replace them with more modern units, but in the end the original units proved hard if not impossible to beat. (They're German-made!)

I will still look at replacing the tweeters with ScanSpeak illuminator tweeters though:



The filter caps in these speakers do take a beating during their lives! Each amp module possesses two 10000MFD electrolytic filter caps, which need to be replaced: (These are not my pictures and are only being used for explanatory purposes.)









I still need to buy these two service kits, to complete service:

[Gamefan]

Are you going for a complete refresh or a "cap kit" type of refresh? Either way, looks fun!

[Irinikus]

I'm going to swap out all of the components that are known to take strain. B&O has quite a vibrant community, so there's plenty of information and support available.

[Irinikus]

The spares arrived today and I'm very happy with them! (I am however going to wait until I have all the parts I need before moving forward with the service though!)

This little purchase cost me 615 UKP (including shipping from the UK and taxes), but it's worth it!

[jpstewart]

I'm doing some LAN upgrades here, so I recently purchased a new D-Link DGS-1250-28X Ethernet switch and DSR-250N router.  They're from D-Link's "business class" product line rather than typical consumer junk.  I found it amusing (but not surprising) that they showed up in plain brown boxes rather than the flashy retail packaging of consumer-grade stuff.

       

(First one is the router, the second is the switch box.)

The DSR-250N router has 1 (Gigabit) WAN port, 7 Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports, and 1 port that can be configured as either a secondary WAN port or an internal LAN port.  It also supports wireless-N connectivity.  That's more ports than I need on a router.  My favourite feature -- and the main reason I bought this one -- is the serial port for out-of-band management.  I could have gotten faster wireless for the same money, but I would have had to give up the serial port.  I don't use wireless much, and I feel more secure turning off network-based management and relying solely on the out-of-band connection.  (Maybe I'm just being paranoid.)  It's not exactly easy to configure, but it supports lots of features and configuration options that just aren't there on the consumer models.  It's clearly made for network professionals rather than home users.  I really like that it doesn't dumb down stuff and limit configuration options, even if that does mean I have to learn a bit more to properly use it.

The DGS-1250-28X switch has 24 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports, 4 SFP+ plus ports for 1/10 Gigabit connectivity, and (again) a serial management port.  I haven't tried out the 10 Gigabit stuff yet.  That's a (near) future upgrade.  Like the router, it's not exactly user friendly but that's just because it has so many features and configuration options.  I'm still working to configure it best for my little home LAN. 

It's a big upgrade from the 8 port switch it replaces which was totally unmanaged, didn't support jumbo frames, or have any noteworthy features.  The old switch was bought mainly because it was the most affordable 8 port switch I could find at the time.  It turned out to be a good investment.  The old switch was also a D-Link (DGS-1008t).  The main reason I went with D-Link again is because the old switch has run 24/7 for almost 18 years (since May of 2003)!  The only problem it ever gave me was that its fan died about 10 years ago;  it's run flawlessly without one ever since.  Over the years I also had Dell and Linksys 10/100 switches for when I needed more than 8 ports but they each died after a few years.  A used HP ProCurve that I bought off E-Bay to replace everything was nothing but trouble.  (Probably why its previous owner sold it!)  I hope the new D-Links are at least half as reliable as the old one!

Here are the new ones together before being put into service:

   

I should have taken a family photo of all three, but that would require taking down the whole LAN.  It's overkill for my needs, but a good combination of features and (hopefully) reliability that should serve me well into the future.

[jan-jaap]

Two Seagate Cheetah 10K.7 (ST3300007LC), 300GB Ultra320 SCA disks, for a total of €25.

The Cheetah 10K.7 is the last generation of Seagate 10K SCSI disks that still had a SCA or UW connector, and 300GB the largest capacity offered. They have FD bearings so they're durable and don't turn into jet engines when they get old. They make nice disks for workstations.

I occasionally check for these at acceptable prices so I have some when I need them. This is the HP version but that doesn't matter. They also exist with DELL or IBM label.

[Irinikus]

I've just bought this graphics card (Intergraph Realizm II VX25-T, with 4 resolvers) for my AlphaStation 255 300: (It's one of the best graphics options for one of these machines, and one of the rarest pieces of hardware I've had to hunt down!)

[jan-jaap]

I recently did some work on the PSU of my Professional IRIS 4D/70. On the bench with a couple of power resistors attached it worked fine. I spent 4 hours assembling the wiring inside the Twin Tower chassis, only to find out the PSU has an oscillation of ~ 0.6V TT @ 2500Hz on the +5VDC output under load. Lesson learned: need better tools to test PSU before assembling everything. An electronic load for 200A is very expensive, and the wiring is troublesome, so I settled for this 40A specimen from China. The cables are custom made, 16 mm2 to attach to the 8mm bolts where normally the bus bar attach.

The rotary selector know is the cheapest ever, but it seems to do what it's supposed to do otherwise.

[weblacky]

I just bought the two channel version of this load tester. Seems good enough for smoke testing on bench and checking basic overshoot/undershoot regulation. I assumed I'd use my dual channel to load both 5v and 3.3V rails as those are the heavy hitters on SGI workstations anyway...time will tell. I tried to get the older model with PS/2 keyboard port, I did but it doesn't work, tried 4 different keyboards, only one had a numlock response, nothing produced characters. Seems their newest firmware removed this ability entirely on all hardware revisions (not not happy). Oh well, let us know if you encounter anything with it.

[Irinikus]

I just bought a geometry accelerator card to complete my 4D60T in my AlphaStation 255 300: