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A FUCKIN CANARY!! posted:My PC is still running on an i5 2500K from 2011 and I've never felt limited by it. Trying to use a 2001 CPU for general daily use in 2008 would probably result in some sort of explosion. I got an Athlon XP 1800+ in early 2002 (CPU apparently released in October 2001 though), and I seem to recall it still being reasonably usable in 2008. I was working for a pretty lovely company that the year before was still making me use a Pentium III running Windows 98, so I guess relative to that it still seemed pretty good. I think when I got the Athlon machine it only had 256MB of RAM, and I think I doubled that twice over the years. I guess I played GTA San Andreas in fairly low detail but it seemed fine to me  On the other hand, I had a Core 2 Duo launched in 2008 which 2 years ago (i.e. at around 8 years after launch) was already feeling pretty unusable for things like watching YouTube.
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Apr 28, 2018 06:15
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I use a Core2Duo for a dedicated arcade game PC! My i5 I bought... jesus, I guess 5-6 years ago is still humming along fine. I threw a geforce 1070 in it, maxed it out at 32 gigs of RAM, put in a nice SSD, and it runs anything I throw at it incredibly well. The only thing that makes it choke are CPU-bound tests in 3DMark. 
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Apr 28, 2018 07:25
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Flipperwaldt posted:USB floppy drives work without issue on modern Windows in my experience. Regular floppy dives as well, btw, if your board has the header. It's not worth any amount of time dealing with XP just to get to the files. If you've got other plans with the old machine in addition to that, that's a different story. It’s just that there are Freecom floppy drives (a reasonably reputable brand) and all the no-name Chinese stuff. Both are cheap, but the same money can sometimes get you an old XP box, which, once cleaned up, might do a better job. I am running Windows 10 and that dropped floppy support I guess, which is why I’d rather go through some painful stuff that has a good chance of working. I have been a computer janitor for a number of years (Aldi Medion anyone?) Every time they sold a P4 in a snazzy black case with XP SP2 (Remote Procedure Call fix, remember that?) and a slightly cut down GeForce I could rack up the hours. God, so depressing, but with some silver linings: a lady called, feeling pretty distraught; a few days ago she gave birth, husband took pics, put them on the computer, and them it didn’t want to boot anymore. My dumbass coworker did not want to ruin his call time averages, so he told her to format, “sorry, everything is lost”. She called again to ask whether there were other options and I guided her through 45 minutes of restore procedure, and got her the irreplaceable pictures back. Then I told her to back up rightaway It ruined my own CTA but I didn’t care, I got out of there not much later.Anyway, I have no other plans for such a machine, which is why I would also like a low profile box, and Optiplexes were pretty slim. I’ll just return it if it doesn’t work I guess, unless you have some brand recommendations?
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Apr 28, 2018 08:02
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Laserjet 4P posted:God, so depressing, but with some silver linings: a lady called, feeling pretty distraught; a few days ago she gave birth, husband took pics, put them on the computer, and them it didn’t want to boot anymore. My dumbass coworker did not want to ruin his call time averages, so he told her to format, “sorry, everything is lost”. She called again to ask whether there were other options and I guided her through 45 minutes of restore procedure, and got her the irreplaceable pictures back. Then I told her to back up rightaway You did good, feel good about it. You actually did your job. It's weird that providing actual customer service is a selling point rather than the norm.
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Apr 28, 2018 08:18
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Laserjet 4P posted:Anyway, I have no other plans for such a machine, which is why I would also like a low profile box, and Optiplexes were pretty slim. I’ll just return it if it doesn’t work I guess, unless you have some brand recommendations? HP/Compaq make (or used to) Small Form Factor cases too. They seemed to be popular in businesses so you could always find lots on auction sites when I used to look. The ones I had had built-in floppy drives, no idea how good the controller was or what it supported though.
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Apr 28, 2018 09:32
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Pham Nuwen posted:Floppies seemed to be super unreliable at that point; the reasoning I've heard was that in the face of declining supply, nobody had manufactured new disks in a while and a new-in-box disk might already be 5 years old. It wasn't that the disks were old. It was that the later one were just really poor quality. Good floppy disks will last 30+ years. I've got BBC Micro disks from the early 80s and Amiga disks from ~1992 that all still work perfectly. However when floppies started falling out of common use in the late 90s and early 2000s the quality of new disks nosedived virtually overnight (and it's kind of obvious when you hold them - they feel lighter and flimsier), and that's when then joke about them being bad out of the box became true. Sweevo has a new favorite as of 11:32 on Apr 28, 2018 |
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Apr 28, 2018 10:32
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Laserjet 4P posted:unless you have some brand recommendations? Gonna add that I've never tried non-standard formatted disks either, if that matters.
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Apr 28, 2018 17:04
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CaptainSarcastic posted:I just hit the wall of my Phenom II not being able to play Far Cry 5 because it doesn't support SSE4.. Misread “Phenom II” as “Pentium II” and was  .
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Apr 28, 2018 19:49
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:I'm not sure if Moore's Law still applies to computers in general these days, but it certainly doesn't seem to apply to most consumer-level machines, and I have to say I'm ok with that. It still mostly does. The "law" was never about speed or CPUs. It is about transistors in (originally memory) chips. That number still goes up up, they are just used differently (more cores, longer pipelines, more cache).
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Apr 28, 2018 20:01
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Today, I learned that BOFH still writes. I'm not going to link it, because – much like floppies – the memory is much better than the reality.
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Apr 28, 2018 21:24
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Lowen SoDium posted:Tip of the Day: Your ex-coworker has kept at it!
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Apr 28, 2018 23:28
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My current computer -- a couple years old gaming laptop, though you'd better be using a controller/external keyboard if playing modern games on it, because the built-in keyboard gets real hot running GTAV -- doesn't have even an optical drive. Physical media is obsolete, what with Steam and Nettflix/Hulu/&c.
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Apr 28, 2018 23:35
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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Rappaport posted:Your ex-coworker has kept at it! 
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Apr 29, 2018 01:13
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Buttcoin purse posted:I got an Athlon XP 1800+ in early 2002 (CPU apparently released in October 2001 though), and I seem to recall it still being reasonably usable in 2008. I was working for a pretty lovely company that the year before was still making me use a Pentium III running Windows 98, so I guess relative to that it still seemed pretty good. I think when I got the Athlon machine it only had 256MB of RAM, and I think I doubled that twice over the years. I guess I played GTA San Andreas in fairly low detail but it seemed fine to me I built an athlon xp 3500+ with 3gb of ram in 2005 and used it regularly for non-gaming years after and it did anything web-wise fine. I gave it to my parents in 2012 and they used it everyday with no problems until 3 years ago when it powered off suddenly and refused to turn back on. That box got a lot of mileage before it died.
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Apr 29, 2018 02:07
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I had a 75Mhz Intel until 2001. I think It had 24MB of RAM. Jumping from that to my P4 was amazing.
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Apr 29, 2018 08:40
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My old Athlon X2 4400 I built in '06 was a workhorse that rarely let me down, and I would be using it today if the motherboard had not finally died of capacitor plague last year. But I've had naught but hell from the three computers that have since replaced it. Admittedly they were used computers themselves, but bad caps killed the i7-920 setup I built, the power supply in the Dell i5-650 took out everything including my monitor, and the i3-550 system that I'm typing on now likes to occasionally spontaneously fail to boot until I reseat the CPU and RAM. Some days I'm tempted to trash everything and see what internet access I could get with a loving abacus. e. I bought my first computer in '99, a Pentium 133 with 16mb of RAM. It was finally retired in '06, after having first been upgraded to a P3-450 with 256mb of RAM, then later to a Duron 1.1 gHz with 512 mb of RAM. I consider it one computer the whole time though, because in each case the processor/motherboard was the only component swap, and maybe later I would swap out other components one at a time as I scavenged/bought used/swapped off a friend. The Athlon X2 was the first system built from all-new components purchased at the same time. e2. The Duron and its motherboard were a swap from a friend, and was originally a Duron 600mhz overclocked to 1100 mhz. But he loled at the thought of giving me his janky old overclocking rig and wouldn't part with it until he swapped the processor out for an actual 1.1ghz chip first. So there's a tech relic for you, processors that could be overclocked to nearly-double rated speed. rndmnmbr has a new favorite as of 11:43 on Apr 29, 2018 |
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Apr 29, 2018 11:14
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Chillbro Baggins posted:My current computer -- a couple years old gaming laptop, though you'd better be using a controller/external keyboard if playing modern games on it, because the built-in keyboard gets real hot running GTAV -- doesn't have even an optical drive. Physical media is obsolete, what with Steam and Nettflix/Hulu/&c. I use my optical drive all the time to rip old workout DVDs and play Saturn games (some games emulate weird if I try to use a disc image).
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Apr 29, 2018 13:06
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In PC chat, I somehow managed to completely skip AGP in my computer building/ownership. I limped PCI cards along and on my next build splurged on an MSI motherboard with a single PCI-E slot, and ran a Radeon X800. It was mostly a happenstance of poverty/priority, but it still happened. That loving motherboard still runs, too. I can't bring myself to discard it, it's too nostalgic. It has a S939 3000+ in it.
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Apr 29, 2018 15:08
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I just found out about Minitel and I find this stuff just so dang fascinating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOhK9bgQo8g In Finland we got one way Teletext but having an interactive system like this in an average home in the 1980s must've been pretty amazing.
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Apr 29, 2018 15:10
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insta posted:In PC chat, I somehow managed to completely skip AGP in my computer building/ownership. I limped PCI cards along and on my next build splurged on an MSI motherboard with a single PCI-E slot, and ran a Radeon X800.  Although my AGP skip was more because my dad convinced me that buying an Optiplex through his company discount was a good idea. I did manage to put a Voodoo 3 in it, which was the best PCI card I could get at the time.
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Apr 29, 2018 15:26
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AGP was pretty good, but it was amazing what PCI-E could do. I worked in a computer store when PCI-E started coming out. Two people there had the same card but one was AGP and the other was PCI-E. It was crazy how much better the same card with a better interface did.
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Apr 29, 2018 15:44
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Maybe four years ago at work, I needed a random PC with a parallel port for an old label printer. The one I grabbed was a late-model Pentium 4 (with hyperthreading and EMT64), so out of idle curiosity I filled the RAM slots and put a newish HDD in it, and network installed the standard Win7 64 bit image. It's ... surprisingly usable when it finishes booting. Of course, it helps that all we do with it is some label printing and light office 2007, but I have idly browsed news and Gmail and the like without things grinding to a halt.
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Apr 29, 2018 20:36
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Put a bargain-basement A-Data 120gb SSD into it. It'll be incredibly usable. Spinning discs are a cancer on computers for anything but bulk storage.
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Apr 29, 2018 21:42
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insta posted:Put a bargain-basement A-Data 120gb SSD into it. It'll be incredibly usable. Spinning discs are a cancer on computers for anything but bulk storage. Maybe install Windows on the ssd but keep the old platter style drive around for saving documents and stuff to? SSDs are faster but when they die they go all at once with more or less no warning, those old spinning drives will limp along for quite some time once they start to give out, giving you plenty of time to back things up.
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Apr 29, 2018 22:02
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Chairman Mao posted:those old spinning drives will limp along for quite some time once they start to give out, giving you plenty of time to back things up. Sometimes. I've had one drive ever that had an increasing reallocated sector count in the SMART data, and it was increasing at a fairly constant rate, and I was able to let it burn down to about 10% before I replaced the drive. Just about every other time (admittedly some of these were from before I monitored SMART) the machine has stopped booting, or the drive has disappeared if it wasn't the boot drive, and only sometimes have my dozens of attempts to power the drive off and on to get it to spin up succeeded. Of the last two drives I tried to recover, one just spun up first try and I was able to image the whole thing in one go like there was nothing wrong, and the other one kept dying (reporting it was 600PB in size and not responding to read commands) and I basically had to keep power cycling it, and I lost interest after hours of doing this. I think from the second one I might have gotten 80% of the data from the 1/3 of the disk that I managed to image, with unreadable regions scattered in a fairly regular pattern. So anyway I actually do backups now
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Apr 29, 2018 23:40
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Buttcoin purse posted:Sometimes. I've had one drive ever that had an increasing reallocated sector count in the SMART data, and it was increasing at a fairly constant rate, and I was able to let it burn down to about 10% before I replaced the drive. Just about every other time (admittedly some of these were from before I monitored SMART) the machine has stopped booting, or the drive has disappeared if it wasn't the boot drive, and only sometimes have my dozens of attempts to power the drive off and on to get it to spin up succeeded. Of the last two drives I tried to recover, one just spun up first try and I was able to image the whole thing in one go like there was nothing wrong, and the other one kept dying (reporting it was 600PB in size and not responding to read commands) and I basically had to keep power cycling it, and I lost interest after hours of doing this. I think from the second one I might have gotten 80% of the data from the 1/3 of the disk that I managed to image, with unreadable regions scattered in a fairly regular pattern. Sounds like a perfect case for the ol' freezer trick. It really works.
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Apr 30, 2018 04:00
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I want to see someone put a borked HDD in a plastic bag (keeps the condensation at bay when you warm it again), in the freezer, and get some loooooooooooong cables to attach it while it's still in the freezer. Wonder if this would help retrieve some bits.
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Apr 30, 2018 04:35
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Dang, I remember throwing hard drives in the freezer to try to get data off it.
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Apr 30, 2018 04:40
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Chairman Mao posted:Maybe install Windows on the ssd but keep the old platter style drive around for saving documents and stuff to? SSDs are faster but when they die they go all at once with more or less no warning, those old spinning drives will limp along for quite some time once they start to give out, giving you plenty of time to back things up. hmmm I think that's a pretty shaky reason to still use platter drives. should be backing up regularly with an automatic solution. if you're at a point where your drive is making weird noises and you haven't backed up yet.... no bueño
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Apr 30, 2018 14:03
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RE: AGP Chat, my favorite video card I've owned to this date was an AGP nVidia Riva 128, my first 3d accelerator card, and my introduction to GLQuake, Half Life, all that stuff. That card got regular driver updates far, far beyond what I would consider reasonable, well into the TNT's lifecycle. nVidia really did good by their early adopters. That card combined with my P2-300 Dell was a combo that served me well for years of gaming.
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Apr 30, 2018 14:23
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I haven't bought a video card in ages, do they still have absolutely insane box art? I was hoping my googling would turn up an exhaustive, centralised collection of the stuff but guess not. Here's a small Imgur gallery at least. Not Operator has a new favorite as of 14:28 on Apr 30, 2018 |
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Apr 30, 2018 14:25
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:RE: AGP Chat, my favorite video card I've owned to this date was an AGP nVidia Riva 128, my first 3d accelerator card, and my introduction to GLQuake, Half Life, all that stuff. My first AGP card was an ATI Rage 128 and I have the opposite feelings towards it. What a useless garbage card. Things would crash regularly and anything that could run reliably would have weird texture artifacts and poo poo. I replaced it with a (technically inferior) Voodoo 3 3000 and suddenly hardware acceleration just started to actually work and everything was glorious.
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Apr 30, 2018 14:35
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Thats odd, the only thing I remember being a problem was there was one driver release that introduced a one-pixel wide seam between all the textures, so the skybox would show through in 3d games. They fixed that in the next release though.
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Apr 30, 2018 14:38
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:Thats odd, the only thing I remember being a problem was there was one driver release that introduced a one-pixel wide seam between all the textures, so the skybox would show through in 3d games. They fixed that in the next release though. You had one too, then? It's possible it was just a driver issue and I didn't realize it. I think this was when my household had no internet which would have made this harder. For what it's worth we didn't buy any of these cards. The Rage 128 came installed with our computer and the Voodoo was a gift from a family friend. No money wasted on this ordeal, I guess. Mak0rz has a new favorite as of 15:27 on Apr 30, 2018 |
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Apr 30, 2018 15:25
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Last Chance posted:hmmm I think that's a pretty shaky reason to still use platter drives. should be backing up regularly with an automatic solution. if you're at a point where your drive is making weird noises and you haven't backed up yet.... no bueño Yeah. Regular drives don't fail any more gracefully than SSDs. People have this idea that they'll get a few read errors one day and then have time to copy everything before it gets worse. But the drive is just as likely to poo poo itself catastrophically one day and never work again.
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Apr 30, 2018 15:31
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Mak0rz posted:It's possible it was just a driver issue and I didn't realize it. I think this was when my household had no internet which would have made this harder. It's so crazy to realize this is how most people updated their poo poo back then.
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Apr 30, 2018 20:03
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FilthyImp posted:Man, half of the euphoria of buying the latest MacAddict or (whatever windows equivalent) was looking to see what program updates were available. Oh man, System 7.5.1?!? Quicktime 2.5 AND Quicktime VR?! Growing up in rural Newfoundland meant even that was hard to do 
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Apr 30, 2018 20:31
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FilthyImp posted:Man, half of the euphoria of buying the latest MacAddict or (whatever windows equivalent) was looking to see what program updates were available. Oh man, System 7.5.1?!? Quicktime 2.5 AND Quicktime VR?! My family had America On-Line pretty close to the beginning. AOL had originally been Macs only, so it was the perfect way to get updates (as long as you had free minutes available).
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Apr 30, 2018 20:39
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More olde tyme tech at Bookman's yesterday.      I also couldn't help myself. I stood there and played Mario 64 until I got, like, 10 stars. I thought about tossing the baby Penguin off the side of the level, but ultimately, decided against it and returned it to it's mother.
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Apr 30, 2018 21:06
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Those Madcatz Dreamcast controllers are surprisingly good
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Apr 30, 2018 22:10
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