General Computer Thread

[Amaris]

Under the guise of discussing computers and computing in general, I also wanted to say that I got a new computer! My previous computer finally bit the big one, and I was going to repair it as best as I could, but my dad asked me how much it would cost to buy a new one, and even though I told him I could easily build one for half the cost, he insisted that I buy one from the store, so I did.

My specs:

Intel 4th Gen. i3 Processor (3.7Ghz)
6 GB DDR3 RAM
Intel 4400HD Video Processor
1 TB 7200 RPM HDD
24X DVD Multi-Drive
23" LED Flat Panel Monitor
Windows 10 Home Edition (64 bit)

So I've arrived in the modern age! A few observations:

Holy cow, technology really has jumped ahead in the past 9 years I've been using my old Athlon X2. For starters, onboard video processors have advanced by leaps and bounds. I can play modern games like Battlefield 4 on high settings without experience frame rate drops or lag.

I've been working on building my digital library, but with my old PC burning DVDs, and converting videos used to take hours, but where it took me 2 hours to copy and convert a DVD to a digital MP4 file on the old system, this one can do it in about 20 minutes. I can convert 6 movies in the time it used to take me to create one!

Everything is snappier with a 64 bit OS. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I have been surprised by how fast the response time is for everything I do. I guess I got so used to waiting several minutes for a program to start (Paintshop Pro X6 being one), that it taking only a few seconds is still alien to me.

I love this monitor. LED technology has advanced significantly since my LCD 19" 2009m monitor I had before. The images are crisper, brighter, more detailed, and the contrast is far superior. There simply is no comparison to quality. Plus, this monitor is a true full HD monitor, whereas my old LCD monitor couldn't handle more than 720p at best.

What's nice is that this motherboard has a lot of future options available to it. I have 3 expansion slots for video cards or whatever I need, it can support up to 16 GB of RAM, so for the next 5-10 years I'm solid, and with the i3 processor, it is fast, cool, and efficient. I admit I'm an AMD fanboy, but if this is what Intel has to offer, I have been missing out!

So how about yourselves? Anyone else upgrade to a new system only to be surprised how far things have come? Have a favorite PC? Want to share your specs? Do it here. I'm still excited.

 

[Santaman]

Out of 60+ machines this is the fastest I have:

AMD FX 8350
8Gb RAM
GTX 780 gfx card
1 Intel SSD and one WD Caviar black HDD
DVD/RW drive
Ah and a Philips LCD @ 1680x1050
It runs Win 8.1 and I use classic shell to turn it into Win2K...
I've got a few Win 7 machines around and a whole bunch of Linux machines.

My oldest PC:
IBM Model 5160 XT
8088 running at a blistering 4.7 Mhz
640Kb RAM
Seagate ST-225 R RLL harddrive 22 Mb large, also I have an original 10Mb Seagate ST412
Interesting bit, the 225 R is a single platter RLL drive, a normal ST-225 is a two platter MFM drive with the same capacity
2x 5.25" 360Kb floppy drives
IBM MDA graphics(?) adaptor
IBM 5150 radioactive green on black monitor
the parts inside were made between 1983 and 1986, its still working but I am not going to do so anymore before I've had the chance to check the capacitors, those are at least 30 years old...

I almost have used/gathered about all desktop CPU's Intel 8088, 8086, 80286, 80386, 80486, Intel Pentium, Pentium MMX, Pentium I, II, III and 4, Core Solo, Duo and quad and I've got a laptop with an old model i7

AMD 8088 (they started out as a second tier manufacturer) 80486, K6, Athlon, Duron, Sempron, Athlon 64, Athlon 64 x2, Phenom II x4, AMD FX and AM1 Athlon 5350

Cyrix 6x86 M2 200+ Lovely chip, really fast for the 150 real Mhz it runs, can almost beat my Pentium 233MMX, it does whipe the floor with every other Pentium chip I have except with floating point heavy stuff, in those days however there hardly was any heavy floating point stuff.

Will stop boring you all now...

 

[Amaris]

Out of 60+ machines this is the fastest I have:

AMD FX 8350
8Gb RAM
GTX 780 gfx card
1 Intel SSD and one WD Caviar black HDD
DVD/RW drive
Ah and a Philips LCD @ 1680x1050
It runs Win 8.1 and I use classic shell to turn it into Win2K...
I've got a few Win 7 machines around and a whole bunch of Linux machines.

My oldest PC:
IBM Model 5160 XT
8088 running at a blistering 4.7 Mhz
640Kb RAM
Seagate ST-225 R RLL harddrive 22 Mb large, also I have an original 10Mb Seagate ST412
Interesting bit, the 225 R is a single platter RLL drive, a normal ST-225 is a two platter MFM drive with the same capacity
2x 5.25" 360Kb floppy drives
IBM MDA graphics(?) adaptor
IBM 5150 radioactive green on black monitor
the parts inside were made between 1983 and 1986, its still working but I am not going to do so anymore before I've had the chance to check the capacitors, those are at least 30 years old...

I almost have used/gathered about all desktop CPU's Intel 8088, 8086, 80286, 80386, 80486, Intel Pentium, Pentium MMX, Pentium I, II, III and 4, Core Solo, Duo and quad and I've got a laptop with an old model i7

AMD 8088 (they started out as a second tier manufacturer) 80486, K6, Athlon, Duron, Sempron, Athlon 64, Athlon 64 x2, Phenom II x4, AMD FX and AM1 Athlon 5350

Cyrix 6x86 M2 200+ Lovely chip, really fast for the 150 real Mhz it runs, can almost beat my Pentium 233MMX, it does whipe the floor with every other Pentium chip I have except with floating point heavy stuff, in those days however there hardly was any heavy floating point stuff.

Will stop boring you all now...

I was hoping you'd respond! I love when you talk about your collection. I love old computers, and you probably have one of the largest collections around, and among the people I know you're the one with the most what I'd consider "antique" computers. Also, I remember Cyrix! A lot of us back then thought they were going to be the next Intel, but then they all but disappeared. Sometimes I miss my old Zenith 286. It had a 20MB hard drive, Windows 3.11, a 512KB Oak Technologies EGA card, and I had so much fun with it over that summer. Of course, like most people, I learned to type and program on a Commodore 64. That was a hell of a computer.

 

[Santaman]

I usually can't resist talking about the older generations of computers.

My collection sounds impressive but its actually quite insignificant... there's a guy with 3 barns full of machines, I think its someone named Tom Copper, I'll try and find a link, I guess some Google foo would find him, also there's someone who collects IBM mainframes...

A friend of mine had an Oak VESA bus VGA adapter, it had 128Kb VRAM which made some games crash, fortunately it had 6 extra sockets so he was able to upgrade it to a blistering 256Kb downside was that these chips were hilariously expensive.

I happen to own both Commodore 64 types, the later one looks like a small Amiga, I haven't had the time to see if they still function, besides these I've got some MSX 1 machines and two Atari 8 bitters, 800XL and a 65XE.

Its hard to have one favorite machine but one favorite is a rather old Duron machine which used to hang in a LAN at a friend's house where 4 of us LAN gamed Doom I, II, Doom Legacy, Redneck Rampage and Unreal Tournament 1999 GOTY edition.

 

[Amaris]

I usually can't resist talking about the older generations of computers.

My collection sounds impressive but its actually quite insignificant... there's a guy with 3 barns full of machines, I think its someone named Tom Copper, I'll try and find a link, I guess some Google foo would find him, also there's someone who collects IBM mainframes...

A friend of mine had an Oak VESA bus VGA adapter, it had 128Kb VRAM which made some games crash, fortunately it had 6 extra sockets so he was able to upgrade it to a blistering 256Kb downside was that these chips were hilariously expensive.

I happen to own both Commodore 64 types, the later one looks like a small Amiga, I haven't had the time to see if they still function, besides these I've got some MSX 1 machines and two Atari 8 bitters, 800XL and a 65XE.

Its hard to have one favorite machine but one favorite is a rather old Duron machine which used to hang in a LAN at a friend's house where 4 of us LAN gamed Doom I, II, Doom Legacy, Redneck Rampage and Unreal Tournament 1999 GOTY edition.

My senior year in high school was full of days where our computer science teacher would get us together to play Warcraft II on the school LAN in the computer room. That was my first experience with multi-player over a network. It wouldn't be until a number of years later (2004 or so) where I would play an online game for the first time (Battlefield: Vietnam) and I was hooked. I owned the Commodore 64 (original) and the Commodore 64c, but at different times in my life. I just loved the aesthetic of the original C64. I do recall memory being absurdly expensive back then, and was that way until recently. I remember that I wanted to upgrade the memory on my Laser 386, as it had 4 MB of RAM. I believe, IIRC, I would have had to pay $300 to upgrade it to 8 MB, which was just way, way too much money for me.

 

[Santaman]

Yeah... memory prices were crazy in the old days, when we bought our 486 (DX2 66Mhz) there suddenly was a global shortage of a kind of resin needed in SIMM production, prices rose like a rocket and for a while they even made so called topless SIMMs..
Of course it was a big scam, Win95 would come out soon and it needed 8mb RAM which most computers didn't have, everyone and their grandmother would buy RAM to run it so they deviced this scam to ruthlessly beat money out of everyone's pockets.
I still have a really early 386 around, a DX 20 with a seperate 387 coprocessor, its mainboard is gigantic and it only has 16 bit and 8 bit ISA slots, it uses SIPP memory modules, they're like SIMMs but with pins to connect them into little sockets on the mainboard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIPP_memory

Not three bans but still quite the collection.
http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/copper/

http://www.corestore.org/IBM.html
The guy who collects IBM mainframes

http://home.iae.nl/users/pb0aia/index.html
A Dutch guy with WAY more machines than I have.

 

[Amaris]

Yeah... memory prices were crazy in the old days, when we bought our 486 (DX2 66Mhz) there suddenly was a global shortage of a kind of resin needed in SIMM production, prices rose like a rocket and for a while they even made so called topless SIMMs..
Of course it was a big scam, Win95 would come out soon and it needed 8mb RAM which most computers didn't have, everyone and their grandmother would buy RAM to run it so they deviced this scam to ruthlessly beat money out of everyone's pockets.
I still have a really early 386 around, a DX 20 with a seperate 387 coprocessor, its mainboard is gigantic and it only has 16 bit and 8 bit ISA slots, it uses SIPP memory modules, they're like SIMMs but with pins to connect them into little sockets on the mainboard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIPP_memory

Not three bans but still quite the collection.
http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/copper/

http://www.corestore.org/IBM.html
The guy who collects IBM mainframes

http://home.iae.nl/users/pb0aia/index.html
A Dutch guy with WAY more machines than I have.

It makes me relieved to see that I can go ahead and purchase some extra memory in the near future and not have it cost an arm and a leg. I remember when I had my 286, and all of these games on CD-ROM were starting to come out, and I was reading a software catalog and said out loud "oh, these people think they're soooo special with their CD games and such. Well I'm happy with my box of floppies, thankyouverymuch!"

 

[Santaman]

I remember the early days of the CD-ROM.. also the lucrative early days of the CD burner...

 

[Amaris]

I remember the early days of the CD-ROM.. also the lucrative early days of the CD burner...

I remember paying a small fortune for a 2X CD burner. I had an AMD K6-2 (350mhz) with 16 MB of RAM, and I needed a fancy new CD burner to make the ultimate mix CD. The first CD I copied and burned was Bond (as in, the pop orchestra group). Unfortunately, this was an IOMEGA CD burner, and it died in less than a year.

 

[Marc]

I remember the early days of the CD-ROM.. also the lucrative early days of the CD burner...

You back in the days when we had to connect those things using SCSI controllers?

My current system is a 3rd Gen I5, 16GB ram, 128GB Crucial SSD, ASRock M-ITX board in a bit fenix prodigy case running Windows 10 Pro. Server is a Xeon E3-1230v2 on Supermicro board with 16GB using Hyper-v Server 2012R2 to host Sophos UTM and Windows Server Essentials 2012R2.

 

[Santaman]

I still have machines with a SCSI controller, one being a IBM Netfinity server, it is the devil, it either runs Win2K or Xubuntu 6.06 LTS and nothing else, it even murdered Puppy Linux which is designed to run on older machines.

Specs: IBM typically overdesigned casing
Mainboard: IBM typically overdesigned mainboard with riser card.
CPU: Intel Pentium 3 650Mhz with a big ass passive cooler aka big lunk of aluminium.
128Mb IBM SD ECC RAM, I've got a bazillion more DIMMs of that type but the machine will not run, I haven't been able to find the same kind of RAM so its stuck at 128MB, did I mention this machine is the devil's spawn?
SCSI controller: the legendary Adaptec AHA 2940 U2W
HDD: Quantum Viking II 9.2Gb Ultra Wide SCSI HDD, this is not the original HDD, the IBM drive it came with was broken.

https://bruijn9.home.xs4all.nl/netfinity/
^^ Similar machine.

 

[John Clark]

I remember paying a small fortune for a 2X CD burner. I had an AMD K6-2 (350mhz) with 16 MB of RAM, and I needed a fancy new CD burner to make the ultimate mix CD. The first CD I copied and burned was Bond (as in, the pop orchestra group). Unfortunately, this was an IOMEGA CD burner, and it died in less than a year.

And don't forget the price of the RAM. When I got my 486 dx266, we paid extra to upgrade from 4mb to 8mb - and it cost nearly 100 quid.

My current main use computers are:-

Laptop (win10)
AMD Quad Core A8-4500
8Gb Ram
750Gb Hd
Blu-Ray Drive
HD7640g graphics card.
(I can run most of my favourite games at the monitor resolution but some it's a little slow on)

Off the top of my head, I can't remember all the specs of my desktop (win7), but I do remember that it has one of the AMD 8 core processors, an R9 290 (4gb) graphics card, 16 gb of memory and several hard drives. I only have a cd rewriter in that though. It will play anything I've chucked at it adequately though.

The dx2-66 isn't active anymore, with the chip and original trident graphic card (though kept) has been replaced by an Overdrive Pentium running at 83mhz.

 

[Amaris]

And don't forget the price of the RAM. When I got my 486 dx266, we paid extra to upgrade from 4mb to 8mb - and it cost nearly 100 quid.

My current main use computers are:-

Laptop (win10)
AMD Quad Core A8-4500
8Gb Ram
750Gb Hd
Blu-Ray Drive
HD7640g graphics card.
(I can run most of my favourite games at the monitor resolution but some it's a little slow on)

Off the top of my head, I can't remember all the specs of my desktop (win7), but I do remember that it has one of the AMD 8 core processors, an R9 290 (4gb) graphics card, 16 gb of memory and several hard drives. I only have a cd rewriter in that though. It will play anything I've chucked at it adequately though.

The dx2-66 isn't active anymore, with the chip and original trident graphic card (though kept) has been replaced by an Overdrive Pentium running at 83mhz.

I remember having my 386 and wanting so badly to run Doom, but I couldn't, as it required a 486DX to run. I dreamed of having that 486DX processor, and a sweet rig on which to play it, but alas, it wouldn't come along for another 5 years.

 

[John Clark]

I remember having my 386 and wanting so badly to run Doom, but I couldn't, as it required a 486DX to run. I dreamed of having that 486DX processor, and a sweet rig on which to play it, but alas, it wouldn't come along for another 5 years.

I was lucky there. For my first pc (not counting ones I'd borrowed), it was ok. Doom and X-wing were the first games I got for it.
Before that, I occasionally borrowed my dads work laptop (325 sx if I recall and running at 25mhz), though I could run Heroquest on that.

Back before he got one of those for his work, I occasionally had use of one of the really old IBM PCs. (Not sure what type it was, but looking at google, it wasn't unlike the old 5150s and had the 5 inch floppy rather than the 3 inch ones) At that time, I still preferred to use both spectrum 48 and then later the Amiga A500+.

 

[Santaman]

My first 486 was a DX2 66Mhz monster! with 4 Megs of RAM a Trident 9440 VESA card and a Soundman Games soundcard, it had a Philips 2 speed CD-ROM and a 250/420 Mb QIC-80 tapedrive which we used to make backups of the harrdrive which is a 420Mb Seagate drive.
Of course a year later Windows 95 came out requiring at least 8Mb RAM to function...
We tried OS/2 Warp 3 for a while, incredibly stable but ultimately we did run Win 3.11 on it with the 32 bit extensions, a few years later we upgraded to a Pentium 100 which was awesome and then a K6 233Mhz, Intel Pentium II 333, P-III 450 etc etc etc, I've got a Pentium II 400 with a VooDoo II card, it still functions.

 

[John Clark]

My first 486 was a DX2 66Mhz monster! with 4 Megs of RAM a Trident 9440 VESA card and a Soundman Games soundcard, it had a Philips 2 speed CD-ROM and a 250/420 Mb QIC-80 tapedrive which we used to make backups of the harrdrive which is a 420Mb Seagate drive.
Of course a year later Windows 95 came out requiring at least 8Mb RAM to function...
We tried OS/2 Warp 3 for a while, incredibly stable but ultimately we did run Win 3.11 on it with the 32 bit extensions, a few years later we upgraded to a Pentium 100 which was awesome and then a K6 233Mhz, Intel Pentium II 333, P-III 450 etc etc etc, I've got a Pentium II 400 with a VooDoo II card, it still functions.

Not sure which Trident I had, but the rest sounds close (540mb drive though and no tape drive). 3.11 was my OS until we went 98 (then XP). I went upto an Overdrive Pentium which fit in the same slot as the DX2-66. Next Processor (and new motherboard naturally) after that was one of the "blade" style Intel Pentium 2 running at 233. (After that, my memory get's a bit hazy.)

I do remember running twin Voodoo2s (for 3dfx games) with a Matrox G400 Max (for the d3d graphics) with the 233 chip though. That's the last time so far I've been running more than one graphics card together though.

 

[Santaman]

VooDoo II in SLI? back in the day that was eye watering expensive, I skipped it and got a VooDoo III 2000 AGP card later on, mainly played The Need For Speed III with that card upgraded to a Hercules Geforce 2 MX after that, a few years later I upgraded to a AMD Duron 850 with a Geforce 440 MX, that was a huge upgrade in speed, those old Durons were dirt cheap and beat the crap out of most Intel chips.

 

[Amaris]

The AMD Duron is what made me an AMD fan boy for the past 16 years. That was (and still is as far as I'm concerned) one hell of a processor.

 

[Amaris]

Well, my cousin paid me a little bit of money for fixing his website, which was nice since I usually do it for free! I took the opportunity and bought a graphics card for my PC, because the onboard is really solid as long as I'm not trying to do something graphic intensive, but when I am, it just can't really handle it. Granted, onboard graphics have come a long way, but they still don't beat a discrete dedicated graphics card. I found a great deal on an open box Nvidia GeForce GT 740, which should handle most things thrown at it.

This is a bit different for me, what with an Intel processor and an Nvidia graphics card. I've been an AMD guy for so long, that it just feels odd. I mean, my previous system was an AMD Athlon X2, and the video card was an ATI Radeon HD4670. I've been Team Red for so long, it's odd to be sitting on the green side of the fence. I hope Nvidia is still as good as I remember it.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I'm still using an AMD FX 4300 3.8 quad core which I got the day they were released. Has served me well. I'm on the other side of the fence. I was and always have been on the red team for my CPU stuff and up till this year have been on the green team for my GPU cards. My last one was a Nvidia GTX 550 ti OC edition.

Current GPU is an AMD Radeon R9 380 with 4gig onboard ram.

I have also made the move to solid state drives for my system drive.

What a difference?

I had never considered changing before but took a gamble and purchased a 500gig SSD.

I'm considering doing the same for my B drive which has my system backups and copies of my folders and stuff.