General Computer Thread

[Santaman]

The first AMD I used was the fabled K6-233, with an Abit mainboard and at that time a whopping 64Mb RAM running Windows 98SE, it had an S3 Virge I believe... and a Conner 1.2Gb drive.
After that a whole slew of Intel machines, Celeron 300A Pentium 2 333 and 400 and then the P-3 450 which was a really great chip, used it for eons and when I had to upgrade AMD just came out with those new Duron chips, bought a Duron 850 because the only Intel I could actually afford at that time would have been a Celeron which was extremely slow due to that stupid 66mhz bus speed, Pentium 3's were insanely expensive so it became the Duron, after that I always bought AMD for my machines, never turned to Intel again, at the moment I'm using a FX8350 which is more than capable of performing the tasks I need it to do.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I can recall a time when 20gig drives were considered a thing. Now if you had one of those it'd barely work for anything windows related. Linux would work fine on that though.

 

[sojourner]

20gig is huge. My first harddrive was 50 Meg.

 

[B.J.]

My first hard drive was (I think) 20Mb. And we had a couple older computers with no hard drive at all.

 

[Santaman]

The smallest HDD in terms of capacity I have is the magnificent Seagate ST-412 10 Megabytes, build between 1981 and 1983 and still working flawlessly, in terms of physical size it is among the largest I have, 5.25" full hight which is like two CD-ROM's stacked on top of eachother.
In most of my XT machines there are Seagate ST-225's fitted, they were everywhere and with a damn good reason, they are indestructible and quality wise one of the best drives ever made, drive size progression over the years was about like this.

20Mb (XT), 40Mb(AT) 80, 120 and 210Mb (386), 420Mb(486) 1.2Gb, 2.3Gb, 4.3Gb (Pentium Era) 6.4 Gb (AMD K6) era, 10Gb, 20Gb 30Gb 40Gb and 80Gb, (Pentium II era) 120Gb, 160Gb(Late Pentium III and AMD Duron era) after that drive capacity went from 200Gb to 1Tb within a few years for me and now there are 16TB drives available IIRC..

In the past you could recognise the manufacturer of the drives by the sounds the drives made, some sound like an alien star ship while spinning up...
I've got a pair of really early 2.1Gb Seagate drives, the first ones to have 7200 RPM and these are the loudest most grating sounding drives in the universe, they make a high pitched never ending nerve destroying screech while spinning and at a sound level that makes them audible at the end of the street when the window is open.. before you can install an OS on it you'll have had at least a nervous breakdown or two because of it..

 

[Marc]

In the past you could recognise the manufacturer of the drives by the sounds the drives made, some sound like an alien star ship while spinning up...

and you could also more easily tell when they were running as the drives whirred and clicked away or when they weren't.

Back in the early 90s I had come people bring in a computer they'd bought that was fitted with full height 300MB ESDI drive (of the days when you used Debug to get into the drive controller for things like low level formats).

Anyway the system wasn't running and upon hearing it fired up could tell why. The drive made a sound like a heavy ping-pong ball being dropped and bouncing. Can't remember the outcome but they weren't happy when I told them the drive was dead.

 

[Amaris]

The first AMD I used was the fabled K6-233, with an Abit mainboard and at that time a whopping 64Mb RAM running Windows 98SE, it had an S3 Virge I believe... and a Conner 1.2Gb drive.
After that a whole slew of Intel machines, Celeron 300A Pentium 2 333 and 400 and then the P-3 450 which was a really great chip, used it for eons and when I had to upgrade AMD just came out with those new Duron chips, bought a Duron 850 because the only Intel I could actually afford at that time would have been a Celeron which was extremely slow due to that stupid 66mhz bus speed, Pentium 3's were insanely expensive so it became the Duron, after that I always bought AMD for my machines, never turned to Intel again, at the moment I'm using a FX8350 which is more than capable of performing the tasks I need it to do.

I have an Intel i3 right now, and I like it a lot, but I'm itching to make my next computer (some years away) an AMD system again. I guess it's in the blood.

I can recall a time when 20gig drives were considered a thing. Now if you had one of those it'd barely work for anything windows related. Linux would work fine on that though.

Linux is a real gem. There's a flavor for every need.

 

[Santaman]

and you could also more easily tell when they were running as the drives whirred and clicked away or when they weren't.

Back in the early 90s I had come people bring in a computer they'd bought that was fitted with full height 300MB ESDI drive (of the days when you used Debug to get into the drive controller for things like low level formats).

Anyway the system wasn't running and upon hearing it fired up could tell why. The drive made a sound like a heavy ping-pong ball being dropped and bouncing. Can't remember the outcome but they weren't happy when I told them the drive was dead.

Oww.. yes I know that sound.. CHRRR KLANK CHRRRR KLANK CHRRRR THUD THUD CCCHHHHRINK.. General failure reading drive C:\ abort, retry, fail?

 

[Marc]

Oww.. yes I know that sound.. CHRRR KLANK CHRRRR KLANK CHRRRR THUD THUD CCCHHHHRINK.. General failure reading drive C:\ abort, retry, fail?

nah wasn't that sound - that would meant the drive had fired up and the platters were spnning - this particular drive wouldn't get that far.

But I do know the sound you mean and the old joke "Who is General Failure and why is he reading my drive".

 

[Santaman]

Yeah.. DOS stuff... "Who the hell is General Failure and why is he reading drive A:\ ???"

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Smallest hdd I have is a Conner 425 megabyte drive. I used to use this with Windows 98 and old DOS games like Blood and Duke Nukem 3D Oh that drive was faithful but a little noisy. It lasted a fair while too and when I got my first XP machine was the year it decided to die on me with a clunking sound.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Clockspeed has been irrelevant for ages, in the old ages a NEC V20 and V30 chips kicked Intel 8088/8086 chip's arse at the same clockspeed they were quite a bit faster, later on a 150Mhz Cyrix beat the living shit out of a Pentium 1 running at 200Mhz, mainly because it was a far more advanced chip and it had a bus speed of 75Mhz compared to the 66Mhz of the Pentium, today its bus speed, memory speed, architectural advances, core count/thread count and mass storage speeds that matter.

As someone who actually had one of those vaunted 150MHz Cyrix chips, I can tell you that it didn't always perform better, sometimes it was significantly worse. Cyrix had their CPU-rating system where they provided a MHz equivalent. For the 150MHz chip, the rating was 200, which meant it was supposed to perform on par with a 200MHz Pentium. It definitely did not. Switching to a Pentium 166MHz chip ended up showing a lot of improvement. (You could blame this on the chipset or something else, bottom line was the Cyrix didn't deliver on all the performance PR in my case.)

I then built a new system altogether with one of those Socket 370 Pentium IIIs. Had issues with the motherboard's VIA chipset--switched to an Intel chipset and it ran like a dream. Such a nice experience with that computer.

Probably the weirdest computers I ever had, though, were a Compaq Ultra Portable (google it!), and this HP desktop that had two Pentium 90MHz chips in it. Needed a special version of Windows NT to use them.

Oh, and my smallest hard drive was 20MB, I believe.

 

[Santaman]

Most Cyrix chips ended up on the lowest quality boards with indeed rather weirdly named chipsets which were rebranded old SiS, Via or Ali chipsets, but mine runs on a late era higher quality board and it is a lot faster than my Pentium 1 200 which runs on the exact same board, also, boards with Intel chipsets did not work well with the Cyrix, they mostly didn't get the 75mhz bus so you'd be stuck at 66mhz, for the Cyrix that 75 Mhz bus was needed.

Early Via chipsets were indeed iffy unless you got hold of the right drivers but they were slower than most Intel chipsets, later on drivers became better but the best pentium 3 era chipset is the Intel 815 by far, and yes, even better than the Intel BX.

 

[Marc]

this HP desktop that had two Pentium 90MHz chips in it. Needed a special version of Windows NT to use

HP must have done some serious dicking around with the deisgn if they needed a special version of NT given that multi-processor was right up it's alley. Then again it was probably setting the path for HP's behaviour in the future (got a slightly older system, need bios/driver updates? don't have a service contract? forget it - everything it locked away unless you've got a support plan in place).

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Most Cyrix chips ended up on the lowest quality boards with indeed rather weirdly named chipsets which were rebranded old SiS, Via or Ali chipsets, but mine runs on a late era higher quality board and it is a lot faster than my Pentium 1 200 which runs on the exact same board, also, boards with Intel chipsets did not work well with the Cyrix, they mostly didn't get the 75mhz bus so you'd be stuck at 66mhz, for the Cyrix that 75 Mhz bus was needed.

Early Via chipsets were indeed iffy unless you got hold of the right drivers but they were slower than most Intel chipsets, later on drivers became better but the best pentium 3 era chipset is the Intel 815 by far, and yes, even better than the Intel BX.

Pretty sure my Cyrix was on a SiS board. One funny quirk about it: because the bus was clocked at 75MHz, and the jumpers that allowed you to set the bus speed didn't work right (seemed fused at 75MHz for some reason), my Pentium 166MHz was overclocked to... 187MHz. Not enough to damage the chip or anything, just kind of funny.

On my P3 system, there was a known issue if you had a combination of a Via chipset, Soundblaster Live! card, and a Voodoo graphics card. Of course, I had all three. The bus mastering in the Via chipset was flawed and the sound and graphics cards would go into bus contention and freeze the system. All recommendations were that an Intel chipset would fix the problem, and sure enough it did.

HP must have done some serious dicking around with the deisgn if they needed a special version of NT given that multi-processor was right up it's alley. Then again it was probably setting the path for HP's behaviour in the future (got a slightly older system, need bios/driver updates? don't have a service contract? forget it - everything it locked away unless you've got a support plan in place).

Oh yeah, it was definitely some weird ass custom configuration that stock NT couldn't deal with. It was a computer someone gave me when clearing out their own collection, and I liked getting my hands on strange computer designs.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

The Compaq Corner PC was a notorious design that was prone to failure. You can look those up online but while it looked neat on the outside the inside was shit. In my younger days I used them on one of my first jobs and while mine was fine we had at least one or two break down every month.

What were those Pentium chips that looked like a game cartridge?

 

[Robert Maxwell]

The Compaq Corner PC was a notorious design that was prone to failure. You can look those up online but while it looked neat on the outside the inside was shit. In my younger days I used them on one of my first jobs and while mine was fine we had at least one or two break down every month.

What were those Pentium chips that looked like a game cartridge?

Those were "slot" CPUs. I believe the Pentium II, III, and 4 all came in "slot" designs initially, before they were able to manufacture them in socket formats.

I personally hate slot CPUs for reasons I cannot articulate. It's just a visceral hatred of the whole concept.

SOCKETS FOREVER

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Those were "slot" CPUs. I believe the Pentium II, III, and 4 all came in "slot" designs initially, before they were able to manufacture them in socket formats.

I personally hate slot CPUs for reasons I cannot articulate. It's just a visceral hatred of the whole concept.

SOCKETS FOREVER

Sockets are more convenient.

 

[Bagofmostlywatr]

And Slockets were far from convenient. I used one on the PC I built when I went to uni because I bought a top notch motherboard but could only afford a Celeron initially.

 

[Marc]

Those were "slot" CPUs. I believe the Pentium II, III, and 4 all came in "slot" designs initially, before they were able to manufacture them in socket formats.

I personally hate slot CPUs for reasons I cannot articulate. It's just a visceral hatred of the whole concept.

SOCKETS FOREVER

Think the P4's were socket design from the get-go but the models suffered serious performance issues, were as hot as hell and the less said about RDRAM the better.

PII's were purely slot based (had one of those) while the PIII's were both Slot1 and Socket 370. Adding to the confusion were the slotkey adapters that would allow you to use a socket 370 CPU in a Slot 1 system (thanks wiki - had a vague recollection but needed to check) and I guess give you an upgrade path if you had the right chipset.

AMD also had a slot system (Slot A) which lead to Socket A. Can't remember if my first AMD system was a Socket or Slot but think it was the former as it was built after the Athlons hit 1Ghz.

Not sure why Intel introduced the Slots but in AMD's case it originated with the DEC Alpha's (which turn was probably influenced by the design of the VAXs which had seperate CPU modules) and AMD licenseed technology from DEC for the Athlons.