General Computer Thread

[Santaman]

Hyperthreading, nope, as for optimalisations, for a low budget chip it's not bad I think: SSE 1,2,3, 3 suplemental SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AVX, AES, F16C, BMI1, AMD V virtualisation support.
It is indeed not a fast chip, it does beat some older Phenom and Phenom II chips, I've got a Phenom II 905e which runs at 2.5Ghz and it is maybe a few percents faster here and there than the Athlon, but it is 65 watts and when I bought it about three times the price, also the graphics card is a Geforce 315 which is ancient and slow..

 

[Santaman]

Been given a antiquated Medion PC, so far I've been able to decipher that it has Pentium 4 2.66, 512 MB RAM and that the fancy door which covers the floppy drive and front panel connectors keeps falling off, also it has no harddrive and the graphics card has a micro sized heatsink with a fan that has fallen apart, PSU is a 250 watt FSP unit, it has a burner and DVD-ROm drive, also a 56K modem, mainboard and GFX card are from MSI, some google foo revealed that it has a Geforce MX440 chip.. eh, not great but enough for Unreal GOTY 1999.

This is the third machine of this type that has fallen into my hands... sturdy little buggers, they all still work, one I have discarded but stored the internal parts, they were made around 2002-2004, I'll have to open up the PSU to see if no caps have blown off.

 

[John Clark]

I remember the medion pc's. I think we're still using the case at least of one of them though the components themselves have probably been overtaken (well except for maybe possibly the dvd rom and the floppy drive)

 

[Santaman]

This one I'll just clean and keep around as an example of neanderthal tech.. Including Windows XP, of course it will never be allowed to go online..

 

[Haggis and tatties]

I am sure these were sold by Aldi or Lidl......can't remember which.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Who remembers Compaq "Corner Computers" that had a wedge shaped case with two front sides split .... Very unreliable machines too.

 

[John Clark]

I am sure these were sold by Aldi or Lidl......can't remember which.

We got ours via Aldi. (Don't know if Lidl did them as well, but Aldi certainly did).

Most of the desktops we've built ourselves from various places/pieces over the years, but our first one came from Escom (long gone now) and this one from Aldi for the complete system.

 

[Haggis and tatties]

^^Escom, now you are going back somewhat, i remember we had a escom shop here in Glasgow and it is where i bought my first sound card, a adlib card, back in 95, because Dixons sold me my very first 386 PC that had no sound card at all, for £699, robbing swines. lol

 

[John Clark]

It is a while and we got our 486 from the Bolton one. Picked up X-wing at the same time from them.
The 4mb (to 8mb total) memory upgrade was a bit costly though.

 

[Santaman]

Here we had shops of Escom and Vobis, I think they sold some Vobis machines through electronic stores, later on Aldi started with Microstar/Medion.
The only brand machine me and my brother bought at the time was a Philips NMS 9100 XT computer.

In 1994 and 1995 there was a world wide shortage of RAM modules.. the bullshit story was that some factory of epoxy resin was damaged and couldnt provide the materials to make SIMM's so RAM would be "rare" of course this was just to make people pay insane prices because M$ bloody well knew that Windows 95 could not run on machines with 4MB, everyone and their grandmother needed more RAM and they all wanted it NOW.

 

[StarCruiser]

Who remembers Compaq "Corner Computers" that had a wedge shaped case with two front sides split .... Very unreliable machines too.

Compaq "Corner Computers"?!?

I worked for Compaq for 10 years (1993-2003) and never heard of these. Where were they sold and when?

 

[Marc]

In 1994 and 1995 there was a world wide shortage of RAM modules.. the bullshit story was that some factory of epoxy resin was damaged and couldnt provide the materials to make SIMM's so RAM would be "rare" of course this was just to make people pay insane prices because M$ bloody well knew that Windows 95 could not run on machines with 4MB, everyone and their grandmother needed more RAM and they all wanted it NOW.

I don't recall a ram shortage at the time (do know of the one a few years before that pretty much killed off OS/2 before it had a chance) but remember the debacle of people putting Win95 on machines that would barely run it (and trying to help some of those people).

There is always good wisdom in taking the minimum requirements and doubling them to get to a good starting point.

Then there's Exchange Server which is just a pure memory hog

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

I found an example of a Packard Bell "corner" computer.

 

[Stephen!]

but remember the debacle of people putting Win95 on machines that would barely run it (and trying to help some of those people).

I tried that with installing Windows 95 on a 386. I didn't particularly expect it to perform that well. It was more of an experiment, just to see if I could make it run at all with only 16 mb RAM.

 

[StarCruiser]

I found an example of a Packard Bell "corner" computer.

View attachment 2917

Ok - I thought that didn't make sense. I'm very familiar with just about everything Compaq made up until the end.

Now - Packard Bell computers were usually junk. Not all of them but, a very high number were very cheaply made. I had never heard of this model but, I wasn't paying much attention to them after the mid-90's so...

 

[Santaman]

Plastic Hell Computers.. ye gods, was on repair and helpdesk duty when some guy brought in a Packard Bell, the problem was a broken CD drive, so me and a colleague tried to open the machine.. removed all screws but nope, casing did not open, didn't slide forward, backwards, up, down, whatever, nope and noper.. took us half an hour to find out that the carrying handle also had a screw, we took it out and suddenly you could slide the handle backwards, we did that and then all panels fell off .. including the entire front panel, replaced the drive and then it took us 45 minutes to figure out the order of installing the panels again..

 

[Marc]

20 years ago we had all sorts of manufacturers for desktop PCs these days how many are left?

You've got the Dells (who also own Alienware), HP, Acer, Lenovo/IBM but who else is there really?

 

[Amaris]

20 years ago we had all sorts of manufacturers for desktop PCs these days how many are left?

You've got the Dells (who also own Alienware), HP, Acer, Lenovo/IBM but who else is there really?

Toshiba, LG, as well as smaller manufacturers like PowerSpec, CyberPower, and so on. Computers are run-of-the-mill these days. They all carry roughly the same specs, with the same hardware made by the same companies, just in slightly varying colors.

 

[Santaman]

Dell, HP and Lenovo are the largest PC companies as far as I know, Asus, Acer, Medion, LG, Asrock, quite a lot of mainboard manufacturers also have a range of barebone systems, even Intel builds them, Toshiba is mainly a laptop manufacturer but I have encountered a few of their desktop machines too.

 

[John Clark]

I tried that with installing Windows 95 on a 386. I didn't particularly expect it to perform that well. It was more of an experiment, just to see if I could make it run at all with only 16 mb RAM.

My dad did that with an old 386 laptop he got from work. Let's just say the results were less than optimal.

In other computer news, my Sapphire R9-290 seems to have died. Looks to be a memory issue
I'll stick an old 5850 in for now but I guess I'm looking for a replacement that is preferably better (and hopefully shorter) than the R9. It fit and nothing in there seemed to get too hot, but that R9 did take up a fair amount of real estate.