General Computer Thread

[Gingerbread Demon]

I just got a box of 3.5 inch floppies...... I didn't realize they were still available till I looked so bought that and an USB powered floppy drive. This should be fun. There's also internal drives you can still buy too.

Anyway this brought something to mind. Remember how creative you had to be to work in short filenames. OMG because even back then I was a picture hoarder you had to be so creative to name your files with the old 8.3 filename system Windows used.

 

[Haggis and tatties]

^^1.44 mb double sided........I remember Star Trek Judgements rites coming on 12 of these at the time. lol

I also rememebr the Atari St 520 had this weird thing where there was two versions of it, one had a single side drive and one had a double sided drive, we only found this out when the Bro-in-law's new Atari St did not play the digital music on the Starglider disk which was on the other side of the disk, and mine did. lol

Great days.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

^^1.44 mb double sided........I remember Star Trek Judgements rites coming on 12 of these at the time. lol

I also rememebr the Atari St 520 had this weird thing where there was two versions of it, one had a single side drive and one had a double sided drive, we only found this out when the Bro-in-law's new Atari St did not play the digital music on the Starglider disk which was on the other side of the disk, and mine did. lol

Great days.

And you had other makers with their own unique odd format that didn't accommodate anyone. Amstrat had 3 inch disks never mind 3.5 inch disks which were standard, no they had to use their own unique format that wasn't usable anywhere else but Amstrad machines.

Still have those too and an external drive, though the latter has a dead PSU.
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And back from system restore.

I just finished a backup of my system a little while ago today, then restored everything to a 3.5 inch 7200rpm mechanical hard drive as a safety net. When I booted the system up it took 1 minute 5 seconds to boot into windows.

My normal drive is an SSD and the same boot takes 17 seconds.

I didn't realize mechanical drives were that slow or have I just been spoilt using an SSD for the last year?

Also I don't use fast boot so that 17 seconds on the SSD is not using fast boot.

 

[John Clark]

I just got a box of 3.5 inch floppies...... I didn't realize they were still available till I looked so bought that and an USB powered floppy drive. This should be fun. There's also internal drives you can still buy too.

Anyway this brought something to mind. Remember how creative you had to be to work in short filenames. OMG because even back then I was a picture hoarder you had to be so creative to name your files with the old 8.3 filename system Windows used.

Yeah, they're not as common here as they used to be, but on occasion I still spot them. For my current (main) desktop though, I'd probably have to pick up an external floppy as there aren't any spare slots for an internal one anymore

 

[Santaman]

A lot of my machines still have floppy drives, later era mainboards lack a floppy controller anyway and only can handle USB floppy drives, some recent boards, like my main machine's mainboard don't even have PATA IDE ports anymore.

 

[Marc]

A lot of my machines still have floppy drives, later era mainboards lack a floppy controller anyway and only can handle USB floppy drives, some recent boards, like my main machine's mainboard don't even have PATA IDE ports anymore.

Apart from floppy drives being so last century. with small form factor motherboards being the trend (unless you need uber expansion) there's no room for the FDD port.

Some are even down to a single PS/2 port or less. Was onsite this morning changing over the POS terminals. They wanted to keep their mice (not keen on the track pads on the keyboards and don't blame them - it was a piddly little thing) but the rodents were PS/2 and the HP RP9s don't have PS/2 ports.

 

[Santaman]

I have some converter plugs, you can plug a PS/2 mouse onto an USB connector with them, plenty of old non USB machines around an most mice have died or just got lost..

 

[Stephen!]

They could have done with USB mouses in high school. Naughty people kept taking the balls out of the regular ones.

 

[Stephen!]

And you had other makers with their own unique odd format that didn't accommodate anyone. Amstrat had 3 inch disks never mind 3.5 inch disks which were standard, no they had to use their own unique format that wasn't usable anywhere else but Amstrad machines.

They worked with the Spectrum +3 as well.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

They worked with the Spectrum +3 as well.

That isn't surprising.....Amstrads and Spectrums share a lot of commonality.

 

[John Clark]

A lot of my machines still have floppy drives, later era mainboards lack a floppy controller anyway and only can handle USB floppy drives, some recent boards, like my main machine's mainboard don't even have PATA IDE ports anymore.

That's probably the issue with mine too (I'd thought it was too many other drives, but then I remembered, I had spare slots for the latest hard drive and optical drive on the board).

In other news, I also remembered another reason I dumped my 5850. I did need an upgrade but it had got totally crash happy (It didn't seem to be overheating and was getting a constant power supply) but running any games and it would crash to bios and reboot

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

That's probably the issue with mine too (I'd thought it was too many other drives, but then I remembered, I had spare slots for the latest hard drive and optical drive on the board).

In other news, I also remembered another reason I dumped my 5850. I did need an upgrade but it had got totally crash happy (It didn't seem to be overheating and was getting a constant power supply) but running any games and it would crash to bios and reboot

Maybe that was the ram going faulty or a io or glue chip gone bung.

 

[John Clark]

Possibly

Looking at getting a GTX1060 6GB later. I know it's not top of the line, but given the resolution/monitor size I play at, it should be perfectly suitable without killing the bank.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I am actually debating going back to my old 4:3 monitor for gaming, It's got DVI inputs and is still in very good condition. Native resolution is 1024x768 but that doesn't phase me. I'm wondering how my games will perform at that resolution. Won't that need less video memory?

 

[Santaman]

Not sure modern games even support 4:3 anymore, yes it would need less VRAM but I can't imagine gaming on it being a nice experience.

 

[think]

https://quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net/qx/user-guide
form the IBM site... above link ... ways to program in quantum computing ?

anyone?

So what is different about a quantum computer.? mostly? If you break down the ideas then processing still comes down to binary just a little slower when done = but it is all binary work all the three level processing is really binary of one form or another?
they are saying molecular constructions can be folded and un-folded and solved easier with this type of processing? we will see....

 

[Marc]

Possibly

Looking at getting a GTX1060 6GB later. I know it's not top of the line, but given the resolution/monitor size I play at, it should be perfectly suitable without killing the bank.

So no high frame rate, 4K video gaming for you

Though I wondering how people are managing to read the screens on some systems these day. Was reading about the latest Lenovo Yoga laptop. The thing can have a 13.9" 4K screen.

Must be nice to be able to read a screen like that. I have a 24" 1980x1020 monitor and wouldn't warn the resolution any higher - would have difficulty in working with that resolution on a smaller screen - I know from experienc on a Windows tablet with a 12.1' screen.

Sure you can scale but that's only going to go so far.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

And this is why I think widescreens are fine for TV and media but not for reading and productivity, in some cases I'd prefer a large square 4:3 screen like my old 17 inch screen for reading and stuff. On that it was very easy to read.

I did game on that screen for a while and never had problems, what problems were people thinking you'd get?

 

[Marc]

And this is why I think widescreens are fine for TV and media but not for reading and productivity, in some cases I'd prefer a large square 4:3 screen like my old 17 inch screen for reading and stuff. On that it was very easy to read.

it has nothing to do with wide screen. There's no reason why you couldn't do a 4:3 monitor that was 4K but there's no demand and it would off little benefit.

If you have mutiple documents or windows open, widescreen is so much easier to work with work. Even good old side by side page view in Word Cocument works better widescreen.

Do any sort of serious spreadsheeting and wide screen is a godsend.

 

[John Clark]

So no high frame rate, 4K video gaming for you

Though I wondering how people are managing to read the screens on some systems these day. Was reading about the latest Lenovo Yoga laptop. The thing can have a 13.9" 4K screen.

Must be nice to be able to read a screen like that. I have a 24" 1980x1020 monitor and wouldn't warn the resolution any higher - would have difficulty in working with that resolution on a smaller screen - I know from experienc on a Windows tablet with a 12.1' screen.

Sure you can scale but that's only going to go so far.

Yep - Besides, looking around in the local shops, if I wanted to go much higher, I'd be spending between a 30 to 200% more on a card.
For my DT, I too have a monitor about that size and given the size of our computer room I can't back up too much to get a larger screen. In theory, I could shove everything else in some other room, but then I've got to deal with other people getting in the way

If you have mutiple documents or windows open, widescreen is so much easier to work with work. Even good old side by side page view in Word Cocument works better widescreen.

Do any sort of serious spreadsheeting and wide screen is a godsend.

Oh hell yes. I sometimes have to compare spreadsheets to the one of the software packages we use a little and it would be nice to have a w/s monitor for that. If we ever go full time on that particular software, i'm demanding a widescreen monitor - and 23 inch at least.

For home use, I do have widescreen and often have vlc/video software open on one half of the screen and a browser open the other side.