General Computer Thread

Discussion in 'Science and Technology' started by Amaris, May 26, 2016.

  1. Santaman

    Santaman Vice Admiral Admiral

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    ^^ yeah normal 3.5" HDD's were a lot faster than the Bigfoot, I was lucky to get a 10GB IBM Deskstar with one of my P-II machines back then, it was a 7200RPM disk and it was gloriously fast, also one of the more silent 7200RPM drives.
    I've got two 20GB Maxtors and a 20GB WD, also 7200RPM drives and these three are a lot more noisy, also I have the first ever 7200RPM drives.. the SCSI Seagate Barracuda, these are the loudest and literally most nerve wrecking drives ever made, there is no way I can fully explain what they sound like.. :crazy::ack::cardie::wtf:

    Seems the new 65Watt Ryzen 4's are quite good, quite cool and only a few %'s slower than the "X" versions, they also come with stock cooling, the 7600 comes with the Wraith Stealth CPU cooler whic isn't good enough... but the 7700 comes with a Wraith Prism which actually is capable of keeping the chip perfectly cool enough.
    https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-ryzen-5-7600-non-x/
    https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-7700-non-x/
     
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  2. Amaris

    Amaris Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    I love what AMD is doing with their Ryzen line. My little Ryzen 5 2600 is a beast, as far as I'm concerned. I don't play up to the minute AAA games (except for Star Citizen), and it handles everything capably. I do quite a bit of video authoring, and transcoding, and the processor is a champ in that regard. It's just an all around solid processor, and the price is so reasonable compared to Intel's offerings.

    Would I love a newer Ryzen? Yeah, I'm curious to see what I could do with one. I'm always interested in the latest and greatest, it's just my wallet that rejects those wishes. :P
     
  3. Marc

    Marc Fleet Admiral Premium Member

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    no the lucky part was it being a deskstar and not a deathstar :)

    Okay I guess it was probably a bit later than those spinning disasters.
     
  4. Santaman

    Santaman Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Only one series of the Deskstar, the 75GXP was plagued with problems the other series are among the most reliable harddrives ever made, also they were all seriously fast, I had one 75GXP, a 30GB model and it indeed failed, but was refurbished and it actually worked for a few years after that.
     
  5. Marc

    Marc Fleet Admiral Premium Member

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    sign of the times.

    My wife has some some floppy disks she wants to look as they're marked as having photos on them.

    I haven't had a connected floppy drive in over a decade.

    Had an idea - my mother-in-law has an old Acer laptop (circa 2006) though it would have a floppy.

    I was wrong.
     
  6. Santaman

    Santaman Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Hmm.. you could look for USB floppy drives, especially in shops that sell laptops you might be able to find those, else second hand online somewhere.
     
  7. Unicron

    Unicron Boss Monster Mod Moderator

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    So, I have an oddball and perhaps silly question for my own curiosity. And perhaps it's just a side effect of slowly turning into an old fart. :D

    I was watching some stuff earlier on Netflix, and have noticed that when I'm logged in on Safari, it doesn't show the "encrypted" lock icon although it does show up if I were to log in on Chrome, and there are a few other sites like this in Safari (but not many). The main Netflix page is encrypted if no one is logged in. I haven't had any problems with Netflix or other services, but I'm kind of curious why such a difference would exist when both browsers are up to date versions on a newer system. Is there any specific concern with such a configuration or it is too minor to realistically care about?

    * shakes the old fart cane * :lol:

    I have read that people have occasionally had problems connecting to a service like Netflix after updating Safari or Apple stuff or using a VPN, but I've never had such issues. Mainly I'm just curious. :)
     
  8. Gingerbread Demon

    Gingerbread Demon I love Star Trek Discovery Premium Member

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    Drivers killing GPUs........


     
  9. Santaman

    Santaman Vice Admiral Admiral

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  10. Marc

    Marc Fleet Admiral Premium Member

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    Jan 19th 1983 and a computer that was released that would take a concept whose creators wheren't interested in taking to the world and ran with it.

    Today marks the 40th anniversary of the Apple Lisa - the first commercially available desktop computer with a graphical interface (Sun workstations didn't get a GUI until November 83)

    https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/revisiting-apples-ill-fated-lisa-computer-40-years-on/

    Sadly it had two major flaws - the price tag which put it out the range of pretty much any home user (a shade under $10K which included 2 x floppy drives, 1MB ram and pre-emptive multitasking) and the lack of connectivity that discouraged the business markets, the latter due to a decision made by steve jobs.

    But even with the internal politics at Apple it did lead to the Mac (which got networking cos they ignored jobs on that point) which really put us on the path to graphical interfaces but the product that I think would have really spurred things on (remember Windows didn't pre-emptive multitasking until much later when WinNT was released).
     
  11. Gingerbread Demon

    Gingerbread Demon I love Star Trek Discovery Premium Member

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    How different things would have been had the Lisa been a real success
     
  12. Marc

    Marc Fleet Admiral Premium Member

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    yes I believe I made the very point.
     
  13. Gingerbread Demon

    Gingerbread Demon I love Star Trek Discovery Premium Member

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    Oops yes I know..... Just that was a very cool machine that deserved more
     
  14. hbquikcomjamesl

    hbquikcomjamesl Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Last Spring, while I was on vacation, my DOSbook (an old 400-series Compaq Contura, running IBM PC-DOS 2000) finally crapped out on me. Thankfully, I was already at a point where, short of a disaster, it was mathematically impossible to go over-budget (the budget spreadsheet was on it), but I had planned to do some writing on my novel on it, which abruptly became impossible.

    My first attempt at setting up a new DOSbook, last year, failed: the cheap no-name vintage notebook I acquired had hard disk problems.

    So I bought another vintage notebook, this time a Dell Latitude, that actually had a warranty from the vendor, which arrived after the first of the year, and this one was completely stable (albeit a bit bulkier and heavier than I would have liked).

    After FDISKing it and installing PC-DOS 2000 (I don't allow WinDoze in the house), I took it home Tuesday night, hooked up a LapLink cable, and replicated the additional stuff for the C: volume onto it, along with the entire contents of the D: volume, from my DOS/Linux tower. Then, last night, I hooked up the LapLink cable again, and replicated the E: volume, which has the most stuff of any of the five volumes on the DOS side of the tower. Squeezing all of that through a LapLink cable took quite some time: I started it around 6:30 PM, and it didn't finish until 3 AM!
    [​IMG]
    dosbook dosshell
    by James Lampert, on Flickr

    Once E: was replicated, I could finally give it the "acid test": I launched Xerox Ventura Publisher. (The real Ventura, not the PageFaker knockoff that Corel turned it into.) And it came up just fine.
    [​IMG]
    dosbook ventura
    by James Lampert, on Flickr
     
  15. Marc

    Marc Fleet Admiral Premium Member

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    Now that's a package I haven't heard of in many decades.

    I got my start in the IT industry in the the very very late 80s with Business that also developed software and the two people responsible for the manuals did it all Ventura.

    One of them used a lunch box PC (same style as Compaq Portable III) it was a time when the orange Gas Plasma displays were still thing.

    The was also a sign on the door admonshing people not to feed the desktop publishers :)
     
  16. Gingerbread Demon

    Gingerbread Demon I love Star Trek Discovery Premium Member

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    What were those orange displays like? Were they easy on the eyes?
     
  17. KamenRiderBlade

    KamenRiderBlade Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    With Micron putting out new 24 GB & 48 GB DIMM sticks of RAM and general PC RAM/System Memory getting cheaper, so that we'll all have absurd levels of RAM at the consumer side.

    I noticed that "Initial First Time Boots" are getting longer due to the larger RAM Capacities that we all have.

    Has anybody bothered to tell the BIOS/UEFI manufacturers/developers to update their BIOS/UEFI to count the RAM with as many CPU Cores/Threads as possible that is available on your PC System?

    Seriously, it seems like they deliberately left that part to be a "Single-Core" task and never bothered to update it.
     
  18. Gingerbread Demon

    Gingerbread Demon I love Star Trek Discovery Premium Member

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    That video I posted seems there's more to the story then what has been told. Those cards might have been modded for mining via vbios and sold onto other people without telling them hence the problems.. Krisfix who also does youtube videos has made statements about this.
     
  19. KamenRiderBlade

    KamenRiderBlade Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    The Mystery of the Radeon RX 6000 Mass Extinction Event May Have Been Solved
    Ex mining cards were probably a victim of humidity from poor warehousing

    Most miners have their rigs setup as "Open Test Benches", so I'm not surprised if they didn't have the humidity controlled very well.
     
  20. Gingerbread Demon

    Gingerbread Demon I love Star Trek Discovery Premium Member

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    I did love how everyone jumped on AMD as if "Oooh mass defects"