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General Computer Thread

It is amazing how quickly storage prices fell back then as i remember buying the Amiga 500 +HD 20 meg cheese wedge hdd in 1991 for £299 , which is a big drop in only 6 years. Ha

Oh and once i had it, then finding 99% of games simply would not use it, even mutiple disk games. Lol
 
Oh yeah, I remember how big 10MB was back then. Also, who remembers when you actually had to park the disk before shutting things down?
 
I did not buy my first PC until 1994, so i think by then auto parking was the norm for HDDs, but i thought you only parked the HDD when you were going to physically move the machine, or am i thinking of something else?
 
I have a Seagate ST-412 harddrive, it is from 1981 IIRC and 10MB in size, yes MFM stepper drives need to be parked, later on harddrives parked themselves but ST-225's etc do need park.com, diskpark.com or other programs of that kind to park their heads.
It is safer to park the heads even if you don't plan on moving the machine, there's always a chance that someone will bump into the desk or so.
 
Yeah, the era the 10MB drive is from an era where where was far less automation. It wasn't a suggestion, it was something you had to do regardless of where the machine was. And that was long before the idea of portables (heh, the idea of 10 pound lunchbox style portables is kind of funny looking back) . But those portables did also use parking. The drives back in those days also took their time spooling up, and they were far noisier, with their click-clacking.
 
Ah yes! in the old days you could recognize a drive by the sound it made, the Seagate ST-225 you could recognize the second it spinned up, the ST-4096 still has the most wonderful sound I know. :hugegrin:
 
And let's not forget, that even with a hard drive, you still saved things on floppies as the hard drive was usually used for the system, and you still loaded things via the floppies.
 
Boot windows off the old girl and install Linux on it, it will do wonders for it's speed and capabilities and then use it as a backup machine.:mallory:

well that and a a decent SSD.

though the problem is if you have to go back to working with spinning rust it makes it all the more painful.
 
Horizontal pc cases are very hard to find. Lots in micro ATX and mini ATX but not much of anything for full sized boards. I'm looking at local retailers and not interstate though, it's time for my old girl to shed her old case and get a new home

Pretty much all of the computer retailers here sell tower desktops. Last time I had a horizontal PC was over 15 years ago.

A few weeks I started thinking about my next PC, as I'm wanting to upgrade from i7-9700 to a i9. Waiting on Windows 12 and deciding if I'll upgrade to Windows 11, when support runs out for Windows 10. Would love to use Linux, but not sure how that would work with a program I use a lot (daz3d).
 
Pretty much all of the computer retailers here sell tower desktops. Last time I had a horizontal PC was over 15 years ago.

A few weeks I started thinking about my next PC, as I'm wanting to upgrade from i7-9700 to a i9. Waiting on Windows 12 and deciding if I'll upgrade to Windows 11, when support runs out for Windows 10. Would love to use Linux, but not sure how that would work with a program I use a lot (daz3d).


I did find one, the Silverstone GD08 httpc case. Takes a standard ATX board as well as the other sizes
 
Was given a graphics card, old one, Sapphire HD 6950 Dirt3 card, was made around 2010-2012 it isn't looking too bad, nothing large that got damaged over time, it wasn't too dirty either, just one standoff was missing on one of the DVI connectors, I had one lying around and it fits perfectly.
I cleaned it up with alcohol etc and I now need a machine to test the thing, it needs a 500 watt powersuply to run, I have a machine with good enough specs and all but that one is not in one piece, I have no casing for it.
I do hope the thing works, would be nice, back in the day these were really great, I have some AMD/ATI cards from the same era, HD 5770, HD 5870, HD 6970 which is the bigger brother of this card and a HD 7850 which is a generation newer.
So yeah, back at PC archeology, have found drivers already so hopefully it will still work. :)
 
So, I picked up my new computer yesterday, and OMG, it's so fast. This feels like a supercar in comparison to my older one which felt like an old jalopy that struggled to get up any hill. That one took about 10 min to boot up properly as I'd have to wait for things to settle in the background. This boots up in like 5 seconds.

The case is an AZZA. Never heard of them, but it's a really nice one. All the easy to access things including the power button are on top rather than in the front. And I've got color-changing lights in front that look like an aurora dancing. It's quite nice. My Ram also lights up.

Oh yeah, here's the case in question. https://www.azza.gg/products/celesta-f-340f
 
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Brand new modem with two phone ports for voip but only one works....

I ordered the Netcomm NF20mesh starter pack but I have a very curious issue with it. It's got two connections for analog phones but I can only use port 2 on the back of the modem, despite setting both up only the light for port 2 is on and I only managed to get that far because I had to ring support and they had to do something remotely to the modem which I can't duplicate for port one of the two phone connections.

Everything is working fine just it is reallly niggling at me why I can't use both phone ports, and why only port 2 of the phone ports seems to be the one that wants to work. I hav considered reflashing the firmware but it's a brand new out of the box modem
 
Linux Mint 21.3 has been released which is the last incarnation of the 21.X series, besides the standard version they also have a Debian based version, desktops available are Cinnamon, XFCE and Mate.:)
As I mentioned a couple of months ago, I kinda broke my Mint 21.2 install by removing Flatpak support. Nothing broke except for the Software Center, and I probably could have undone my change, but I decided to let it ride and I'd do a clean install with 21.3. In the interim, LMDE6 became my daily driver. Still I was curious about the nascent Wayland support in Cinnamon 6.

Wayland, on Mint, is not ready for prime time. They do label it "Experimental," because there are things that do not work. Most of the time, things are fine. But when something doesn't display the way you expect, or doesn't run at all... Grrr. Try to open, for example, Timeshift, which requires root permissions, and the password dialogue will never open, so the application will never run. I was surprised Coverflow actually worked, except there's no background.

I also installed the Wayland-capable version of FreeRDP, since that's an application I used daily for work, and I don't think it's Muffin (the Mint compositor)'s fault that FreeRDP Wayland doesn't have any window decorations at all. The X11 version runs just fine (with maybe a little lag) under Wayland, and I'll stick with that for the time being.

Now LMDE has updated to Cinnamon 6, so I don't really need 21.3 for Mint with Wayland, but I've been running a main branch Mint for so long I can't bear to part with it.
 
Been on Mint main branch for ages, started with 13 so it's been a while, been through three laptops and quite a few desktops while using it.:mallory:
 
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