General Computer Thread

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

  1. Santaman

    Santaman Vice Admiral Admiral

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    This is how it goes, some stuff works, some stuff doesn't, in any case M$ has been very flaky the last two years or so...
     
  2. Marc

    Marc Fleet Admiral Premium Member

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    never had to worry in quite that way.

    The first computer that sat on my desk at home and wasn't a a C64, was an NEC APC III. It had a 8086 clone (The NEC V20 or might bave been V30) and ran a customised version of MS-DOS 3.3 and EGA graphics. There was also a board called an SLE (Software library Expander) which allowed it run IBM MS-DOS and apps such as MS Flight Simulator but only in CGA graphics mode). the SLE board had a second processor on and I guess the correct bios support or something to go IBM. Apple did the same thing on of the Apple Macs and think Sun Microsystems did to.

    Anyway there was 256Kb on the motherboard and then it had add in proprietary cards that would take the memory up to 640Kb.

    Was a nice machine and the APC IIIs were used in TAFE Colleges (vocational training) uptil about 1991/92

    It was then replaced by a NEC Powermate SX which had a 80386SX (remember those - 32bit internal/16bit external bus). 640Kb on the motherboard but also had a proprietary slot for memory expansion. Can't remember the size of the memory on the card. This was a hand me down from dad so by the time i came to me had both the high speed memory slot filled and a hyperam card- oh the megabytes of memory and the 2 x 42MB hard disks. Oh and after changing the clock crystal the thing ran at a blinding 20Mhz :)

    And the reason for the NECs? Dad's job and the company that I first started in the IT industry with was a big local NEC dealer.
     
  3. Santaman

    Santaman Vice Admiral Admiral

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    V20's and V30's were fun chips, I've got a few XT's that have these in them, confused the hell out of software so 286 and up stuff sometimes worked on the XT although quite slowly. Dune II even ran on our NMS 9100 up to level 3 after that the machines simply couldn't handle it anymore. :D
     
  4. Marc

    Marc Fleet Admiral Premium Member

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    dad reckoned they were a bit faster than the Intel chip but don't know if was a faster clock speed or NEC had tweaked the design a bit.
     
  5. Santaman

    Santaman Vice Admiral Admiral

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  6. Gingerbread Demon

    Gingerbread Demon I love Star Trek Discovery Premium Member

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    Is there a version of Windows Movie Maker still available? I like that program but it won't install in windows 10 and I just need it to make quick youtubes. Is there an alternative that is just as simple to use?
     
  7. Santaman

    Santaman Vice Admiral Admiral

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    No idea, I've lost touch with the windows sphere of programs.. doesn't M$ have a download catalog or something? Else Google is your frennemy.
     
  8. Gingerbread Demon

    Gingerbread Demon I love Star Trek Discovery Premium Member

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    MS used to have a download catalog and up until July of last year Movie Maker worked inside Windows 10. Not anymore.

    I'm googling.
     
  9. Santaman

    Santaman Vice Admiral Admiral

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    They just kicked Paint from Win 10, its now an app you can freely download from the store, guess your moviemaker might have had the same treatment.
     
  10. Marc

    Marc Fleet Admiral Premium Member

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    Courtesy of wiki (who is one's friend just like google). Microsoft discontinued moviemaker at the beginning of this yaar and iit will replaced by a product called "Windows Story Remix".

    Given that Moviemarker dated back to 2000 (was release with that abomination known as Windows Me) so I could imagine the code is very old very creaky and hard to optimise for modern CPU architecture.

    Also they've recanted on their decision to drop Paint.
     
  11. Santaman

    Santaman Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Windows MEh.. never even ran it on a test machine, of course compared to M$ Spyware 10 it suddenly doesn't sound that awful anymore.. I do like Win 98SE more.
     
  12. Marc

    Marc Fleet Admiral Premium Member

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    I only had to deal with once - never sold it, never had any of my clients install it (it was a 3rd party working with one of my clients). Was moving more to Win2K so having to do things like reboot after changing an IP address (available in W2K not in ME) was pain in the arse.

    Guess that's the problem when you get used to new operating systems. I occasions have to deal with a point of sale system that's running n XP. The regular environment is locked tight so you have to log out to do anything. If it was say Vista or Win7 could use the option to log in as a different user rather than have to wait 5 minutes each time for the damn POS system to load (I'm sure a SSD would do wonders).

    The entitty that ones them has left things too late to move off XP - MS won't sell them Win7 or 8.x and Windows 10 doesn't have driver support for some of the devices so they are sorta stuck.
     
  13. Gingerbread Demon

    Gingerbread Demon I love Star Trek Discovery Premium Member

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    My favourite windows was XP.... 2000 I had on one machine but XP was my favourite. Was there a 64 bit version, I can't recall?
     
  14. CorporalClegg

    CorporalClegg Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    XP did have a 64-bit version.

    It was awful.
     
  15. Gingerbread Demon

    Gingerbread Demon I love Star Trek Discovery Premium Member

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    That's too bad because I liked XP.
     
  16. Marc

    Marc Fleet Admiral Premium Member

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    moving to 64bit has been painful for Microsoft.


    Don't think I ever used to bit at the time there probably wasn't much that would really take advantage of its 64bit nature and I could imagine that driver support was next to non-existent

    Just having a quick wiki read it, the 64bit version of XP was originally developed to run in Itanium systems but once the AMD brought out the 64bit versions of Athlons people started to move away from them (it was a pretty expensive platform).

    First 64bit version of Windows Server was 2003R2 (the client and server versions share the same code base). but it wasn't that crash hot either. IIRc people had to wait until Microsoft updated Exchange Server before it would support 64bit (which didn't happen for another 2 years). Exchange has always been a memory hog so 64bit addressing would give it more space and and more ram to gobble.

    First 64bit version of Office came out ini 2010 and of course that broke more stuff - mainly plugins and add-ons for Outlook.

    Though it's stable now (I have office 2016 64bit installed without problems).
     
  17. Santaman

    Santaman Vice Admiral Admiral

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    XP 64 was okay as long you managed to build a system with parts that had good driver support.

    Itanium.. yeah I still don't know what Intel was thinking, going from a REALLY REALLY REAHEAHEALY well supported architecture with a gigantic user AND developer base to something entirely new which had no software, no hardware, no compilers, no killer app, NO NOTHING and then assume people would change over because it was made by Intel... and indeed, then AMD gave them a big kick where it hurt most..
     
  18. Ar-Pharazon

    Ar-Pharazon Admiral Premium Member

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    I did my first scratch-built machine around 2005. I wasn't aware of 64 bit XP, so I installed 32 bit.

    I did install 8 GB of RAM and was surprised I couldn't use all of it with 32 bit XP, so then I got the 64 bit version.

    Yeah, there were some issues getting programs that ran under 64 bit at that point, but it wasn't that bad. I remember having to dump Norton in favor of TuneUp Utilities and ESET anti-virus. Other than that, not really too problematic, maybe a few driver issues.

    I've been on 64 bit Win7 since it came out. If just for the ability to use larger amounts of RAM, it's worth dealing with any minor issues.
     
  19. Marc

    Marc Fleet Admiral Premium Member

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    when I built my current system a couple of years back I put in 16GB so 64bit was necessary (though except for a couple of times when I've virtualised some stuff I've never really pushed - don't game other than flight sim on the odd occasions) but still nice not having to worry about memory limits.

    Come to think of it my last machine had 8GB so yeah been running Windows 64bit for quite some time.

    Even turned my computer in a hackintosh but can't remember whether it was a 64bit version of OS X I used.
     
  20. Gingerbread Demon

    Gingerbread Demon I love Star Trek Discovery Premium Member

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    I have two hdds on racks..

    Do you need extra hardware to do a Hackintosh?