The reason I mentioned those was that there were certain games back in the old days that needed lots of tweaking of things to work.
Wing Commander I'm looking at you
The reason I mentioned those was that there were certain games back in the old days that needed lots of tweaking of things to work.
Wing Commander I'm looking at you
I was more into war and flight sims, with Harpoon, Red Baron II, Fighting Steel, Silent Service and anything that Microprose made that flew. I still have Fighting Steel, which runs just fine on my Win7 Thinkpad. I never played WC.
Yep. My boxes for those probably still have the floppy in for them too.
Seem to recall Command and Conquer being a pain too.
The Amiga A500+ seemed easier at the time (and I had a 40mb HD for that too) but I got used to messing around more with the pc.
Command and Conquer was indeed a bit of a pain.. one trick we used later on was to start up Windows 95 which loaded drivers etc in good order and then fall back to DOS, the Win95 drivers were just a teensy smaller than the DOS versions and C&C worked with that, when booting up to DOS alone it was a pest, you had to load drivers and TSR's in exactly the right order or else no go.
Can't remember which game it was but it demanded 629KB of conventional memory... now THAT was a puzzle to get right, no CD drivers, the smallest and crudest mouse drivers and older Soundblaster drivers because these were also smaller..
Can't remember which game it was but it demanded 629KB of conventional memory... now THAT was a puzzle to get right, no CD drivers, the smallest and crudest mouse drivers and older Soundblaster drivers because these were also smaller..
Funny how times have changed, 4 classic C&C titles are now Free/Open Source.
Soundblaster was so fiddly. It needed attention constantly. I don't miss all that one bit. Remember saving for more or faster RAM or a graphics card that would fit into the one available slot after the FDs & CD took the rest and wouldn't be obsolete in four years..
I seem to remember being charged £100 for an extra 4mb of memory when I started out. 
The fun of limited interrupts and address spaces.
Ironically while we no longer have to deal with those limits, design of modern boards and processors and their limited number of PCIe lanes is almost as big a headache.
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Those are artificial limitations imposed by the manufacturers.
They could give us more, but they won't until pushed by consumers.
So much of the BoM (Bill of Materials) cost wasted on superficial RGB decorations & fancy coloration/graphics on the MoBo that don't add to performance.
They're not entirely artificial, yes you can have more lanes but the difficulty to keep signal integrity will make it MUCH more expensive, to cut it very VERY short, you need a bigger everything, bigger socket, with more pins/islands, more mainboard layers, more everything, so yeah, you can get it, but it will cost ya, go HEDT you want more lanes you get a 1000 buck mainboard and a 4000 buck processor oh and since they have quad channel memory banks you need at least 4 dimms as well.
So, do you actually need more lanes? Multi GPU is dead and deader and really dead, most users have 2 drives, not more, so what do you need more lanes for? Server? nah, NAS, most users do not make their own server.
So yeah for old hackers and techheads it's never enough
but for 90+ % of the computer users it doesn't matter.
So, do you actually need more lanes? Multi GPU is dead and deader and really dead, most users have 2 drives, not more, so what do you need more lanes for? Server? nah, NAS, most users do not make their own server.
So yeah for old hackers and techheads it's never enough
but for 90+ % of the computer users it doesn't matter.
I loved the Windows 10 Start Menu. First I removed all of the active tiles -- I didn't want any of that nonsense -- and I pinned all of my app shortcuts to it, plus shortcuts to local and shared folders. Basically, I turned it into a GNOME overview or a Rofi launcher for Linux, and then eliminated all of my shortcuts on the desktop.
I don't like the Windows 11 Start Menu at all.
^ I thought the W11 start menu was more or less the same as 10's? I don't use the default, so I don't see it most of the time unless I hit a key by mistake.
They're not entirely artificial, yes you can have more lanes but the difficulty to keep signal integrity will make it MUCH more expensive, to cut it very VERY short, you need a bigger everything, bigger socket, with more pins/islands, more mainboard layers, more everything, so yeah, you can get it, but it will cost ya, go HEDT you want more lanes you get a 1000 buck mainboard and a 4000 buck processor oh and since they have quad channel memory banks you need at least 4 dimms as well.
So, do you actually need more lanes? Multi GPU is dead and deader and really dead, most users have 2 drives, not more, so what do you need more lanes for? Server? nah, NAS, most users do not make their own server.
So yeah for old hackers and techheads it's never enough
Just for fun, my desktop has four hard drives, two opticals (one Blu-RW, One DVD-RW). I could probably drop one of the opticals, but want to keep the other.
At some point, I do want to replace at least two of the hard drives with larger SSD's (one HDD is fine)- but I really need to update a few other things too
The multi GPU is a long (long) time in the past for me
They're not entirely artificial, yes you can have more lanes but the difficulty to keep signal integrity will make it MUCH more expensive, to cut it very VERY short, you need a bigger everything, bigger socket, with more pins/islands, more mainboard layers, more everything, so yeah, you can get it, but it will cost ya, go HEDT you want more lanes you get a 1000 buck mainboard and a 4000 buck processor oh and since they have quad channel memory banks you need at least 4 dimms as well.
So, do you actually need more lanes? Multi GPU is dead and deader and really dead, most users have 2 drives, not more, so what do you need more lanes for? Server? nah, NAS, most users do not make their own server.
So yeah for old hackers and techheads it's never enough
yet 10 years ago we had lots of slots and lots of lanes now while the signal path length is becoming and more critical with PCIe5 (Level1techs has covered this several times) but not as much for PCIe3 and even 4.
but I guess I'm once of those 10%. I've got an x670e board that I need enough lanes for a GPU, HBA (SATA ports are also being cut back on), dual port nic.
Run 2 x NVMe drives, 6 x SSD, 1x HDD (had 2 more that are starting to throw some errors)
Yes, you two are not the usual kind of user.
As for the rest, mainboards aren't cheap anymore because of the high speed stuff and modern CPU's actually being SOCs, add more lanes = add more cost.
Guess we can just hope that things will improve over time again but I am afraid that more lanes for less won't be on the table..
As for the rest, mainboards aren't cheap anymore because of the high speed stuff and modern CPU's actually being SOCs, add more lanes = add more cost.
Guess we can just hope that things will improve over time again but I am afraid that more lanes for less won't be on the table..
Count me in as part of the 10% / Power User.Yes, you two are not the usual kind of user.
AMD's X-series of Chip Sets gets very close, they just need a few modifications to the latest iteration to get them there all the way.
That's the ultimate End-Goal to convince AMD & Intel to go that direction.
The UpLink from the South Bridge chips would be capped at x8 lanes of the PCIe Version that is above the current version used in the South Bridge.
Ergo if the Connection is PCIe 5.0 to all the U.2 / U.3 Connectors, than the UpLink to the CPU from the Bridge chips will be PCIe 6.0 over x8 per Bridge or x16 lanes in total over 2x Chips.
Current AMD X-series Chips already use 2x Bridge chips that link into each other.
It's only a matter of Min / Maxing what they are already producing and guiding them to a more universal connector route.
And leaving M.2 SSD's for the LapTop market.
Using U.2 / U.3 connectors on the old 1.8" HDD form factor, re-purposed for the modern age NVMe SSD drive.
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I installed Haiku on an old Dell optiplex. It's running ok. I could not get wifi to work with DHCP so went with regular ethernet instead. I can ping out to the outside world but the browser that comes with it isn't automatically connecting to anything, DNS or IP address, so some kind of IP socket issue.
It's not a lightweight OS, really. Not on the level of some minimal 'nix instal or a true wonder like Kolibrios, at least.
All in all not incredibly thrilled with it. Reminds me of the woes of trying to get Linux functional in the late 90's, early 00's, albeit with a much better installer Software available is minimal though there is an unofficial fork of Firefox I haven't tried on it. From a nostalgia perspective, it's interesting seeing what looks like BeOs on a screen again.
It's not a lightweight OS, really. Not on the level of some minimal 'nix instal or a true wonder like Kolibrios, at least.
All in all not incredibly thrilled with it. Reminds me of the woes of trying to get Linux functional in the late 90's, early 00's, albeit with a much better installer Software available is minimal though there is an unofficial fork of Firefox I haven't tried on it. From a nostalgia perspective, it's interesting seeing what looks like BeOs on a screen again.
Yes, you two are not the usual kind of user.
As for the rest, mainboards aren't cheap anymore because of the high speed stuff and modern CPU's actually being SOCs, add more lanes = add more cost.
Guess we can just hope that things will improve over time again but I am afraid that more lanes for less won't be on the table..
Not so much power-user, but semi hoarder
I do need to tidy up the hard-drives somewhat, but I'd also like to install some of the older stuff too.
I have that eh.. issue as well, my solution, I have older machines around, the most useful of the bunch run Win 7, 8.1 and 10 and I have a bunch of Linux machines as well, some for fooling around and some that are a 100% copy of my main machine.
I used to have a few do-it-all machines but that went south one day when a main machine failed and it took a looooong time to get everything back to what it used to be, if it happens now then I'll unplug it and just plug in a backup machine, no hassle and no need to reinstall, it's all there.
I used to have a few do-it-all machines but that went south one day when a main machine failed and it took a looooong time to get everything back to what it used to be, if it happens now then I'll unplug it and just plug in a backup machine, no hassle and no need to reinstall, it's all there.
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