Really tight fit but those new capacitors did fit the mainboard, will need to dig out a cooler and some RAM to see if the board works.
i had a TI 99/4a. It sucked. (let me append that. I STILL have a TI 99/4a but i don't turn it on) It could have been competitive, apart from some strange technological choices, but it had very few titles, and those it had weren't good. For all the number of them they sold for $99, it didn't develop much of a community, so good luck finding a friend at school you could swap cassette tapes or share basic programs with. It wasn't the worst computer I ever owned (looking at you Timex Sinclair), but it was close. I mowed a bunch of lawns and got a Ratshack Coco, and I was extremely happy with it. It was fun to program on, had a decent community though nowhere as big as the Vic 20 and C64 users, and the magazine you could pick up for it at Waldenbooks came with a cassette full of programs to try each month. The 8 bit era was a fun time of competing architectures. 6502, 6809, Z80, intel, the oddball TI chip.. the one I think is kind of a missed opportunity was the RCA 1802. NASA loved the hell out of it, but it didn't see much use in home computers. It had a lot of features that would have made it superior in many ways. Maybe it was just too expensive.
In the '70's and early '80's every chip was expensive, that is the reason why IBM chose the 8088 instead of the 8086, the 8 bit bus was already well known and parts readily available to build a usable chipset, just take a look at early motherboards for the 8088, 286 and 386, the early ones have a staggering amount of individual chips on them so those boards were very expensive to build, later on all those chips were replaced with the so called North and Southbridge chips which held the entire chipset instead of the 100+ chips before that. Having a great CPU is nice, having a less great CPU which makes home computers/PC's possible were just a tad nicer...
having a not-so great computer with a real keyboard was still better then having a great cpu and chiclet keys, or worse the membranes. though i don't think any great computer of that era necessarily had membrane kbs. fun to remember this stuff.
Only computer that comes to mind with membrane keys was the Atari 400 (which either says something about my memory or how few of them there were . Other with the chiclet keys was the Oric-1 which was like a sinclair though I recall the keys being a bit high (like chewing gum thingys before you've chewed them). Not exactly conducive to quick typing though.
My first computer was an Oric-1, Had fun with it, but the software wasn't quite as available as it was for Spectrum/Commodore/Amstrad at the time (Pretty sure we still have it too, but I haven't tried it for a good few years)
I actually started with a Atari 260 ST which we upgraded to have TOS in ROM a little more RAM and the DS/DD floppy drive, also added a PC emulation card which held a NEC V20 so it could run DOS stuff, we traded it in for a Philips NMS 9100 XT it had a 8088 and a early VGA graphics card (woaaah!!) XT's were quite awesome in one respect, thieves usually were used to the computer being a part of the keyboard, in the '80's someone tried to steal PC's from a school or university, they only took the keyboard, they left the IBM XT's behind...
Damn, ye olde Athlon 64 x2 kicked several buckets, luckily I had been given a same era board recently so it has been resurrected.
Installing XP on the machine I resurrected, seems to work fine, some details of Installing XP had faded, thing has a AMD Athlon 64X2 4800+ so it runs at 2500Mhz and it stayed at that, which isn't right.. it supports Cool & Quiet so at idle it should go back to 1000Mhz, adjusted the power plan to "Minimal powersaving" which usually does the trick but nope, dug around a little online and there's a driver, I had it actually on the HDD, tried to install it and nag nag nag bitch whine, not an Asus mainboard piss off! Of course AMD itself didn't have it anymore, heck no word of these old beasts, but after a while digging I found a non Asus infected version (bitch!) so now it the three normal speed modes, 1000, 1800 and 2500Mhz. Going to try and recreate the machine how it would have been in the past, era correct hardware/software/everywhere.. lots of old software I saved, being a maniacal backup tirant does have its advantages.
Linux Mint 19.3 "Tricia" has been released, there are some software changes which you can read about right here: https://www.linuxmint.com/rel_tricia_xfce_whatsnew.php I'm installing the new version fresh on one of my machines and see how it goes.
Santaman's techhead Pirate tech tip! The Antec P5 minitower! https://www.antec.com/product/case/p5.php I needed a casing for a backup machine, I was actually planning to buy something cheap or dig out a neanderthal casing which I have stashed away when my attention was drawn to the Antec, so I dug my main desktop machine out of its old casing and dropped it in the Antec. This casing will have space plenty for a micro ATX mainboard, supports a 360mm long graphics card, 155mm tall CPU coolers and several SSD's and HDD's. It has a 5.25" bay for CD/DVD/Blueray drives/writers. It is a casing geared to silence, it comes with a 140x140mm front fan, you can also fit two 120x120 ones or a radiator, the rear has a 120x120mm fan, both fans are not high speed and also geared towards silence but enough for my system which is a Ryzen 3 2200G Both side panels have sound insulation and the casing has a front door also with the same sound insulation material, behind the door is an intake airfilter which you can remove with one click of a button, easy peasy, on the bottom is another filter for the PSU, you can't remove that one though. Installing mainboard and CD/DVD/whatever drives require the usual screwdriver action, nothing wild there, the HDD cage has two plastic frames which hold a HDD, you then slide it in, no tools required. Cable management is easy, you can reroute most cables behind the motherboard plate, even with a non modular PSU like mine I was able to clear away most cables. Powerbutton, USB ports and IO are situated on the top of the casing, means you can leave the door closed when you need them, the HDD and powerled are a combined white LED ring, not too bright and rather good looking, the door has a wood grain/brushed metal-ish detailing. The main advantage of this casing is that it has NO window and NO RGB, the sound level is very low and temperatures very good, building a computer with this casing is not complicated, you get a manual and zip ties etc with the casing, one more nice detail is that the feet are rubberized so the casing doesn't slide around when you plug in external devices etc. Price wise I think that it is a very good casing, in the Netherland it goes for 55-ish Euroes and for that I actually think it is one of the best casings you can get for micro ATX. So my rating would be four bottles rum out of five.
Well then, This was the last month that Windows 7 had its usual patches and is now declared end of life by Micro$oft, Windows 8.1 will be supported up to Januari 2023, after that there will only be Windows 10 left or if you can make the switch several userfriendly Linux distros are available. As for the rest, if you don't need the internet then your Windows 7 machine can go on as long as the hardware, it is not like the OS will suddenly fail or whatever so don't panic, even if you do use Windows 7 online then for the coming few months that is okay as long you don't visit any strange/dodgy sites and you will have to install a third party antivirus/malware program but eventually you will need to switch to 8.1 or 10.
Microsoft does have a program where governments and big corporations can pony up some cash to have support to Windows 7 until 2023 which costs between $25 and $200 per workstation and the German govt will pony up over 800,000 Euro this year alone. https://www.zdnet.com/article/german-government-to-pay-eur800000-in-windows-7-esu-fees-this-year/ I'm sure it will be a nice little earner for Microsoft. There was also a call (a tad tongue in cheek) from the FSF to MS to open source Windows but will be a cold day in hell before that happens as there are parts that MS would want to keep secret but there's also components in there that have been licensed from other vendors.
M$ would be in serious trouble if they'd open source any NT based Windows... within no time it would be adopted by anyone who wants to get rid of the money sucking vampire M$ has become, companies would be rid of licence fees etc, M$ can't have that..
They actually use Linux a lot, in the past they just didn't want us to use Linux, and gawd forbid companies.. all those delicious overprized licences, but nowadays they make stuff that runs on Linux.. for which you have to pay, no longer for the OS but for everything else you use M$ for unless you stick to open source all the way.
I think Windows broke something again with an update. Last week Messenger was working just fine, today nothing happens when you click on the Messenger tile. Over the weekend was a 1909 feature update. Tried all of the suggestions on the MS website, nothing seemed to fix it.