General Computer Thread

[Guy Gardener]

One of the files I recovered from my twatted external hard drive is Anne of Green Gables (1985) ... My girlfriend is now forcing me to watch this bollocks, which is not nearly as charming as I remember.

Childhood ruined, again.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

One of the files I recovered from my twatted external hard drive is Anne of Green Gables (1985) ... My girlfriend is now forcing me to watch this bollocks, which is not nearly as charming as I remember.

Childhood ruined, again.

My first proper official date / sleepover made me watch that with her before we went to bed. I loved her dearly but what words can describe this?

Oh the pain, the pain.

 

[Santaman]

Rediscovered an old machine, a Duron 700, it used to be one of the four machines my friends and I made for LAN gaming, ah, the old days.. Doom Legacy, Redneck Rampage, Mechwarrior 4 and of course Unreal Tournament 1999 GOTY Edition..
The machine still works, haven't had the time to check it out yet, I do know it was reinstalled ages ago, but I think I saw the Unreal directory sitting on the drive.

 

[rhubarbodendron]

LOL those were the days, Santy
Btw, can you remember what that game was called where you have to move a snake across the screeen that keeps growing while you play and must touch neither the screen's borders nor itself? IIRC it was published around the time coloured screens came into use (I seem to recall that the snake was yellow, not green as the monochrome screens were), so that it must have been published around the time the C-64 was built (1982) but before computer mice came into use (1983/4).

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

LOL those were the days, Santy
Btw, can you remember what that game was called where you have to move a snake across the screeen that keeps growing while you play and must touch neither the screen's borders nor itself? IIRC it was published around the time coloured screens came into use (I seem to recall that the snake was yellow, not green as the monochrome screens were), so that it must have been published around the time the C-64 was built (1982) but before computer mice came into use (1983/4).

Oddly enough, it was called Snake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_(video_game_genre)

 

[rhubarbodendron]

That put me on the right track! Thank you!!
It was a variation of Snake, called Nibbles =) Wikipedia says it was written in good old QBasic and came for free with the C-64 in 1982. My long-term memory appears to be a good deal better than I dared to hope.

10 start
20 input A$ = "Oddly enough, it was called Snake."
30 return "Thank you!!!!!!!!!!!"
40 hug
50 end

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

That put me on the right track! Thank you!!
It was a variation of Snake, called Nibbles =) Wikipedia says it was written in good old QBasic and came for free with the C-64 in 1982. My long-term memory appears to be a good deal better than I dared to hope.

10 start
20 input A$ = "Oddly enough, it was called Snake."
30 return "Thank you!!!!!!!!!!!"
40 hug
50 end

OMG I loved your little program at the end, memories of typing in long BASIC programs to do stuff and I remember all those old for next loops I made and using DATA statements to access and store memory. Fun times.

RND became a favourite command once upon a time as I made a little lotto program that drew random numbers for when you play lotto. Was a very short program and fun.

 

[Santaman]

I'm more a hardware guy/ techhead.. I do have several 8 bit machines around, MSX's the two types of the Commodore 64 and two Atari 8 bit macines, a 800XL and 65XE which are about the same, for the two Atari machines I did type programs which were featured in a manual and some old magazines.. lots of poking and peeking and gawddamn typos...

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Interesting today I took apart a hard disk that had gone mental and removed the platters. They make great tea coasters and bird scarers if you hang them.

Anyway I noticed two metal half hoops around the top platter held in by pressure from the top one and 3 torx screws. Interesting that they would do that and not sure what the half hoops were, as they were just there they didn't move or provide any function that I know of one just was above the top platter and one in the middle between the two platters.

 

[rhubarbodendron]

Santy, I am just tidying up my desk at work. Do you have any use for approximately fourty 5.25" discettes? Else I'll put them in the bin.

Tetagrammaton, HDDs also look pretty good as a mobile. It looks very similar to this one made from CDs:

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Anyway I noticed two metal half hoops around the top platter held in by pressure from the top one and 3 torx screws. Interesting that they would do that and not sure what the half hoops were, as they were just there they didn't move or provide any function that I know of one just was above the top platter and one in the middle between the two platters.

I think those are probably "dumpers".

Dumpers (also termed separators) are located between platters to reduce air fluctuations and acoustic noise. Dumpers are usually made of aluminum or plastic. Aluminium dumpers are better at cooling the air inside an HDD than plastic dumpers.

I made some small corrections to the English of the text; the original can be found at:
http://hddscan.com/doc/HDD_from_inside.html

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I think those are probably "dumpers".

I made some small corrections to the English of the text; the original can be found at:
http://hddscan.com/doc/HDD_from_inside.html

Ta thanks.

Santy, I am just tidying up my desk at work. Do you have any use for approximately fourty 5.25" discettes? Else I'll put them in the bin.

Tetagrammaton, HDDs also look pretty good as a mobile. It looks very similar to this one made from CDs:

That looks cool. I've done CD mobiles. They also make good bird repellers when the sun bounces off them.

HD platters are neat for that as well.

 

[rhubarbodendron]

indeed. You just need more sturdy material, due to the weight of the discs.

Cool site, Asbro! One never gets to see all these details IRL.
Hmm, I could use some of these spacer rings for making buttons =) (All of these have a brass ring inside)

 

[Santaman]

Santy, I am just tidying up my desk at work. Do you have any use for approximately fourty 5.25" discettes? Else I'll put them in the bin.

I do have a few XT's and other dinosaur machines around but I doubt it is worth to send them over.

 

[Santaman]

So, besides the Duron 700 which is almost back to how it was in the past I also finally had the time to assemble a more modern machine, a Socket 775 Core2 Quad Q6600, it has a MSI P6N SLI Platinum mainboard, Nforce 650 chipset, 4Gb RAM which was quite a lot back then, the original graphics card no longer exists so I gave it an Ati HD 5770, the powersuply can handle this machine comfortably, I installed XP on it, not ideal but since $pycrosoft is messing with Win7 and 8.1 is too modern I've settled on XP, as for the casing, an old Chieftec, sturdy as hell, thick steel and plastic.
I've got more parts lying around and I am making time to see what is still working or not, 10-12 years ago these things would have cost quite a bit of money, nowadays they're worth nothing...

 

[Guy Gardener]

Fuh-nished... Almost.

30 hours to scan the broken drive.

24 hours into that, my girlfriend thought that the area around my computer looked dusty, and decided to clean it, to make me happier and a better person... During which she kicked a cord and unplugged the hard drive that was being scanned.

I reacted calmly to that.

The scan did resume, but not until after I had pushed a button labeled "ignore" at least once, trying to get back to the scan and away from "do not recognize drive" but 8 hours later, when it was all over, there was about 15 gb missing from a few noticeable chunks.

"War and Remembrance"

The free version of dmde, took forever to move my media off my broken drive to an empty lifeboat drive, almost a week to transfer 2.4 tb, because I had to stand there (awake) and tell it what to do, then 2 minutes to (quick) format, which was a surprise, since last time I was formatting hard drives it was taking 30 hours... Doh!

Then 36 hours to transfer data in my life boat drive, back into my reinvigorated hard drive at USB2, please don't laugh, and I am done, after I have finished reacquiring the data I know that wasn't recovered through "means".

"The Duchess of Duke Street"

"Sigh"

So I am done, but on a long enough timeline, all my hard drives are going to fail.

####.

 

[Santaman]

Yep, harddrives will fail eventually, so backup, backup, backup..

 

[Guy Gardener]

It's the external enclosures that fail first, rather than the hard drives themselves. So you stick a screw driver in the seam and take the hard drive out.

All my towers are dead.

I have had so many towers over the years.

I bought an ide/sata to usb adapter a few weeks ago, so i don't necessarily need a tower to observe what I got stored on a floating full sized sata hard drive pulled out of a dead enclosure... But it's hardly a tidy set of affairs.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I had a 3.5 inch external enclosure that failed in 6 months, it was the crappy switchmode power supply inside the case. These things sometimes get the weakest PSU components. Drive was fine but yeah. I haven't had much luck with external enclosures.

 

[Santaman]

The oldest self build machine I have is a Pentium 233 MMX machine, it is ancient but still working, about every other machine I build for myself is still working, of course I buy quality parts and of course have total freedom in how to setup the cooling and all.
As for external drives, yeah, they're a tad fragile, two died on me but the harddrives inside are used for two of my backup machines so no loss there.