General Computer Thread

[Santaman]

Not interested in quantum computers at the moment, as soon it hits the desktop then I'll take a peek.

Coloratura: nice list!

Not going to post all of mine..

One of my most recent machines:
Asus microtower zombie-has-been-lying-under-the-bed-for-ages casing
intake 80x80x25 mm Arctic cooling fan exhaust 92x92x25mm Arctic cooling fan, bothe mainboard controlled.
Antec 350 watt PSU
Asus AM-1 board
AMD Athlon 5350 quad core 2.05 Ghz
Arctic Alpine large lunk of aluminium passive cooler for the CPU
4Gb RAM
500Gb 2.5" drive
Asus DVD drive which was still fitted inside the casing
On board Radeon R3 gfx card.
Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon desktop

Interesting machine, the CPU draws only 25 watts at max which enabled me to use that passive cooler, it simply doesn't get hot, the build in gfx card is quite strong, it can even play 4K stuff if its DXVA encoded

Price for the CPU is under 50$ same goes for most of the mainboards, I guess you can have a fully tricked out AM1 machine for about 250$ which isn't bad IMO

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

My oldest machines were an Amstrad CPC664 and Commodore 64 respectively. I also had an Amiga with hard drive expansion.

My newest machine is about 3 years old.

AMD FX 4300 quad core 3.8ghz
16gig ddr3 ram
MSI 970 gaming motherboard
AMD Radeon R9 380 4gig gaming GPU

The only really new part was the motherboard. It has served me very well through several OS changes too .... Newest part has been the change to an SSD for my OS

 

[John Clark]

I don't think I could do a full history as (at least when it comes to the PC) most were upgrades a part at a time and remembering the full history might be more than my memory can handle.

My first computer was an Oric 48k, followed by Spectrum 48k, Spectrum 128k then Amiga A500+. (Somewhere in there was the old pc I got from an Uncle). My first bought pc was the 486-dx2-66

 

[Marc]

First computer I used was my Dad's Kaypro II back in 82. 9" green screen, twin 5.25" floppies running CPM. Dad had had it modified it so you flip a switch and double the clock speed to an incredible 5Mhz At the time we also had the ubiquitous Commodore 64 but only with tape drive.

Then as dad moved computers along, I had an NEC APC III which like many machines circa 1983/84 ran a customised version of MS-DOS but had an add in board that allowed you to run an IBM Compatible MS-DOS. Problem was you couldn't take full advantages of the computers features. Had to use 360Kb floppies instead of 1.2MB and the video resolution dropped from 640x400 to 320x200. Can't remember how much RAM but it had two 8Mhz NEC licenced 8086s, one on the SLE card, on on the mainboard.

That was replaced by an NEC Powermate SX with a 386SX chip and I finally moved into the world of hard disks Had a lovely NEC keyboard with it until the spacebar died. Eventually replaced by an Epson AX3/25 which had a 25Mhz 386DX and a 140MB ESDI hard disk and 8MB of ram.

Don't think i ever had a 486 system but went through various AMD and Intel custom built systems and Mac Mini.

Also bought a couple of HP servers off E-bay both rack mount. The one with the dual 2.8Ghz single core Xeons is long since scrap but I've still got one with a Quad Core Xeon that was nice system but being a 1RU rack mount sounds like a banshee.

Have run pretty much ever version of Windows since 3.1 with the exception of Windows Me, Also used FreeBSD for a number of years as well as Linux.

Also at one point I had a Sun Sparc Stations 5 and 10 (back when Pizza boxes were sexy . Didn't have a SunOS/Solaris licence for them so ran Debian Linux.

 

[Santaman]

Around 2004 I have been building Intel servers, the most powerful ones were 5U quad xeon Intel Shasta machines which also required 4 DIMMS since the mainboard bus was quad channel, back then they were really expensive, a fully equiped one was 53.000 Euro, they were lovely machines though, also very quiet despite the 15.000RPM SCSI drives.

 

[Amaris]

Not interested in quantum computers at the moment, as soon it hits the desktop then I'll take a peek.

Coloratura: nice list!

Not going to post all of mine..

One of my most recent machines:
Asus microtower zombie-has-been-lying-under-the-bed-for-ages casing
intake 80x80x25 mm Arctic cooling fan exhaust 92x92x25mm Arctic cooling fan, bothe mainboard controlled.
Antec 350 watt PSU
Asus AM-1 board
AMD Athlon 5350 quad core 2.05 Ghz
Arctic Alpine large lunk of aluminium passive cooler for the CPU
4Gb RAM
500Gb 2.5" drive
Asus DVD drive which was still fitted inside the casing
On board Radeon R3 gfx card.
Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon desktop

Interesting machine, the CPU draws only 25 watts at max which enabled me to use that passive cooler, it simply doesn't get hot, the build in gfx card is quite strong, it can even play 4K stuff if its DXVA encoded

Price for the CPU is under 50$ same goes for most of the mainboards, I guess you can have a fully tricked out AM1 machine for about 250$ which isn't bad IMO

Thank you! I think I miss my 386 the most. It was the first actual multimedia computer I owned, and I had so many great games for it, like Heart of China, the Police Quest series (3 is my favorite), Stellar 7, Rise of the Triad, Duke Nukem, Crystal Caves, Spellcasting 301: Spring Break, and a bunch of other great games. It was also the first time I logged onto a BBS, and actually connected to a different computer.

Also, I see you run Linux Mint 17.3. How is it handling your Radeon R3? When I had my older system, I had a Radeon HD4670 and it did not like Mint one bit.

 

[Santaman]

Older AMD hardware indeed has driver problems on Linux although they're making progress with new stuff for the 5xxxx and 6xxxx series, your card is quite old, it should be supported generally but I am not sure on 3D and performance in general, as for the R3, it works really well, its supported well which is of course no surprise since its a recent chip.

 

[Amaris]

Older AMD hardware indeed has driver problems on Linux although they're making progress with new stuff for the 5xxxx and 6xxxx series, your card is quite old, it should be supported generally but I am not sure on 3D and performance in general, as for the R3, it works really well, its supported well which is of course no surprise since its a recent chip.

I'm glad AMD is making headway. From what I can tell, it's because AMD dragged their feet in helping to create an optimized Linux driver for the various cards. One of the reasons I chose Nvidia is so that should I install Linux Mint on this machine in the future (a distinct possibility), it will take right to the video card without any major issues.

 

[Santaman]

Nvidia has a sharp cut off as well when it comes to drivers, many old cards also have no support anymore except the open source ones.

 

[Amaris]

Nvidia has a sharp cut off as well when it comes to drivers, many old cards also have no support anymore except the open source ones.

Ah, I see. Well, my card came out last year, so I should be alright. I finally got it today, by the way, and installed it. Oh wow, it's a great card! It only has 1 GB of video RAM, but sweet Jesus it really knows how to make it work! It's also 128 bit, which I felt was worth springing for rather than a 2 GB 64 bit version. I decided to test it out by maxing out Star Trek Online's graphical settings. The card didn't even flinch, and handled it all with ease. For some that may not be much, but since STO is the game I play the most, I wanted to see what it could do.

Also, STO looks incredible at max settings. It looks like a completely different game!

 

[Marc]

Around 2004 I have been building Intel servers, the most powerful ones were 5U quad xeon Intel Shasta machines which also required 4 DIMMS since the mainboard bus was quad channel, back then they were really expensive, a fully equiped one was 53.000 Euro, they were lovely machines though, also very quiet despite the 15.000RPM SCSI drives.

Can't say I've ever heard of Intel Shasta systems - where they task specific systems or what?

 

[Santaman]

It was a nickname for them, oficially they're known as SRSH4 the ones I build were used to create a Citrix environment for a munchipality. made 6 or so of them.

 

[Amaris]

It was a nickname for them, oficially they're known as SRSH4 the ones I build were used to create a Citrix environment for a munchipality. made 6 or so of them.

All this talk about Citrix and Shasta is making me thirsty.

 

[Marc]

It was a nickname for them, oficially they're known as SRSH4 the ones I build were used to create a Citrix environment for a munchipality. made 6 or so of them.

Okay - using the Socket 604 Xeons which having a look on wiki were pretty much the last of the single core models. Not sure they were quad channel as much as you need to balance the installed memory because of the multiple processors. My HP DL140 was the same - had two processors so had to fill the memory slots in a particular order to balance things out. Fortunately I wasn't deploying in a commercial environment so could by second hand and it was a couple of years later. Stuff still wasn't cheap though.

Think they might also been the last xeons that you couldn't virtualise on

 

[Santaman]

As far as I know they were the final Netburst Xeon, at the company I worked for we used socket 603 and 604 dual and quad CPU machines.
The largest Compaq machine I ever build was a 7U ML 530, dual Xeon, empty it weight 71 Kg...

 

[Tribble puncher]

I bought a new dell 7559 Laptop.

Replaced my old Compaq cq-62 laptop from 2010.

Has a Nvidia 960M chip which allows me to run every game I've thrown at it on ultra/near ultra settings, (I do play a few older games like Sins, but this one runs Alien:Isolation maxed out, this thing is considered a gaming laptop it would seem.)

8Gb of Ram (Plan to put 16 in)

only came with a 250 GB SSD drive (Faaaast!, had no idea how fast these were!) but it has an extra empty drive bay that I plan on throwing a 1TB drive into for media and some games/programs I don't use as much.

It has a Non Removable battery....I did not realize this until I got the laptop (ordered online, should have looked at pics more closely) whole bottom of laptop comes off with one screw, battery looks like it will be easy to remove, laptop was designed to be easily upgraded, easy to clean fans. I am not sure how easy batteries will be to come by for this however. (easy to find off brand batteries for my old Compaq online even though I've had a couple that blew out after only 2-3 months)

Windows 10 (I had upgraded my Compaq to this last year)

Screen is way more vivid than my old Compaq (I was pretty shocked)

No Optical Drive, but I seldom used it when I had it. I have a lightweight usb powered one if I really need it.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I had a Compaq CQ61 314TU that came with Windows 7 and you were pretty much stuck with Windows 7 and couldn't install XP on that machine as it was written into the BIOS, so couldn't downgrade it. Bought it in 2010 and it is still alive and kicking. I think it needs a new battery now because there's an icon on the taskbar that says to replace the battery. That icon has only just popped up after nearly 6 years.

Still has Windows 7 as I disabled the wifi as I had never intended it to go online. Runs Windows 7 fine but slow as shit to run Windows 10 and I never solved the "Why" as to that issue. It just kept doing that so reverted to windows 7 and it runs faster with that.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Why are my icons like this on the desktop? All of them are working but what's the red circle? Windows 10?

 

[Santaman]

I have no idea, it does seem like something doesn't like them or thinks they're invalid programs for some reason...

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I have no idea, it does seem like something doesn't like them or thinks they're invalid programs for some reason...

But they all still functioned properly.

Today they are all gone. I think it was me fiddling with admin permissions