Something Random

jtr1962

Storage? I am Storage!
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Are you playing ancient computer games? I can't imagine what good a 20 year old OS would be .
I know someone who's still using Windows 3.1 on an ancient 386 with I think 4MB or 8MB of RAM. They still back up on an ancient tape drive (the ones with the 50 or 100 MB cartridges). Tape has been obsolete for what, a decade? I've been asked multiple times if there's any way to upgrade the machine so they can use the Internet. They can't accept my answer of no, the machine just doesn't have the computing ability to render modern websites, nor would it have enough RAM. Apparently they don't want to get a new machine for at least 4 reasons:

1) They would need to learn a new version of Windows (no, I'm not teaching them)
2) The software they use for work almost certainly wouldn't run on a new O/S
3) They paid something like $4,000 for the machine in the mid 1980s and are reluctant to not use it so long as it's still working
4) They don't see how a new machine costing well under $1,000 can be as reliable as their old one. In their words, "they had to cut corners somewhere". They think a decent computer will cost the equivalent of $4,000 in 1985 dollars, which would be something like $10,000.

I'm sure there are people out there still using 8086s and DOS 5.1, although I don't know any personally. At some point you have to let go unless you need your machine to do no more than it's already doing. I hate to think of the trauma this poor person will be going through when their machine finally gives up the ghost. My 10 year old Garmin GPS probably has more computing power than that POS machine.
 

LunarMist

I can't believe I'm a Fixture
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I know someone who's still using Windows 3.1 on an ancient 386 with I think 4MB or 8MB of RAM. They still back up on an ancient tape drive (the ones with the 50 or 100 MB cartridges). Tape has been obsolete for what, a decade? I've been asked multiple times if there's any way to upgrade the machine so they can use the Internet. They can't accept my answer of no, the machine just doesn't have the computing ability to render modern websites, nor would it have enough RAM. Apparently they don't want to get a new machine for at least 4 reasons:

1) They would need to learn a new version of Windows (no, I'm not teaching them)
2) The software they use for work almost certainly wouldn't run on a new O/S
3) They paid something like $4,000 for the machine in the mid 1980s and are reluctant to not use it so long as it's still working
4) They don't see how a new machine costing well under $1,000 can be as reliable as their old one. In their words, "they had to cut corners somewhere". They think a decent computer will cost the equivalent of $4,000 in 1985 dollars, which would be something like $10,000.

I'm sure there are people out there still using 8086s and DOS 5.1, although I don't know any personally. At some point you have to let go unless you need your machine to do no more than it's already doing. I hate to think of the trauma this poor person will be going through when their machine finally gives up the ghost. My 10 year old Garmin GPS probably has more computing power than that POS machine.

I'd tend to agree with #4. Do you think a $1000 computer today will last over 30 years?
 

jtr1962

Storage? I am Storage!
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I'd tend to agree with #4. Do you think a $1000 computer today will last over 30 years?
Probably not, but at the rate PCs advance, it will likely be functionally obsolete in 5 to 10 years. That's why electronics these days aren't made to last more than about 5 years They get replaced before they wear out. That said, I tend to think we're reaching a plateau in terms of future improvements. 10 year old PCs are still fairly usable for lots of stuff. If there are no major improvements on the horizon people might start pressuring companies to make electronics longer lasting. We could probably make a PC now which would last 100 years but few people would want to buy it.

Integrated electronics need to last a lot longer than 5 years. Today's cars are lasting longer than ever. That means the electronics need to be designed with a 20 or 30 year life in mind. Either that, or you need a modular design where they can easily be upgraded.

On another note, if we paid any attention to code bloat PCs would take even longer to become functionally obsolete. I think it's amazing how on some websites where I'm typing text my computer is lagging behind me. All the bloated crap these sites are trying to run, mostly for advertising, is the culprit.
 

LunarMist

I can't believe I'm a Fixture
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Weather is rather bad in the Floridas. Fortunately I do not need to travel this week.
 

ddrueding

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Completely random, but I was just reflecting on the comment Tannin left about monitors. Buying his used 20D was the first bit of international buying/selling I ever participated in. I just shipped 3 systems spec'ed the same as my "Work1" PC, including one to Australia (near Melbourne). Times have changed.
 

Handruin

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I've been tempted by the i7-8086K to refresh a new system using it. I've read good things on it. I'm wondering if it makes more sense than the very expensive i9-9900K that just announced.

Can you list all the other components you used? I'm curious what motherboard you paired with it and RAM speed/manufacturer.
 

ddrueding

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If the 9900k was out I would have used it. I plan to use Silicon Lottery going forward for CPUs, seems like a nice service. All the other components were ordered and systems built well in advance, so I could ship completed units as quickly as possible once the 2080tis showed up. Full build spec below:

Intel i7-8086K
ASUS ROG Strix Z370-I Gaming (Mini ITX)
Samsung 970 Pro 512GB
Corsair Vengance RGB 32GB DDR4 3000MHz C15 (2x 16GB)
Corsair Hydro H115i 280mm CPU cooler
Corsair HX850i PSU (system draws 590W at full synthetic load)
Corsair Carbide 275R Mid-Tower case
Corsair Fan Controller Commander Pro
Corsair ML RGB fans (magnetic bearing, mixed 120mm and 140mm)
Corsair RGB lighting strips

Yes, the case could take a larger board, but this build doesn't need a larger board. Plus having all that free space under the GPU makes feeding it cool air that much easier (got another 185MHz above the factory).

Going aftermarket water with the GPU would be next, we'll see if they want that.

Edit: Also, this is my first tempered glass/RGB build. It does make things shiny. But nVidia needs to get onboard with the logo in their cards....
 

snowhiker

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Completely random, but I was just reflecting on the comment Tannin left about monitors. Buying his used 20D was the first bit of international buying/selling I ever participated in. I just shipped 3 systems spec'ed the same as my "Work1" PC, including one to Australia (near Melbourne). Times have changed.

Is this a potential side business for you or just a hobby? Are the builds for friends/business associates?
 

ddrueding

Fixture
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Horsens, Denmark
I've always built crazy machines and shown them around. Here is one I showed here a while ago, "The Coffin".

Some of them have been more crazy, or specific to some random industry need. This has led to individuals asking for either an exact copy of something I've already built, or having me solve a specific problem. The first ones I built for a real customer were for Dolby Labs in San Francisco in the late 90s; they needed completely silent audio workstations for some of their gear.

I don't advertise, I don't sell a lot, and I only really do them for people I know. In a busy year I might ship 20 machines. This last batch was because I told some friends who are also into gaming how this new super-fast CPU and GPU were coming out at around the same time, and that I was going to take this opportunity to upgrade to the fastest thing money can buy. 3 of them with some spare cash asked me to do the same for them. I don't do a lot of mark-up; it isn't for profit, really. I just like building rigs and playing with high-end hardware.

Edit: Just in case anyone was wondering, these systems shipped for $8000 each.
 

ddrueding

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As mentioned about 5 posts up, it doesn't need to be bigger. Having the open space below helps me feed cooler air to the GPU, which helps the oc.
 

sedrosken

Florida Man
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Are you playing ancient computer games? I can't imagine what good a 20 year old OS would be .

Why yes, yes I am. I'm currently fiddling with Al-Jalima to see just how far I can push it -- right now roundabout Quake III Arena/Unreal Tournament seem to be ever so slightly too much for it -- if I were to track down an SL259 CPU for it, as apparently those clock to 233 without issue, I'm almost certain it'd iron that out along with Glide mode on the Banshee -- it comes so tantalizingly close to being playable, smaller maps are almost perfect, but some maps are just a mess of stutter and frame droppages. That goes double if for some ungodly reason I feel like playing a LAN game with it, where ironically it wastes CPU cycles waiting on my network more than anything. You'd think botmatches on a CPU-limited configuration would be more trouble, but no. And I'm well aware that this machine would have been designed with NT 4 in mind and NT 4 would likely run better due to its full 32-bit design (where 9x remained partially 16-bit for performance reasons on 586 and older chips) and the PPro's well-documented near-uselessness for 16-bit code; however, I simply can't ignore the convenience that MS-DOS mode offers, and being limited to a hacked version of DirectX5 at best isn't really what I had in mind for that machine. I do want to, some day when I have an excess of time and a dire need for additional brain cells, swap the SD card I've got in that machine's IDE adapter for some throwaway card just to see how badly XP would run on it. It's 53MHz below minimum spec, sure, but it does have twice the minimum RAM. :bomb:

Samsur's been getting some attention lately as well. It got a semi-broken install of XP -- God, that was a pain to install, it kept complaining about trying to format the 320GB hard drive it's got saying I didn't have enough RAM for it (it's got 768MB) -- which broke when I installed the unofficial service pack 4 and started getting updates intended for POSReady2009. On a more modern machine I'm sure it'd work fine but those updates make foobar2000 crash trying to call up gdiplus -- my only guess is that its lack of SSE, being a Thunderbird 1333, angers the new libraries in some way. Oh well. Lesson learned. It's about to get its copy of 2000 put back onto it.
 

sedrosken

Florida Man
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Heads up, RTX2080Ti's are apparently dropping like flies, particularly Founder's Edition cards. Mostly affecting overclockers at first but now people are reporting dying cards despite not touching any clocks.

In other news I've delidded my 3570K -- For now, I'm just using some Arctic Silver 5 I had laying around as a proof of concept, but here soon I plan on massively upgrading my cooling; First, I'll put some Conductonaut (you may have heard of it referred to as liquid metal) between my die and IHS, seal it back up, then I'll run an AIO cooler with a 240mm rad -- probably an H100i as I can find those relatively cheaply recertified. These two should bring my temps low enough that I'll feel comfortable running my chip at higher speeds -- as I know I have the voltage headroom, with supposedly 1.35v being the safe limit for Ivy and my current being 1.24 to hit 4.3GHz stable. I should have no trouble hitting 4.8 or maybe even 5.0.

And Samsur did indeed have Windows 2000 reinstalled onto it, with the extended kernel for good measure, which essentially lets you run anything XP can provided you bypass installers that specifically check the OS version. I was usually able to just extract installers using 7-zip and run the executables directly -- the most involved fix I had to do was opening the msi installer for Strawberry Perl 5.16 in Orca and changing the LaunchCondition entry from VersionNT > 500 to VersionNT > 400. Foobar2000 1.4 works just fine now -- even down to the Shpeck plugin to use MilkDrop2 visualizations I hijacked from a copy of Winamp. Probably the most stressful game I run on it is the "collector's edition" of Half Life 2 (modern Steam version removed the DX8/7 render paths) -- it's a mixed bag, some sections run perfectly, others literally run at less than a single frame per second. That much I can probably chalk up to swapping, as I could definitely stand to max that machine out to 1.5GB since I am running 2k after all. HexChat 2.9.4 is the reason I installed Perl libraries -- it can use them for scripts, of which I have a few. Surprisingly it's one of those that "just worked". Firefox 45.9.0esr is the latest that will launch, due to my lack of SSE2, but I have no reason to assume it wouldn't run 52.9.0esr as well if I were running on a SSE2-capable machine.
 

Chewy509

Wotty wot wot.
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Gold Coast Hinterland, Australia
Just a short post...

Was getting new tyres on the car last weekend (Cooper CS5 Ultras for our Suzuki Grand Vitara), and whilst waiting for them to fit them whilst in the waiting room, a rather smug looking individual comes in asking about getting two new tyres for their car (Merc C63 AMG about 3 year old)...

He asked about tyres to suite, and the nice lady behind the counter recommended decent range of Coopers, Bridgestones and Pirelli's to suite the vehicle... (All tyres that are speed/weight rated for the vehicle). Nope, all those options were too expensive, only wanted to pay no more AU$89 (for each tyre), because that's all he paid last time for tyres... Oh, and didn't want a wheel alignment either, because he had that done 30K ago... And to top it all off, wanted it done immediately...

After he left disgruntled that they couldn't squeeze him immediately, and that they had to order tyres to fit (about 3-4 days lead time needed), I asked the lady behind the counter, if they get that all the time... Her reply: "a lot, especially from those with the more expensive cars"...
 

LunarMist

I can't believe I'm a Fixture
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Just a short post...

Was getting new tyres on the car last weekend (Cooper CS5 Ultras for our Suzuki Grand Vitara), and whilst waiting for them to fit them whilst in the waiting room, a rather smug looking individual comes in asking about getting two new tyres for their car (Merc C63 AMG about 3 year old)...

He asked about tyres to suite, and the nice lady behind the counter recommended decent range of Coopers, Bridgestones and Pirelli's to suite the vehicle... (All tyres that are speed/weight rated for the vehicle). Nope, all those options were too expensive, only wanted to pay no more AU$89 (for each tyre), because that's all he paid last time for tyres... Oh, and didn't want a wheel alignment either, because he had that done 30K ago... And to top it all off, wanted it done immediately...

After he left disgruntled that they couldn't squeeze him immediately, and that they had to order tyres to fit (about 3-4 days lead time needed), I asked the lady behind the counter, if they get that all the time... Her reply: "a lot, especially from those with the more expensive cars"...

There is no shortage of cheapskates. Some people put funky 3rd party batteries in $7000 cameras to save $50 for example for example.
 

sedrosken

Florida Man
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Eglin AFB Area
You've named you machines after towns in the MMORPG Asheron's Call. Is that game still running? Private servers?

Yes, I have, and I even tried to make the names appropriate. Arwic is called such as it's the bustling trade hub of my network, Al-Jalima is the ho-dunk one-horse town in the middle of nowhere that nonetheless has some interesting inhabitants, and Samsur is nothing really special by itself but was home to several players over the years and holds a soft spot nonetheless.

To sum up, Warner Brothers killed it off in January of 2017. There's been a few emulation efforts underway since; one, PhatAC, got a cease and desist and later was opensourced as GamesDeadLol and forked as Classic Dereth and GDLEnhanced. ACE has been the slow and steady favorite but started from scratch and is a ways off -- Phat started during the Dark Majesty days and got resurrected when AC was brutally murdered. GDLE is currently the most playable emu, but I personally prefer Classic Dereth even if it is a bit buggier and the dev behind it went MIA. That one requires you to patch your client and dats -- GDLE works with the current latest client as-is. If you're wanting to get back into playing, download ThwargLauncher, make sure you've got the latest client (you can probably find help on http://gdleac.com for that) and decal and go ahead and hop on Reefcull, the current most active server. Be prepared for a lot of things to have changed from what you are used to, depending on when you quit, and lots of things not working. The main things I can tell you off the top of my head are don't build a void mage and probably don't bother with two-handed combat yet.

I'd like to also mention that I'm on the look out for decently priced beige cases with a decent amount of drive bays in them. My favorites are the Evercase offerings but I just don't have the disposable income to pay shipping from the UK.
 

Handruin

Administrator
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Messages
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Just a short post...

Was getting new tyres on the car last weekend (Cooper CS5 Ultras for our Suzuki Grand Vitara), and whilst waiting for them to fit them whilst in the waiting room, a rather smug looking individual comes in asking about getting two new tyres for their car (Merc C63 AMG about 3 year old)...

He asked about tyres to suite, and the nice lady behind the counter recommended decent range of Coopers, Bridgestones and Pirelli's to suite the vehicle... (All tyres that are speed/weight rated for the vehicle). Nope, all those options were too expensive, only wanted to pay no more AU$89 (for each tyre), because that's all he paid last time for tyres... Oh, and didn't want a wheel alignment either, because he had that done 30K ago... And to top it all off, wanted it done immediately...

After he left disgruntled that they couldn't squeeze him immediately, and that they had to order tyres to fit (about 3-4 days lead time needed), I asked the lady behind the counter, if they get that all the time... Her reply: "a lot, especially from those with the more expensive cars"...

I'm at the other end of the spectrum with this. I want the best tires I can get for my car because it's the only thing sticking to the ground. I don't have an issue with spending near $300/us per tire for the best I can get. I run Micheline Pilot Super Sports in the summer and Bridgestone Blizzak LM-32 in the winter. I need new snow tires this year and I'm considering getting Nokian Hakkapeliitta's...just not 100% sure yet.
 

ddrueding

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I'm willing to spend a lot, but there are limits. I know people to daily on 100 treadwear track tires (R888R for example) for the extra edge, and that is crazy.
 

Handruin

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I don't go that crazy. The Micheline PSS's are 300 treadwear or 30,000 miles. That's lower than many all seasons but really good considering their stickiness. Plus, I don't use them all year so I probably have one more season out of them with tread to spare. I've been riding on them for over four years now.
 

LunarMist

I can't believe I'm a Fixture
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Tires never seem to last anywhere near the rated treadwear with a decent traction. I suppose highway use at constant speed is closer, but how many always drive like that compared to stop and go or winding roads? I used to get less than 15,000 through the canyons.
 

LunarMist

I can't believe I'm a Fixture
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15,000 is about right for me. In theory that is less than they advertise, but I know I am using them outside of spec.

Once I had a tire blow out a <15K, and the manufacturer claimed that it was normal wear. The 50K guarantee was BS.
I was driving normally on a public canyon road most of the year.
 

Handruin

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I'm probably over 20,000 miles on mine and there's still enough left for 5K more or so.
 

snowhiker

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Have any of you guys ever went back to your tire dealer with your "worn-out" 60k-mile-rated tires after 30k miles and got any type of replacement or pro-rated discount on new tires?
 

Chewy509

Wotty wot wot.
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I don't understand it, I always tend to go for decent without spending $$$. (The tyres I got were AU$270ea and have a 80K km (50K mi) rating - I'll be happy with 60K km (38K mi) from them). Last set of tyres on the car (Dunlop SP Sport 01) we changed at 55K km (34K mi), as while they were still OK in the dry, they had become dangerous in the wet (and we still had quite a bit before the wear markers).
 

Chewy509

Wotty wot wot.
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Gold Coast Hinterland, Australia
Today the family took a drive up to O'Reillys @ Lamington NP, and went for a short bushwalk... Enjoying all the birds and other flora/fauna we came across this cute little guy...

DSC_0019.jpg

Sorry for the bad pic, but off the camera on the mobile using digital zoom, as didn't want to get too close, despite them being rather docile in nature... For those outside of Oz, it's typically ranked as #7 deadliest in Australia.
 

LunarMist

I can't believe I'm a Fixture
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Does anyone know women with name as a junior (e.g., Mary Louise Smith, Jr.)? Is it a southern thing?
 

snowhiker

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Today the family took a drive up to O'Reillys @ Lamington NP, and went for a short bushwalk... Enjoying all the birds and other flora/fauna we came across this cute little guy...

View attachment 1282

Sorry for the bad pic, but off the camera on the mobile using digital zoom, as didn't want to get too close, despite them being rather docile in nature... For those outside of Oz, it's typically ranked as #7 deadliest in Australia.

You need a 200 macro or such. ;)

When you consider the 135th most poisonous critter in Australia is still 40 times more poisonous than anything else in the world I'd want to use THIS 2000/11 lens.
 

LunarMist

I can't believe I'm a Fixture
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I know that lens. It's a cat (telescope) with a very long MFD of over 50 feet IIRC.
 
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