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10 year quest

I do alot of photography and I use up 20Gig of Hdd on my system without a problem. It's the only reason I keep having to upgrade my system all the time... Otherwise I would be more than happy to keep using a Dream 6800....

:twisted:
 
ridiculous?

ridiculous?

I really don't think your reasons are ridiculous at all.
Games have driven plenty of hardware sales and it only seems to be a bigger and bigger seller of hardware the past few years.

So what if you are only moving up into 2000 or 2001 hardware? ;)

What's ridiculous is upgrading hardware just because it's available but I'm preaching to the choir here aren't I? ;)


Shoot, that thing I made up there (the AT in the picture) is only a Pentium III, and the only reasons for the upgrade were pretty ridiculous, The Sims, and Robot Arena. If not, I'd still have a Pentium 200 MMX with 64MB of EDO RAM. My mom has that with 128 MB of RAM instead of 64 and a 60 GB HDD.
Click to expand...
 
Re: ridiculous?

Re: ridiculous?

mryon said:
I really don't think your reasons are ridiculous at all.
Games have driven plenty of hardware sales and it only seems to be a bigger and bigger seller of hardware the past few years.

So what if you are only moving up into 2000 or 2001 hardware? ;)

What's ridiculous is upgrading hardware just because it's available but I'm preaching to the choir here aren't I? ;)


Shoot, that thing I made up there (the AT in the picture) is only a Pentium III, and the only reasons for the upgrade were pretty ridiculous, The Sims, and Robot Arena. If not, I'd still have a Pentium 200 MMX with 64MB of EDO RAM. My mom has that with 128 MB of RAM instead of 64 and a 60 GB HDD.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

I know, the ridiculous was just put there to ward off those who feed me that "If you want to play games, get an X-Box". I don't fit the mold of a typical gamer though, I'm actually learning how these buggers work by modifying them (changing graphics, messing with the play physics etc.). Outside the 3-D engines of todays new stuff, they are much simpler than something like Monkey Island or Ultima VI that uses an interpreter, and I'm learning how those work too, on the same machine.

I just recently added another computer to my collection off E-bay which is of the same manufacturer as this one, it's turning into my DOS programming and testing machine. It's got an even bigger AT size chassis (it barely fits on the desk next to my 17" monitor). It's a of course, just another GEM, however, it has a 286-10 under the hood, and no I'm not going to cut that one up.
 
Ref six pack and prob with laptop reading cd/r

Ref six pack and prob with laptop reading cd/r

I dont know much about laptops but I have an old PC that would not read cd/r's which I found very annoying BUT only yesterday I cured the problem. I found an update IDE driver for the motherboard and now it reads cd/r fine.

I'm affraid I don't now if you can get an update driver for your laptop but I did notice that there are some drivers still downloadable from ACER's website

http://support.acer-euro.com/drivers/notebook/ext_500.html
 
Terry Yager said:
I can't imagine any flavor of Pentium being collectible, now, or in the forseeable future, they're just too common. Possible exceptions might be laptops, which don't age very well, and, of course, the old original 60 MHz Pentium (I call it Pentium 0, since everyone insists on calling the second version "Pentium 1"). Especially collectible would be chips that have the floating-point bug, as very few of them survived the recall.

--T
Click to expand...

How do you identify a Pentium which has the bug? I seem to recall that "fixed" 386's had a double sigma printed on the CPU, was this the same with Pentium?

Just wondering, because I've got an old Pentium 60 (CPU only, no socket 4 mobo) here.
 
Floppy

Floppy

I couldn't help but notice the blurb above about 5/25 inch floppy drives. I have a Very modern AMD Athlon 64-bit system running a 200 gig SATA hard drive, about as unvintage as you could get. (I DO have reasons for having a lot of power and HD space) And my BIOS still supports 5/25 inch floppy drives, both 360 and 1.2 MB. I have VIA BIOS and Chipset. The Main Board is Chaintech but I would NEVER buy from them again. The english section of the manual wasin't translated right and it acts really weird if the power is ever turned off (compleatly, like unplugging it.) So Modern BIOS chips SOMETIMES supports the older drives. So far the only ones I know of doing this is VIA. I would recommend VIA, just not Chaintech.

-Vlad
 
Terry Yager said:
I can't imagine any flavor of Pentium being collectible, now, or in the forseeable future, they're just too common. Possible exceptions might be laptops, which don't age very well, and, of course, the old original 60 MHz Pentium (I call it Pentium 0, since everyone insists on calling the second version "Pentium 1"). Especially collectible would be chips that have the floating-point bug, as very few of them survived the recall.

--T
Click to expand...
Would some of the " Other CPU's" Such as IBM,CYRIX Mustangs be considered, keepers, or would you put them in the Pentium class ?.
 
Cool, Vlad. I'm not skilled enough to tell if the hard part lies in the chipset or the BIOS to support odd devices. Somehow it is possible to address units outside of BIOS calls too? Probably it is a matter of rewriting old code and how much space certain functions take, although FlashBIOS chips seem to contain more and more data.. is it 512K or even 1M these days?
 
vq304 said:
How do you identify a Pentium which has the bug? I seem to recall that "fixed" 386's had a double sigma printed on the CPU, was this the same with Pentium?

Just wondering, because I've got an old Pentium 60 (CPU only, no socket 4 mobo) here.
Click to expand...

Via Google:

PENTIUM - One of the most famous and most known bugs is the Pentium FPU flaw / bug discovered by a a mathematician in October 1994. This bug involved the Pentium incorrectly performing floating-point calculations with certain number combinations, with errors anywhere from the third digit on up. This issue does not occur on 120MHz and above Pentium computers however is known to occur on Intel Pentiums 100MHz and below.

Ways of testing your Pentium CPU to determine if it has the Pentium flaw.

Correct Answer
962,306,957,033 / 11,010,046 = 87,402.6282027341

Incorrect Answer
962,306,957,033 / 11,010,046 = 87,399.5805831329

Correct Answer
4,195,835 / 3,145,727 = 1.33382044913624100

Incorrect Answer
4,195,835 / 3,145,727 = 1.33373906890203759

Another way of testing for this flaw is to use Microsoft Excel and enter the following formula:

=4195835-((4195835/3145727)*3145727)

When entering this formula you should receive a returned result of 0.
 
I didn't read the entire thread, rarely do (rarely have the time), but cheap evaluations of Windows 2k are available with certain MSoft publications. Compusa has had them, bought at least 1 on ebay. The keyword is evaluation - you have to reinstall it (and all your apps) after 120 days or thereabouts. You can get them on ebay and probably amazon for about a dollar though plus shipping.
 
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