Author Topic: Old computers?  (Read 54331 times)
themaritimegirl
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Re: Old computers? « Reply #195 on: January 12, 2016, 11:56:32 PM » Author: themaritimegirl
Well, I guess I'm done fooling with the Sharp PC-7000 for now. I've had it apart and cleaned the B: drive five times, and one head of the drive is just not working right. I think it reads fine, but when you try to write it falls on its face, and when you try to format a disk it formats just one side. Someone sent me an image of the original Sharp PC-7000 diagnostic disk, and that also throws an error when testing the B: drive. I don't have my multimeter here right now to measure the resistance of the head. I'll write to vintage-computer.com sometime and see what they think.
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rjluna2
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Re: Old computers? « Reply #196 on: January 13, 2016, 07:09:30 AM » Author: rjluna2
Well, I guess I'm done fooling with the Sharp PC-7000 for now. I've had it apart and cleaned the B: drive five times, and one head of the drive is just not working right. I think it reads fine, but when you try to write it falls on its face, and when you try to format a disk it formats just one side. Someone sent me an image of the original Sharp PC-7000 diagnostic disk, and that also throws an error when testing the B: drive. I don't have my multimeter here right now to measure the resistance of the head. I'll write to vintage-computer.com sometime and see what they think.
I think one of the head of the "B:" drive is a write off.  You can find a suitable replacement drive to see if this fixes the problem.
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Re: Old computers? « Reply #197 on: January 13, 2016, 07:23:38 AM » Author: themaritimegirl
You can find a suitable replacement drive to see if this fixes the problem.

No I can't, unfortunately. The drives are a single module proprietary to this computer.
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Re: Old computers? « Reply #198 on: January 13, 2016, 09:11:31 AM » Author: rjluna2
You can find a suitable replacement drive to see if this fixes the problem.

No I can't, unfortunately. The drives are a single module proprietary to this computer.

I see... :-\

You can use the ASSIGN command to use the A drive with a virtual B drive.  Alternatively, you can disabled the B drive via BIOS and use the A drive with a virtual B drive.  I have done with IBM PC XT with one floppy and one hard drive at one time.
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Re: Old computers? « Reply #199 on: January 13, 2016, 05:44:59 PM » Author: themaritimegirl
The BIOS has no option to disable a drive. I can indeed use it at a reduced capacity as a single-drive computer, but Assign doesn't work for software that requires two drives, like Windows, because they expect both disks to be accessible simultaneously.

It really stinks because the B: drive originally didn't work, then it worked fine for a couple of weeks, and now it's dead again.
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Re: Old computers? « Reply #200 on: January 13, 2016, 08:02:59 PM » Author: rjluna2
Ugh :(
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Re: Old computers? « Reply #201 on: April 20, 2017, 06:03:06 PM » Author: icefoglights
Being back home and doing a little spring cleaning.  With the end of support for Windows Vista, I pulled out that Pentium D machine and messed around on it for a little bit.  It ultimately went off to the recycler.  It worked fine in it's day, but was hot, kind of slow, and not the most reliable.  By the time I retired it in December of 2010, it was on it's second video card and wireless card, than the power supply went out.  I messed with it for a while, and recovered some stuff off of it and decided it wasn't worth keeping around.  I did pull the wireless card and hard drives.  Primarly hard drive was a 3.5" 250GB Samsung.  Secondary was a 2.5" "HP Pocket Media Drive" that connected via USB 2, and fit into a slot in the front of the case, or to another computer using a short A-B cable.  I wish I had remembered it when I built my new desktop, I would have reused it's DVD drive instead of buying a new one.  It had light scribe, which was a cool feature if you could find software supporting it.  Ultimately a sharpie marker is quicker and easier.

I than turned my attention to the old AthlonXP.  A little more attached to this machine, since I built it back in 2001, and used it as my main PC from than until I got the Pentium D 6 years later.  It was kind of like a time capsule firing it up.  I put the wireless card from the above machine into it and got it online, and was surprised when Windows XP started downloading updates.  I had fired it up back in 2014 to get the last of the updates available for XP, but I guess there were just a few more out there.  Since it's running, I decided to see just what I could make an old XP machine do these days.  Turns out XP wasn't as much of a hurdle as the CPU ended up being.  First off, I had up the RAM in it.  It was originally built with 256MB of DDR, later upped to 512.  I found a 512MB DDR stick, so now it has 1GB to work with.  I than looked at software that still supported XP.  Since I was into using Firefox at the time this machine was retired, and it still supported XP, I went with that.  Got online and downloaded the current version of Firefox, but ran into a problem when I tried to install it.  Firefox after version 49 requires a processor with SSE2 support, which AMD didn't add until the Athlon64.  After a little research and digging, I downloaded Firefox 48.0.2 from Mozilla's FTP and got it installed and running.  Upgrade from Firefox 2.0.0.7 to 48.0.2 and have a modern enough web browser to be usable.  Second issue was security.  It had McAfee 2007, which had long since expired, so I uninstalled it.  McAfee had dropped support for XP in 2015, so they were off the table.  Ended up picking up a clearance copy of last year's version of Norton Security.  Said it supported Windows XP SP2 and up, and only required a 300MHz processor.  After activating it, the installation downloader wouldn't run.  Turns out to be another SSE2 issue.  Still have an install disk from Norton Internet Security 2013, so I used that, with the new activation code, and got it to work.  Also went through and got rid of old Flash/Shockwave and Java.  The machine is no speed demon, but is surprisingly workable.
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Re: Old computers? « Reply #202 on: April 20, 2017, 08:05:18 PM » Author: Ash
Random hardware failing for no reason - Replace the power supply

The AXP should work well with Linux. Right now i am testing KDE5 on my best box (Core 2 Duo E8400), it is ok though still a bit Alola at times. KDE4 works fairly well with 1G RAM unless you open some websites that eat it all up
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Re: Old computers? « Reply #203 on: April 20, 2017, 09:03:50 PM » Author: icefoglights
I thought about the power supply, but in the end, it still took up too much space.  Surprisingly, boot time, and loading most programs, that machine wasn't that much quicker than the AXP.  However, pushing the AXP to do modern things is making it show it's age.  I'm typing this reply on it right now, and Firefox is using between 20 and 30 percent of the CPU, and about 175 MB of RAM.  I watched a YouTube video and Firefox's CPU usage shot up to 95-99% and needed nearly 300MB of RAM.

This machine has has some interesting history.  I first put it together at the end of 2001, reusing the case from my first home build with all new innards.  It worked, but I wanted to run the old machine for class projects, and that case, while sturdy, lacked some convenience features, mainly front USB.  It was originally built with a 1GHz Athlon processor, 256MB of DDR, a 64MB GeForce 2 Pro graphics card, SB Live! sound card (reused from the previous machine) 40GB hard drive, a DVD-ROM drive (also borrowed from previous machine), and a CD burner.  It also has a Linksys Ethernet card (which never got any use), a hardware modem, and had a fire wire card.  Originally ran Windows 2000.  I later moved it into a new case, which gave me front USB, and freed up the old case for the old machine, but I didn't like the case.  Went through one more case within a year before finding this really nice Lian Li aluminum one on close-out at the computer shop.  I later replaced the 40GB hard drive with an 80, which was also the qualifying hardware needed to get a system builder copy of Windows XP at a discount at that time.  By early 2003, the original 1GHz Tbird was replaced with the current AXP 1800+ (1533 MHz), and added another 128MB of DDR, so it had 1MB of RAM for every KB of cache the CPU had.  Around 2005, the floppy drive ruined a disk for the last time, and it became a short-lived wheel chalk.  In it's place went a 4-in-1 card reader, which also required an internal USB port (not just a header).  Since the onboard USB was 1.1, I replaced the (so far unused) fire wire card with a firewire/USB 2 card, which had an internal port for the card reader.  The USB 2 was also handy for an MP3 player I got shortly after.  Also, the old CD burner had quit working, so it, and the DVD-ROM, got replaced with a DVD burner.  I later got an external hard drive, and was finally able to put the fire wire port to use.  In 2006, it started giving me problems, and I tracked it down to a failing UPS and bad RAM, so it got 512MB of new DDR.  It pretty much just worked after that until I retired it in October of 2007.  Windows XP only needed a clean install a couple of times in those years.  It's running now on a clean install that was done in July of 2006.
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Re: Old computers? « Reply #204 on: April 30, 2017, 01:16:26 AM » Author: ace100w120v
Icefoglights, I've always thought XP would be a solid system many years after it would otherwise be obsolete and I guess I was right if you've got it back on the Internet superhighway and are posting in Lighting Gallery with it.  I got in a discussion about '90s-'00s tech with a classmate recently and she was telling me that apparently the self-checkout kiosks at Fred Meyer West apparently still run on Windows XP.  In a way I'm not surprised since it's probably not connected to the Internet, per se, just running the credit card machine interface (however that works) and however the store keeps track of and catalogs inventory.  My dad still uses the blue-toolbar version of XP to run a chart program on the boat and I believe the city office back home still uses it as well, at least for word processing...typing meeting minutes, etc. 

As for OLD computers, I just remembered:  Spenard Builders Supply in Sitka, had and could easily still have, machines so old they have monochrome yellow or green CRT screens.  These were at the checkout counter and I'm certain they were just used for the store's inventory database/catalog, but still, I remember being surprised.  They may be upgraded by now but for years and years they sure weren't!

On a side note, does anyone else like the new backlit LCD screens more than CRTs?  I personally don't miss the flicker, the static electricity, and the high-pitched buzz one bit.  I know some of us are TV collectors but I'm not,  I collect vintage audio but not vintage screens.  Does anyone actually still prefer CRTs?





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Re: Old computers? « Reply #205 on: April 30, 2017, 04:41:43 PM » Author: Lodge
Windows XP is still good enough to run an airport, Paris only stopped using Win 3.1 a few years ago after it crashed .. http://www.zdnet.com/article/a-23-year-old-windows-3-1-system-failure-crashed-paris-airport/
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Re: Old computers? « Reply #206 on: April 30, 2017, 10:18:50 PM » Author: dischargecraze
ace100w120v, I preferred CRTs until 2014 or so, because of the higher refresh rates, and the sharpness of the display. I got an LED monitor after that. Which worked quite well for me. Now I have an OLED display which turns off the black pixels for energy saving (not that I care about that) but it makes the black actually look dark. And color accurate.
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Re: Old computers? « Reply #207 on: May 04, 2017, 02:21:24 PM » Author: Ash
I use LCDs. I do mind what the backlight of the LCD is - CCFL it is in my LCDs
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Re: Old computers? « Reply #208 on: May 06, 2017, 04:09:48 AM » Author: Lodge
ace100w120v, I preferred CRTs until 2014 or so, because of the higher refresh rates, and the sharpness of the display. I got an LED monitor after that. Which worked quite well for me. Now I have an OLED display which turns off the black pixels for energy saving (not that I care about that) but it makes the black actually look dark. And color accurate.

Any issues with burn in on the OLED screen yet? I was looking at them and I know the cell phones with OLED screens burn in real nice leaving image retention forever on the screen, so I'm not sure about the monitors ...
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Re: Old computers? « Reply #209 on: May 06, 2017, 05:57:22 AM » Author: Ash
I have one LCD TV which took an impact to the screen but didnt break. But apparently it was on the border of breaking. It looks like it lost seal somewhere around the edge and lost some of the liquid fill, and there is a cluster of dead pixels in the spot of impact in the center of the screen

Anyway, this LCD tends to sorta "burn in" within under a minute of displaying a still image, but not permanently - it slowly recovers over the next few minutes. If the image is there for longer it may take longer to recover, up to a couple hours in one case. I use it as a terminal screen so dont care too much about the burn in (its not bad enough to interfer with displaying terminal text or basic OS stuff like window frames)
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