Any custom computer builders out there?

[MarineOne]

300 baud modems, man I remember those. I think I've still got a Zenith Z-Systems 300 baud sitting in a box somewhere right next to my 8 inch floppy discs and a working Compaq 386 "lunchbox" laptop (the one with the fold down 88 key keyboard) with an amber screen.

Apple II's (the plain II, not the IIc or IIe mind you), Trash 80's, Commodore PET's, Tandy 1000's, and the upgrade from the Commodore 64 to the 128.



Man I'm really reaching back into the stone age.




-K

[Corvin]

300 baud modems, man I remember those. I think I've still got a Zenith Z-Systems 300 baud sitting in a box somewhere right next to my 8 inch floppy discs and a working Compaq 386 "lunchbox" laptop (the one with the fold down 88 key keyboard) with an amber screen.

Apple II's (the plain II, not the IIc or IIe mind you), Trash 80's, Commodore PET's, Tandy 1000's, and the upgrade from the Commodore 64 to the 128.

Man I'm really reaching back into the stone age.

-K

I told myself I'd stay out of this but when you mentioned 8 inch floppies and Tandy 1000s I had to jump in.

I have fond memories of going into my parents closets and rearranging my fathers punch cards. I didn't know what they were at the time, they were one of his first successful programs (by successful I mean working).

Then when I started school we upgraded from an Vic28 to a Tandy 1000 with it's massive 40mb hard drive and a whole 1024kb of ram. It was the envy of everyone at my fathers job at the time.

Now I'm sitting with an Acer One Netbook on my lap with a 160gb hard drive, 1gb of ram and a 1.6ghz processor all in less then 1.5kg. Ahh technology, how I love it.

[ggiese]

300 baud modems, man I remember those. I think I've still got a Zenith Z-Systems 300 baud sitting in a box somewhere right next to my 8 inch floppy discs and a working Compaq 386 "lunchbox" laptop (the one with the fold down 88 key keyboard) with an amber screen.

Apple II's (the plain II, not the IIc or IIe mind you), Trash 80's, Commodore PET's, Tandy 1000's, and the upgrade from the Commodore 64 to the 128.



Man I'm really reaching back into the stone age.




-K

I just recently tore apart and upgraded my expansion module on my Radio Shack Model I. Now I get the descending lowercase letters!! Much better to look at!!! I even added 16K RAM and the 5 1/4" floppy - cost me a pretty penny, but WELL worth it (I was sick of loading in the programs on the cassette tape drive - it was SO dadgummed slow)!!!

I was thinking about upgrading to the Model IV - I like the built in dual 5 1/4" floppies. Anyone else did the upgrade? Thoughts??

[ggiese]

If you meant hand fishing....heck ya i have. With all the flooding we have had lately its been hard to find them and they aren't very big. A couple of years ago my brother and I fished out some holes on the rattlesnake and ended up with a couple 20 pound flatheads, a 36 pounder, and a 42 pounder. And boy were they some good eating.

Excellent!!! Than you will enjoy our Okienoodling discussion thread!!!

Okienoodling!!!

Too bad Scotty's not around any more. I thought sure he wouldn't drop the ball on us...

[bigwhiteash]

I still have my Commodore 64 with cassete storage, Commodore color monitor, and dot matrix printer!

Along with about 3 years of Compute's Gazette magazine... I remember spending hours on end keying in code in "Comodore Basic"!

[Kenyth]

Current rig is:

Case: Coolermaster Praetorian ATX Mid Tower
PSU: Corsair TX850W 850 watt (single 12v rail)
Mobo: Intel D955XBK LGA775 chipset
CPU: Pentium D 3Ghz (coolermaster cpu cooler with 120mm fan)
Mem: 2GB Kingston DDR2 667Mhz
GPU: Sapphire HD3870 Toxic edition
Sound Card: Creative X-Fi Pro
Hard Drive: 2 Western Digital 500GB (1TB total)
DVD Drive: 2 LightScribe DVD+R drives

Don't over-invest in a power supply. This is a component where you need "enough". Excess capacity will do you no good.

CPU technology has finally outran the software. Multi-core is the future computing standard, but most current software doesn't take advantage of it. Anything running at 2.5Ghz or above should work fine.

If you're using Vista, might as well choke it up and buy 4GB of RAM. IT's cheap, and the processes will use it.

ATI makes a good GFX card. The 3800 is a bit dated though. The Nvidia GEforce seems to be the standard these days, so that's what I buy. IMHO, dual GFX cards have minimal bang for the buck on a standard size monitor. If you run a huge, high res. display monitor with dual inputs though, you need it. I don't know what you're using.

HDD arrays are one of the places you can get the biggest increase in overall speed peformance. Mechanical HDDs are slow, and the bigger they are, the slower they are. For maximum performance, use a SATA3 RAID array. Run your OS on a single small drive off the built in MOBO interface. Run your games/apps off four fast drives in a RAID 0+1 array (Mirrored striped sets). Striping doubles your potential Read/Write speed. Mirroring the striped sets doubles your read speed again in theory. Five drives is a lot and will take a big power supply, but quadrupling your drive read speed will really increase performance.

The sound card all depends on your sound system. Once again, don't buy an expensive sound card and run it to PC speakers. Link into a surround sound system or it's wasted functionality.

[pmp]

I just ditched my liquid cooling system and went air cooled again. I have a lian li aluminum chassis with 4 120 mm vantec stealth fans(my personal favorite for the level of quiet the provide).

The guts are outdated Asus mobo core 2 duo, nvidia 9800GT, 360gb SATA 2 RAID 0 and 4 gb Corsair DDR 667.

I run vista ultimate with all the bells and whistles as well as a local sql server instance, IIS, and a visual studio 2005 with infragistics, and 10 or 15 various debugging programs without a hiccup.

[daredog4]

I really hate that word. As i said in another post, my 3870 was the Top Of The Line card that ATI offered when i bought it six months ago. Now it is already outdated.....grrrr. I don't mind not having the latest and greatest but with the new software and games out there these days you just about have to have one of the best systems to get them to perform smoothly.

In a couple of months i will spend another 200 to 300 bucks on a Top Of The Line card, which will then be outdated in another six months.

I am starting to side with the guys that still have their computers from the stone age of computing. They were simple and you didn't have to upgrade every few months....lol

[MarineOne]

I prefer to use the term "legacy hardware" over outdated. It's not outdated hardware since it's really not that old, and to be honest for the purpose the hardware was designed for it's a great card. It's like trying to run a high end workstation or entry level server with a 300 watt power supply. Of course you can do it, but don't bitch and complain when you release the magic smoke.


-K

[mrtr33]

I haven't bought a new computer since May of 1998. It's not that I don't use them - obviously - I do jobs for people and pick up spare parts here and there. I don't have a super-pimped out system, but I get done what I need to get done.

I really want one of those new netbooks, though.

Now, if only I could fix cars the same way........

[Kenyth]

I really hate that word. As i said in another post, my 3870 was the Top Of The Line card that ATI offered when i bought it six months ago. Now it is already outdated.....grrrr. I don't mind not having the latest and greatest but with the new software and games out there these days you just about have to have one of the best systems to get them to perform smoothly.

In a couple of months i will spend another 200 to 300 bucks on a Top Of The Line card, which will then be outdated in another six months.

I am starting to side with the guys that still have their computers from the stone age of computing. They were simple and you didn't have to upgrade every few months....lol

I know what you mean. Video cards are the fast moving hardware bit these days. Back in the day, it was the processor that changed every six months. Before that, it was the memory (measured in MB or even KB) and software's ability to use it. You didn't even give the video card much thought until the Pentium era.

[ggiese]

Has anyone found a decent USB device that is a combined cigar cutter and lighting device? I've scoured eBay and it's a no go...

I would like the USB fan, though - it looks like it would do a wonderful job of keeping the smoke from hanging in front of my face while I'm surfing the net!!!

...is there an expansion for my RS Model I expansion interface that gives me a USB port?

[ggiese]

I know what you mean. Video cards are the fast moving hardware bit these days. Back in the day, it was the processor that changed every six months. Before that, it was the memory (measured in MB or even KB) and software's ability to use it. You didn't even give the video card much thought until the Pentium era.

I just did the upgrade on my RS Model I that allows for descending lower case letters. MAN - what a DIFFERENCE!!!

[pmp]

The situation now is much better than it was 5 years ago. I have done system building, business analysis, and consuting for many years. It wasn't long ago that to get 512 mb video ram you were dropping 5 bills. Now its standard on all 100 dollar graphics cards. And with stuff like the mid-ranged 9800gt out for under 150, this is a buyers market on graphics cards.

As to the notion that stuff is outdated... outdated doesn't mean useless. You can drop under 150 bucks on a graphics card that will play any game made quite respectably. Trying to future proof your rig by positioning yourself on the cutting edge with each release is a waste. Games just aren't there yet.

[ggiese]

I was cleaning up over the weekend and came across a brand-new-in-the-package Radio Shack 1K static RAM chip - in case anyone needs it for their expansion interface.

[MarineOne]

The situation now is much better than it was 5 years ago. I have done system building, business analysis, and consuting for many years. It wasn't long ago that to get 512 mb video ram you were dropping 5 bills. Now its standard on all 100 dollar graphics cards. And with stuff like the mid-ranged 9800gt out for under 150, this is a buyers market on graphics cards.

As to the notion that stuff is outdated... outdated doesn't mean useless. You can drop under 150 bucks on a graphics card that will play any game made quite respectably. Trying to future proof your rig by positioning yourself on the cutting edge with each release is a waste. Games just aren't there yet.

I will never "future proof" a system simply because it's not financially reasonable to even try, so I agree with you there. I saw potential with the Aegis accelerator card, but never bought one, and it was a great idea but no one, not even game dev's, bought into it.

However, there are some games (Stalker: Clear Sky, Crysis, Far Cry 2, CoD4, CoD:WaW) that play or played horribly with the video cards that were top of the line when the game was released, even with dual cards. Crysis is a great example of this; it plays great on my single GTX 285, but game play sucked on dual 8800 GTX's. Even the Stalker pre-quil plays bad on a nVidia 9800, but I haven't tested it yet on my rig so I don't know how it will play.

I think the games coming out will continue to push the hardware to evolve more than they did a few years ago, like when the original Ghost Recon was released in 2001 and UBISOFT used the very same game engine for their release of Sum of All Fears game for the movie when it came out.

[Kenyth]

I was cleaning up over the weekend and came across a brand-new-in-the-package Radio Shack 1K static RAM chip - in case anyone needs it for their expansion interface.

Dude! You're killing me here!

Next you'll be bragging on upgrading your intel 8086 to dual 5 1/4" floppy drives and dreaming of the day you can afford one of those new high capacity 10MB fixed hard drives.


Hercules graphics rule! Theoretical 720×350 resolution man!

[pmp]

I will never "future proof" a system simply because it's not financially reasonable to even try, so I agree with you there. I saw potential with the Aegis accelerator card, but never bought one, and it was a great idea but no one, not even game dev's, bought into it.

However, there are some games (Stalker: Clear Sky, Crysis, Far Cry 2, CoD4, CoD:WaW) that play or played horribly with the video cards that were top of the line when the game was released, even with dual cards. Crysis is a great example of this; it plays great on my single GTX 285, but game play sucked on dual 8800 GTX's. Even the Stalker pre-quil plays bad on a nVidia 9800, but I haven't tested it yet on my rig so I don't know how it will play.

I think the games coming out will continue to push the hardware to evolve more than they did a few years ago, like when the original Ghost Recon was released in 2001 and UBISOFT used the very same game engine for their release of Sum of All Fears game for the movie when it came out.

I def. don't consider crysis the benchmark everyone else did when it came out. It played like crap on my 8800 and my 9800 was playable at a lower res. I think that had way more to do with the coding than the cards. And don't get me wrong the graphics were good but far from amazing to the degree that was hyped. The other games mentioned played on my 9800 without a problem although I think the original stalker was kind of choppy when maxed.

[ggiese]

Dude! You're killing me here!

Next you'll be bragging on upgrading your intel 8086 to dual 5 1/4" floppy drives and dreaming of the day you can afford one of those new high capacity 10MB fixed hard drives.


Hercules graphics rule! Theoretical 720×350 resolution man!

I hate to brag - but I do have my eye on a Radio Shack Model 4 with dual 5 1/4" floppies and a green screen (I hear it's easier on the eyes)...

Hercules graphics... I hear good things about it. Not seen one yet, but I figure something will probably pop up at the HamFest this summer.

Hey - don't know if you heard this. You can PUNCH a hole on the on the opposite side of those disks and make dual sided floppies out of 'em.

10 MB fixed drive is out of the budget at the moment...

[Kenyth]

Commodore VIC-20! The wonder computer of the 80's! The ultimate in affordable home computing! 5K of built in RAM, expandable! Save money on hardware! The keyboard and Basic language are built right in to the case! No more seperate components or loading from expensive 5 1/4 floppies! Displays right on your home color television! Use regular inexpensive cassette tapes to store your data!




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUEI7mm8M7Q