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Post by Tom Maneiro on Nov 30, 2014 19:35:13 GMT -5
She. Still. BOOTS!(Although I had to rebuild the Registry -USER.DAT- yet again. Thanks, buggy Win95...) In other sad news, a huge power surge over the CATV lines 4 months ago fried two of my laptops -including the i5-, my TV, a bunch of USB devices, and half of my gadgets. And since I still live in Soviet Venezuela... well, it still hurts since you can't buy anything here anymore. But eh, the rest of the survivors are still doing fine. Also, I've discovered an old video card which plays nice with my Lenovo monitor: a ATi 3D RAGE II+. It has only 2MB VRAM (so no truecolor 1024x768), but it can drive my LCD panel at its native resolution, and as a bonus, it is still supported by Linux kernel frambebuffer drivers (atyfb). I also found a 64MB PCI GeForce MX4400 card, but it refused to work on Saki :/ (not even a POST). Ah well, I guess someday either a ISA Mach64 or PCI Radeon 7000 will finally pop up somewhere around me...
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Post by GiGaBiTe on Dec 20, 2014 18:28:52 GMT -5
In other sad news, a huge power surge over the CATV lines 4 months ago fried two of my laptops -including the i5-, my TV, a bunch of USB devices, and half of my gadgets. And since I still live in Soviet Venezuela... well, it still hurts since you can't buy anything here anymore. But eh, the rest of the survivors are still doing fine. Well hopefully you saved the laptops and didn't toss them. I would guess that the motherboards are probably toast, but the rest of the parts are probably fine. You should bail out of Venezuela and come to the states and get all of the cheap computer parts you want I also found a 64MB PCI GeForce MX4400 card, but it refused to work on Saki :/ (not even a POST). Ah well, I guess someday either a ISA Mach64 or PCI Radeon 7000 will finally pop up somewhere around me... Newer PCI video cards made in the last 10 years generally won't run on 5v only PCI slots, which pretty much everything prior to 1998 is. I think the video card manufacturers are using the PCI 2.3 or 3.0 spec which specifies only 3.3v signalling but aren't using the correct keyed card edge. Basically video card manufacturers should be using the top left card edge connector, but are instead using the middle left card or the lower left card. The reason they don't use the upper card is because motherboard manufacturers haven't adopted the PCI 2.3 or 3.0 spec and have stayed with 2.2 to allow for use of both 5v and 3.3v cards.
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Post by Tom Maneiro on Dec 21, 2014 19:21:26 GMT -5
As for the laptops: While I was able to find a new motherboard for the Dell (the Inspiron 6400 was a HOT seller back in its time down here, so finding parts locally isn't hard), there was nothing I could do for the Asus, so there goes my fast rig :/ You say "fly out of Bolivarian Retardistania"? Sadly this is becoming a non-option for pretty much everyone, thanks to an ongoing hyperinflation. As for the video cards: Yeah, the MX4000 card had a "Universal" slot, and that's the one which didn't worked on Saki. Luckily I was able to find a cheap MX440 (also 64MB) online for cheap, this one had a 5V-only slot, and indeed it works just fine So I'm better avoiding "universal" cards like the plague then. Bonus: how to use all that extra useless VRAM as... well, RAM modprobe uvesafb mode_option=1024x768-32@60 scroll=ywrap vram_total=8 modprobe phram phram=VRAM,0xE0800000,56Mi modprobe mtdblock mkswap /dev/mtdblock0 swapon /dev/mtdblock0 -p 1
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Post by GiGaBiTe on Jan 26, 2015 2:41:51 GMT -5
Using video RAM as swap space or a RAM disk is fine if the card uses a PCIe slot. It's not so much if the card is AGP or PCI.
AGP is a weird bus in that while it allows extremely fast transfers to the card (2133 MB/s on AGP 8x), reading from the card is very slow. From what I've read and tested myself, you'll only get 8-10 MB/s read from an AGP card. Also since the video RAM is not exposed directly to the AGP bus (you have to go through the GPU) you can never expect to achieve theoretical peak performance. You'll probably get anywhere from 300-1200 MB/s depending on the card and the video memory used.
As for PCI, it's an even slower bus. You have 133 MB/s of shared bandwidth between many devices, though you don't have the disparity of lopsided bandwidth to and from the card. Though I've never personally tested the bandwidth to a PCI video card, it will never top 133 MB/s unless you're using 66 MHz PCI slots or 64 bit PCI slots which are rare outside server boards or Apple machines.
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Post by Tom Maneiro on Sept 3, 2023 14:00:02 GMT -5
~ Rise from your grave, my creation! ~
2023 Status Update of the fleet:
- Marika (the 386): she still lives~! I still boot her once a year, the ISA cards still play flaky all the time, haven't done any major upgrades since Venezuela is a no-fly zone for any kind of hardware older than Socket 478 :/
- Saki (the PCChips routerbox): Sadly she went to the great scrapyard in computer hell after a power surge zapped her motherboard last year. Hold a minute of silence for this highly resilient piece of computer kit that routed my packages between the dorms/home and the world for almost 15 years non-stop (The crapacitors have been giving trouble since 2019, but the power surge -similar to the one that killed half of my crap in 2014- delivered the final nail in the coffin). But her Debianized brains now live in a similar craptacular build: a Compaq Presario 5000LA (the only box of the appropriate vintage I could find in such a short notice), this time running non-EOL'd Debian!
- The laptops: all working more or less fine, although they're no match anymore for the modern web of dog vomit we call "Web Technologies™" since the Silly Valley VC kids decided to do its best to kill native software (the surge of the smartphone didn't helped!). The Inspiron 6400 loves to die every now and then, but a full teardown and cleanup always bring it back in service. Soon to get SSD updates...
- Newest additions: Between 2014 and 2019, a ol' IBM ThinkCentre M50 did duty as my main (and only) TV, but since I decided to quit TV, it now only sees action from time to time for data recovery / HDD refurbishing jobs. Also, last year added a IBM ThinkPad M40 from the same vintage, tricked it out a bit (maxed out CPU with a 2.1GHz Dothan and 2GB RAM), and it now quad-boots XP, Debian, 98SE and Me! And to close the circle of life, I ended salvaging a PCChips M756LMRT mobo from the dumpster (complete with bad G-Luxon crapacitors) last December, with very similar specs to the M755 that did duty as my main PC between 2001 and 2006. Now sporting 384MB RAM (which I couldn't afford back in 2003!) and a proper Pentium III 750, its SiS 630 chipset is still as awful as it was 20 years ago, so now it also dualboots 98SE and Me as my current time machine of choice for when I want to go to simpler, suckier times.
These days I don't tinker that much with my boxes - as soon as I reach a setup I like, I leave them be - my machines ARE picky, after all!
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Post by GiGaBiTe on Mar 8, 2024 3:08:57 GMT -5
Gasp! Blast from the Past!
Too bad you don't come across older PC stuff more often down there, I get old crap all the time, usually for cheap.
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