What did you do to your computer today?

Certificate of Excellence said:

512mb which at the time iirc had 128mb. I asked for 1gb but got the 512

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LOL, Mine came with 512mb of ram preinstalled I think. I am to lazy to get it open right now to look. I am am liking it a lot too!

PentaxEnthusiast said:

Oh, you've got the fancy base for it! I just passed on a Dimension 3200, kinda wish I'd have kept it, but I already have a better Pentium 4 build, just needs a good GPU.

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Fancy Base? What is your pentium 4 build?
I do think the 8250 is a really cool machine. With the way I collect things soon dad's gonna kick me out of the house!


Doe's anyone know of good mods that are easy to do to the 8250 that makes it better without having to replace the cpu?
I was surprised when I saw that the only video out on it is on a video out card. It did come with a modem card and an ethernet card.

Froggy814 said:

LOL, Mine came with 512mb of ram preinstalled I think. I am to lazy to get it open right now to look. I am am liking it a lot too!

Fancy Base? What is your pentium 4 build?
I do think the 8250 is a really cool machine. With the way I collect things soon dad's gonna kick me out of the house!


Doe's anyone know of good mods that are easy to do to the 8250 that makes it better without having to replace the cpu?
I was surprised when I saw that the only video out on it is on a video out card. It did come with a modem card and an ethernet card.

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The tower sits in a little base around it that's supposed to reduce the chance of tipping, saw them every now and then when these were still current tech.

I've got a Pentium 4 HT 630, so a later Prescott chip with hyperthreading on an Asus P5GDC-V motherboard.

As far as mods go for the Dell, your biggest limit really is going to be the factory BIOS that doesn't really allow you to do all that much under the hood.

PentaxEnthusiast said:

As far as mods go for the Dell, your biggest limit really is going to be the factory BIOS that doesn't really allow you to do all that much under the hood.

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Bummer!

PentaxEnthusiast said:

I've got a Pentium 4 HT 630, so a later Prescott chip with hyperthreading on an Asus P5GDC-V motherboard.

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Cool! That sound's awesome! Do you think you can send a photo or 2 of it?

PentaxEnthusiast said:

The tower sits in a little base around it that's supposed to reduce the chance of tipping, saw them every now and then when these were still current tech.

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Ahhh, the base! I see it now! Thanks!

Froggy814 said:

Bummer!

Cool! That sound's awesome! Do you think you can send a photo or 2 of it?

Ahhh, the base! I see it now! Thanks!

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It's nothing too special, but it's in an awesome Lian Li case from back in the day that I've always wanted, so there's that. It's on a table that's entirely too small, I'm missing a proper CRT, and the Quadro 1800 that's in there is obviously awful for gaming.

My Model M is nice, though the V-key is sticking.

Well, I broke one of my MX linux boxes last week and it has been a slow and painful spiral down to the bottom of the toilet trying to fix it. Essentially, after some updates and getting retroarch to work, when I rebooted the machine, I got a black desktop that would flash between that and the splash screen. Ok so x was failing but why? Interestingly wifi connectivity died too. Anyways, I then got into grub+e, removed no splash and was watching the os load when I noticed user accounsservices daemon was failing so I decided to try and reinstall some core services like lightdm etc. THEN it was telling me that somehow ownership was through my admin account and not root and it wouldnt let me dl updates ... omg so then I jump down the rabbit hole of trying to fix that mess which ultimately I was able to reestablish downloading and reinstalling files via cli but reinstalling those core system files did not fix my whacko screen issue. I then broke down and decided to not use nouveau driver which works perfectly on every other machine I use MX on and decided to build legacy 340xx driver. That took about 15 minutes and I pointed the install to use this driver ... and then the screen went totally black with no cursor so yeah, that made everything worse LOL. With my tail between my legs, I grabbed my MX USB stick, wiped this giant pita (gave myself a bit more room for my home folder this time) and reinstalled fresh MX and guess what?

Everything is working fine. Ive been using MX for quite a while at this point with 100% stability and no issues until now. It still has to be something I did to it because one of my other boxes would be exibiting similar issues and they're all absolutely fine. The cuddy part is I cant figure out what I did haha. Oh well, dems da breaks LOL.

PentaxEnthusiast said:

It's nothing too special, but it's in an awesome Lian Li case from back in the day that I've always wanted, so there's that. It's on a table that's entirely too small, I'm missing a proper CRT, and the Quadro 1800 that's in there is obviously awful for gaming.

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Hey, At least it's got the expandability!

I updated FreeTube to 24.0.1. I assumed the manual install would overwrite the app but it did not. It installed the updated version 24.0.1 as a standalone app next to 24.0.0. Interestingly I could've sworn that I installed 24.0.0 through mx package manager but when I went to delete it, it deleted 24.0.1? What? I did not install 24.0.1 through package manager so why did it uninstall it? How did it even see it? In PM it was gone but on the system menu, there it was lol. I only found it as a flatpak which was so weird. Anyways long story short I had to manually locate the flatpak package ID (io.fretubeapp.Flatpak) in terminal and then delete it. I then circled back and installed the version update. How all that broke down was confusing to me because that was not how I recalled it but whatevs, it's working now lol.

I also installed EasyEffects & decided to try JackHack96's plugin pack, so am excited to give it a go and try them out. This was more straight forward and was installed directly to EE's directory via a curl command on jackhacks github via terminal. Anyways, tomorrow I am going to grab a bootable iso via MX Snapshot and then stick it on one of my flashdrives with MX Live USB Maker in case the install takes a dump.

It is so cool that all of these tools are already present in the os.

I have a Japanese PC-Engine Duo-R hooked up to the video input of my Powermac 6500, and Wasn't getting any sound. I think I spent hours checking everything but the sound settings. It turns out that when I upgraded from MacOS 8.5 to 9.1, it mutes the audio input by default, and doesn't unmute it when the TV program is launched. So that's awesome.

I realized the irony of everything, when I launched iTunes and listened to Internet Radio instead of the game audio. Either way, had a good time, Garden iTunes patch is awesome.

I'm looking for some fun math games to put on the G3 for my son to play that hopefully captures his interest better than GCompris.
What's kinda sad is that GCompris is such an awesome package for Linux when it comes to educational stuff, but he just doesn't seem to like it. Still, kudos to the team and anyone else involved in making it for doing so and keeping it going. I also love that it's ad-free and there's no paywall for anything. I'd happily donate to the project, however.

The ~2009 Macbook Pro I received from eBay wasn't booting. I opened it up, cleaned it with compressed air and a healthy dose of Elektro spray and reseated the RAM. It lives! Now I'm install Linux on this one, just messing around with it. There is a problem with the hinge, so might look into fixing that if its not expensive / hard.

The ~2008 I have kept macOS on it, currently on El Capitan... Waiting for an SSD / RAM to arrive so I can maybe (hopefully) make it a bit more pleasant to use because I really like it.

~ 2012 MBP... Just been using it like a computer for regular computer stuff.

My 2011/2012 hybrid MBP is my main machine at work while HR and IT still drag their feet on getting me credentialed to use my actual desktop at work.

I'm beginning to think there's some trepidation on IT's part as I was once IT for a specific office within the county that superseded their authority; ironically, I'm not even doing IT anymore beyond the occasional Cyber Forensics.

I upgraded my MacBook Pro 2012 to 16GB RAM and used OCLP to bring it up to macOS Monterey 12.7.6. I'm astounded this computer is 14 years old! It's a wonderful machine. I have been using it daily since I acquired it - albeit with only 4GB RAM, fortunately it came with a 250GB SSD. I have been using it for Youtube, Music, Movies, and even some 'almost-classic' (?) gaming! I've been playing Civ V on this and at turn 123 it's still running just fine on a medium map - I'm impressed! I've been using Apple Notes extensively, have a bunch of other games installed via Steam as well. I am loving this machine!

I am downloading Half Life 2 via the internets "free rental" system despite owning all the Half Life games on Steam, because for whatever reason that is not shown as an option on Steam - a bit annoyed by that.

My 2008 MacBook Pro I acquired 8GB RAM and a 8GB RAM from Aliexpress and installed Windows 7 on it - I'm turning that into a sort of retro gaming machine for Windows games from roughly 1998 ~ 2008. So far I've only tested out Farcry and Sim City 4 Deluxe on it - but its great! And the 15 inch screen really shines there. I'm hoping to set it up in a permanent spot somewhere as a sort of "Hey, here's a nice 15" Macbook ready and waiting to be played". I love it also!

I also attempted to repair my 2009 Macbook Pro I bought as 'broken' from eBay. Opened it, cleaned it with Elektro and Compressed Air, replaced the RAM (Also 8GB), kept the original HDD... Sadly, one of the dim slots or the clip is busted, needs work. But works with 4GB RAM for now. Considering making this a Windows XP machine. I acquired a second Macbook Pro 2009 with no peripherals hoping to use it for parts - No luck - The exact same broken dim slot or clip issue! Testing with various RAM sticks, verified its the DIMM slot. So that's a project with a bit of work ahead of me.

I am having a blast with these computers!

I just finished a month and a half of fighting with a Dell OptiPlex 7050 I use for automating music for a private radio station I built for myself.

It was working absolutely fine under Windows 7, then I decided it might finally be time to give Windows 10 a try because there was a neat new streaming program I wanted to try that wouldn't run on 7 (I subsequently found a way to make it work).

Anyway, It worked decently for awhile. Better, in fact because while the radio automation software I'm using technically supports 7, it's clear that it's not optimal.

Then the crashes started happening.

Nothing, and I mean NOTHING would fix them! Fresh installs would begin crashing once I got all my programs installed. All of which worked perfectly on 7.

So I finally decide to put 7 back on this thing, but that wasn't without troubles, too.

So many hours and a few downloads later, I finally got an ISO from Dell which was updated to support this model's NVMe slot and USB 3.0 ports.

But it didn't end there! I started getting weird stalls.

Things finally settled down when I discovered that it was a regular SATA SSD I had installed which was causing the problem. I took that out, and it's been running perfectly (I was having trouble getting VirtualBox to install, but I figured out that it was some weird interactions with some other software; I uninstalled that other software, and VirtualBox installed fine. I was able to reinstall the other software afterwards, and it's all stable now!

The moral of this story? DON'T INSTALL WINDOWS 10 WHEN WINDOWS 7 WORKS FINE!!!!*

*typed in all caps for extra emphasis.

c

cc333 said:

I just finished a month and a half of fighting with a Dell OptiPlex 7050 I use for automating music for a private radio station I built for myself.

It was working absolutely fine under Windows 7, then I decided it might finally be time to give Windows 10 a try because there was a neat new streaming program I wanted to try that wouldn't run on 7 (I subsequently found a way to make it work).

Anyway, It worked decently for awhile. Better, in fact because while the radio automation software I'm using technically supports 7, it's clear that it's not optimal.

Then the crashes started happening.

Nothing, and I mean NOTHING would fix them! Fresh installs would begin crashing once I got all my programs installed. All of which worked perfectly on 7.

So I finally decide to put 7 back on this thing, but that wasn't without troubles, too.

So many hours and a few downloads later, I finally got an ISO from Dell which was updated to support this model's NVMe slot and USB 3.0 ports.

But it didn't end there! I started getting weird stalls.

Things finally settled down when I discovered that it was a regular SATA SSD I had installed which was causing the problem. I took that out, and it's been running perfectly (I was having trouble getting VirtualBox to install, but I figured out that it was some weird interactions with some other software; I uninstalled that other software, and VirtualBox installed fine. I was able to reinstall the other software afterwards, and it's all stable now!

The moral of this story? DON'T INSTALL WINDOWS 10 WHEN WINDOWS 7 WORKS FINE!!!!*

*typed in all caps for extra emphasis.

c

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Horribly painful and frustrating situations like this have made me a bootable back up junkie LOL. I see it was hardware related for you but still, all the back and forth installing os & apps eats up so much time.

I myself haven’t done anything really computer related. I did remodel my office though which will house all my retro computing and gaming things. In regards to this, my hidden cable routing kit came today from the Amazon stork so I will be installing that and then slowly reinstalling all my retro junk so I can get back to having fun with these old boxes and occasionally sharing about it

Oh and I am getting a free thinkpad T61 that was offered up on the local Craigslists. I’ll go grab that midday I think. I loves me the IBM Thinkpad/ThinkCentre/ThinkStation aesthetic.

Certificate of Excellence said:

Horribly painful and frustrating situations like this have made me a bootable back up junkie LOL. I see it was hardware related for you but still, all the back and forth installing os & apps eats up so much time.

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Yup.

I think part of what threw it all off was the fact that coincidentally, either the motherboard or PSU (probably both) failed as I was testing for the cause of the crashes, so I had to wait on parts (the first PSU I ordered – a 360W unit from a 7080 – didn't work, so I had to get another one (a 240W unit from a 7050 tower) and wait for that. THEN I had to wait on NVMe SSDs (I had suspected that it was failing) because the first one I had bought was an mSATA and not NVMe.

But now, it's hopefully working as it should.

There are a few differences (the old MB had a Realtek NIC, the new one has an Intel NIC, and I upgraded from an i7-6700k to an i7-7700k, which is about the same aside from the stupid trickery I must now do to bypass the artificial blocks that Intel and Microsoft co-developed), but on the balance, after trying so many different things, its configuration ended up pretty much where it started.

Windows 7 Forever!*

c

*and XP, too, on computers able to run it well!

Yikes! Im glad it is up and running and working well for you after all of that

Thanks! So am I!

A few weeks ago, I was about ready to through it out a window and smash it with a sledge hammer!

I put it back into service last night, and it's still going strong just about 24 hours later. There's still a few minor glitches, but they're not a big deal.

c

I've got five near identical HP ProBooks and three dock setups scattered around the place.

Installed LinuxMint in the wee hours and really like it. Loved the Ubuntu NetBook ReMix on HP_Mini, but not taking to the current version much at all.

LOVING Mint so far. My quarantined FireFox workstation has been Windows since I retired the Mini. So Mint is where it's at I guess. Still need to install a lighter distro I read about that's Windows like on the fourth ProBook to try it out too. Read something about being able to run Windows applets via somethingorother.

One' ProBook's a bit borked, but its I7 is heading into my original Cherry I5 ProBook at some point. Wondering if the ProBook will "just know" that it's been upgraded from I5 to I7 or if I'll need to tweak settings? Anybody got a guess at that?

I was back at repairing my boys MX25 2009 9,1 24" iMac. They were trying to play DVDs and ran into some problems: A.) It would eat the dvd but would not play it and B.) it would not eject it back out. This is the machine I replaced the DVD drive a few years back when its original died so was curious what was up as IIRC it was working fine post swap. Turned out to be a pretty easy fix. For playback, I installed libdvdcss2 which is an updated DVD Codex for retail DVD playback that can properly handle contextual menus etc. in most Linux distros. This fixed playback but the ejection issue was still there. I did not notice this when I first examined the box but the small sliver of aluminum that comprises the far edge of the DVD slot was bent in about .5mm. Anyways as such, I ended up taking the case off to examine thinking the replacement drive was giving up the ghost. I quickly realized it ejected just fine with the case off which then pointed me right back to a closer examination of the case and voila, I saw the bend and proceeded to straighten/fix it. Works like a champ now. The iMac spits out DVDs like they're covered in extra spicy buffalo sauce.

Subsquently, I also took the time since I had the case off to give it a good air dust and I color coded the screw holes and screws that hold the case down and sit hidden under the removable glass panel. That way I dont have to guess which are the long/medium long/short screws because I never remember which ones are which LOL. Anyways its working like a champ.

Oh yeah, I installed fresh Tiger on a 800Mhz 17" iMac G4 this morning. This is one of those macs that took a tumble off my a wall mounted shelf when its support failed, so Im glad it survived LOL. Its DVD drive is acting up however so I will have ot get into this one and replace it with one of my known good drives while I take a look at it. It might be dead but if its soemthing easy like a clean or belt or something, well that's easy enough to fix.