Quick Poll, how old is your computer.

snip

Yep. I still keep a couple of old PCI cards for just such
a purpose and they've served me well more than once.



I keep all kinds of obsolete parts here...

about two years ago...some guy actually paid me $10 for a 386

though I told him he could have it free...but he insisted.


seems that he was a programmer many years ago
and needed to run his application...but it would not work on the faster
cpu's

he said he wrote it such a long time ago...he could not remember how he
wrote it
and did not want to spend months trying to rewite it for a faster cpu...

so even old computers /old parts can have a use...


that said...I finally sent a few 2400 baud modems to the recycler !!!!

"philo" wrote in message
.. .

"Bazzer Smith" wrote in message
...

I keep a few older machines around just for the heck of it;

A Kaypro
a few 8088's
a 286, 386 and 486

i fire them up every once in a while just for the heck of it.

my 286 has a memory expansion card and had the full 16 megs of ram

the 386 has win95 on a 40 meg drive...
it was a fun project getting win95 on that 40 meg *uncompressed* drive!

Wow 8088 lol!!! Thats 8 bit isn't it, not much more than a Z80
(lovely processor), take me back a bit.
Well maybe not full 8 bit but only 40 legs!!
Must have ripped along at 4.77MHz!!
My current machine is 377 times faster!!
Do you do much video work on it?




the 8088 is 16 bit at 4.77 mhz
i have three of them:
the original IBM XT
an IBM Eduquest
and the Compaq "Sewing machine" (two floppies and no HD) Runs Dos3.3 only!

I think I had one of those Compaq Deskpros?
some only had one flopppy drive.




the IBM's can run any 16bit version of DOS (AFAIK)
also can run windows up to version 3.0

btw: the company i work for manufactures indutrial battery chargers
and still has one in current production with a Z-80 based control unit...
it was designed in the early 80's and no need was seen to change
anything...
it's a battery charger after all


I used to write Z80 machine code C9=RET
thats about all I can remember now..



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wrote in message
oups.com...

Bazzer Smith wrote:
This is you main computer.
I am particularly interested if anyone (truthfully) has a main
computer 10 years or more old. (relates to an earlier post).

To start the ball rolling my computer is in its first year ( ~3 months
old).

I still have an Amiga A500 of 1985 vintage and an A1200 from
1993.


I can beat that I have an Atari ST which I think has 256K of memory?
Of course I don't use it anymore, but I did have need to use it recently
to try and see it could be used to play some games I download
(Sokoban), unfortunately I could not get it read the PC floppy discs
I would need to upgrade the drive to enable that unfortunately, other
than that it worked fine.
Prior to that I had a Spectrum 48k :O)
(sold it).

Although I seldom use them anymore, I just don't have
the heart to put them away. My brother's printing press
still uses a 100MHz P1 that I assembled for him in '95. My
daughter doesn't complain about her 450MHz P3 that I threw
together from old parts, and which she uses mainly for
playing mp3s and elementary C++. I use a 2-year old Athlon
XP 2600+ while my son plays games on a new A64.

My first PC was a 200MHz P1, O/C to 266, built entirely from
salvaged parts. I assembled the CD-ROM drive from three
damaged ones. The HDD was a merger of one with fried
electronics and one with a damaged platter. It didn't have a
case for the first few months and I used it with the
motherboard propped up against a wall. The PSU was a
repaired dead unit, with the CD drive lying on top of it. At
first, I just placed the HDD on the CD drive, but vibration
from the CD drive sometimes caused errors, so I inserted
plastic foam between them (worked great). The sound card was
an ISA type with a built-in amplifier, connected to a pair
of speakers that I built back in the '70s. The gfx card was
a SiS 6215 with 0.5MB VRAM. I desoldered the RAM chips from
another gfx card and inserted them into the expansion RAM
sockets, getting a whopping 1MB video card.

"kony" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 13 Jul 2006 02:13:07 GMT, "Bazzer Smith"
wrote:


Yes but be honest, what are you going to use those old systems for?
Yea a 1 gig system would be OK for a lot of stuff, but basically
switching it on is a waste of electricity!!!

It cansave power to have multiple systems. I have a highly
overclocked gaming system, uses between double to triple the
power of the one I'm typing on at present. When I'm not
gaming it is turned off.

Take "right now" for example, if you hibernated your most
power hungry system and used something with good power
management and only the muscle needed to do usenet, that
will save a far amount.


Well I have my old Cyrix system which I could use it only
has a 90 watt power supply!! I think my new semp is 250W?
Not sure how much power it uses but it does turn the monitor off
when not it, the old system seems to have forgot how to do that!!