I've been testing Windows XP games on my newly-tweaked XP build. The major difference is the SSD and a high end DVD drive to replace the cheap 2012 drive I had in there before + 8800 GTS to replace the Radeon HD 4870 that was way too hot even when idle and seemed to be getting stability issues even though the case is way better cooled than most cases would have been at the time.

The SSD makes things a breeze - 480GB of SSD goodness coupled with a relatively modern 2012 motherboard allows very quick loading times. Even though the 8800 GTS is half as fast as the HD 4870, all XP games tested so far run butter smooth. Added benefit is absolutely quiet fan compared to the very noisy HD 4870.

[quote="red_avatar"][/quote]

Which GTS, the G80 or G92?
I used to have an HD4870, with the reference cooler it was loud and hot, I later used an Arctic Cooling Twin Turbo. Pretty much solved all my issues.
I recently started thinking about picking up a Sapphire Vapor-X version.

Which is faster, SSD on SATA II or HDD on SATA III?

Errius wrote:

Which is faster, SSD on SATA II or HDD on SATA III?

SSD on PATA can beat a HDD on SATA in speed in alot of applications/real life use.. so SSD

HDD generally can't saturate a SATA II link (absent port multipliers).

Has anyone benchmarked how all of this stuff runs together: SSDs, HHDs, PATA-33/66/100, SATA I/II/III

This artist released their entire album on a Sega Genesis cartridge. Cool.

https://remute.bandcamp.com/album/technoptimistic

I'm sitting between two foot-high stacks of hard drives. One is DOA, one passed SMART but I just started doing surface tests. I'm running the Linux mini on Hiren's and running 6 concurrent badblocks instances on 6 drives at once. It's the simplest way I've found to test 6 drives at once. Technically I have 8 SATA ports on this board so it may become a server (and I might try testing 8 drives but I'm already using the data bus as a punching bag as it is).

Behold my elegant testing rig:

Okay that's *almost* retro: A Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3, a first gen i7 board, apparently the first USB3 motherboard (according to the ads anyway). i5-760, and I think I have an 870 around here somewhere.

I said "almost" retro. The HD 4650 came with it, as well as a very clean Matrix G45 (450) and a couple of other motherboards.

I hope to dig though some more stuff tomorrow, the HDs are taking all my time right now. I just have to find a use for scores of bad 2.5" HDDs. Windchime? Skipping on ponds? Jenga?

As an ultimate test of my tape backup setup, I took a 400gb tape that I had in storage and tested it on my new 800gb drive. Worked perfect once I remembered the encryption password. Compared perfectly to the data I had on my nas.

Going to move forward with the new drive now.

For the record, I backup things I cant really replace. tax data, business accounting, digitized family photos. 2x the room now because I has hitting the cap of the old drive. I plan to now have a running backup of all my important systems.

Just in case shit totally hits the fan, I have a chance to get back up without data loss.

I got a Thinkpad R60e a while back for almost free, but it has/had an issue where the screen backlight would randomly shut off.

I wanted to open it up today to check it out, but the problem did not appear in the hour I had the machine on.

So I decided to put in an old SSD, and I found some memory that fit so I could upgrade from 1GB to 2GB.

I am now installing Linux Mint on it. It's a Core Duo, so no 64bit unfortunately, and the screen sucks. Still a Thinkpad though, the build quality is very good. And it has the ThinkLight which is cool.

RandomStranger wrote:

Which GTS, the G80 or G92? I used to have an HD4870, with the reference cooler it was loud and hot, I later used an Arctic Cooli […]
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red_avatar wrote:

Which GTS, the G80 or G92?
I used to have an HD4870, with the reference cooler it was loud and hot, I later used an Arctic Cooling Twin Turbo. Pretty much solved all my issues.
I recently started thinking about picking up a Sapphire Vapor-X version.

G80

For the HD 4870, I fully opened it, replaced the memory pads, replaced the thermal paste with better one, cleaned all fins, etc. I looked into replacing the cooling solution but I couldn't really find any affordable solutions. I mean, if you pay €40 for a cooling solution to use on a 10 year old card, you might just as well BUY a new card of the era for that much.

Also, a cooling solution just removes the symptoms namely the heat - the cause is still massive power draws and generating far too much heat that will then get pumped into the case. Yesterday I played KOTOR at 1280x1024, full graphics, AA x4, etc. so I pushed it pretty hard and it barely made any noise, temperature was at 60°C. The HD 4870, IDLE, was 65°C.

@Cyrix200+: My ThinkPad R40 has the ThinkLight and I have the original display assembly stored somewhere safe as I have another display installed in it currently that I bought off of eBay. The only thing that caused the system to not boot was the broken 512MB DDR memory, however, it had the original 256MB installed (slow with that much RAM inside) and it currently has 1GB of DDR RAM installed and Windows XP Pro SP3.

The main issue and concern is the hard drive (has a couple of bad sectors), however, I got lucky to image the hard drive on my main desktop PC, as well as a few other hard drives from other laptops, so in case those go out, at least when I get the new drives, I can clone the images and find a way to resize them to fit the full capacity. Might go with an SSD drive method (mSATA to 2.5" IDE) and set the limit using SeaTools per system as the Ontrack Dynamic Disk Overlay software takes 40K of 640K of conventional memory. Also, some of my laptops cannot run Linux without the PAE, but, there is a workaround for the Centrino processors.

I got a molex connector and barrel plug in the mail to turn into an 12V adapter to power a lcd controller board with. However, when I was finally ready to put the whole display assembly together, I realised that the connector for the LCD panel's CCFL tubes is a BHR-03V (or BHMR?) and the controller board needs a BHR-04VS-1!

The controller board claims to be compatible, but apparently there are a couple of different models of the panel out there with different connectors.

Now, there are websites that sell the cables for this kind of stuff and I even found what should be an adapter

http://www.invertech.de/catalog/product_info. … de950db8d9c82a6

but the jury is still out on whether I can get this one, because a lot of these specialized retailers only sell to businesses.

I could just try to make one, but I don't have a crimp tool and I'm not sure about just soldering the respective cables from the CCFLs to the connector on the controller board. If anyone has experience with LCDs, I'd happily take some advice on this!

Not much,

Somewhat found out that a P5ND2-SLI mobo I have will only POST if I short the green and black wires together on any PSU. For some reason, the 5vSB light will not show up if I don't.

Any ideas? Again, shorting black and green on the PSU will turn on the motherboard. If I don't short them, 5vsb LED won't light up, and that is available regardless of what PSU I use.

Tested out a couple of the keyboards I found recently when clearing out a shed in the garden. The first worked, but appears to have a loose cable inside so I left that for another day and turned my attention towards a Cherry branded AT/XT selectable keyboard.

Upon first test, a few keys were either not working or working sporadically & 1 key was stuck (I removed this before testing). The stuck key just needed removing and reattaching correctly.

So I took it apart and set about cleaning it. Quite a lot of dirt and surface level corrosion. A quick swab with isopropyl alcohol pretty much cleared it all up quickly & easily. Then I did a quick clean of the plastics and keys etc and put it all back together.

Working great now on my XT/8088 build. Works a lot better than the PS/2 to XT adapter I was previously using and having a working period correct mechanical keyboard is a bonus.

I was getting frustrated for a while though - I was using the IBM E Editor to test out the keys and every key appeared to be working, except the number 5 key on the numpad. Faced with having to strip the keyboard down again, I exited E and got to DOS only to discover the key was working fine. Must be a strange quirk of the E Editor! 🤣

red_avatar wrote:

G80 […]
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RandomStranger wrote:

Which GTS, the G80 or G92? I used to have an HD4870, with the reference cooler it was loud and hot, I later used an Arctic Cooli […]
Show full quote

red_avatar wrote:

Which GTS, the G80 or G92?
I used to have an HD4870, with the reference cooler it was loud and hot, I later used an Arctic Cooling Twin Turbo. Pretty much solved all my issues.
I recently started thinking about picking up a Sapphire Vapor-X version.

G80

https://www.ixbt.com/video3/images/g80-7/msi- … ts320-front.jpg

For the HD 4870, I fully opened it, replaced the memory pads, replaced the thermal paste with better one, cleaned all fins, etc. I looked into replacing the cooling solution but I couldn't really find any affordable solutions. I mean, if you pay €40 for a cooling solution to use on a 10 year old card, you might just as well BUY a new card of the era for that much.

Also, a cooling solution just removes the symptoms namely the heat - the cause is still massive power draws and generating far too much heat that will then get pumped into the case. Yesterday I played KOTOR at 1280x1024, full graphics, AA x4, etc. so I pushed it pretty hard and it barely made any noise, temperature was at 60°C. The HD 4870, IDLE, was 65°C.

Yeah, but that's how the cards of that era worked (especially with reference coolers). My 8800 Ultra isn't any different on that regard and the GTX280 was even worse.
The G92 is cooler and faster. It could catch up to the GTX and it was manufactured at 65nm instead of 80nm.
Also, I wasn's suggesting to replace the cooler, I just mentioned that I did when I had one as a main (non-retro) card back then.

As a footnote, I found the pictures I've taken back in 2012 when I sold it:

henryVK wrote:

I got a molex connector and barrel plug in the mail to turn into an 12V adapter to power a lcd controller board with. However, when I was finally ready to put the whole display assembly together, I realised that the connector for the LCD panel's CCFL tubes is a BHR-03V (or BHMR?) and the controller board needs a BHR-04VS-1!

The solution turned out to be dead simple. Just cut the connector into two bits, one with the ground and one with the two cables for the tubes and push onto respective pins... 😵

henryVK wrote:

henryVK wrote:

I got a molex connector and barrel plug in the mail to turn into an 12V adapter to power a lcd controller board with. However, when I was finally ready to put the whole display assembly together, I realised that the connector for the LCD panel's CCFL tubes is a BHR-03V (or BHMR?) and the controller board needs a BHR-04VS-1!

The solution turned out to be dead simple. Just cut the connector into two bits, one with the ground and one with the two cables for the tubes and push onto respective pins... 😵

Sometimes it do be like that. I bought a SATA interposer thinking it was for a Dell Vostro 1015 but it was for a HP.

Same thing - just had to snap one tab off, then it fit nice into the respective slot.

keenmaster486 wrote:

Wow, funny that modern antiviruses will still detect and remove viruses from 1996!

I downloaded an "MS-DOS collection" torrent a few weeks ago that had an entire folder of DOS-era viruses. Bitdefender went absolutely nuts when I was poking around in there. 😀

The 720K 3.5" drive was on its way out in my Tandy but you can just swap in a 1.44M drive (though it operates at a 720K drive) but Tandy uses some of the ground lines on the floppy cable to deliver power, so obviously you want to sever those as to not destroy your replacement drive.

Behold, my absolute hack job. Compare to Tandy's nice ones on the left. (The center connector goes to the board, the nice Tandy-severed side goes to the 5.25" floppy drive as it gets its power from molex. The side I butchered is what goes to the new 3.5" drive.)

It's not pretty but I'm not trying to sell it. 😀 It works and that makes me happy.