Another frustration is being patient. I love this hobby, but I'm not at a place where I can throw much $ at it. I've gotten spoiled by getting most of what I have for free, and those freebies usually only come with patience.

clueless1 wrote:

Another frustration is being patient. I love this hobby, but I'm not at a place where I can throw much $ at it. I've gotten spoiled by getting most of what I have for free, and those freebies usually only come with patience.

Small bucks make some good things pretty unlikely - interesting things pop up on ebay and are also gone fast too. There have been too many times where I had to change to a local site where I could pay in instalments.

clueless1 wrote:

Another frustration is being patient. I love this hobby, but I'm not at a place where I can throw much $ at it. I've gotten spoiled by getting most of what I have for free, and those freebies usually only come with patience.

Maybe Artex will use his MPU-401 cards for captive mating purposes and share the offspring with the rest of us. 😀

I installed the 4.6GB Fujitsu HDD from my Pavilion N3350 laptop with the 2.5" to 3.5" IDE HDD kit from MicroCenter (had to buy another cable, DeoxIt, and batteries) into my Packard Bell, but it detected it as a 733MB HDD (I understand why mainly because the system only supports up to 2GB).

Here're the parameters I've set it up with:
C: 4000
H: 15
S: 63 (per track)
LZ: 4000
PreCompZ: None

Equivalent to 1935MB (1.89GB) of space, which I'm OK with that.

bjwil1991 wrote:

I installed the 4.6GB Fujitsu HDD from my Pavilion N3350 laptop with the 2.5" to 3.5" IDE HDD kit from MicroCenter (had to buy a […]
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I installed the 4.6GB Fujitsu HDD from my Pavilion N3350 laptop with the 2.5" to 3.5" IDE HDD kit from MicroCenter (had to buy another cable, DeoxIt, and batteries) into my Packard Bell, but it detected it as a 733MB HDD (I understand why mainly because the system only supports up to 2GB).

Here're the parameters I've set it up with:
C: 4000
H: 15
S: 63 (per track)
LZ: 4000
PreCompZ: None

Equivalent to 1935MB (1.89GB) of space, which I'm OK with that.

You ever thought about using a Direct Drive Overlay, enabling you to use the full capacity of your hard disk?
It also will use C/H/S emulation makeing sure that you don't "write garbage data" due to wrong settings in that regard.

If you're fine with the storage size, nothing is wrong per se, though. 😀

jaZz_KCS wrote:

You ever thought about using a Direct Drive Overlay, enabling you to use the full capacity of your hard disk? It also will use […]
Show full quote

bjwil1991 wrote:

I installed the 4.6GB Fujitsu HDD from my Pavilion N3350 laptop with the 2.5" to 3.5" IDE HDD kit from MicroCenter (had to buy a […]
Show full quote

I installed the 4.6GB Fujitsu HDD from my Pavilion N3350 laptop with the 2.5" to 3.5" IDE HDD kit from MicroCenter (had to buy another cable, DeoxIt, and batteries) into my Packard Bell, but it detected it as a 733MB HDD (I understand why mainly because the system only supports up to 2GB).

Here're the parameters I've set it up with:
C: 4000
H: 15
S: 63 (per track)
LZ: 4000
PreCompZ: None

Equivalent to 1935MB (1.89GB) of space, which I'm OK with that.

You ever thought about using a Direct Drive Overlay, enabling you to use the full capacity of your hard disk?
It also will use C/H/S emulation makeing sure that you don't "write garbage data" due to wrong settings in that regard.

If you're fine with the storage size, nothing is wrong per se, though. 😀

I have thought about that, but unfortunately, I'm out of 1.44MB diskettes per se. Plus, the system only boots from either the C drive or diskette drive (unless I use Plop boot manager on a diskette).

Sooo..... People are yanking molex connectors instead of wiggeling them from side to side?
Be carefull out there, as there are really no need to get deep cuts from those flimsy and sharp AT case's.
Personally I have no problem with molex's that are nearly stuck. It just takes a bit more time to loosen.

Speaking of frustration. AT cases and ATX cases of low grade are usually sharp as a box cutter knife.
Yet one is not a true nerd, until one or two cases have been baptised in blood.

clueless1 wrote:

Another frustration is being patient. I love this hobby, but I'm not at a place where I can throw much $ at it. I've gotten spoiled by getting most of what I have for free, and those freebies usually only come with patience.

I've thrown money at the occasional thing-that-I-just-had-to-have but I never have the same love for them as the things I've pulled off a scrap heap or bought for cheap by being patient - not sure what the psychology behind this is!

As a cat owner^H^H^H^H^H servant, I've pondered this phenomenon for a long time.
http://www.catster.com/lifestyle/does-your-ca … things-from-you

brostenen wrote:

Speaking of frustration. AT cases and ATX cases of low grade are usually sharp as a box cutter knife.
Yet one is not a true nerd, until one or two cases have been baptised in blood.

Yesterday my AT case got baptised in blood from my thumb...

Maybe someone said this already, but getting files onto them is often frustrating for me. They won't take USB drives, and if they can even be connected to a network, there's usually a bunch of files that need to be transferred before that can happen. Can't use floppy disks because my modern computer, where I download the files, can't read or write to floppies. So all that's left is burning a CD and hoping like hell I can connect an old SCSI or IDE CD-ROM to the machine and read from it.

To me, one of the most frustrating things has been finding a working 512MB PC133 module. I had to buy a lot of them finding out that are defective or die within days or even hours after their arrival. So far I have two error free 512MB sticks out of ten, and two error free 256MB sticks, so I'm running my P3 at 1,2GB of RAM. I gave up at looking for another 512MB module so I just run it with that amount of memory.

Another frustrating thing is made by incomplete BIOS versions: my motherboard, the QDI Advance 10T, has a beta BIOS installed, and it's the only version that supports hard drives larger than 137GB, since I don't have a bootable SATA controller to use for my WD Velociraptor hard drives, plus I don't even know which bootable PCI controller would work with such drives.

The drawback of the beta BIOS, which is the last one released for my motherboard, is that I lose the Hardware Monitor feature, meaning I'm no longer able to check temperatures and voltages, except for the graphics card and hard drives.

p24t wrote:

Maybe someone said this already, but getting files onto them is often frustrating for me. They won't take USB drives, and if they can even be connected to a network, there's usually a bunch of files that need to be transferred before that can happen. Can't use floppy disks because my modern computer, where I download the files, can't read or write to floppies. So all that's left is burning a CD and hoping like hell I can connect an old SCSI or IDE CD-ROM to the machine and read from it.

My 486 and Pentium have CD drives that can read burned CDs. I actually have a couple of CDs labeled "486 Games" that I keep around in case Ineed to reinstall. And many "Pentium Games" CDs. For the P2 and P3, they have USB 1 ports, so I can either use DVDs (I compromised on these slightly newer systems) or plan ahead to transfer files slowly over USB 1. No biggy, I can always set the file transfer up before I go to bed so it's not impactful.

USB 1.0 or 1.1? Because IIRC USB 1.0 was not used widely at all.

1.1

looking4awayout wrote:

To me, one of the most frustrating things has been finding a working 512MB PC133 module. I had to buy a lot of them finding out that are defective or die within days or even hours after their arrival. So far I have two error free 512MB sticks out of ten, and two error free 256MB sticks, so I'm running my P3 at 1,2GB of RAM. I gave up at looking for another 512MB module so I just run it with that amount of memory.

Another frustrating thing is made by incomplete BIOS versions: my motherboard, the QDI Advance 10T, has a beta BIOS installed, and it's the only version that supports hard drives larger than 137GB, since I don't have a bootable SATA controller to use for my WD Velociraptor hard drives, plus I don't even know which bootable PCI controller would work with such drives.

The drawback of the beta BIOS, which is the last one released for my motherboard, is that I lose the Hardware Monitor feature, meaning I'm no longer able to check temperatures and voltages, except for the graphics card and hard drives.

There are ways around that. USB-to-Pata dongles, so you can connect old harddrives to a modern computer. Or usb floppy drives. Usb cd burner and a CD-RW disk. CF card reader and CF-to-IDE in your retro machine.

Lots of ways to transfer stuff. Just be glad you do not have to set up a stock Amiga 600 (1mb Ram), KickStart 37.300, with no data on the harddrive, and not having any workbench disks.

That is a really tricky task...

brostenen wrote:

There are ways around that. USB-to-Pata dongles, so you can connect old harddrives to a modern computer. Or usb floppy drives. Usb cd burner and a CD-RW disk. CF card reader and CF-to-IDE in your retro machine.

Lots of ways to transfer stuff. Just be glad you do not have to set up a stock Amiga 600 (1mb Ram), KickStart 37.300, with no data on the harddrive, and not having any workbench disks.

That is a really tricky task...

I don't need all those things. I'm setting up my Pentium 3 to be usable as an everyday system and I'm actually succeeding at the task. It's however frustrating to find out that only two out of ten 512MB PC133 sticks are working without errors.

At the moment I run the system with the main WD Velociraptor hooked to a SATA to IDE adapter, and the data one to a non bootable VIA VT6412 SATA RAID controller. Now if there is a bootable PCI controller compatible with the Velociraptor, I would have a very fast Pentium 3 machine, even though it's already very fast and usable as it is now. A fast hard drive and graphics card does really make a difference.

For me most frustrating part is when you buy an old part and it works perhaps for few days and then it dies. Seems to happen to me very often.

p24t wrote:

Maybe someone said this already, but getting files onto them is often frustrating for me. They won't take USB drives, and if they can even be connected to a network, there's usually a bunch of files that need to be transferred before that can happen. Can't use floppy disks because my modern computer, where I download the files, can't read or write to floppies. So all that's left is burning a CD and hoping like hell I can connect an old SCSI or IDE CD-ROM to the machine and read from it.

I've come to really like LS120 drives for this. More capacity than regular floppies and they're also more compatible with newer PCs, because they use an ATA Interface instead of the floppy port. If your DOS PC can boot from them then it's even more useful, since you can stuff a lot of stuff on one bootable LS120 disk.
They also just feel right. I always used floppies to transfer files in the DOS days, and the LS120 is basically the same experience, just more efficient.
Not sure if explicit BIOS support is needed to allow booting from them or not. My DOS PC explicitly knows about LS120s.

For the same reason, I use Zip100. They exist as IDE, SCSI, USB, and parallel port versions, working on PC and Mac. Not even drivers are required. For DOS, you just start GUEST.EXE which will assign a drive letter to whatever Zip drive is found.