King_Corduroy wrote:The only problem I see with collecting XP era computers is the quality of the materials they used. My 80's and 90's computers ar […]
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The only problem I see with collecting XP era computers is the quality of the materials they used. My 80's and 90's computers are still going strong with no issues or part failures (other than the occasional bad PSU or CD-ROM / Floppy drive) but the XP era computers have a glaring flaw. All (Or most) of those 2000's machines used cheap caps and bad design choices on the motherboards which means that if you put an XP machine into storage there is no garuntee that when you come back the whole board wont be fucked.
My first computer I ever purchased was an IBM Thinkcenter 8183 that had windows XP home edition on it. It was a refurbished business computer from MiComp and I paid 99.00$ for it back in 2008. However 6 years down the line I dug it out of storage and noticed the caps on the motherboard are bulging.
I'm going to take pictures of it and document it's last days before I recycle it (hell I'll probably put XP on it again for one last time). Why am I going to recycle it instead of try and replace the caps? Well a number of reasons but mainly because like many have already pointed out, all the software that would run or did run on XP and these old Pentium 4 machines runs flawlessly on modern computers.
So while it would be nice to think that people are going to try and save these P4 machines I really don't think many will start collecting them due to the fact that they were basically designed to fail after a number of years. Designed Obsolescence... isn't it a wonderful thing?
This isn't all XP era boxes. I have a number of NetBurst machines that have zero problems with bad caps or stability. Granted they were all very expensive pieces of equipment 10-12 years ago, but the cap plague, much like the black plague, was not a 100% universal event. It's also worth pointing out that generally the garbage equipment from the 1970s, 1980s, and even 1990s will likely have long since died and been discarded, so you're getting an inaccurate representation of "how things were" from those decades.
Now of course I can tell you the other side of the story, where I recycled most of my AthlonXP box a year ago after pulling it out of storage and the board was an unstable mess, and after powering it up to test it some of the caps started to bulge. So don't take my post to mean that I'm looking back on 2003 with rose colored goggles. 😀
I would also say that "all the software that would run or did run on XP and these old Pentium 4 machines runs flawlessly on modern computers." is not entirely accurate. There are plenty of games and applications that will work in XP on a P4 (or whatever other "old" CPU) that will have trouble in both XP on newer hardware, or especially in Windows 7 on newer hardware. This list can only be expected to grow as XP has gone EOL and developers finally abandon it moving forwards (so backwards compatibility becomes less and less of a concern), just as happened for Windows 9x software starting around ten years ago. At this point I think we've only started to see the tip of that iceberg as XP is only starting to be abandoned on a large scale, and after that migration is done we'll start seeing the real hijinks - just as DOS and 9x stand apart right now, there will probably too be a category for NT 5.x applications and hardware.
m1so wrote:Actually quite the opposite. I have a friend with an old Core 2 Quad rig from 2008 or 2009 and it runs Far Cry 4 comfortably eno […]
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Actually quite the opposite. I have a friend with an old Core 2 Quad rig from 2008 or 2009 and it runs Far Cry 4 comfortably enough on Low (not the lowest possible) settings in 1920x1200 with all components stock except for SSD. That's a 5-6 year gap between the game and the PC and it still runs it good enough. Now try running Doom 3 from 2003 on 1997 hardware (let's be generous and assume top of the line Pentium II, Voodoo Graphics, fast RAM etc.). The game won't even start.
From my experience, plenty of people throw out their perfectly functional computers because they don't know what "adware", "bloatware", and "system update/reinstall" even means. This Core 2 Quad beast was stuck with a ridiculously slow installation of Windows XP and tons of adware. The guy wanted to throw the computer out because it was "slow". I talked him into installing Windows 7 on it and he also got an SSD now and now he's oohing and aahing at how fast his computer is.
People consider Core 2 and such PCs "retro" because they're used to their PCs becoming useless for modern software 2 years after buying it. The days of "good enough" are here, the rapid upgrade cycle is over and this is why companies are so desperate to force people by doing things like artificially blocking perfectly usable dualcores from running games (looking at you Ubisoft) and inventing ridiculous resolutions like 4K.
As for quality of XP era PCs, my Pentium 4 Northwood HT 3.2 Ghz from 2004 is still kicking strong as an office PC now in 2015. The original HDD and the Geforce 6600 in that thing died a long time ago, but another HDD + Geforce 4 MX keep it going. I'm tired of all the hate towards P4s. "They can do anything i7 can do only worse" - is that supposed to be a drawback? At least they CAN do it unlike 486s and Tulatins that everyone seems to worship here. But then, it was a custom build computer from a local company, not one of those Dell "econobox PCs" that everyone seems to associate with P4.
I agree with this, but wanted to point out that Doom 3 on a Voodoo is probably a bad example, because people actually have gotten that to work on Voodoo2 (but maybe you were referencing that ironically). 😊 But I do completely get what you're saying, and agree with the general argument - there's absolutely been a "slowing" of performance growth, and aside from newer chips offering newer features or better power management, there's not a whole lot of incentive to upgrade as performance gains aren't generally linear or geometric as they once were.
I also will agree with not understanding why P4s get denigrated so much. I've never had an issue with NetBurst though - I've happily owned them since 2001, and don't have too many complaints. 😀