Re: Today is Windows 95's 25th Birthday. Share your memories.

Posted on 2020-08-27, 16:30

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by Cobra42898

in Milliways

in Milliways

Well one thing that i don't see mentioned a lot is that Win95 was also intended to bring more people into the arena of using computers. Dos required knowing how to manually set up drivers on occasion. Not everyone remembers /D:MSCD0001 with fondness. Most people's eyes glazed over when they saw that …

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Re: New to me - IBM Valuepoint 433DX/Sp

Posted on 2020-08-27, 13:45

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by Cobra42898

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I meant to ask: is this win95 installation worth having? or should I wipe it out and start fresh? or could I install win 3.11 also, and use both? HDD space may become a problem, though I have some smaller HDDs if I need it. the win95 seems okay to navigate, though boot time seems long. shuts down …

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New to me - IBM Valuepoint 433DX/Sp

Posted on 2020-08-27, 13:38

by

by Cobra42898

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

So I got this new toy, and I'm trying to decide what to do with it. Specs: 486DX/33mhz 20mb ram 270mb hdd s3 vision864 ethernet card and for unknown reasons, what appears to be a fairly fresh copy of win95 (original release) i had to open up pin#9 on the vga connector, and it started working fine. …

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Re: Collecting rants

Posted on 2020-08-26, 13:15

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by Cobra42898

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

That's why i only buy if it's dirt cheap. Had a guy on craigslist try to sell a tandy 1000 type system for $800. a quick look on eBay said it wasn't worth a third of that. I'm not paying crazy prices for the next Beanie Baby craze. I mean let's be honest. The number of people who know how to use a …

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Re: DOS CD-ROM/IDE initialization?

Posted on 2020-08-17, 02:01

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by Cobra42898

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

have you tried another driver for the config.sys, like oakcdrom.sys?

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Re: What is your Favorite CPU and Why ?

Posted on 2020-08-15, 12:34

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by Cobra42898

in Milliways

in Milliways

From an assembly perspective, I love Slot1 processors and the 286/386/486 era because theyre so easy to buuld. Not so many fans necessary, no worried about thermal paste and heatsinks. Pentium 133-166 were a "golden era" it seemed like, to me. In the groups of people I knew, a lot of people seemed …

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Re: How much RAM do you need ?

Posted on 2020-08-10, 16:56

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by Cobra42898

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

For anything XT, max it out on ram, some systems are limited to 640k, 286+ can take more, and its useful. I know our computer lab ran a token ring network of IBM 286s on win 3.11. it was laggy but that was expected and totally normal at the time. 386 is not a win95 machine. more than 16mb seems like …

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Re: If you were able to go back say 15-20 years ago what one motherboard would you buy ?

Posted on 2020-08-02, 22:43

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by Cobra42898

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

probably a few 700-1000+ capable slot 1 440bx boards a raid capable version of my d865gbf a few various MBs that I could play the OC/UC game with slot1 s370 S478 .

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Re: Pentium M Build Log

Posted on 2020-07-27, 13:02

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by Cobra42898

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

i haven't gotten to try it myself, but in theory if you create a ramdisk that leaves ~500mb ram available, it should then be able to run win9x okay. XP would of course run without the ramdisk and use the full amount. I've done the vcache and maxphyspage mods, and gotten 98se to run on 1gb ram, but …

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Re: Two Win95 installations on one! partition

Posted on 2020-07-27, 12:54

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by Cobra42898

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

the amount of room taken up by a second case vs the room taken up by constantly having what is going to be basically two computers completely disassembled in the room is negligible. Swapping IMO is really risking getting boards damaged.

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Re: Your favorite retro socket/platform

Posted on 2020-07-26, 05:13

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by Cobra42898

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Very cool, and well thought out. For me, s370 is sort of an awkward teenager. it's generally not easy to find with ISA as easily as a slot1 board, but lacks big cpu power to run some more modern things. my 1.0ghz did surprisingly well though for the years of overuse i put it through. Perhaps I just …

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Re: Your favorite retro socket/platform

Posted on 2020-07-24, 13:28

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by Cobra42898

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Tetrium, Just wondering what your favorite uses are for your s370 rigs. i have some early HP pavilion rigs with the early s370 Celeron CPUs, but haven't found a use for them yet. I also have my d815eea2/1.0ghzp3 rig, which I love, but needs caps. Rock solid MB , just without the flashy OC options in …

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Re: Great collectors of Vogons! What's missing in your collections? :P

Posted on 2020-07-23, 12:28

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by Cobra42898

in Milliways

in Milliways

A 720k floppy drive for my Tandy 1000SL. A slot1 PC (at least MB/CPU) of the p3 800-1000ish variety. The Epson 486 I used to have as a kid. And an ever increasing number of caps to repair all the stuff I *do* have.

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Re: 16MB of RAM only shows as 12MB

Posted on 2020-07-23, 12:22

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by Cobra42898

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

is ram being used for video or other bios shadowing?

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Re: Retro builds with modern conveniences

Posted on 2020-07-23, 12:19

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by Cobra42898

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I agree. We begrudgingly accept motherboards now that have a 512mb ram limit, but in 2001 my first brand new PC was an i815/p3 with 256mb. Ram was becoming cheaper but it was still more expensive than today. BX boards typically had 64/128MB, and 386/486 usually had 8 or 16. The performance increase …

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Re: Intel SE440BX-2 P13 BIOS Maximum HDD Size?

Posted on 2020-07-19, 17:21

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by Cobra42898

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

the win98se fdisk works fine up to the 127gb limit, if you can work with it's quirkiness. I've done several 120gb drives with it. The trick is instead of typing in a number of MB, to type "100%" in the dialog, and it does the job just fine. Haven't tried a 250gb drive (don't have any) but i bet if …

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Re: Your favorite retro socket/platform

Posted on 2020-07-13, 13:04

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by Cobra42898

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I love slot1, and a lot of that comes from the fact i never had one. I have a few of them now. I'm still searching for one in the 700-1000 range, though they are apparently more rare. Probably my second favorite was my 486, which i later hotrodded with one of those evergreen 133mhz CPUs. Still miss …

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Re: IBM PC 5150 games?

Posted on 2020-07-13, 12:48

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by Cobra42898

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

Wheel of fortune family feud jeopardy oregon trail i used to love the original indy 500 game as well. tons of games written in BASIC.

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Creating my own benchmark suite

Posted on 2020-07-13, 12:27

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by Cobra42898

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

I have a bunch of PCs and cards, and one of the things I'd like to do is to run benchmarks and tests of different combinations and settings. I've seen a few programs here i could use, but I know there are also a few games with demos that are popular for comparison here. I usually do racing games but …

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Re: Throttle CD-ROM drive speed in DOS?

Posted on 2020-07-13, 12:04

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by Cobra42898

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Somehow I have been a member here for a while, and missed this thread! Both the cdbq and the teac drivers look like manna from the heavens! I was just mentioning this was my biggest pet peeve once we got past the 4x-8x cd era. Can't wait to try them out.

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