BitWrangler wrote on 2022-10-19, 15:59:

I bought a bunch of 16GB USB 2.0 sticks cheap ... and I'm sorta regretting it... I swear I could burn 4 DVDs quicker than filling one of those.

I think they're great for all kinds of bootable media. They're slow to fill up, but way faster to read than a DVD when installing Windows.

I have a little baggie full of 16GB sticks. I never have enough. I consider them to be "write once", they do take so long to fill up, and aren't as convenient to rewrite over a single session of use.

Have three PSUs on the way. Remembered I had some spare cases in the garage and found two with PSUs in them, one 300w fsp 30A on the 5v and a bestec. As I suspected after installing driver for fx 5900xt on athlon xp build, it locks up on splash screen. I'm suspecting the bulging cap next to msi ago 8x heatsink, which I really don't want to deal with. I'm not and miss at soldering, soldered a falcon cap back onto 9800 pro successfully but nearly killed a 6800gt trying to solder smd component trying to get VGA port working

Thermalwrong wrote on 2022-10-18, 00:31:

Aaahhh, that wasn't supposed to happen: UA0392P01-in-bits.JPG […]
Show full quote

Aaahhh, that wasn't supposed to happen:
UA0392P01-in-bits.JPG

I was trying to solve the flickering backlight problem with my T2130CT now that it's up and running. What you see here is the spare inverter that didn't have the problem but it needed recapping anyway - the purple cap is fine as far as I can tell, they made that capacitor with epoxy and I've not seen that one leak. But the little 35v 10uF one next to it always leaks.
While I was trying to find electrolyte I got a bit carried away and burned out that white thermal fuse, which isn't a resetting one. Thought I'd try pulling that off and ended up destroying the npn transistor it was there to fuse. Oops, now to figure out what on earth the markings "C C" and "T5C" indicate on what seems to be a SOT89-3, to repair it again.
UA0392P01 inverters are always worth fixing imo since they have a design weakness with that capacitor, people will always be replacing them and eventually they'll run out. With my spare inverter now broken, I fixed the original inverter by spraying lots of IPA onto the inverter PCB, front and back, under all its parts to clear out the electrolyte that must have been left over. Now inverter #1 isn't flickering, hooray.

I should really put what I know up on caps wiki...

This inverter I destroyed, it's working again although I sacrificed another Toshiba inverter to do it. The NPN transistors were slightly different gain (original 310, new ones are ~180) but the power consumption after the repair is exactly the same and the thermal fuse is back:

The middle one is the fixed one, the top one is somehow yet another spare? Just how many Toshiba Satellites do I have?

It's kinda funny overall though because I've been deliberating for ages on what transistors to use to repair a PC Chips M919 board with both transistors blown. Instead of finding suitable replacements I just bought some original NEC 2SD1691 transistors to replace the dud ones on the board. I need to learn up on how NPN transistor voltage regulation circuits work.

Usb 2.0 flash memory speeds are all over the place I have some sticks that are VERY fast and some that CRAWL..

appiah4 wrote on 2022-10-19, 23:58:

Usb 2.0 flash memory speeds are all over the place I have some sticks that are VERY fast and some that CRAWL..

What counts most is write performance. Anything else doesn't matter. Borrowed a good stick and was able to write 6GB folder of files on it took 10 minutes instead of 20 minutes, all of my usb stick and this borrowed stick are usb 3.0 and plugged into usb 3.0 port. This is OSU1 reinstallation system software used on reinstalling blank xbox one (orignal, S and one X). The folder contains so many files of all sizes which slows this down.

So need to know which sticks to buy that has good write performance when I'm ready to buy by then.

Cheers,

Worked on swapping the broken case that was damaged in transit on the Apple IIe I had bought. I acquired a non-working, but cosmetically intact unit.

Swapping the case and keyboard I have now have a working Apple IIe with an intact case. And now I have a spare motherboard and PSU I can scavenge for parts if needed.

Next up will likely be some disk repair. I have a pair of drives and while they both work, they sound a bit rough.

Couldn't get a modern linux booted on my "Sleeper" Athlon II build (see modern) think I only have non-UEFI downloaded or something. Anyhoo, stuck an old MSDOS utility disk in the LS-120 and it booted to DOS, yay. Somewhat hilarious running various stuff, Superscape ran way too freaking fast, just screen flicker, no score must have overflowed. Snooper by John Vias, said that it's a 20,000Mhz AT in the bench module, scored the graphics at 647,000 char per second and the SSD I think which was detected as SCSI at 94,000KB/sec. CTCM reported some basics and errored.

Edit: Realised this morning I was feeding DVD-ROM to a CD drive, derpy derp.

pentiumspeed wrote on 2022-10-20, 00:10:

What counts most is write performance. Anything else doesn't matter. Borrowed a good stick and was able to write 6GB folder […]
Show full quote

appiah4 wrote on 2022-10-19, 23:58:

Usb 2.0 flash memory speeds are all over the place I have some sticks that are VERY fast and some that CRAWL..

What counts most is write performance. Anything else doesn't matter. Borrowed a good stick and was able to write 6GB folder of files on it took 10 minutes instead of 20 minutes, all of my usb stick and this borrowed stick are usb 3.0 and plugged into usb 3.0 port. This is OSU1 reinstallation system software used on reinstalling blank xbox one (orignal, S and one X). The folder contains so many files of all sizes which slows this down.

So need to know which sticks to buy that has good write performance when I'm ready to buy by then.

Cheers,

Early USB 2.0 sticks and even some newer ones actually used modified USB1 internals (Nand/controller), thus they were almost as slow as USB1 for write speeds but their read speeds were as high as normal USB2.0 devices, you really did get what you paid for and cheap chinesium sticks were prone to this cost cutting.

PACKED

(poor resistor pack...)

appiah4 wrote on 2022-10-19, 23:58:

Usb 2.0 flash memory speeds are all over the place I have some sticks that are VERY fast and some that CRAWL..

It also depends on the USB controller. Different chips can have wildly different speeds.

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-10-19, 16:03:

I'm impressed that USB 2.0 is still actively used on some modern hardware like audio interfaces. It's a little surreal to see a high-end piece of audio hardware costing thousands of $ that still uses USB 2.0.

I have personally been using MOTU audio interfaces for my music production for the last decade and started out with their FireWire devices. When they started moving over to USB 2.0, I questioned the bandwidth needs of simultaneous multitrack digital and analog audio recording. I think this Focusrite answer best explains it. I have yet to run into any issues with multitrack recording via USB 2.0.

So a while back I attempted to re-install XP on my pentium 4 machine. Unfortunatly, I failed multiple times to get past the "phase 1" text mode setup. Sometimes it had issues copying files and other times it failed to recognize the disc. At first I thought I solved the latter by reconnecting my usb dvd drive (it can use one or two usb ports at a time and I just stapped the two plugs around). So then I tried it again and it seemed to go through phase one fine but upon reboot the graphics portion didn't boot because of a missing dll file. At the time my first thought was the check the hard drive. So I removed it and plugged it into my daily driver using a sata/ide to usb adapter. using KDE's partition manager I decided to do a SMART check. the drive was reported as being healthy and no bad sectors. So I replugged the hard drive back into the pentium 4 machine and just left it alone for a while.

Earlier today I went back and attempted to install xp again, this time the disc was once again not recognized. So I thought maybe the CD is bad. So I unplugged the usb dvd drive and plugged it into my daily driver. I went and created a virtual machine in virt-manager and passed through my usb dvd drive. I was able to install xp in the VM and boot to the desktop. I even ran "sfc /scannow" just in case and no errors were reported. I plugged into the usb dvd drive back into my pentium 4 machine and attempted the install again and just like before a dll checksum error on reboot. I guess I'm just cursed or something when it comes to old hardware and software

Those double pluggers, you've gotta make sure you're plugging them into two ports with two independant power supplies, ports in the same stack on the back probably aren't, just sharing same 500mA worth. You can also rig power from a wall wart to the 2nd plug, but you've gotta make sure it's a 2 wire power only cable or it nobbles the data wires.

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-10-20, 18:05:

Those double pluggers, you've gotta make sure you're plugging them into two ports with two independant power supplies, ports in the same stack on the back probably aren't, just sharing same 500mA worth. You can also rig power from a wall wart to the 2nd plug, but you've gotta make sure it's a 2 wire power only cable or it nobbles the data wires.

That's possible, but then again I've used the drive with usb ports that are close to each other before with no problems. I also have ran it off of one usb port without problems if I had to. I've loaned it to others from time to time and they never reported issues either.

turns out my usb drive got aids using warez cd's... win95/cih.1003 etc aids 🙁
daemon tools language errors, infected system on my athlon 64 build. damn it

I think modern USB ports are simply wired for more power than they used to be, do the problem just isn't apparent unless it's a legacy system.

gmaverick2k wrote on 2022-10-20, 19:15:

turns out my usb drive got aids using warez cd's... win95/cih.1003 etc aids 🙁
daemon tools language errors, infected system on my athlon 64 build. damn it

Infections are usually from running an exe, or possibly from an autorun. I'd forgotten about the threat of viruses on old systems from warez. That's really annoying.

What antivirus caught it?

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-10-20, 19:51:

gmaverick2k wrote on 2022-10-20, 19:15:

turns out my usb drive got aids using warez cd's... win95/cih.1003 etc aids 🙁
daemon tools language errors, infected system on my athlon 64 build. damn it

Infections are usually from running an exe, or possibly from an autorun. I'd forgotten about the threat of viruses on old systems from warez. That's really annoying.

What antivirus caught it?

Trying to open files getting nsis error messages. Connected to win 10, getting messages on Microsoft in built scanner of viruses tagged onto lots of files on the USB. Sucks because I prime all my win 98 builds using this 120gb ssd enclosure in fat32

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-10-20, 19:49:

I think modern USB ports are simply wired for more power than they used to be, do the problem just isn't apparent unless it's a legacy system.

well the usb dvd drive I have is usb2 and has worked fine on virtually every usb2 system I used in the past 10 years as I've had it for a decade.

well I'm back to thinking this being a bad hard drive in my pentium 4 machine. It is a seagate afterall and has a few years on it. I reconnected it and even swapped sata cables it it doesn't want to boot at all. just says disk read error, hit control+alt+delete to restart. I mean I suspected that the drive had issues even before I put it my pentium 4 but it did seem to work a time (though it was slow and often never was able to shutdown properly).