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Dug out a HP Pavilion that I haven't bothered with until now, bought it last year or the year before for $1.

Pavilion 5030 socket 5 system (desktop) from 1995
75mhz pentium (no l2 cache installed)
S3 Trio 32
Crystal onboard audio with yamaha ymf289
16mb (maybe)
850mb Conner

Case is in great shape but very filthy and plastics are piss yellow, psu is riddled with bad caps and the whole machine is loaded with dust.
Need to figure out what I am going to do with another HP Pavilion (tower) that has rotted connectors and case is rusty. No l2 cache but has yamaha onboard.

rick6 wrote:

Well my retro activity for this week is all about testing Geforce 3 cards VS everything else. […]
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Well my retro activity for this week is all about testing Geforce 3 cards VS everything else.

I'll be testing and sharing the results in a week or two about the geforce 3 TI 200 64MB, Geforce 3 TI200 128MB (and OC'ed version), Geforce 3 TI 500 64mb, Geforce 5 5600 (64bit), Geforce 6800, Geforce 7800GS, ATI 9700 pro, AMD HD 3450 AGP and AMD HD 4670 PCI-E in Doom3, Unreal Tournament, Unreal Tournament 2004, Painkiller, 3DMark 2000 and 2001, 3DMark 2003 and possibly Need for Speed underground if i ever find how to benchmark that game.

All this in a Athlon 3200+, ASROCK 939 Dual - SataII, 1GB single channel.
Doing this for fun, not sure if i can deliver 😜

EDIT: Geforce 3 video cards obviously are going to get smashed in these games, probably apart from Unreal Tournament and also against the Geforce 5 5600 (64bit).

Done:

23 video cards VS Quake3 Arena, UT99, UT2k4, Painkiller, Doom3, 3DMark 2000/2001/2003, enjoy!

Tested an Abit LX6 I got some months ago. Even that the 440LX chipset only supports 512MB SDRAM officially it took 2x256MB and 2x128MB at once, a total of 768MB. 😈 Too bad Pentium II Klamath only caches 512MB.

Test of my last GeForce 2, i've bought. Remove of the heatsink+fan due to dust and re-mount. Looks like the fan, it's a evercool, might not be the original of this card...

Result: This fan is definitely too loud. If i want really use this card, i'll need a replacement (40mm fan) of this cooler.
An alternative - with silent fan - can be the following, maybe?!

• Noiseblocker, BlackSilent Fan XM-1 - 40mm , 9,2 dB(A), 2.800 Rpm
  Noiseblocker, BlackSilent Fan XM-2 - 40mm, 14 dB(A), 3.800 Rpm
  Scythe, Mini Kaze 40mm Lüfter SY124010L , 14 dB(A), 3.500 RPM

Doing some preliminary work for a OPL3 sound test that I may be doing next week... checking out a few screen+audio recording packages. If you happen to have a recommendation for software let me know. Free only, I don't plan on spending any money on this. I need something that can record a custom defined window on screen and simultaneously audio from line-in, preferably with as little compression as possible for the audio.

Started packing up my computer lab. It's moving time 😀

Hopefully next week. Quite excited, it will be an upgrade with much more space, going from a 2 bed unit to a 3 bed house. Been at the current place for 5 years now.

I will be able to have a few permanent retro PCs setup throughout the house rather than having everything crammed into a single room.

See you on the other side 😀

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Started packing up my computer lab. It's moving time :) […]
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Started packing up my computer lab. It's moving time 😀

Hopefully next week. Quite excited, it will be an upgrade with much more space, going from a 2 bed unit to a 3 bed house. Been at the current place for 5 years now.

I will be able to have a few permanent retro PCs setup throughout the house rather than having everything crammed into a single room.

See you on the other side 😀

Best of luck! It's nice having more space. 😀

I hate moving. I've done it so many times, and hate it more than ever. There was a period of 7 years of my life when I moved 9 times. 🙁

After the last time, I promised myself that the only move I will make from now on will be to the graveyard. 😀

Here is a fun story for you guys. My grandpa wanted me to work on his Dell. Vista 32bit, q9550 Core2Quad, 4gb of 667 and a 500gb HDD. The trouble was reinstalling Vista without losing all of his programs, software, files, and all around 9 years of computing history on a single machine. Looked into repairing his current install (nope, it was absolutely trashed) made some attempts at installing a fresh copy of Vista onto another drive then reinstalling his old software and info but gave up after realizing what a daunting task that was. Long story short ended up buying a 7 key, upgrading his dead Vista install to 7, then upgrading his now "barely" usable 7 install to 10. Oddly enough running 10 now and EVERYTHING works and is a million times faster 😁

ODwilly wrote:

Here is a fun story for you guys. My grandpa wanted me to work on his Dell. Vista 32bit, q9550 Core2Quad, 4gb of 667 and a 500gb HDD. The trouble was reinstalling Vista without losing all of his programs, software, files, and all around 9 years of computing history on a single machine. Looked into repairing his current install (nope, it was absolutely trashed) made some attempts at installing a fresh copy of Vista onto another drive then reinstalling his old software and info but gave up after realizing what a daunting task that was. Long story short ended up buying a 7 key, upgrading his dead Vista install to 7, then upgrading his now "barely" usable 7 install to 10. Oddly enough running 10 now and EVERYTHING works and is a million times faster 😁

Vista had a tendency to run like crap on random setups. I remember one of the laptops in my dads workplace had a quad-core AMD (not sure which model), 4GB of ram and it took nearly an hour to boot up, so every time instead of turning the thing off they would put it on 'hibernate', which would "only" take around 5 minutes.

ODwilly wrote:

Oddly enough running 10 now and EVERYTHING works and is a million times faster 😁

In my experience it works great on desktop systems from big OEMs. Good work 😀

brassicGamer wrote:

ODwilly wrote:

Oddly enough running 10 now and EVERYTHING works and is a million times faster 😁

In my experience it works great on desktop systems from big OEMs. Good work 😀

Thanks! Some of these machines are just far to nice to turn into Linux boxes or to scrap. Why spend $500 on a new PC when you can throw a $20 key code and a $20 video card in the old machine? So far I am around 12/12 on successful Windows 10 upgrades. Kinda shocking that a 9 year old Vista install, upgraded to 7, worked out so well upgraded to 10 😊

Munx wrote:

Vista had a tendency to run like crap on random setups. I remember one of the laptops in my dads workplace had a quad-core AMD (not sure which model), 4GB of ram and it took nearly an hour to boot up, so every time instead of turning the thing off they would put it on 'hibernate', which would "only" take around 5 minutes.

Ha, sounds like exactly how my grandpa's machine was. No excuse for such long bootup and wake times! XP on a Pentium 1 is faster. . .

Yesterday I was having issues in Windows 98 with my CD-ROM drive making Windows lock up when I put a disk in with audio. I did two things that helped solve the issue. 1. Turned of DMA on the CD-ROM drive. 2. Disabled Windows Media Player for CD Audio. So now putting in an audio disk...still makes Windows lag a big while it settles down on the music disk, but eventually settles down and I can then play Quake with the new audio CD I burned. I downloaded the audio tracks as MP3s then used my MP3 of NIN - Closer as the first track so that the correct tracks will play on the correct levels. Worked like a charm....except that Windows kind-of gets confused by a disk I guess. Still tinkering with it. I thought about re-installing Windows from scratch on the C: drive in order to switch to the 12MB STB Voodoo2 cards.

A few months ago I surreptitiously replaced Vista on my wife's laptop with 7. Reinstalled her wallpaper, programs and bookmarks, moved all her files from the old HDD to the new one in the same folders, put all icons on the desktop in the same places(only approximately because icons are slightly a different size in 7). She never noticed the difference in OS, but says that since I "cleaned" her laptop it works better. 😀

(BTW that's a 2005 MSI laptop, core 2 duo CPU, geforce 9600M)

stamasd wrote:

A few months ago I surreptitiously replaced Vista on my wife's laptop with 7. Reinstalled her wallpaper, programs and bookmarks, moved all her files from the old HDD to the new one in the same folders, put all icons on the desktop in the same places(only approximately because icons are slightly a different size in 7). She never noticed the difference in OS, but says that since I "cleaned" her laptop it works better. 😀

(BTW that's a 2005 MSI laptop, core 2 duo CPU, geforce 9600M)

Try upgrading it to Windows 10. I have two Core 2 Duo PCs that are running 10 and they're running better than with Vista or 7. Boot times are rediculous too (rediculously fast).

FFXIhealer wrote:

Try upgrading it to Windows 10. I have two Core 2 Duo PCs that are running 10 and they're running better than with Vista or 7. Boot times are rediculous too (rediculously fast).

Nope, sorry, not gonna happen. I'm staying away from 10.

And boot time is irrelevant. I have a Linux computer that goes from completely powered off to a immediately usable desktop in less that 2 seconds. Does that by itself make it a better computer than my 7 machine? No. (It _is_ better but for other reasons)

I've been playing (and beating) games that have absolutely no business being on a PIII...on a PIII. Pushing this thing to the limit is quite fun and it's actually very impressive how much it'll do with tons of RAM and GPU horsepower pushing it.

Just finished Prey!

stamasd wrote:

A few months ago I surreptitiously replaced Vista on my wife's laptop with 7. Reinstalled her wallpaper, programs and bookmarks, moved all her files from the old HDD to the new one in the same folders, put all icons on the desktop in the same places(only approximately because icons are slightly a different size in 7). She never noticed the difference in OS, but says that since I "cleaned" her laptop it works better. 😀

(BTW that's a 2005 MSI laptop, core 2 duo CPU, geforce 9600M)

That isn't 2005 specs, more like 2009. I know my laptops and 2005 was the end of the pentium M era and Core Duo was coming in. Core 2 Duo for laptops was the thing from 2006 on through 2009 and to some extent 2010. The 9600M can still play some light weight games and casual stuff just fine.