An Evening at the Co-Op room
Since I’m in the UBC Computer Co-op club, which never meets, I get to play around with some interestingly ancient hardware. And nothing stinks of ancient as much as musty old keyboards, 16-color Windows 98SE, a Pentium 100, a Sound Blaster 16, ATi Rage XL graphics, and tons of clicking <10GB hard drives (ADDENDUM: 540MB hard drives? That too!). The Celeron 1.7GHz is still up and running, uptime reporting 43 days of uptime, average load 0.00 0.00 0.00. Does nobody care about this room anymore? Anyway I’ll install Linux on a few systems and go back, with the satisfaction that once the LAN here is fixed, I’ll have my own render farm/botnet/Folding@Home/Beowulf cluster. Too bad I can’t work on the most powerful system, a Thoroughbred Sempron or something, since I don’t have DDR RAM. That’s ancient for you.
Oh yeah, and a AMD K7 700MHz. The good old Goldfinger days… admittedly I wasn’t that into computers back then, but I love the time when the Athlon was… what the hell is this…. Windows protection error? WTF?
I don’t have a camera at the moment, sorry people. But this sure is a good excuse to pull out Linux! Wait… wait… oh, Windows 98 finally came to its senses. My, what a horrible wallpaper. And is that a Chinese edition of Windows 98? Goddamn. And it’s installing USB hub drivers….and it’s asking me for the time… and what the… oh man the good old days are back! Windows 98 just BSODed on me after I set the time and clicked OK. Good to see that some things never change. I press enter… it seems to be recoverable.
Okay, Arch, it’s your debut… again. I press the button on the CD-ROM drive that says 50x… and it doesn’t come out, so I pull the tray out with my nails. Thankfully, it seems to go back in just fine, and so I reboot.
Then this awesome sound of an incredibly powerful motor starts up, and I realize that the drive really meant business when it said ‘50x’. Old technology can be pretty scary…. will that cheap CD-R hold up? wait… I don’t have Ethernet on this. No prob, I’ll just enable ICS on Vista, connect the Ethernet cable from the crapass RTL8139B to my laptop’s R8169 (thankfully it’s crossover) and voila, bridged internet over the wireless. Blame the local LAN for not giving me an IP.
I just realized something… I forgot to include the date and time of the posts in my blog’s index.php. Whatever, I’ll add that later tonight. Anyway, now that it’s downloading the packages and stuff (I’m surprised this ad-hoc network actually works!) I’ll just go review some Physics.
OK I’m back. Installed KDEMOD on the Athlon 700. After installing xf86-video-ati, the resolution was correctly detected (oddball 1152×900, never heard of that res before, but hey, it looks good on that monitor… it seems only Sun monitors use that resolution) and moving windows didn’t tear as much. In general, the desktop was snappy and responsive. However, scrolling up and down on this site in Opera 9 always tore and felt slow, and moving Konqueror around tore sometimes and never felt instantaneous. So I found a Geforce 2 MX200 and discarded the ATi Rage XL. Installing nvidia-71xx… aww, nvidia’s driver hasn’t heard of 1152×900 before, it seems, and it’s using 800×600 with 256 colours. Some colours aren’t displaying as a result, so the white text in Konsole isn’t shown at all. Installing nvidia-96xx… oh yay, it works correctly now!
Moving windows is very responsive now, no tearing at all. Scrolling this blog in Opera doesn’t result in tearing, only jerkiness, which must mean the CPU is at fault now. Oh well, can’t do much about that.
Playing videos: A H.264 720p Conclave-Mendoi sub of Gundam 00 really rapes the machine. But an episode of the A-Team is handled with only 40% CPU usage. When you compare that to my laptop, which needs 1080p H.264 stuff to make it stagger a little (with Overlay output even 1080p is silky smooth, 100% over two cores) it really drives home the point about technology’s progress.
Well, with this computer all pimped out, it shouldn’t be long before somebody is completely sold on the idea of Arch Linux. Especially when KDEmod only comes with Arch LInux, hehe. No, I will not install Xandros. Eat that! The problem arises, of course, when I try to find 384MB of SDRAM for each machine… that one will be a clincher. I’m not Face, after all.
AKIHA system components:
AMD Athlon 700MHz Slot A (Pluto/Orion)
384MB SDRAM at 100MHz
ASUS K7M Rev 1.04
6.4GB Quantum Fireball (pretty quiet for an old drive)
Garnet Geforce 2 MX200 (Korean company, apparently)
Realtek RTL8139B PCI Ethernet card
that’s definitely a dinosaur. vintage.
today is the era of quadcores, blurays, hddvds, dx10, DDR2 & 3, GDDR2s, hidef displays.
the world of tech, sure is changing.
what you’ve all said was just a hefty decade ago.
I remember, our first family computer before was a (non-branded) P3 450mhz, 4gb of HDD, voodoo gfx, yamaha sound card (PCI; not integrated), and the good’ol trusty generic kboard and mouse plus an external 56KBPs modem (the throughput wasn’t even giving me the real speeds though).
hehe. thanks for sharing this post about your old systems. it sure brings back alot of memories to me as well.
Yeah, man, the old days. My first computer was a Pentium II 300MHz, with some S3 Trio graphics card… at that time, 36x CDROM drives were state of the art. I remember the next one after that, because mom brought it back from the office and I used that most of the time from 99-03 or so… that was a Celeron 433MHz, S3 Trio 3D/2X, 64MB PC66 SDRAM, with a 10GB Seagate partitioned into 4GB and 3GB. Oh, and ESS Solo-1 1938 sound card.
There was Netscape Navigator 4.0, which I started out with. Navigator 4.71 looked the same, it seemed like just another incremented version number to me. I tried Netscape 6.0… which always crashed.. I remember that very distinctly… and that made me move to IE4. I thought IE was so fast at the time. Then I found the browser Phoenix, better known as Firefox nowadays. I used Phoenix from 0.7 onwards… lovely browser, I really didn’t see any difference from 0.7 to 1.0.
Strangely enough, I don’t remember Windows 98 BSODing on me that much. I was on Winamp at the time…. Office 97… MSN Messenger 6 or something, and a LOT of ZSNES. Favourite version: ZSNES 1.337, dedicated to some guy (pagefault?). Also played around with some Genesis emulator (not Gens) to play Phantasy Star.
Now, that computer is running Arch Linux… and serves duty as an old downloaded file repository, firewall and Folding@Home client. Damn, I remember it so well.
EDIT: Oh yeah, I also had 56kbps. I used DAP, because I didn’t know what adware was back then. It really did increase my download speeds, though… from 2kb/s to around 8-10kb/s. I appreciate having grown up on dialup. I would use Kazaa… and play a LOT of Doom… I’m really good at it BTW, and dad would always complain about when I left the internet connection on throughout the night and he couldn’t use the phone plus the phone bill was really adding up. That was because I sacrificed all to get Final Fantasy VII (I had already played I-VI by then) a stripped down version on Kazaa without the movies (which made the game freeze at Cosmo Canyon). Then after that I really got fixated on Final Fantasies IX and VIII, and I used ePSXe 1.4.0. Yup, 1.4.0 at the time. Pete Bernert’s plugins were already top notch, and I was using his software rendering plugin since the S3 Trio can’t do OpenGL/Direct3D. As a result, it was always very slow. 30-40fps average on the world map of Final Fantasy IX, and even less on Final Fantasy VIII. That was one of the main reasons why I pestered my parents for a new computer, which I finally got in 2003… initially I called for a Duron 600-700MHz, KT266 mainboard with a Geforce 2 MX or a Radeon SDR and 128MB RAM, but my parents (they’re rarely like this) said that they could buy an Athlon XP 1800+! and a KT333, which supports USB 2.0!!!! WOWW!!! Then the kicker… they said they had gotten a Geforce 4 Ti4200 in the office, and they had rather favourable impressions of it… would I like to have it?
Well fuck yes. In retrospect, the Radeon 9500 was a much better choice, but I was already overwhelmed by my parents’ generosity. So I took the Ti4200 and said it had to be 128MB (in anticipation of Doom 3, which came out in 2004 and was major fucking flop, and it turned out that it was still jerky sometimes on 640×480 LQ anyway).
EDIT2: Oh, and they upped the RAM to 256MB
I don’t think I could have gotten such a deal nowadays, given my recent academic performance, which is why I have to work on it!
/rant about old computers
ahh, the dial-up days..hehe… my last taste of dialup was mid-april last year. then, I decided to go broadband. broadband here in the Philippines was kinda expensive 5 or 4 years ago. But, since there are many companies have sprung and offered DSL services, price point went low, that one must need it, especially students for their research works or projects. My connection is a nifty 384KBps, but at latenight upto morning before noon, its speed can be boosted upto 768kbps. I love to download files now. I’m also wifi using my own router here. Today, some tel-companies offer USB wireless connection, uhhh… whatcha call that? Wherein, you don’t need a wifi hotspot but instead, you use the cellsite just like that of a mobile phone to connect to the NET! Drawback is, they offer it time-limited, upto 40 hours. =/
Technology has change differently these days. And, its so cool.
hmmm… back in the old days, well, 8 years ago, I got hooked into computers and on tech. Games, yes, but these days, I’m a little rusty and seldom play now. Unless, its a hentai Visual Novel, LOL! XD~ joke! Counter-Strike, anyone?
Half-Life? 
ahh… the good’ol days of Win98SE, 2000, and the dreaded Windows ME!!! Then… along came XP! Now, Vista:) uhh… Windows 7, next? XD~
Thanks:)
oh, and yeah, about download managers; I did use DAP wayback almost 6 or 7 years ago. But, nothing can beat my 1st ever used DM on the net to get files: GetRight