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Reconsider/recall the crustiness of older technology.
- Thread starter FAST6191
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I remember using early wireless routers or usb wifi receivers and they had terrible range (sometime around 2006 ish). I even recall using tin foil or soda can cutouts to focus/increase range. It wasn't until years later (I'd say 5 or 6) until they improved wifi standards and made better tech available at cheaper prices. But man... It was a blessing to see a strong unsecured wifi access point (even in your own home). Pokemon GTS trading was absolutely necessary as a kid.
For me, I picked my computer's part with convenience and silence in mind, so the motherboard has a ton of debug LEDs and three temperature meters (CPU internal, CPU external and GPU) and with the see-through side panel I can tell if something is wrong right away. The case had two silent fans and I added an extra almost silent one too for good measure (6dBs at full speed), so the only noise coming from the system is the AMD FX CPU fan which is pretty loud but with proper adjustments I lowered it to just 22dBs. Some parts happen to have LEDs and they do look kinda nice, but I never look at my tower unless there's an issue.For the cars, you forgot to mention the BRILLIANT idea of allowing hydraulic steering wheels to lock themselves if you try to steer too suddenly, as if they don't want you to avoid crashing!
I haven't bothered getting a driver's license yet (already know how to drive though because I took my mum's car for rides), but if I do anytime soon, I'll DEFINITELY go with a good oldie, mechanical steering all the way! If I got money to burn, I'll go with Toyota RSC, but most likely will go with an old Renault.
Got a '97 Megane cabrio.
Perfect for me.
What mobo do you have?
Try installing it now on a laptop from '95 or '96 ;p
Smartphones are the worst, especially iphones, because they forever nag you to update your phone until you finally do, and as your phone gets older, they pretty much force you to get on the latest firmware that's really only meant for their newest phone, which causes your phone to start to perform like shit. All in a calculated effort to get you to go upgrade to their latest and greatest phone that will run great... until the next phone gets released. Makes me sick.
Some time ago*, when you had to actually read the Heads/Sectors/Cylinders from your HDD and carefully write them down in your BIOS Setup for it to be recognized, and how inputing wrong values could end up in a very bad day.
Aaah, good 'ol low level formatting... Do one on a MFM drive and your drive will work fine, but do one on a non-protected RLL drive and you'll end up with a nice, hi-tech doorstop
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Saving school data into floppy disks, and those damn things always corrupted your files when you needed them.
I'm so happy USB keys are a thing now.
That's funny because I still have my stack of floppies somewhere.
I'm so happy USB keys are a thing now.
That's funny because I still have my stack of floppies somewhere.
I miss floppies to be honest... They were pretty interesting-looking and the slide thing was fun to play with when bored, forget anti-stress balls, fidget spinners or any of that crap, grab a floppy!
Never had an issue with corruption though since I had access to high quality ones for free when I was using them so I avoided a lot of hassles. USB is definitely better though!
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I'm willing to bet the school computers were the problem. These old machines ran Windows 98, and they were old, yellowish, and really buggy. With all the kids using them, the floppy drives probably didn't do too well.I miss floppies to be honest... They were pretty interesting-looking and the slide thing was fun to play with when bored, forget anti-stress balls, fidget spinners or any of that crap, grab a floppy!
A rare special edition MSI 990-FXA GD80 I won in a contest. Never had a problem with it!
Could be that, although floppies were never the best choice for saving stuff
Btw, I just remembered the beauty of IDE devices... I miss those things with the slave/master thing, slow as hell but the nostalgia is strong with this one!
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Oh yeah, I loved to make perverted jokes then show a concept of it with no context. Only knowledgeable computer people understood them.A rare special edition MSI 990-FXA GD80 I won in a contest. Never had a problem with it!
Could be that, although floppies were never the best choice for saving stuff
Btw, I just remembered the beauty of IDE devices... I miss those things with the slave/master thing, slow as hell but the nostalgia is strong with this one!
Not everything "oldie" in tech therms is bad actually.
Nowadays with all those devices capable of joining on a wireless network, the need for increasing security arises, something that many brands overlook. Many hack attacks are possible "thanks" to that fact.
Old tech wasn't free of those matters, but it wasn't so easy to attack a system when it wasn't "globally connected".
Also, programmed obsolescence is something that old hardware didn't had long ago, and many devices still work perfectly on this days. And that can't be said by many brands that are made to fail, more soon than later. While others have a "quality" that seem to be the last part on their production plans, even when those are products from "good" brands.
Nowadays with all those devices capable of joining on a wireless network, the need for increasing security arises, something that many brands overlook. Many hack attacks are possible "thanks" to that fact.
Old tech wasn't free of those matters, but it wasn't so easy to attack a system when it wasn't "globally connected".
Also, programmed obsolescence is something that old hardware didn't had long ago, and many devices still work perfectly on this days. And that can't be said by many brands that are made to fail, more soon than later. While others have a "quality" that seem to be the last part on their production plans, even when those are products from "good" brands.
My (newest) desktop PC built in 2001 ran anything 95 to XP SP1 perfectly, and with some mental flexibility DOS/3.1(1) to SP3 -- using a past verb since HP had the clever idea of removing drivers and documentation for most of their stuff from that age and who knows where are the CDs I backed them to
Even ME wasn't that bad - before you start adding drivers for then-sub-$200 products, of course!
What's old about that, to be honest?
It's been the norm for directly connected 2-player Minecraft back when it still was popular
AMV and MTV, more like slideshows (optimized for absolute minimum processing power = BMP or JPG and WAV)... got one of those players as a gift but never got the "Chinese" aka all question marks converter to work -- besides, a DS with Moonshell had loud speakers, way better colors, and an equally crappy video format that at least worked
Nerf this!
Oh wait, newer laptops (if they have any useful LED at all) have them in disgusting blue or white
I actually bought a PCMCIA wifi card in 2005 (the high end model with hardware accelerated WEP) to play Mario Kart online... never got it to work, but I bypassed the issue courtesy of my neighbor...
A couple of years later, with a brand new Vaio (in retrospective the worst PC I owned due to those infamous Nvidia failures but let's be grateful to my parents which spent 2000 cucuzze on it) and its 3-antenna Intel 4965, I was on the 6th floor of this building (higher than any others in the line) and I could see the network of a camping 2 towns away! It didn't actually work but it was very cool...
Unrelated but back to the former computer, my friends and I spent the previous summer doing real work on that one - namely, designing ball racetracks in Openoffice 1 and levels in Lunar Magic, too bad they've long been lost :/
A PC magazine around 2003 (remember those? ads and reviews of stuff you wouldn't need, lame tutorials or editorials, at best 2 pages of tech support, but you only bought them for the yearly "365 registry mods for XP" books and monthly shareware CDs) had this tip:
"How can you improve the reliability of floppy disks?" "Throw the drive in the trash and buy one made in the early 90s, they don't make them like they used to"
and only as of this year I can confirm - decently kept old stock or current production (intended for retrocomputer fans and older but perfectly working music keyboards/CNC) is having more effort behind them, rather than when the format was for those too poor to afford CD-RWs and DirectCD (one of the stability disasters I mentioned above!!)
No need to, all those LEDs are useless for the most part. You can tell if you have the wifi on or off just by looking at the bottom of your screen, bluetooth is useless, etc.! When I'm talking about debug LEDs I mean CPU (flashes whenever the CPU does something and stays on when it's on full load), HDD usage (similar to CPU one), short circuit warnings, PSU overload, etc., stuff that actually matters.
still is? i thought every modern ethernet port would automatically select the mode? supporting both straight and crossover cablesWhat's old about that, to be honest?
It's been the norm for directly connected 2-player Minecraft back when it still was popular
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_crossover_cable
Depending on what you're running and your taskbar preferences... the standard Windows icons for those features degraded in every major version since XP (with 10 RS1 and above outright faking the number of bars) but sticking to your reasoning, power and charging are less useful than any of those you mentioned
Yeah, but manual IP configuration (and remembering to put it back when you return home!) is still needed unless you want to guess the random default 169.254.x.x
I managed to Bluescreen ME on first boot.
Dun ask how tho.
Also, me 1999 IBM T20 looks kinda similar to that.
A rare special edition MSI 990-FXA GD80 I won in a contest. Never had a problem with it!
Neat.
I'm still looking to modernize me own server, upgrade from DDR2 to DDR3.
Lot cheaper to get newer parts then to spend a fuck ton on DDR2 RAM ;/
I actually still have a TON of parts from old computers I dismantled and that includes quite a few DDR2 sticks, both desktop and laptop ones! These go for twice as much as DDR4 does, lol! Sold 2 sticks for almost 80€ a year back!
I actually still have a TON of parts from old computers I dismantled and that includes quite a few DDR2 sticks, both desktop and laptop ones! These go for twice as much as DDR4 does, lol! Sold 2 sticks for almost 80€ a year back!
Yeh, prices now are even worse ;/
Hence the want for an upgrade.
Then again, I'm already spending 750 quid orso on new harddrives, why not go all the way and get a new CPU + RAM + Mobo as well.
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A @ Aglae Pheryl:Is anyone familiar with former forum opg.life ? I missed the transition to the new forum over the week end (was scuba diving in the sticks with no internet connection). If anyone in touch with any members please pm me.
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