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What have you done with an early Intel recently?

eyoungren said:
I have video cards in the way. 😊
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Then you need a video card with a built-in USB port. 🙂

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Amethyst1 said:
Uh-oh 😅
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😀 😀

On a more serious note…this is what I have in there already (times two)

www.ebay.com

Nvidia GeForce GT 640 for Apple Mac Pro 1GB Displayport 4K 120 Supports Mojave! | eBay

Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Nvidia GeForce GT 640 for Apple Mac Pro 1GB Displayport 4K 120 Supports Mojave! at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!
www.ebay.com

Nvidia GeForce GT 640

MODS: this is NOT my auction! I am not selling these!

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was out and about for a medical appointment a couple days ago, when I passed a CEX (Second hand device/computer parts shop here in the UK) that had a GT 630 in the window, for £20, but not any GT 630, it was one of the HP Dual Display port+DVI ones so I snapped it up as I knew there was a Mac ROM floating about on the internet for it, and indeed I was able to flash it and stuff it into my MacPro3,1 that I recently got 🙂 Saves me digging out my GT 640 from the Xserve3,1 LOL (which itself I need to try re-flash, it has a semi-broken Mac ROM on it atm, I think I have found a better ROM for it but still need to test it out)

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annoyingly when MacVidCards made the ROM, he doubled spaced between "GT" and "630" so instead of NVIDIA GeForce GT 630, it reads NVIDIA GeForce GT 630 instead and it bugs the crap out of me LOL

(I theres also a space behind "NVIDIA" as well) wonder if theres a way to fix it! I might try hex editing the ROM but thats a quick way to upset checksums and the such like!
 
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B S Magnet said:
Berman was a hack and a menace.
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This is true but the same also applies to Roddenberry and he makes Berman look like a saint in comparison but in no way is that intended to be a justification for the latter's behaviour. On the contrary. I wrote a paper about TOS during my undergrad and the revelations by Solow and Justman in their must-read, Inside Star Trek: The Real Story about what really happened on the show and who actually deserves credit for what made it so great (seasons 1 & 2, anyway) were sobering.

For all his faults, Berman - along with Piller, saved TNG - which had been poorly received under Roddenberry's helm during seasons 1 and 2. It's thanks to them that the show transitioned from fluctuating between awful and mediocre with a smattering of strong episodes, to superb from season 3 onwards.

Returning to the theme of this thread, the other day a friend invited me to join them in person (LAN party style) for a session of Don't Starve Together and so I took the most logical choice - my 11" MBA C2D 2010 running Catalina as its main OS. It's a light, compact machine and more than sufficient for a game whose minimum system requirements are Lion and a 2 Ghz Intel CPU. 🙂

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The macOS documentation appears to contain a misprint because you apparently need 4GB RAM (3GB more than the Linux and Windows versions!) but it loaded and ran fine with 2GB.

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Usually I'd play it on my 2011 13" MBP but given its modest requirements I didn't experience any performance issues with the MBA.

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The portability of the MBA lends itself very nicely to multiplayer gaming sessions away from home and it'll be my default choice for further instalments. 😀
 
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sgtaylor5 said:
I remember having the use of a VAXmate with an amber mono monitor at DEC running Windows 2 with a 20 MB 5.25" hard drive and thinking the very same thing.
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One of my first major purchases on an AmEx card was a 1GB hard drive. Think that was either 1993 or 1994. Cost me $300 and went inside an HP 486. And when I say inside, I mean loose inside because it was a second drive and HP had made no provision inside that case for mounting second drives (but it had the hookups).

A step up from the 100mb hard drive I bought used in 1990 for a 286 for $100 (in $10 monthly payments!)

Right now I'm transferring 880GB from one 3TB drive to another 3TB drive. So, yeah…
 
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eyoungren said:
Just bought two seller refurb WD Gold drives (Enterprise). 6TB.

One will replace my current 3TB drive I use in the MP (bay 4) for cloud services (Dropbox, Box, etc). I have 4TB of storage with Dropbox so technically with a 3TB drive I could never fill all of that. I'll pull out the 2TB drive in bay 3 and this 3TB drive will shift to bay 3 from bay 4.

That'll give me the following: Bay 1 - 1TB SSD, Bay 2 - 6TB HD, Bay 3 - 3TB HD and Bay 4 - 6TB HD. Total of 16TB storage for the MP.

The second new drive is going to go into the G4 NAS, replacing one of the 3TB drives that is in there now. I've only got 500gb of storage left on that drive. In doubling the storage I will be able to fully backup my main NAS which is 6TB.

So, I'll end up with a spare 3TB and 2TB drive. I already have a 2TB WD Green doing nothing so I might upgrade another one of my NAS enclosures from 2TB to 4TB by dropping those two 2TB drives into that.
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Drives in, files copied, backups restored with new sources/targets.

Screen Shot 2022-09-23 at 16.13.01.jpgScreen Shot 2022-09-23 at 16.15.43.jpgScreen Shot 2022-09-23 at 16.16.07.jpg

Next up will be dropping 2x 3TB HDs into one of the drive enclosures in the garage.
 
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The keyboard in my 08 macbook broke (random shifts from caps to lowercase), so I took the opportunity to swap the drive into my other 08 macbook which had a broken track pad, so pulled the functioning trackpad out of the first 08 mb and stuck it into the second along with a ram upgrade to 8gb from 5gb.

Kind of humorous after the fact - when the kb broke, it was turned off, so when I booted up the machine but could not get by the login password, I was irritated. Took me about 20 minutes to irrationally think through what the issue finally was. Thought process went:

1. @#%$@&@%^$ I cant log in. Macos forgot my pw. WTF lol
2. Crap, I screwed up the SMC/NVRM jerking around with the boot loader making macos forget my pw.
3. Lemme check if the capslock is stuck on in accessibility kb - nope.
4. Lets try disabling capslock in sys pref. Fixed for about ... 3 seconds.
5. Try ext kb - works fine, so not an issue in software.
6. Swap SSD, works great, so the kb is borked.

I should have tried the SSD swap outright lol.
 
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eyoungren said:
One of my first major purchases on an AmEx card was a 1GB hard drive. Think that was either 1993 or 1994. Cost me $300 and went inside an HP 486.
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I’m thinking that probably was around the late ’94 end, as I have this unforgettable memory of a work conversation around a just-arrived computer parts catalogue and my co-worker noticing the 1GB drives had just hit $999 for the first time. This would have been sometime in mid ’94, just before I joined the desktop services group to replace said co-worker right before he left for grad school. (I have no idea what the price difference at the time would have been between SCSI and ATA buses.)

His specific, notably excited quote, which I’ve recalled every time since, whenever I look at cost-per-storage unit: “Wow, hard drive storage is now down to a dollar per megabyte!” What I remember, as he said that, was that amounted to ~750 floppies (which at the time would have cost much more than $999 — how much, I no longer recall). All these years later, I forget his name, but I remember his hair (long, wavy, brunette) and how he drove a VW minibus (“Split windows, like what I drive, are just better,” he’d insist; I’d be all, “Sure OK I guess?” Like I knew anything about VW minibuses!).

Of course, nowadays, the cost-per-storage unit is usually around the gigabyte which, even so, amounts to mere pennies — contrasted against what was, in effect, one grand per gigabyte in mid ’94. That’s what really puts the cost-per-gigabyte into perspective from that long-ago conversation. 🙂
 
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B S Magnet said:
I’m thinking that probably was around the late ’94 end, as I have this unforgettable memory of a work conversation around a just-arrived computer parts catalogue and my co-worker noticing the 1GB drives had just hit $999 for the first time. This would have been sometime in mid ’94, just before I joined the desktop services group to replace said co-worker right before he left for grad school. (I have no idea what the price difference at the time would have been between SCSI and ATA buses.)

His specific, notably excited quote, which I’ve recalled every time since, whenever I look at cost-per-storage unit: “Wow, hard drive storage is now down to a dollar per megabyte!” What I remember, as he said that, was that amounted to ~750 floppies (which at the time would have cost much more than $999 — how much, I no longer recall). All these years later, I forget his name, but I remember his hair (long, wavy, brunette) and how he drove a VW minibus (“Split windows, like what I drive, are just better,” he’d insist; I’d be all, “Sure OK I guess?” Like I knew anything about VW minibuses!).

Of course, nowadays, the cost-per-storage unit is usually around the gigabyte which, even so, amounts to mere pennies — contrasted against what was, in effect, one grand per gigabyte in mid ’94. That’s what really puts the cost-per-gigabyte into perspective from that long-ago conversation. 🙂
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Some time in that period is when I began to build my own PCs. Back in that time period I knew nothing about places like Fry's Electronics (now defunct) where you could buy parts and it was mainly office stores that sold computers. The office stores only sold whole units though.

So, for parts, it was computer shows. These weren't conventions, just places where vendors showed up with their stuff and you could go from vendor to vendor looking for parts at the lowest price. That's where I would have picked up the drive. It had to be the price I said because there's no way I'd have paid $1000 for it.

However, I don't recall it being in the winter (which would have been the end of the year), so it could have been in 1995. That might be more likely.
 
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eyoungren said:
Some time in that period is when I began to build my own PCs. Back in that time period I knew nothing about places like Fry's Electronics (now defunct) where you could buy parts and it was mainly office stores that sold computers. The office stores only sold whole units though.

So, for parts, it was computer shows. These weren't conventions, just places where vendors showed up with their stuff and you could go from vendor to vendor looking for parts at the lowest price. That's where I would have picked up the drive. It had to be the price I said because there's no way I'd have paid $1000 for it.

However, I don't recall it being in the winter (which would have been the end of the year), so it could have been in 1995. That might be more likely.
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Yanno we grew into building our own pcs during a really fun time (mid 90's through say 2010) I think where there was a cottage industry of computer stores that sold prebuilt, BTOs and all the parts for said builds. Its funny to me that even though ebay was a thing through most of that, I still went and preferred local shop cash transactions to buy parts for new builds or upgrades vs online purchasing which is 90% of my computer purchases nowadays. Many of those stores are long gone nowadays - a few are still around but I mainly swing by now and then to look for old retro computing bits. It was a fun era for PC builders for sure.
 
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Certificate of Excellence said:
Yanno we grew into building our own pcs during a really fun time (mid 90's through say 2010) I think where there was a cottage industry of computer stores that sold prebuilt, BTOs and all the parts for said builds. Its funny to me that even though ebay was a thing through most of that, I still went and preferred local shop cash transactions to buy parts for new builds or upgrades vs online purchasing which is 90% of my computer purchases nowadays. Many of those stores are long gone nowadays - a few are still around but I mainly swing by now and then to look for old retro computing bits. It was a fun era for PC builders for sure.
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My last build was sometime in 2001, but at that point I was getting tired of it. I ended up flashing the wrong BIOS to the computer and that was the end of it. My mom had given me a TiBook for Christmas 2001 so that's pretty much how I switched over to Mac. Well, that and not being able to recover my data from a drive that had an overlay.

But in the 90s I was all about non-Intel processors (they were cheaper). Lots of fun times with those computers.
 
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eyoungren said:
I ended up flashing the wrong BIOS to the computer and that was the end of it.
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Never touch a running system. 🙂

eyoungren said:
But in the 90s I was all about non-Intel processors (they were cheaper). Lots of fun times with those computers.
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An AMD a day keeps Intel away. 🙂

(I know there were many more manufacturers than just those two in the 90s.)
 
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