Random nonsense

[Big Red]

Thought I'd try a "nothing is off-topic" thread, considering the nonsense we started in the other.

I used to build computers back in the late 90s/early 2000s. Built one for myself last week and it's the first computer I've ever built that had no removable media drive. Also, setting up the bios was trivial. I remember jumper configurations, ridiculous bios combinations, etc. I can't believe how easy it is. Threw all the pieces together and it booted into Windows without issue. So strange to me.

[maxtog]

I build all my home computers- always have.  Ends up costing a bit more and requires more research, but I get the exact things I want and it is typically higher quality than anything I could buy.  Plus I can upgrade things and reuse things more easily.  Haven't made one yet without any drive bays.  Mostly because I still use removable trays for large spinning rust for the slow/big storage, and need a disc reader/writer.  M.2 is da bomb, for sure.

Current main desktop system (which is now 4 years old):

ASUS Prime X570-P Ryzen 3 AM4 with PCIe Gen4, Dual M.2, HDMI, SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.2 Gen 2 ATX Motherboard

AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-core, 16-Thread Unlocked Desktop Processor with Wraith Prism LED Cooler

Kingston Technology HyperX Fury Black 32GB 3466MHz DDR4 CL19 DIMM (Kit of 2) Memory HX434C19FBK2/32

Corsair Force Series MP600 1TB Gen4 PCIe X4 NVMe M.2 SSD

UCEC 5.25" Front Panel USB, 2xUSB 3.0, 2xUSB 2.0, HD Audio (to supplement rear ports)

ZOTAC Fanless GeForce GT 730 DirectX 12 (feature level 11_0) ZT-71114-20L 1GB 64-Bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 (x8 lanes) Video card  (I am not a gamer, this is very old now, but hard to find fanless)

Cooler Master Centurion case mid tower with 5 x 5.25" external bays and 1 3.5" external bay and filtered front air flow.

Antec 750W power supply

LG 5.25" sata M-Disc Bluray writer WH16NS40

3 Connectland hotplug 5.25" sata trayless drive bays for 3.5" HDD (had 4, removed one to install USB front port panel)

Connectland hotplug 3.5" sata trayless drive bays for 2.5" HDD

3x 3.5" WD 4TB sata hard drives

1x 2.5" Sandisk 256GB sata SDD

(And ultrawide LG monitor, Brother multifunction laser, Creative speakers, Asus Linux router, Cyberpower UPS, etc)

Even though it is now kinda old, it is plenty fast enough for anything I ever throw at it.  Running Linux Mint, of course.

[Big Red]

The one I just put together, which is set up as my gaming/home theater rig:

Gigabyte Z590i Aorus Ultra, Mini-ITX size, 1 PCIe Gen4 slot, single M.2, USB 3.2 Gen 1 and Gen 2, HDMI, 6gbps SATA, 2.5Gbps LAN, Wifi 6 built in, 3200MHz ram support native

Intel i5-11400f, 6 core, 12 thread

Thermarite Assasin X120 cooler

Team Group CL16 DDR4 3200MHz 2x16Gb ram

Team Group M.2 1TB NVMe SSD

WD Blue 1TB 5.25" HDD (for large game installs)

Seagate 2TB 3.5" HDD (For my PLEX server)

Front-ish I/O panel, USB 3.0x2 and audio

No-name 600W ATX PSU

MSI GTX 1070 full-size dual fan GPU

Cooler Master Q300L Mini ATX case, with 4x120mm fans. Went with that case because it sits in a hi-fi cabinet and anything less wouldn't have enough airflow.

All hooked up to my 65" TCL TV that was like $300 for Black Friday.

Cost right about $500 to build, other than the HDDs, which I already had.

[dboogie2288]

Hahah yeah me too! I worked for about 2 years a local computer renaissance. Remember those?! They were awesome! Our store rocked....it was run by this Chinese lady and she was a ball buster. Other CR stores looked like a semi had just unload a full trailer of machines at any given moment, but our store was pristine. Always clean, always organized. It was something to be proud of.

I was promoted to assistant manager within my first year and I made a killing there. Made some commission on my service work, commission on my sales/builds, and then a pretty nice base hourly...I think it was 14 bucks an hr at the time. I cant tell you how many PCs I built in that period, but we had new and used for every budget. We even had a customer that came in every 6 months or so for a custom build gaming machine to run quake on. I remember this massive voodoo3 card we installed in one of his new machines. I was proud of those, hand built, tested fully, confident that it would last him years without issue. Of course they weren't as flashy as they are nowadays with the glass cases and RGB LEDs and crap. But he would have a powerhouse machine in a plain beige case built by a local shop. Of course, he was back in to get the latest and greatest in no time....not because of a bad machine, just because that's what he wanted.

I miss those times, simple times. Build PCs, go out with friends, hang out with my girl, go home and do it all over again. Growing up sucks.

[Big Red]

I still think there's a couple Computer Renaissance stores around

[DC Concours]

Loved those stores. I don't think they have too many left.

Now I go to MicroCenter close to me.

[maxtog]

We don't have either of those.  All we had was independent stuff and CompUSA, and when CompUSA went bye-bye, that left only BestBuy, which isn't exactly what I consider a computer store.  So pretty much all mail-order for many years now.

But yeah, I worked for a year at an independent service/sales store (prior to that I worked at Radio Shack), but it went out of business and I moved on.  Still, freaking fun days.  Up to my arms in computers and answering questions, troubleshooting, etc.  Everything was always exciting and new.

[DC Concours]

Oh yes. Radio Shack. That was a great store. Last year I needed some capacitors to repair my old TV. Couldn't find them sold anywhere locally. Back in the day I would have simply walked into RS. Kids nowadays don't repair anything.

[maxtog]

Oh yes. Radio Shack. That was a great store. Last year I needed some capacitors to repair my old TV. Couldn't find them sold anywhere locally.

It was my favorite place, which is why I wanted to work there so badly, but they had a minimum age so I couldn't work there.  Applied when "of age" and they took me immediately- I knew almost everything about every item in that store.  What ruined it for me was when I moved and the new location had a manager that only cared about high pressure sales, which I simply won't do.  I ended up answering all the hard questions and fixing the difficult issues, while other staff stood at the front, jumping on people, and making all the money.

And yes, my first computer was, of course, a TRS-80 CoCo 1, bought long before I could work at Radio Shack.

Back in the day I would have simply walked into RS. Kids nowadays don't repair anything.

Nor would they know how.  Too busy deciding which gender flavor/orientation or "identity" gets them the most attention while spending the rest of their time staring at phones.  OK, maybe it isn't THAT bad, but, in my day....  well, get off my lawn.  Oh wait, there is nobody on my lawn, they are just sitting in their rooms staring at phones.

[Boomer]

My IT background came from my Dad who was at various points a DataComms specialist (Military secure Teletype systems), and Electrical Engineer, and Electronic Engineer, a Mainframe Engineer,  a COBOL Programmer, and then he went into management and eventually Leadership Training. So, we always had IT kit at home ranging from a Wang Word Processor (size of a fridge) to various IBM, Honeywell, and DEC (PDP & VAX) Mini-Computers and eventually the inevitable X86 machines.

In my 20's, whilst working as an Electronics Tech in a college, I got dragged into maintaining the CAD computers (386's running AutoCAD) and learned the WinTel world pretty thoroughly through that. After that I worked as a PIC Programmer working with GPS and GSM systems and then got into doing Software Tech Support due to speaking French and being an accomplished trouble-shooter.

Personally I started my computing journey with a Sinclair ZX81 (Z80- BASIC & Machine Code), then a Sinclair QL (68008- BASIC, FORTRAN, PASCAL and C), then my first introduction to the WinTel world with a 286 running MSDOS 4.11 and later on 6.22 and Win 3.1.
By the time I replaced my home 286 it had 4MB RAM and was running EMM286 to manage the extra RAM and would run Wolfenstein 3D very well indeed and Doom adequately. That 4MB RAM required 102 separate chips to be fitted and took me hours!!
The advent of Quake made me upgrade to a 486 and since then it has been a long stream of upgrades and replacements until the current PCs.
Games PC - 7year old i7-4790, 16GB RAM, GTX960, 2TB SSD, 2TB HDD, 2x 32" monitors.
Garage PC - 15 year old Q9550 , 8GB RAM, GTX750Ti, 512GB SSD, 1TB HDD, 26" monitor.
Both run Win10 because it's what I use for the gaming PC and while I have played with Linux quite a bit it is no use for many games.

I also have a couple of old laptops and a few VMs that I use/play with from time to time, but less so these days as I spend all day working on a PC (Software Support for Radio-Oncology treatment systems) so in the evenings I don't really want to play with PCs.

[Big Red]

I also miss Radio Shack of old. I've had pretty good luck with Chinesium Amazon capacitors. I currently do a little side work repairing Super Nintendos. It really is amazing how far the internet has come as far as sharing knowledge. It's so easy to see what others have done and to reduce the amount of experimentation to see if mods and repairs work.

[DC Concours]

Ahhh. The days when HDD space and RAM were limited, and we had to find ways to make-do with little. I remember using Stacker on my first white box PC because I only had a 20MB hdd and 1 (or maybe 2 mb) of RAM, out of which DOS took up 640kb! I had no math co-processor so playing actions games was crappy as hell; so I had to make the screen small! My first programming language was Quick Basic then Pascal. Learned 8086 (or was it 8088) machine lang in college.

Those were fun days trying to squeeze every ounce out of our limited resources. And miss those heavy "clicky" IBM keyboards that felt satisfying.

Now the kids have too much and no appreciation for the joys of limitation; and crappy touch screen keyboards. Moore's law ruined it for them. I still miss my Blackberry keyboard. Solid.

[Boomer]

Plenty of mechanical keyboards out there with a plethora of key types. You can buy IBM M-type keyboards but you are gonna pay $100+
Personally I use a Hyper-X Alloy Elite 2 because I don't like "clicky" mechanical keyboards, but the feel is so much better than crappy membrane keyboards.

[VirginiaJim]

You know why the click is there, right?  IBM keyboards came out with that feature as they were transitioning from Selectric typewriters to PCs.  People liked the click of the keyboards.  It was a comfort sound and a means to know that you actually pressed a key.  Yes I know it's probably way past the time for that but truthfully I like a clicky keyboard.  I worked for IBM during that transition.

[maxtog]

I hate those noisy things.  Always have

They were *quality* though... but that doesn't mean they have to be loud keyboards to be good quality with good feedback.  Kinda like vehicles don't have to be LOUD to have good performance.  Biggest form of noise pollution where I live are stupid, low-end cars and motorcycles with illegal exhaust modifications that do essentially nothing but annoy everyone many, many, many times every day; and wake me up from my needed sleep nearly every morning.  Not that I am bitter or anything....

[Strawboss]

Old manual typewriters are going for BIG money at the flea markets around here. In any shape. I coulda cleaned up with all the ones I tossed.

[DC Concours]

If I don't get tactile feedback with a little sound I don't like it. Somatosensation or bust for me.

I dislike iphones w/o the home button. I hate cars that have an "on" button. My new Samsung washing machine has a touch screen. Sucks ass.

[BruceR]

If I don't get tactile feedback with a little sound I don't like it. Somatosensation or bust for me.

I dislike iphones w/o the home button. I hate cars that have an "on" button. My new Samsung washing machine has a touch screen. Sucks ass.

I've never heard anyone say they like their Samsung appliances.  Usually lure you in with some cool but useless features, and then their longevity is crap.

[DC Concours]

That's what I read online.

We always buy the European style front loader machines and wanted one with a large capacity. This seemed to be well priced (guess b/c people bitch about their quality  ).

Had good reviews. We'll see...

[maxtog]

We always buy the European style front loader machines and wanted one with a large capacity. This seemed to be well priced (guess b/c people bitch about their quality  ).

Had good reviews. We'll see...

I have been very happy with my huge, front-loading Frigidaire FAFW4221LB 4.2 cu.ft.  It is 12 years old now.  Cleans really well and holds a TON of stuff.  Plus has an "allergy" mode which heats the water really hot/long for bedding and such.  And it wasn't that expensive either.