Analog Tachometer PC Mod

greenape147 writes: "BurnOutPC has this review of a tachometer modification for your PC. The tachometer, made and sold by Xoxide, works via the serial port and displays the CPU utilization in RPM's! The classical look of this external tachometer is really nice to see after the "window phase" everyone seems to be going through. Not to mention the fact that analog meters are so fun to watch. Currently supported in Windows NT/2000/XP, a GNU/Linux driver is in the works."

Comments

Re:It's not RPMs

[scorcherer]

$ rpm -qa|wc -l
573

Dunno about the rev/min, but my PC has 573 RPMs.

One small flaw...

[Daniel Rutter]

I have, of course, just attempted to scam one of these to review on my site (most recent pointless case-mod widget review on Dan's Data: this one), but I can't help but think that there's a basic flaw in the idea.

Namely - aren't most modders and overclockers running the distributed.net client, or some similar background task, which keeps our CPU utilisation at 100% all the time?

I could draw a tachometer on the front of this PC, and it'd be 100% accurate :-).

It only goes to 8!

[Performer Guy]

I want one that goes to eleven.

http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Academy/9177/

Re:Cheating? -Tach not odometer

[Rand Race]

In the States you get funny looks if you drink pints at all, especialy 20 oz imperial pints rather than 16 oz US pints (and your ounces are 4% smaller than ours). And plenty of people down a six-pack a day, which is more than three imperial pints. Hell, you can buy single bottles of beer over here that are more than two imperial pints in capacity (warning to visiting brits, you will NOT like a 40 of Olde English 800).

Drug sales are mixed on this side of the pond too. Pot is always measured in standard, coke is always measured in metric.

My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's how I like it!

Deja vu all over again

[Observer]

(Warning: contains nostalgia ;)

Old-timers among us still remember the days when mainframe consoles had lamps indicating the mode the processor was operating in. The old Univac machines used to have a green indicator for "guard mode" (unprivileged user mode) which was typically quite dimly lit but would flash into prominence when a compute-intensive task was active - or when a program was wedged in a tight loop. After you'd worked with one of these machines for a while, you got used to the behaviour of the lamps and of the rows of Blinkenlights on the maintainance panels and took notice if the patterns looked abnormal: quite often this was your first warning that something was going wrong that would need investigation later.

To return somewhat to the topic, I remember working in the late 1970's on an prototype of the first of these mainframe systems that lacked the customary indicator lamps. I was puzzled for a while by a cheap analog 'Vu' meter balanced on top of one of the cabinets, with a few components soldered to its connectors and a couple of wires trailing back inside: one was clipped to the frame, the other to one of the many wire-wrap pins on the processor back-panel. The meter didn't seem to do anything, but all became clear when I was running a compilation a day or so later: the meter reading went up to 80 percent or so for seconds at a time. Yes, an ingenious engineer had worked out how to fit a guard-mode indicator to the new range machines; sadly, it never made it to the production models and a little piece of computing history came to an end.

Of course, today I run the Windows task manager so I can tell when the braindead browser on this company-issue PC is wedged and must be killed and restarted. So much for progress.