It used to be that a CPU was just a CPU too. The problem is that they're stuffing more and more stuff into the CPU, and if you don't have the driver support for all that other stuff in the CPU then you're going to have problems. Skylake has a GPU like previous generations of Intel chips, but it also USB, Thunderbolt, and SATA integrated into the CPU. So what they're really saying is that they're only going to release drivers for the USB, SATA, GPU, etc. in Skylake for Windows 10. I'm sure you'll still be able to get older versions of Windows to boot and run, but it might involve a bunch of extra add-on cards because the onboard stuff just isn't going to work. This isn't new, for example they never released XP drivers for the GPU in Haswell so if you wanted to run XP on a Haswell chip you had to find something from nVidia or AMD that was supported.
I know 3.5 ran on MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha, and x86. By the time NT4 rolled around it may have been down to x86 and Alpha, and I know NT5 (Windows 2000) only supported x86. I've never heard of NT on Sparc though.
Not every time, but it has it's place. In the future, you may not remember why you did things that way, so it might be helpful to throw a reminder in that Joe helped you with that. Or someone may come to you asking you a bunch of questions about how flarbs get processed, and you might want to have a note in there so that you can refer them to Joe who is the expert on processing flarbs. Or if it breaks things horribly, at least you have Joe's name in the comments.
Technically, you're just changing things up so that you're now depending on archive.org being there in the future. Granted, it's probably one of the more stable things out there, but if you really want to be sure I would keep a local copy anyway.
Never have had problem with the fans like that. Though graphics cards fans from back in the AGP era were the worst. Absolute junk. Usually I have problems with hard drives if they've been sitting a long time. Usually doesn't manifest itself right away either for some reason. The drive will run for a day or two then quit on me. The other problem I'm seeing a lot is the belts in the CD drives slip/break. Can be replaced but taking apart the drives is a bitch. Though that really has nothing to do with whether the computer has been running or not.
Clean room computers can be something to marvel at. Kind of amazing to see a 20 year-old computer that still looks brand new. No dust inside or out, and whatever else they did for their fancy conditioning also prevented the plastics from yellowing, so it really did look brand new. Then to think the computer had basically been powered up for that 20 years.
Windows 7 runs just fine on most any P4l/Athlon XP that you can get enough ram into. Now, if your goal is to get in on the web, you might find it will struggle a bit on Javascript heavy sites and streaming video. Anything newer requires the processor supports the NX bit, so the oldest stuff is about 10 years old. On the other hand, if the processor does supports the NX bit the rest of the hardware is probably ready for Windows 8.1/10.
Back then, their drives were pretty solid. Now, if it was a Quantum, I would be utterly amazed.
If you look around, you might be able to get a late 90's computer yet. Most of what I find nowadays is 2000's stuff, but an early 2000's PC should be able to run Windows 98 just fine as the driver support was pretty decent until dual core came along (hint: if it's a Hyperthreading P4 turn off the hyperthreading. Oh, and if it has more than 512MB take some out).
My main Windows laptop is Thinkpad R60 I bought in very late 2006, so currently 9 years old. It's an early Core 2 Duo, 3GB ram (chipset limitation, actually has 4GB installed), SSD, Windows 10 x64. It's still a pretty capable machine. Linux laptop is only slightly newer, early 2007. It's pretty much the same specs except for actually being about to use all 4GB and being a Dell, and running Debian. Got that one for free as it was a victim of the XP EOL (has an XP license, and they didn't want to pay for a Windows upgrade, so it was going to get scrapped).
My personal best would be my router. It's a P3 that I have been using as my router since 2006. Previously it belonged to my late grandfather who used it to do email and his taxes. He bought it used, originally was a corporate desktop (HP Vectra). I ran a very similar Dell Optiplex from about 2006-2014 as a Linux server. Originally dumpster-dived. Retired when it started throwing lots of hard drive errors which I actually tracked down to the controller on the motherboard and not the drive itself. Still, a pretty good second life for that machine. Conveniently I had recently dumpster-dived the perfect replacement - an early Core 2 Duo Dell Optiplex, which is in service.
I have older hardware but it mostly sits in a closet and hasn't been used for some time.
Or that's the hardware that's survived, the rest died and became landfill fodder years ago. Though between the capacitor plague and ROHS it seems anything made past about 2000 is pretty suspect until you get to stuff that's only a few years old.
MTBF for drives is like the contrast ratios they like to put on LCD panels. It's a 100% pure bullshit made up marketing number. This has been proven by studies done by companies like Google who statistically significant numbers of drives, and their real world MTBF is nowhere close to the manufacturer's numbers.
Because pretty much 100% of calls from a 1800* number are junk? Yes, I know that won't completely eliminate all spam calls, so in the true slashdot style, that makes the idea worthless.
Logically, you would assume they would think that way, but it's not always the case. Sometimes they just see a bunch of monkeys punching out code, and some of them get paid more than the others, so the obvious solution is to get rid of the ones that get paid more. It's not really any different that the mindset that thinks that offshoring it all to third world is a good idea too.
I've recently hit a few webpages that give me the "your browser is not supported" using a fully updated IE11 on Windows 7*. So it seems that there's a few sites out there that feel it's "safe" to ignore Internet Explorer users already.
*this is a work computer, so it's not like I can use something else.
Windows Vista is (and has been stuck) with Internet Explorer 9 for some time now, as it stopped getting new versions of Internet Explorer once it dropped out of mainstream support. Of course, this means that the headline is also wrong, as Internet Explorer 9 is still supported for Vista users. This is true for other versions of IE 8-10 that are on supported OS's that cannot use a newer version.
Windows 8.1 is kind of a weird beast. In some ways, it's treated like a service pack for Windows 8, and in other ways, it's treated like a different OS than Windows 8.
It's not just the weight. If that was all, it would be easy to come up with a coin of the proper weight and size by mixing in different metals, or by making a sandwich coin out of two metals that have different densities. The problem is a lot of electronic machines use electro-magnetic fields to help distinguish coins, and if the electro-magnetic signature is different the machine will reject the coin even if it's the right size and weight. That's why the "golden" dollars are made out of such a bizarre alloy (that looks terrible when it gets worn and tarnished), because the mint wanted the coins to "look" like a Susan B. Anthony dollar to vending machines that use electro-magnetic signatures but still wanted a golden color.
A lot of newer vending machines can take $1 coins, it's just people don't realize it. Well, that and the vending companies that disable the functionality for reasons I don't understand. On the other hand, I haven't seen a vending machine that takes pennies for a very long time. Nor have I seen one that takes 50 cent pieces, most likely because those are physically large and circulate even less than $1 coins.
The gold Eagles used to be made out of an allow of about 90% gold. Pure gold is just too soft to be used as a coin. Interestingly the US mint had to tweak this ratio several times over the years as the value of gold would change relative to the dollar. When gold got to be worth too much compared to the dollar, all the Eagles would disappear from circulation (I know, big surprise). The US Mint also tweaked the value by varying the amounts of copper and silver used for the remaining 10%.
A few local places have caught on to that. You see a bunch of weird prices, but figure it out pretty quick when everything always totals up in increments of 0.25 (or whatever). The problem is chains that want to advertise prices in a larger area. Dollar menu, $99 TV, 6 pack for $2.50, whatever, and sales taxes are different everywhere. They could solve that by including the tax in the sale price, but that has two problems - sales tax is different everywhere, so they'll actually get different amounts of money for the item depending on where they sold it, and if they include sales tax and their competitors do not then their advertised prices will be higher than the competition which is a problem (even if the total price the consumer pays is less).
I never understood counterfeiting coins, as it seems more difficult than paper money. Granted, paper money tends to have all those security features which would be hard to duplicate, but if I was willing to consider counterfeiting coins I'd probably counterfeit $5 or maybe $10 bills where no one pays any attention to the security features. Or $1 bills which lack almost all of them.
Wow, the savings might add up to several dollars per year!
Of course, stores could counter that and start offering a cash discount. Or just stick it to the credit card companies and start charging a processing surcharge.
Well, at least the fluorescent tube fixtures can be converted to LED pretty easily. I did that recently. Basically open the light fixture up, bypass the ballast, and put new "tubes" in that are actually a strip of LEDs in, and done. They make some LEDs that will work off the ballast so it's a simple bulb replacement, but ballasts nowadays are so crappy that I'd rather rewire the fixture so I don't have to worry about the ballast failing later.
Slashdot Mirror
It used to be that a CPU was just a CPU too. The problem is that they're stuffing more and more stuff into the CPU, and if you don't have the driver support for all that other stuff in the CPU then you're going to have problems. Skylake has a GPU like previous generations of Intel chips, but it also USB, Thunderbolt, and SATA integrated into the CPU. So what they're really saying is that they're only going to release drivers for the USB, SATA, GPU, etc. in Skylake for Windows 10. I'm sure you'll still be able to get older versions of Windows to boot and run, but it might involve a bunch of extra add-on cards because the onboard stuff just isn't going to work. This isn't new, for example they never released XP drivers for the GPU in Haswell so if you wanted to run XP on a Haswell chip you had to find something from nVidia or AMD that was supported.
I know 3.5 ran on MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha, and x86. By the time NT4 rolled around it may have been down to x86 and Alpha, and I know NT5 (Windows 2000) only supported x86. I've never heard of NT on Sparc though.
Not every time, but it has it's place. In the future, you may not remember why you did things that way, so it might be helpful to throw a reminder in that Joe helped you with that. Or someone may come to you asking you a bunch of questions about how flarbs get processed, and you might want to have a note in there so that you can refer them to Joe who is the expert on processing flarbs. Or if it breaks things horribly, at least you have Joe's name in the comments.
Technically, you're just changing things up so that you're now depending on archive.org being there in the future. Granted, it's probably one of the more stable things out there, but if you really want to be sure I would keep a local copy anyway.
On the other hand, if the only thing it's going to do is continue to go down, it's stupid not to cut your losses and get out as soon as you can.
Never have had problem with the fans like that. Though graphics cards fans from back in the AGP era were the worst. Absolute junk. Usually I have problems with hard drives if they've been sitting a long time. Usually doesn't manifest itself right away either for some reason. The drive will run for a day or two then quit on me. The other problem I'm seeing a lot is the belts in the CD drives slip/break. Can be replaced but taking apart the drives is a bitch. Though that really has nothing to do with whether the computer has been running or not.
Clean room computers can be something to marvel at. Kind of amazing to see a 20 year-old computer that still looks brand new. No dust inside or out, and whatever else they did for their fancy conditioning also prevented the plastics from yellowing, so it really did look brand new. Then to think the computer had basically been powered up for that 20 years.
Windows 7 runs just fine on most any P4l/Athlon XP that you can get enough ram into. Now, if your goal is to get in on the web, you might find it will struggle a bit on Javascript heavy sites and streaming video. Anything newer requires the processor supports the NX bit, so the oldest stuff is about 10 years old. On the other hand, if the processor does supports the NX bit the rest of the hardware is probably ready for Windows 8.1/10.
Back then, their drives were pretty solid. Now, if it was a Quantum, I would be utterly amazed.
If you look around, you might be able to get a late 90's computer yet. Most of what I find nowadays is 2000's stuff, but an early 2000's PC should be able to run Windows 98 just fine as the driver support was pretty decent until dual core came along (hint: if it's a Hyperthreading P4 turn off the hyperthreading. Oh, and if it has more than 512MB take some out).
My main Windows laptop is Thinkpad R60 I bought in very late 2006, so currently 9 years old. It's an early Core 2 Duo, 3GB ram (chipset limitation, actually has 4GB installed), SSD, Windows 10 x64. It's still a pretty capable machine. Linux laptop is only slightly newer, early 2007. It's pretty much the same specs except for actually being about to use all 4GB and being a Dell, and running Debian. Got that one for free as it was a victim of the XP EOL (has an XP license, and they didn't want to pay for a Windows upgrade, so it was going to get scrapped).
My personal best would be my router. It's a P3 that I have been using as my router since 2006. Previously it belonged to my late grandfather who used it to do email and his taxes. He bought it used, originally was a corporate desktop (HP Vectra). I ran a very similar Dell Optiplex from about 2006-2014 as a Linux server. Originally dumpster-dived. Retired when it started throwing lots of hard drive errors which I actually tracked down to the controller on the motherboard and not the drive itself. Still, a pretty good second life for that machine. Conveniently I had recently dumpster-dived the perfect replacement - an early Core 2 Duo Dell Optiplex, which is in service.
I have older hardware but it mostly sits in a closet and hasn't been used for some time.
Or that's the hardware that's survived, the rest died and became landfill fodder years ago. Though between the capacitor plague and ROHS it seems anything made past about 2000 is pretty suspect until you get to stuff that's only a few years old.
MTBF for drives is like the contrast ratios they like to put on LCD panels. It's a 100% pure bullshit made up marketing number. This has been proven by studies done by companies like Google who statistically significant numbers of drives, and their real world MTBF is nowhere close to the manufacturer's numbers.
Because pretty much 100% of calls from a 1800* number are junk? Yes, I know that won't completely eliminate all spam calls, so in the true slashdot style, that makes the idea worthless.
Logically, you would assume they would think that way, but it's not always the case. Sometimes they just see a bunch of monkeys punching out code, and some of them get paid more than the others, so the obvious solution is to get rid of the ones that get paid more. It's not really any different that the mindset that thinks that offshoring it all to third world is a good idea too.
I've recently hit a few webpages that give me the "your browser is not supported" using a fully updated IE11 on Windows 7*. So it seems that there's a few sites out there that feel it's "safe" to ignore Internet Explorer users already.
*this is a work computer, so it's not like I can use something else.
Windows Vista is (and has been stuck) with Internet Explorer 9 for some time now, as it stopped getting new versions of Internet Explorer once it dropped out of mainstream support. Of course, this means that the headline is also wrong, as Internet Explorer 9 is still supported for Vista users. This is true for other versions of IE 8-10 that are on supported OS's that cannot use a newer version.
Windows 8.1 is kind of a weird beast. In some ways, it's treated like a service pack for Windows 8, and in other ways, it's treated like a different OS than Windows 8.
It's not just the weight. If that was all, it would be easy to come up with a coin of the proper weight and size by mixing in different metals, or by making a sandwich coin out of two metals that have different densities. The problem is a lot of electronic machines use electro-magnetic fields to help distinguish coins, and if the electro-magnetic signature is different the machine will reject the coin even if it's the right size and weight. That's why the "golden" dollars are made out of such a bizarre alloy (that looks terrible when it gets worn and tarnished), because the mint wanted the coins to "look" like a Susan B. Anthony dollar to vending machines that use electro-magnetic signatures but still wanted a golden color.
A lot of newer vending machines can take $1 coins, it's just people don't realize it. Well, that and the vending companies that disable the functionality for reasons I don't understand. On the other hand, I haven't seen a vending machine that takes pennies for a very long time. Nor have I seen one that takes 50 cent pieces, most likely because those are physically large and circulate even less than $1 coins.
The gold Eagles used to be made out of an allow of about 90% gold. Pure gold is just too soft to be used as a coin. Interestingly the US mint had to tweak this ratio several times over the years as the value of gold would change relative to the dollar. When gold got to be worth too much compared to the dollar, all the Eagles would disappear from circulation (I know, big surprise). The US Mint also tweaked the value by varying the amounts of copper and silver used for the remaining 10%.
A few local places have caught on to that. You see a bunch of weird prices, but figure it out pretty quick when everything always totals up in increments of 0.25 (or whatever). The problem is chains that want to advertise prices in a larger area. Dollar menu, $99 TV, 6 pack for $2.50, whatever, and sales taxes are different everywhere. They could solve that by including the tax in the sale price, but that has two problems - sales tax is different everywhere, so they'll actually get different amounts of money for the item depending on where they sold it, and if they include sales tax and their competitors do not then their advertised prices will be higher than the competition which is a problem (even if the total price the consumer pays is less).
I never understood counterfeiting coins, as it seems more difficult than paper money. Granted, paper money tends to have all those security features which would be hard to duplicate, but if I was willing to consider counterfeiting coins I'd probably counterfeit $5 or maybe $10 bills where no one pays any attention to the security features. Or $1 bills which lack almost all of them.
Wow, the savings might add up to several dollars per year!
Of course, stores could counter that and start offering a cash discount. Or just stick it to the credit card companies and start charging a processing surcharge.
Well, once we ditch the $1 bill we can use that slot for $2 bills.
Well, at least the fluorescent tube fixtures can be converted to LED pretty easily. I did that recently. Basically open the light fixture up, bypass the ballast, and put new "tubes" in that are actually a strip of LEDs in, and done. They make some LEDs that will work off the ballast so it's a simple bulb replacement, but ballasts nowadays are so crappy that I'd rather rewire the fixture so I don't have to worry about the ballast failing later.