There's a bit of a difference between finding some old piece of kit that still works, and having that same piece of hardware running continuously, with no interruptions and errors, for that same period of time. There's no way, for example, that the C64's power supply would last that long.
What self-respecting geek doesn't have a pile of old optical drives around? I probably have a dozen or so, and that's after recycling all the old 8X IDE drives and such. If it gives out, pull another off the stack and try it. If that one is too slow, pick another off the stack and try that.
Most of the LCD TVs sold in America are total and complete garbage, made with parts that die and fail within 2-3 years, and can't be meaningfully repaired because everything in them is proprietary, specific to one or two models, and probably costs more as a replacement part than an entire comparable new TV.
Actually, I've had pretty good luck repairing LCD TVs. More often than not it's a bad capacitor. Usually the hardest part is getting the things apart without marring the case too much as most are clearly designed to never be serviced. I won't disagree that the quality is still garbage - having leaking capacitors on 3-4 year TVs in 2012 is inexcusable, and Samsung is a huge offender here.
I can believe that, as your tower eventually grows to the point where you're pretty much screwing around the elevator system the whole time, which is pretty much the point where I get bored with SimTower.
The better equivalent monitor would be the IBM T210 which was a 21" 2048x1536 monitor. But long discontinued and much rarer on the secondhand market than its 22" cousin.
My thought would be to hold onto the CRT for a bit longer, and wait and see if monitors improve in the next year or two. With any luck, someone will start releasing high DPI desktop displays, and hopefully it will also be someone other than Apple so that the monitor will come with a reasonable set of inputs. Either that or hope that 4K catches on in the TV world, and isn't regulated to huge 50+ inch screens either.
The T221 was discontinued in 2005 (sadly) and as far as I know, IBM is out of the monitor business. Lenovo makes some monitors, but they are no different in terms of DPI than everyone else.
If the goal was to disable a copy of Windows which they weren't licensed to sell to you and the hard drive otherwise contained no sensitive information what they did was probably good enough.
At some point you'll have to pay the credit card bill if you want to keep the server running, at which point they'll be able to trace it to you. A possible solution may be to buy one of those prepaid VISA gift cards with cash (preferably at a location not close to where you live or work) and use that to pay for the server.
They certainly can last that long - so long as you're willing to continually sink the money into them to keep them standing. Since people don't like dealing with moving or replacing their house there will be people who will do it too. Just like how many of the really crappy houses built in the 60's/early 70's are still around when anyone reasonable would have bulldozed them 20 years ago.
Theft of factory stereos was never a problem to begin with. They are hard to fence as they'll generally only fit a few models, so the crackheads will totally ignore a $1000 factory system in favor of some cheap $75 Wal-mart aftermarket stereo.
I would think that putting the heated seat control on the seat would be about the cheapest and easiest option. You've got to run the power wires to the seat for the heater anyway. So put a switch inline with it, mount it near where the wires have to go anyway, and done. With the controls in the dash you now have to a relay on the wires to the seat heater, run a wire from the computer to control the relay, then program the computer to run the whole thing. Similar thing with the seat adjustment controls which basically just turn motors on and off.
It's called the "Cigarette Lighter". It can power a wide range of devices...
Which has to be the absolute worst power connector I've ever had to deal with. In its defense though, it was originally made to hold a device for lighting cigarettes.
There's a pretty decent lack of drivers for older graphics cards in 64-bit Windows. One example is the ATI Radeon 9250 and similar series of GPUs. 64-bit Windows won't have anything to do with them - funny thing you can still buy new Radeon 9250 cards. 32-bit Windows doesn't have a problem with them though.
That's only if you leave the computer on 24/7 and even then just barely assuming you take the full 2 years and can score a low powered nettop for under $200. For most situations you're just better off keeping the old hardware going so long as it still works and can remember to power it down when you don't need it.
Microsoft tried that with banning the installation of other web browsers on OEM Windows and got spanked pretty hard (and rightfully so). My guess is that they would be reluctant to try something like that again.
RAM going bad, in my experience is extremely rare. About the worst of it was back in the FP/EDO days and most that was due to corrosion on the contacts as a lot of the cheap stuff used tin for that. That, and the Crucial memory from the DDR2 days for some reason was terrible (the ones with the yellow heat spreaders). Otherwise, I have 10+ year old computers running 10+ year old SDRAM and they're just fine.
I'd say you're pretty fortunate. I've seen plenty of bad motherboards just from blown/leaky capacitors alone. Granted, those can be repaired with difficulty and I've done a few, but it's probably the most common failure I've seen for computers nowadays if you ignore cooling fans getting noisy. The capacitor plague was supposed to be over a while ago, but I've seen enough dead DDR2-era hardware to believe that it's still an ongoing thing.
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Sony was the one selling CRTs that had faces that were sections of a cylinder, before they went to all flat screens sometime in the late 90's.
And what happens when the design life is lower than what would be the useful life for the device?
There's a bit of a difference between finding some old piece of kit that still works, and having that same piece of hardware running continuously, with no interruptions and errors, for that same period of time. There's no way, for example, that the C64's power supply would last that long.
What self-respecting geek doesn't have a pile of old optical drives around? I probably have a dozen or so, and that's after recycling all the old 8X IDE drives and such. If it gives out, pull another off the stack and try it. If that one is too slow, pick another off the stack and try that.
Actually, I've had pretty good luck repairing LCD TVs. More often than not it's a bad capacitor. Usually the hardest part is getting the things apart without marring the case too much as most are clearly designed to never be serviced. I won't disagree that the quality is still garbage - having leaking capacitors on 3-4 year TVs in 2012 is inexcusable, and Samsung is a huge offender here.
I can believe that, as your tower eventually grows to the point where you're pretty much screwing around the elevator system the whole time, which is pretty much the point where I get bored with SimTower.
You do realize the whole point of this Ask Slashdot is that Linux doesn't work yet all that well on the Retina MBP, right? At least try and RTFS.
The better equivalent monitor would be the IBM T210 which was a 21" 2048x1536 monitor. But long discontinued and much rarer on the secondhand market than its 22" cousin.
My thought would be to hold onto the CRT for a bit longer, and wait and see if monitors improve in the next year or two. With any luck, someone will start releasing high DPI desktop displays, and hopefully it will also be someone other than Apple so that the monitor will come with a reasonable set of inputs. Either that or hope that 4K catches on in the TV world, and isn't regulated to huge 50+ inch screens either.
The T221 was discontinued in 2005 (sadly) and as far as I know, IBM is out of the monitor business. Lenovo makes some monitors, but they are no different in terms of DPI than everyone else.
If the goal was to disable a copy of Windows which they weren't licensed to sell to you and the hard drive otherwise contained no sensitive information what they did was probably good enough.
I wouldn't really say that's always been true. The SNES and N64 were pretty advanced at the time of their release.
At some point you'll have to pay the credit card bill if you want to keep the server running, at which point they'll be able to trace it to you. A possible solution may be to buy one of those prepaid VISA gift cards with cash (preferably at a location not close to where you live or work) and use that to pay for the server.
They certainly can last that long - so long as you're willing to continually sink the money into them to keep them standing. Since people don't like dealing with moving or replacing their house there will be people who will do it too. Just like how many of the really crappy houses built in the 60's/early 70's are still around when anyone reasonable would have bulldozed them 20 years ago.
I know there are exceptions, but the ECMs in most cars are incredibly robust. Can't really say the same for the entertainment systems though.
Theft of factory stereos was never a problem to begin with. They are hard to fence as they'll generally only fit a few models, so the crackheads will totally ignore a $1000 factory system in favor of some cheap $75 Wal-mart aftermarket stereo.
I would think that putting the heated seat control on the seat would be about the cheapest and easiest option. You've got to run the power wires to the seat for the heater anyway. So put a switch inline with it, mount it near where the wires have to go anyway, and done. With the controls in the dash you now have to a relay on the wires to the seat heater, run a wire from the computer to control the relay, then program the computer to run the whole thing. Similar thing with the seat adjustment controls which basically just turn motors on and off.
Which has to be the absolute worst power connector I've ever had to deal with. In its defense though, it was originally made to hold a device for lighting cigarettes.
Wow, an "ancient" 2005 model year car? I bought my current car before that car was even built, and it wasn't new either. You kids these days.
There's a pretty decent lack of drivers for older graphics cards in 64-bit Windows. One example is the ATI Radeon 9250 and similar series of GPUs. 64-bit Windows won't have anything to do with them - funny thing you can still buy new Radeon 9250 cards. 32-bit Windows doesn't have a problem with them though.
That's only if you leave the computer on 24/7 and even then just barely assuming you take the full 2 years and can score a low powered nettop for under $200. For most situations you're just better off keeping the old hardware going so long as it still works and can remember to power it down when you don't need it.
Microsoft tried that with banning the installation of other web browsers on OEM Windows and got spanked pretty hard (and rightfully so). My guess is that they would be reluctant to try something like that again.
RAM going bad, in my experience is extremely rare. About the worst of it was back in the FP/EDO days and most that was due to corrosion on the contacts as a lot of the cheap stuff used tin for that. That, and the Crucial memory from the DDR2 days for some reason was terrible (the ones with the yellow heat spreaders). Otherwise, I have 10+ year old computers running 10+ year old SDRAM and they're just fine.
At some point you probably did an upgrade that ended up replacing most of the computer. Or am I to believe that you're still running Socket 7?
I'd say you're pretty fortunate. I've seen plenty of bad motherboards just from blown/leaky capacitors alone. Granted, those can be repaired with difficulty and I've done a few, but it's probably the most common failure I've seen for computers nowadays if you ignore cooling fans getting noisy. The capacitor plague was supposed to be over a while ago, but I've seen enough dead DDR2-era hardware to believe that it's still an ongoing thing.
So were they the ones that caused the big stick over the Celeron 666?