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Who is using the oldest computer?


audioguru

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I think I should say a little about old computers, my dad picked up an old computer that was kicked out the door from a hospital. Believe it or not but the HDD was about the size of 2 bricks and about as heavy as 1 brick. The HDD took up all 3 slots on the panel. I cant remember but I think it held 20MB. Thats as ancient as i've ever seen them.

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Hey Johnny (Wasssup),
What are you doing over here? Welcome to our forum.
That's a nice computer that you made. You overclocked that much without meltdown?
Yeah, my download accelerator program breaks-up a download into many parts and downloads them all at the same time. During the moment that the program pops-up to tell me how fast it is going, the download is complete. I got cable now, but it also worked well for dial-up.
50X CD-ROM? Mine's only 2.5X, works fine. Watch out for CDs flying apart, since at 50X, the edge is moving at close to the speed of sound!

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Must be a good fan, I have seen 3.6G from a 2.4G but with liquid nitrogen cooling!


I have liquid(water)-cooled Athlon XP 2700+ at my home. It's not overclocked, but i like that it's bit more quiet because it doesn't need noisy CPU fan.
One adjustable-speed 120mm fan at the radiator keeps the CPU and GPU temp well below 45-50
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Vainajala,
I've seen refrigerators with plumbing hoses attached, but never a computer like yours has. Good idea.


I've attached a pic in case you interested... it's really not very complicated system, but it works :)

In my opinion, best cooling solution would be Innovatek's "Konvekt-O-Matic Standard". It's basically a huge heatsink, which requires no fan at all. It has enough heat capability for normal standard-clocked processors and graphics cards. Even though this thing isn't the best choice for overclocking, I like the 'quiet nature' of this cooling system...

It would be quiet, and with black anodized finish, would also look _really_ stylish when bolted to the side of the case ;D

Too bad it's very expensive, over 100 euros! That's a lot for a PC radiator :-[

If I had the chance to get something like this for a bit lower price, I would most propably get it! :)

http://www.highspeedpc.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=HSPC&Category_Code=InnovaKonvect

post-2509-14279141695378_thumb.jpg

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Whoo these cooling systems are cool. :D
I remember a few years ago when my dad took me to this computer warehouse that was full of computer stuff to buy. Thier was this stand with a computer on it and a resionably sized heatsink on the CPU, but it had two tubes going to it from a pump outside the computer. The tubes were filled with a green liquid, my guess would be radiator coolent. I cant remember the speed that it increased by. Anyway down hear in melbourne its quite cold we normally dont get 45C days, so the CPU in my computer dosent get too hot. The fan just came with the CPU so its just a standard fan, its currently going at 2.41Ghz. I can try to nuge it a bit harder to 3Ghz, but not to 4.16Ghz with a standard fan. The Mother board has a Spread Spectrum unit that stabalizes the main clock generators wave form, and is only needed at a high frequency. The most wierdest method of cooling your fan is putting a cup of liquid nitrogen on your CPU, I saw it on the net someware, must of been a test run because nitro would absorb the heat. Thier are some good heat transfer compounds like this one.
http://www.arcticsilver.com/as5.htm
Thier was also this super fan that I saw in a PCUSER magazine, i'll try and find it when I can.
I'll give ya my results at running on 3Ghz.

See ya.

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hi all.
i have a TRS 80 which worked fine the last time i used it.
we bought it for $600 and another three hundred for the expansion board..
like i said it worked well ,but , the connectors on it were lead coated and had to be cleaned with an eraser,whenever it started acting up.
i've used it to learn assembly language., Z80 hehe, and even hooked it up to a breadboard.
At one point i sampled tina turner , i forget which song , it sounded really bad. that was because i wasnt sampling accuratly enough ,because the a/d had no track & hold and because the program controlled the conversion start(also not good for accurate conversions)
anyway i guess the point of this rambling is, a computer is useful and fun no matter how old it is..

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I have a Mac Performa 6500/250 PowerPC Processor. It's pretty old and arguably useless for modern day GUI usage (netscape will freeze, lots of the long dead lock waits accompanied with the preX MacOS). It came with 32MB of Ram, and I upgraded to about 96MB along with an 8GB from 4GB hard drive. It's in wide and busy usage as my SMTP+IMAP server running NetBSD 1.6.1 and I'm very happy with it. Once it has gotten an 101 day uptime (the run finished with a thunderstorm and a power outage), so it is VERY stable. The uptime has been on and off since it's ths summertime and power outages are weekly the rainy miami weather. It was made circa 1995, maybe april.
-rian

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Hacker,

Are you a collector of old computers? Were do you live? I can send it to you if you pay for the shipping.

Ante ::)




Well, no, I don't collect old computers, unless a Pentium 75 counts :)
...But I already have too many computers, and I'd much rather build an IBM compatible (still thinking of doing that!), just for the fun of building it, but I don't have the time.
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With my experience with a Celeron, all I have to say is, their crap. I had a celeron and it only lasted a few years; only worked when it wanted to. Until one day it didn't even wanna run startup processes; my one was very sensitive to hot days in a unairconditioned room. Hey dont even ask to trade for my P4.

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  • 3 months later...

Hi Guys,
I'm back!
A few days ago the IE4 on my old 486 computer got messed up (Kernel32.DLL errors) so I couldn't come to this site anymore (other sites worked fine). I was thinking that it's time to replace my computer, and I was drilling an ISP CDrom to make another 3V Chaser, then I realised that newer IE versions are on the CDrom. So now I am running IE5 and it works fine. I even get "replies to a posting" working properly now.

I might try IE5.5 some day because my ISP recently switched to using Yahoo to filter-out junk e-mail, which caused my outgoing e-mail to stop working. They say to use IE5.5 or newer. Even Microsoft won't let me into their site without a newer browser. But I've heard that a 486 runs very slowly with IE5.5.

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Hi Ante,
The original clock/bios soldered-in battery on my 10 years old 486 computer still works so it and I can wait until Intel replaces the Pentium with something better. Then my son will give me his Pentium 4 or one of the many computers that he gets cheap on E-Bay then sells for a good price.

I figure that my 486 uses 1/10th the electricity of a Pentium 4, and over its 10 years has costed about $.35US per day to purchase.

I think I got cheated on my install of IE5 from the ISP's CD-Rom. Its Outlook Express says version 4.72. I wonder if Outlook Express 5.5 will work with IE5.

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Guest Yevgenip

There are two ways of overclocking: Hradware and software, but you will have too cool your CPU using water cooling.

http://www.karbosguide.com/hardware/module3d1.htm

http://www.dansdata.com/aguatec.htm

google for it.

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[move]Yahoo! Yahoo! Yahoo! Yahoo![/move]

The IE5 browser that I installed on my 486 computer allowed me to enter Microsoft's site.
There I analysed and downloaded IE6. I installed it and it works great! A bit slow maybe, especially on this site but I can live with it. My outgoing e-mail works again now too.

Maybe my 486 can keep going for another 10 years!
Yahoo! ;D ;D

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