My antique "back up" computer.............

[Led]

I thought I had better break it out for a run. Circa mid 90's. Has Linux "Manjaro Cinnamon" on it. WAY behind on updates, but they all went successfully. About 700 of them! Even replaced the original OS with a newer version. and there were a couple of "kernel" updates in between the last run, about 6 months ago.

And to think this thing was once "state of the art" in its day. SLooooooooww!!!!!! LOL!!!

But running well. Nice to have a backup machine around! Just try and keep it up to date on occasion............

[Herr Walther]

I have several Core 2 Duo boxes sitting around here that have all been refurbished with memory upgrades and Windows 7. Unfortunately the chipsets in the older machines will not recognize anything more than 3GB of memory even if you load a 64 bit OS that recognizes up to 128GB.

One in particular is my old Flight Simulator main computer server that runs very well with the 'new' Windows 7 OS. Much faster than with XP Pro. It's just a backup computer as even my oldest Lenovo T500 laptop with a Core 2 Duo T9600 processor still is much faster than the older 3GB limited system from 2006. The T500 has a much later version of Core 2 Duo mobile processor from early 2011 running at 2.8 Ghz with 8GB of memory, SSD at 250GB, and 8GB or memory. The T500 and T510's are limited to 8GB of memory so those are maxed out already.

The T510's and my powerhouse T520 is faster still. I use the T500 in the living room which I am typing on right now. The T510's do duty in the train room for quick internet access and music, the other T510 is strictly for iTunes and is wired to the stereo receiver and 12' cabs. The iTunes T510 is running Windows 10 so that doesn't get used for anything else but music. The rest are all on Windows 7 Pro.

The T520 is on my desk and does all the computer work required. It has an i7 Quad-Core 2.4 Ghz processor, 16 GB of ram and a 500 GB SSD hard drive. It's actually spec'd out as one of the high-end W520's that was offered during that time, except I had to install all of it. It's also been upgraded to Bluetooth 4.0, security card reader, and second 250 GB internal spinner drive in the CD drive bay.

[Led]

UPDATE! I nuked the Manjaro as the new Mint "LMDE 3 (Cindy)" has now finally come out.............Keeps me busy anyway!!!!

Still slow, but faster than Manjaro was. But this thing only has a 1.6 Ghz dual core processor wit 3.9 RAM. So it is about as good as it gets, for this machine!!!!

[Herr Walther]

Which processor specifically do you have installed? Is there a Systems option like in Windows to check that?

[Led]

Not positive........but there IS an "Intel Pentium" sticker on the front of the box, if that means anything........It is an HP Pavilion box.

And to top it all off........there is a "Windows Vista" sticker on the front as well...................THAT should date it!! I guess it is newer than I thought. Vista came out in 2007............

Wow! Have things changed that fast already??

[Harlock]

way over my heads guys. I saw Antique and it caught my eye. I was thinking an abacus or the old cuneiform clay tablets we used before there was paper (Database management don't you know) Those hard tablets weighed a ton, but they lasted over 4 thousand years so why knock the old school.

All kidding aside this is what I was exposed to: mainframe (Paper Tape and Punch Cards) Mini-computer - 12 terminal DAC system running a 6 bit OS. Micro-computers - DOS to windows and various variations all of which sucked IMHO, (Didn't I mention the slide rule it rocked!)

if you don't already know I HATE TECHNOLOGY! I can't wait for the comet EMP blast to get rid of the distractions.

Don't quote me but this but I remember: DOS on tape cassette that loaded into an 8080 processors RAM of 4K. TANDY TRS-80 with the radio-shack OS 8.5" floppy disks 700 K. then along came the 8286's and another flavor of IBM-PC dos it used 5 1/4 disks (2) to load up and then you had a whole 160K of storage on a secondary drive. Things got spooky when IBM made he PS2 with MicroChannel layered technology 720K on a colored disk right out of startrek (Memory tapes is what they were called in the fantastic SiFi show) We called them Micro-floppy and they ran dos 2.30 or 3.2 I can't honestly remember I think they were 8386 processors and had 256 K. Then some asshole invented the hard drive and Dos 3.3 or some such came about they had the same size micro-floppy but had two holes (Read write - Protect). I think that's when IBM screwed up and off branded OS's started to creep in because other companies had better products but that's what I recall. 486, 586 and whatnot brought about the OS2 and windows environment (We ran a bastardized version of windows NT - how many of you can remember the governments SMART System?

Lets just say it wasn't smart but that's what you get from government a high cost product with little value.

We all remember the 80's, 90's the frantic COBOL date problem of Y2K = MASSIVE PAYOUTS but thanks to some bug-eyed goober we survived. I lost track around windows 98, I think Windows ME came around 2000 but it sucked. About the only Microsoft windows program worth it's code was XP and that's what all of my survival laptops have on it. I yanked the wifi cards put the os on a flash drive and the database for basic skills and survival on non approved non FCC compliant shielded laptops. No they will never surf the web but I kept the modem and back channel communications to allow for untraceable analog connections (No thanks to the scary guys that are now called geeks or is it nerd?)

I HATE THIS GARBAGE with the WWW and Dark WEB - Blah Blah Blah remove brain and insert group mentality search engines. Technology has only become a big distraction and waste of time, well except for fun likeminded people I guess that's the trade off.

Now I'm going to attend night classes for seniors. The government has offered to pay and I said NO THANKS! I will do it myself, after all someone has to create the TEOTWAWKI virus that is self replicating and polymorphic that infects the host spreads and damages everything with a simple code that does one thing "OFF". Coding isn't that scary it's just math and if I think about the circuit board as alien tech it will be easy to figure out. (FWIW that's where this all started and yes fiber optics we played with that and living walls real weird things like that)

I got this.