Jolt Country

:hi:

Well, they're nothing special, but with all the computer nerd talk lately I figured I'd share my boxes. Parts got rearranged between them back and forth but it appears this is the "final configuration".

Here's my wife's box. It's a Dell SC420; I bought it for her direct from Dell a few Christmases ago because it was a good price and I liked the model # :rolleyes: . It was intended to be a server and did not come with a sound card or DVD-ROM, let alone a burner. It also came without RAM. It's a P4 2.4ghz, and I added 2 1gig sticks of memory. I also added an NEC 3250 DVD burner which I have since burned out :D Wonder if I should blame Liggy and Dee's custom firmware, or the fact that I burned thousands of XBox 360 games with it? It doesn't read or burn dual layer anymore, single layer works fine though.
Sound card is some some old one I had laying around. It's hooked to a basic logitech 2 speaker and sub setup so it doesn't need anything fancy.
Video card is an Nividia Geforce 8500, 256mb. Since this was intended to be a server box, Dell filled in 1/2 of the PCIE slot with plastic to try and prevent people like me from slapping a 3d card in there and using it at home.
Well, a red hot butter knife and 30 seconds later, I put the Nvidia card in and it's been working great ever since. Quite an upgrade from the onboard video.
It's only got one IDE port and 2 SATA ports, both IDE's are spoken for with the CD-ROM drive and the DVD burner. One 300G hard SATA hard drive is partitioned into an XP and a Tiny7 partition. I still have one SATA slot open; it's extended to the rear for a quick e-SATA plug in.




Now this is where the magic happens :cool: :
My box.
Antec case and power supply,
Asus EAH3450 video card w/ HDMI
Asus Xonar DX sound card
Foxconn A690G motherboard
AMD LE-1620 CPU (low power version)
Rosewill multicard reader
2x2g Corsair "value line" RAM
^^^^all of the above parts were made very affordable with the help of mail in rebates.
Free after rebate CPU cooler
3 SATA hard drives, various sizes
old 80gig Maxtor IDE HDD
old 40gig Maxtor IDE HDD
old 3.5" floppy drive

As you can see, with 5 hdd's it's pretty darn cramped in there. All 4 SATA ports are being used, and 2/3 USB headers are used. I couldn't fit another PCI card in there if I wanted to, because of the size of the adjacent cards and the small form factor motherboard. So I guess I'm done building!
You can also see the famous Labatt Blue hockey tape which you may have seen in some of my SX4 projects.




Exciting, huh?

(oh yeah. forgot about the firewire card. I've NEVER been able to locate the correct driver for it. It's a Via, and I also have a "digital origin" firewire card that i ALSO have never been able to find drivers for. What is it with me and firewire drivers?)

But why the floppy drive? I thought they were as dead as the 5-1/4 one these days.



THE
APPENDIX
AARDVARK

cuz I had it and it was black.

Sold the firewire card today, so now the search is on for Digital Origin / Texas Instruments drivers.

AArdvark wrote:But why the floppy drive? I thought they were as dead as the 5-1/4 one these days.

They're still useful in limited contexts. If you want to send files to someone without Internet access, and/or are using a pre-usb computer without a CD or DVD drive, a floppy drive can still be useful. A floppy with compression such as zip files might hold as much as 3 meg.

This post was a good idea. I will try to take pictures of some of my machines later today. I like "seeing" where people hang out. When I read their posts, I imagine them sitting there. It's like after I hear someone's voice, whenever I read their posts I "hear" it in their voice in my head.

I tried to get my old 5.25" floppy drive working the other day. It doesn't! Fucking frustrating. I wanted one machine to boot to Ubuntu, OR run Infocom booter disks if they were loaded.

The 5.25" drive doesn't even light up on POST. =(

What OS? Someone the other day told me that Vista and beyond do not support 5 1/4 drives. I have not verified that.

Jason Scott just posted this the other day on Twitter:

http://shop.deviceside.com/prod/FC5025

USB 5 1/4 Floppy Drive controller. It's read only and it's $55 but ... if you need one, you need one.

Flack wrote:This post was a good idea. I will try to take pictures of some of my machines later today. I like "seeing" where people hang out. When I read their posts, I imagine them sitting there. It's like after I hear someone's voice, whenever I read their posts I "hear" it in their voice in my head.

Hah, and I even forgot to take a pic of my model M!

And yeah, the floppy came in real handy when I was going to school at MCC. I suppose a thumb drive or their email (if it wasn't down half the time) would have worked too, but they always had stacks of empty floppies around so I would have been dead in the water if I didn't have a drive at home.

It's insane, isn't it? $55 for a floppy drive that can't save your progress in Lode Runner. I've got something that can't save your progress in Lode Runner for all of you.

The OS is really the PC booter OS on the floppy disk itself, I guess. So before any modern-day OS gets involved, really. There is an outside chance my 5.25" drive DOES work, and the BIOS is saying, "I ... just, no dude, I'm not letting you boot off that" but I have doubts that that's the case.

Oh, I would also like to apologize if I got anyone's hopes up with the thread title.

My 2 boxes are the computer nerd pr0n equivalent of 2girls1cup.

This is my main workstation. It's a Dell w/4 gig of ram. I used to use this as my main multimedia machine, but now mostly it's where I write and surf the web when I'm not in the living room. I got the 28" monitor on sale and I love it. It makes things I write seem more important. Or at least larger. My sister got me the alien hanging on the wall behind it. This desk is the only place downstairs I get to pile shit, so it always has shit piled on it.



This is a close-up of the generic Dell tower. I got the sticker at Hastings. It also has the sticker that came from my Acer laptop stuck to it for no reason I can remember. The USB "bar" across the top is actually a Microsoft mousepad w/4 USB ports built in. The mousepad is too small to use but I need the ports so there it sits.



This is my Acer Aspire One netbook. It's in the bathroom because I was using it about an hour ago to check e-mail while I was pooping. If you ever want to borrow it, remember that I use it when I poop.



This is a crappy workstation I threw together for my son to use so that he doesn't get viruses on my other machines. It sits in an armoir in the dining room and we close the doors so I don't have to look at all the crap inside there. On top of the armoir is an old school HP LaserJet printer that's connected to the network through that machine so we can all print to it. There's also a big challace up there that my dad bought for me once. When he gave it to me it was full of pistachios, but now it's just full of change.



This is my PC-based DVR or PC-based TIVO, aka "Pivo". It runs 24/7 and hides inside that cabinet. I had a wireless card in it but I was having playback issues over the network so I ran a cable to it. It has 2tb of drive space but it also runs uPnP so I can stream to/from it.



His and her laptops. That's the wife's Dell in the rear and my Acer up front. My old chair was big enough that my laptop could rest on the arm, but my new recliner is so small that now my laptop sits on a TV tray. If I'm not in my room working, I'm probably on that laptop.

Moving upstairs ...



This is really "the" box. It's a quad-core machine w/8 gigs of ram running Server 2K3 and several virtual machines. The top box (the silver one) houses the computer while the bottom tower (the yellow one) houses 8tb of drive space. All media (music/movies/pictures/etc) are stored here. It's a RAID5. On top of the silver tower are 3 tb external drives that I use for backups.



On the other side are two more workstations, my C64 (in the back) and my media workstation in the front. The media workstation has all my audio gear connected to it so I can record podcasts or music or whatever and not have to worry about it. The C64 doesn't get a lot of use but lately I've been converting a bunch of old disks to emulator-friendly D64 files, which is why it's turned on at the moment.

I was going to take pictures of all the machines tucked away in closets or out in the garage but I got tired so, that's the end of the tour.

I love posts with the words porn and poop in them. This is getting steamy in here.

Glad to see there are no shit stains on that netbook.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:It's insane, isn't it? $55 for a floppy drive that can't save your progress in Lode Runner. I've got something that can't save your progress in Lode Runner for all of you.

I should, perhaps, ask which Lode Runner you're referring to, the original or Lode Runner 3D. I found both were fun. In fact, because the original Lode Runner was a self-loader (a game that had its own operating system and ran standalone) I would use it as a compatibility test for IBM PC Clone machines. If it would boot and run Lode Runner it was as close as compatible as possible.

It was amazing at the number of supposed "compatible" machines that would not run LR. Amazingly, the Zenith Data Systems' PC, running a monochrome monitor, would run LR which generally required CGA.

I remember how me and a bunch of other people put together a complete set of substitute levels, all 150. The nastiest one was #150, which had two guards and one piece of gold on the bottom. So you ran to get the piece of gold, and the exit ladder would appear, but it didn't reach the top. It spelled out "YOU LOSE" in ladders in the middle of the screen. Since you couldn't get to the top to end the level, well, you can guess the result.

I bought new computer last month! Specs below:

Gigabyte Ga-GM785US2H mobo with Radien HD4200 graphics chipset, Realtech HD audio (well, HD for realtech, anyway, it's got optical I/O and 6 analog connections so not bad), 5 SATA ports, 6 USB ports, 1 PS/2 port, 1 firewire port, HDMI, DVI, VGA and gigabit LAN
AMD Athlon II X2 250 processor clocked at 3 GHZ (no real reason to overclock it right now)
4 GB DDR2 800 RAM (mobo's expandable to 16)
2 TB storage (2 500-gig internals plus a terabyte USB drive)
8X DVD+/-R/RW/DL/RAM etc burner
80+ certified 550-watt power supply
Storm Scout case with 4 USB, 3 fans, and ESATA

All dat for $600. Not bad if I do say so myself. Running Windows 7 64-bit on it because... anything else would be wasting the hardware, frankly. Might take a pic with my new cameraphone if there's interest. Also, Tascam FW-1884, my holy-fuck-that-is-a-lot-of-knobs mixer of D00M. My stereo system is hawt shit too.

sure, post a pic. Then you can look back on it, and revel in the lack of dust.

Much like I look at pics of my engine bay in the car brand new and say to myself "Self, this muddy greasy thing used to look like THAT?!?"