TPU's Nostalgic Hardware Club

[TOMCAT]

Oh my God, the aliens are invading!!!!!!!!!!!

Spoiler: Alien Invasion

View attachment 181145

Attention, must confirm they are hiding everywere.

 

[Trekkie4]

This is generally because there is very little that ran on 95/98/ME that would not also run perfectly on XP.

I respectfully disagree with this statement. No offense meant, of course
I can tell you from personal experience that there are PLENTY of games which could run on W9x/ME, but NOT under W2k, and/or XP. Some of the legendary Lucas Arts games for example, not to mention tons of other ones. Those which did & could, had various bugs & problems, which often required official (or 3rd party) patches & fixes to address the issue.

And yes, I'm kinda back... Lots of changes on my end, and most of them are for the worse. Emotions aside, when you think that things couldn't possibly get any worse ... a family member very close to me ended up at the hospital on Christmas Eve, and is still at the ICU, although (hopefully) no longer in life-concerning danger. As for my computer collection, I sold & gave most of them away. We are talking approx. 15-20 machines (sold AND donated, depending on what they had to offer) Still got 3 or 4 of them to sell, but after that I'm hoping to concentrate & focus on finishing that Adison project once & for all. However, considering the current state of things & emotional mess, this will have to wait for at least late January, early February.

From what I can remember at this point, the list includes the following systems:

AMD Duron 750 with Epox EP-8KTA2 board
AMD Duron 950 with Asus A7A266 board
AMD Duron 1200 with Matsonic MS8247C board
AMD Sempron (??) with one of those famous ASRock Upgrade boards, S754
AMD AthlonXP 2400+ with MSI MS-6712 board
Intel Pentium II 350 with iWill BD-100 board
Intel Pentium II 350 with FIC VB-601 board
Intel Pentium III 450 with Abit BE6-II board
Intel Pentium III 500 with QDI Advance board
Intel Pentium III 600 with another Abit BE6-II board
Intel Pentium III 933 with Epox board (can't remember the exact model, EP-3PTA maybe?)
Yet another, the same Pentium III 933 with the same Epox EP-3PTA board as above...
Intel Pentium 4, 2.00GHz with Asus P4S533-X board
Intel Pentium MMX 233 with (unknown?) Socket 7 board

Not including the previously donated, given systems ... Celeron 433 with DFI board, Pentium 3 866 with Asus CUSL2-C, Athlon 1000 with SL-75KAV Soltek board & couple of other systems, I honestly lost the track of what & how much I gave away recently. Plus a whole box of spare parts ... not that I don't have anything left, mind you.

 

[framebuffer]

Thing is that Windows XP era lasted from 2001 to... well for most people up to Windows7 which has been released in 2009
Windows 98 era lasted from 1998 to early XP era, would say that most people moved to XP in 2002, maybe with dual boot to keep the compatibility with older games/apps

Also, the XP era brought the computer and Internet access to the masses, so the volume of hardware (and software) stuff that came out was vastly higher
For all this reasons is much more common to have hardware and memories related to the XP era, although I have to say that for me the most precious ones are from Win98 times

In my opinion, of course

 

[biffzinker]

Win98 .... hooray for SE and addition of the back button. Was pretty sweet.

Then this happened. Noticed we skipped right over it. Better or worse than Vista?

View attachment 181289

I upgraded from Win98 SE to Windows Me then Windows XP Home Edition skipped Windows Vista after trying it a couple of times for Windows 7.

 

[Susquehannock]

Win98 .... hooray for SE and addition of the back button. Was pretty sweet.

Then this happened. Noticed we skipped right over it. Better or worse than Vista?

 

[biffzinker]

Better or worse than Vista?

I would have to say neither. Flaky hardware was more likely to blame. I did a in place upgrade from 98 to Me without any trouble.

 

[lexluthermiester]

I respectfully disagree with this statement. No offense meant, of course

None taken.

I can tell you from personal experience that there are PLENTY of games which could run on W9x/ME, but NOT under W2k, and/or XP.

Oh of course. My point was that most games from the 9X era will run fine on XP. There are some that do not, that's to be expected, but compatibility factors for 9X software on XP was a huge concern for Microsoft BITD and they delivered.

Win98 .... hooray for SE and addition of the back button. Was pretty sweet.

Then this happened. Noticed we skipped right over it. Better or worse than Vista?

View attachment 181293

Hey now... WinME, when properly configured, ran great and was easily more stable than 95 or 98. Problem was, it needed to be properly config'd as the OOB default experience was less than optimal.

 

[68Olds]

I’ve got to agree with Lex on WinME. I had a list of reg edits & other tweaks that made ME run really good. I had a WinME install running on a rig for 3+ years & for the most part it was fine. I had the occasional run in with freeware antivirus run amuck, but otherwise ran all sorts of games without issue. It was an antivirus that made me retire that machine. Instead of just renewing the definition service, I opted to upgrade to the latest version. After that, all the PC could do was literally freaking run Norton. Not exactly WinME’s fault.

Vista has a similar bad rap, which was mostly due to not having enough RAM. The official minimum was 512mb, but the real world minimum was 2gb. I ran Vista on a 3.2ghz northwood with 4x512mb of ddr1-400 & it worked very good for me.

Edit: I do like that t-shirt though, Susquehannok. Funny stuff.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Vista has a similar bad rap, which was mostly due to not having enough RAM. The official minimum was 512mb, but the real world minimum was 2gb. I ran Vista on a 3.2ghz northwood with 4x512mb of ddr1-400 & it worked very good for me.

Vista SP2 runs on a similar level as Win7 and was a real joy to use. However, even with 4GB system RAM the release version of Vista was problematic. SP1 fixed things up quite a bit.

 

[QuietBob]

Couldn't resist testing some more games. I was curious to see how they'd run on an IGP with severely limited VRAM. This time the GF6100's memory was set to the slowest 133 MHz (64-bit DDR1). As before, all screenies with the lowest settings. Still plenty of fun to be had with only 16 MB



As an afterthought, all this time fiddling with Win7 it didn't occur to me that I was dealing with a retro/legacy operating system. I find it hard to believe that Win7 is nearly 12 years old at this point and officially unsupported

I would start with a run at my R15 score.

Same score as an FX running at an equal clock. Quite impressive of Nehelem, considering the architecture was three years older.

Any particular benches and settings you would like me to run?

The more the merrier! Would definitely like to see detailed results from 99 max as I got the figures. We could also try some games.

As for my computer collection, I sold & gave most of them away. We are talking approx. 15-20 machines

That's mighty generous of you Good to see those oldtimers will still receive some TLC.

@ThrashZone - that ESU hack you mentioned in the other thread works for me, no issues. Thank you so much for bringing it up!

 

[Susquehannock]

Edit: I do like that t-shirt though, Susquehannok. Funny stuff.

The shirt made me chuckle. My experience with ME is very limited and near none with Vista. Went from XP straight to Win7. Do remember System Restore in ME. If only Win98 had such a feature my early days would have been much easier.

The more the merrier! Would definitely like to see detailed results from 99 max as I got the figures. We could also try some games.

Sounds good. Run some more 99max tests. Just downloaded WinTune98, 3dWinbench, Sandra, and CPU-Z 1.57. Will share some benches soon.

 

[lexluthermiester]

As an afterthought, all this time fiddling with Win7 it didn't occur to me that I was dealing with a retro/legacy operating system. I find it hard to believe that Win7 is nearly 12 years old at this point and officially unsupported

It's not retro until it's not longer in common use. Windows 7 is still in use by at least 20% of the computers in the world. Regardless of it's "unsupported" status, it's still a current OS.

 

[Susquehannock]

Good point. My laptop tells me Win7 is out of date every time it's turned on.

Back to XP. From reading several articles it seems XP usage has actually risen last couple years. Estimated to be over 1.25% total in October 2020 which is more than Win8, Vista, and Chrome combined. No surprise here since I have seen XP on commercial machines three times in as many months. ATM machine, electronic register at local pub, and most surprisingly, as network in major US grocery chain 'Food Lion'. Register screens went down when in line and XP reboot screen popped up. BIOS was dated 2009. Customer behind me was an IT guy and we were both amazed.

 

[cornemuse]

Win 3.11 > 98 > XP > 7 > 10 > (neither 7 nor 10 computers have even been plugged in, let alone turned on in 1+ years) > XP

 

[Bones]

Still have my copy of ME and I also agree, it wasn't that bad of an OS.
I too ran it for a few years, only switching to XP once things forced my hand to doing it.

 

[Fouquin]

Stack of Celeron S 1400s arrived in a chip lot. All bent up but otherwise fine. Started straightening up the pins and picking through them. Got a little carried away with benchmarking.

This is the best of the bunch. I may very well grab the mod BIOS for the TUSL2-C and maybe try some 2v sub-ambient madness in the future, but this is definitely my go-to Tualatin reference chip from here on.



Comparison to the S423 P4 2.0GHz.

 

[framebuffer]

Stack of Celeron S 1400s arrived in a chip lot. All bent up but otherwise fine. Started straightening up the pins and picking through them. Got a little carried away with benchmarking.

This is the best of the bunch. I may very well grab the mod BIOS for the TUSL2-C and maybe try some 2v sub-ambient madness in the future, but this is definitely my go-to Tualatin reference chip from here on.

uh, nice stuff!!
can you do some more comparisons vs Pentium 4? I was expecting the Tualatin (even if it's the 256k varian) to be a bit better vs an almost identically clocked Pentium 4

also some PC133 CL2 would be nice if you have some around

 

[Fouquin]

uh, nice stuff!!
can you do some more comparisons vs Pentium 4? I was expecting the Tualatin (even if it's the 256k varian) to be a bit better vs an almost identically clocked Pentium 4

also some PC133 CL2 would be nice if you have some around

I plan on getting some more tests onto the bench soon and can expand the comparison a bit. I don't currently have any PC133 CL2, and the TUSL2-C has the annoying bug of running 3-3-3-7 the moment you touch the FSB. My current Micron DIMMs are PC125 CL3-2-2-6 rated, but run at PC133 3-2-2-6 on the 133/133/33 stock settings for the PIII-S 1200 that I originally got with the board.

 

[Keullo-e]

Gotta post this gem here.

And yeah, I ran that few weeks ago with an Athlon 1GHz & GF3 Ti 200.

 

[Susquehannock]

Gotta post this gem here.

And yeah, I ran that few weeks ago with an Athlon 1GHz & GF3 Ti 200.

Irony ... I watched that less than an hour ago when running 99max and 2000 benchmarks on the voodoo4 system. Thanks to you I just now enjoyed it again on my win10 system and 43" monitor with full size stereo.

 

[Mr.Scott]

I may very well grab the mod BIOS for the TUSL2-C and maybe try some 2v sub-ambient madness in the future, but this is definitely my go-to Tualatin reference chip from here on.

Here you go.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Gotta post this gem here.

And yeah, I ran that few weeks ago with an Athlon 1GHz & GF3 Ti 200.

I am in awe that this was 20 years ago... It just doesn't seem that long ago...

This one is good too! Edit, found a better one.

 

[QuietBob]

New findings It seems MS have set their min specs quite conservatively. Win7 64-bit with Aero will run on literally a quarter of the stated RAM and VRAM. I've also tried 256MB but, alas, when booting...



I'm still after a 20 GB 5,400 rpm HDD to test load times and general feel. Found one for sale, but the owner didn't get back to me.

I have seen XP on commercial machines three times in as many months. ATM machine, electronic register at local pub, and most surprisingly, as network in major US grocery chain 'Food Lion'. Register screens went down when in line and XP reboot screen popped up. BIOS was dated 2009.

A few weeks ago I spotted an infokiosk stuck at POST. It was running off a 2006 Dell with IDE and had a dead BIOS battery

This is the best of the bunch.

Nice overclock on that Tualatin! Here's my Sempron for clock-for-clock comparison. I also have the latest AIDA results.



EDIT: Added oc'd scores with stock voltage and cooler.

 

[Keullo-e]

Damn this laziness. Soon I'll check how low a Duron 1.2* and Radeon 9550 will score on 3dmark06..

* it's my slowest CPU which has SSE

 

[MaxiPro800]

Good point. My laptop tells me Win7 is out of date every time it's turned on.

Back to XP. From reading several articles it seems XP usage has actually risen last couple years. Estimated to be over 1.25% total in October 2020 which is more than Win8, Vista, and Chrome combined. No surprise here since I have seen XP on commercial machines three times in as many months. ATM machine, electronic register at local pub, and most surprisingly, as network in major US grocery chain 'Food Lion'. Register screens went down when in line and XP reboot screen popped up. BIOS was dated 2009. Customer behind me was an IT guy and we were both amazed.

One of the billboards in my town had to restart because of an error. What it was? A DX2200 running a P4 HT, all with Windows 7 surprisingly.