Should Pentium II/III Systems Have a Forum?

[Unknown_K]

Windows 10 loads in a couple seconds when you have a NVME drive so that's not an issue with anything remotely modern.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Windows 10 loads in a couple seconds when you have a NVME drive so that's not an issue with anything remotely modern.

For a while NVMe drives were very expensive. Good-sized ones are still a fair junk of change. If you only have the 1 PC to worry about its not an issue. But if you've got 7 or 8 to worry about, 6 or 7 of which were built back when SSD/NVMe were not a requirement to run the OS... yeah. Its frustrating.

 

[VERAULT]

I thought this was a pII pIII discussion. Lets keep that modern garbage off this forum.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

I thought this was a pII pIII discussion. Lets keep that modern garbage off this forum.

lol that is fair.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

I thought this was a pII pIII discussion. Lets keep that modern garbage off this forum.

Although for the record you can in fact have an NVMe drive on a PII:

SATA PCI Hard Card

store.rabbitholecomputing.com

 

[VERAULT]

Although for the record you can in fact have an NVMe drive on a PII:

SATA PCI Hard Card

store.rabbitholecomputing.com

that card is fair game... horrible new Operating systems is not.

 

[TH2002]

Speaking of Pentiums... I think some folks are being too harsh on the P4. Ordinary space heaters can be very expensive and don't even come with a complementary BSoD

(The photo ended up like that despite me holding my phone sideways. Sorry.)

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Speaking of Pentiums... I think some folks are being too harsh on the P4. Ordinary space heaters can be very expensive and don't even come with a complementary BSoD

(The photo ended up like that despite me holding my phone sideways. Sorry.)

There are probably children running P4s to stay warm in the winter! Banning P4s MURDERS CHILDREN!

Ok I'll stop being melodramatic.

 

[VERAULT]

There are probably children running P4s to stay warm in the winter! Banning P4s MURDERS CHILDREN!

Ok I'll stop being melodramatic.

kids? have you spent time with kids today? no harm there..

Now if you said puppies were in trouble... that would be a real tragedy.

 

[Caluser2000]

Speaking of Pentiums... I think some folks are being too harsh on the P4. Ordinary space heaters can be very expensive and don't even come with a complementary BSoD

(The photo ended up like that despite me holding my phone sideways. Sorry.)

Obviously it is not a smart phone

 

[bnelson]

Weird how that works, huh? They haven't added any significant new features to windows 10 since release, but somehow its gotten bigger and slower with each passing year.

I call it Windows Entropy (tm). Every version of Windows I can remember started out working reasonably well performance-wise, then turns to crap over time.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

I call it Windows Entropy (tm). Every version of Windows I can remember started out working reasonably well performance-wise, then turns to crap over time.

We used to call that Winrot. In the '98 era no matter what you did, your install would just get slower and buggier as time passed until you just had to wipe the drive and start over. This is what spurned the common(at least in my circles?) practice of a separate drive just for your OS.

 

[3lectr1c]

Had to do that last week on my ThinkPad 385XD. Probably did that install not even more than a year ago and yet had slowed to a crawl. I probably could have fixed the issues but it was just easier to start fresh...

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Had to do that last week on my ThinkPad 385XD. Probably did that install not even more than a year ago and yet had slowed to a crawl. I probably could have fixed the issues but it was just easier to start fresh...

Did you use the machine much? My win98 systems don't get turned on so often. I have one with a probably 15 year old install at this point. But in that time its only been turned on once or twice a year.

 

[3lectr1c]

385XD is probably my most used 98 system, probably because it’s a perfect bridge machine (USB, CDROM, Floppy, and legacy ports).
Also is pretty good for DOS gaming as well, so it sees use for that quite often.

Part of the issue I believe is that it’s using an incredibly slow 4GB IBM drive. Probably the slowest drive I’ve seen from that era. Drive is 100% healthy. Gonna hopefully solid state swap it soon.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

It'd be interesting to chart just how many use-hours a win98 install gets before it slugs. Still, I could load windows 98 in my sleep

Strongly consider doing a CF card instead of SSD. Then once you get it all nice and configured you can make an image of the hard drive.

 

[3lectr1c]

My plan is to use a 4GB SD card. I've found my laptops with an 8GB BIOS limit won't actually play nice with 8GB cards, or at least, not the one I bought. Too bad there aren't any 6GB cards.
CF is just too expensive these days, plus the risk of getting one that's marked as removable storage that won't actually work.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Who really needs more than 4 gigs for a win98 tweener, though?

 

[3lectr1c]

If I wanted to be silly and load my music library onto it then I would... That's the only real usecase. I'd probably eventually run it out if I installed enough Windows software.
I honestly just like having the extra breathing room. My brain works in weird ways like that. I've never run out of space with 4GB in any PC from that time, but I still go way higher than I probably need just for comfort's sake. I put a 64GB SD card in my PowerBook 3400c just because I could.

 

[TH2002]

Hard drive or no drive

Although I consider Microdrives to be in 'acceptable' territory as far as the vintage computer experience goes, in case I ever have to install a CF adapter in one of my computers...