How my 486 Tower died today

On Wednesday, February 20, 2013 2:20:38 AM UTC+2, RayLopez99 wrote:
On Monday, February 18, 2013 5:53:19 PM UTC+2, philo wrote:

Yeah right







XP on a 486, nice try



Why is that weird?



RL

Oh wait...I meant Pentium II, not 486, my bad.

RL

On Saturday, February 16, 2013 7:00:51 PM UTC+2, Paul wrote:
of the nameplate. As a lot of companies are so incompetent they

can't be bothered to show a proper picture of it. And then I'm

forced to squint at some low-res picture on Newegg.

All for naught...I trashed it. But it was a Pentium II not a 486. It was super slow though--even with 2 GB RAM and a Seagate 50 GB HDD. Well it seemed slow compared to my multi-core machine, but at the time I bought it (in 1992) it was fast for its time. I made money off it, doing my work, so I did good with that machine. It was the last PC I had that I bothered to put in a 3.5" FDD.

RIP PC.

RL

RayLopez99 wrote:
On Saturday, February 16, 2013 7:00:51 PM UTC+2, Paul wrote:
of the nameplate. As a lot of companies are so incompetent they

can't be bothered to show a proper picture of it. And then I'm

forced to squint at some low-res picture on Newegg.

All for naught...I trashed it. But it was a Pentium II not a 486. It was super slow though--even with 2 GB RAM and a Seagate 50 GB HDD. Well it seemed slow compared to my multi-core machine, but at the time I bought it (in 1992) it was fast for its time. I made money off it, doing my work, so I did good with that machine. It was the last PC I had that I bothered to put in a 3.5" FDD.

RIP PC.

RL

On the older machines, it was caching or the lack of it,
that contributed to slowness. Some people owned machines,
where main memory wasn't cached through the entire address
space. A limitation of the cache design.

We're spoiled by the integrated cache facilities of modern processors,
where this is no longer an issue (all taken care of for us).

Paul

On Fri, 15 Feb 2013 11:07:26 -0800 (PST), RayLopez99
put finger to keyboard and composed:

I thought I saw this the other day--in this group--but I'd like to share how my 10+ year old 486 tower
I built from scratch died.

Mine's still running. Intel 486DX2-66 with 64MB RAM. I once had to
repair the graphics card (open inductor), but it's been reliable
otherwise.

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

On Feb 19, 7:13 pm, philo wrote:

I've been around for a long time.

In school I started out in the punch card days of the late 60's
writing FORTRAN programs.
In the late 70's built a computer to program EPROMS.

Do a lot of experimenting with obsolete machines.

Though it's not impossible to hack XP in such a way as to run it on a
486, I seriously doubt if the OP "just installed it" on a 486.

My "biggest" experiment in futility was hacking win98 to run on a 386.

Basically I turned it back to win95 to do so.

Yep. Wasn't until SE that the hardware *and* software seemed
integrated, at least to me. Too many anomalies, or just had to be
always on one's toes for data corruption and hardware faults. I was
happy as a pig in **** when first running into NT core technology
ported for XP (still running it, matter of fact). Got a lucky,
fortuitous, start as well, myself (knew the right people with the
right gear. All I had to do was to teach myself). Went from a basic
Intel instruction set platform, within a year, to running programs
congruently through upper DOS 364K/1M limit, into early EMS2.0
specifications from memory off expansion boards. Never really forgave
Intel for keeping the 386 platform artificially inflated while a
market for AMD or Cyrix/TI caught up, whereupon they dropped by some
such ridiculous factor of 10, nor bought my first *real* Intel until
the Celeron D series broke tradition by undercutting both price and
AMD's performance.