new motherboard

Flash or Crash?

Reply to
F. George McDuffee
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So do a dual boot installation, and boot as required. My Ubuntu setup will read most windows files with no problem and OpenOffice/Libre loads them with no problems.

Reply to
F. George McDuffee

I dunno , Clare , I've never had a problem installing XP Home/XP Pro/Vista on any box I worked over - useta "restore" old boxes and give them to the kids on our street - using whatever license number was on the box . Some were from totally different comps that I upgraded to Pro . Only hassle I ever had was occasionally I'd have to activate over the phone , but even that was automated . I use discs burned from images downloaded from torrent sites and other places . And some of those licenses have been used on more than one comp over the years . Not having had problems myself , I don't understand all the negativity - I often have more problems locating drivers for a particular mobo than license problems . One exception is XP Home Media Edition , never could get that one to load properly . And I have several good license numbers for it .

Reply to
Terry Coombs

Here's the experiment I did. I made a dual boot system with win7 and whatever version of whatever distro with whatever desktop was popular at the time.

The experimental parameters were... Boot any OS. When you found something that REQUIRED the other OS, boot that one and stay there until you found something that REQUIRED the first OS. (REQUIRED meant I couldn't find something applicable in the repository that would actually install and work without intimate knowledge of missing dependencies, wrong library version, compile from source... etc.)

Started with linux. Very quickly had to boot windows. NEVER needed to boot into linux again. After a few weeks, I called the experiment conclusive and deleted the linux partition.

At the risk of repeating myself, it's not about the 99.9% that linux can do. It's about the 0.01 that a normal human can't do that's a deal breaker.

Computer users, most of whom are windows users, don't have ANY interest in learning that they can do the same stuff in a different way, most of the time. They want it to just work. They/we have zero interesting in knowing how or why. Just click the box and get what we want. If I wanted another hobby, I'd get one...and it wouldn't be linux.

Reply to
mike

================ Been very pleased with my AMD dual core laptop and desk top.

It appears many of the high performance gaming machines are now being built around overclocked 8 core AMD chips.

Some examples:

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FYI source for MSI motherboard [several others on this site]

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Reply to
F. George McDuffee

================= FYI

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Reply to
F. George McDuffee

My file storage "server" is an older laptop that I can set up when needed and then put away. Its USB3 ports are on an ExpressCard, which can handle four 2 TB external drives with their own power adapters on a USB3 hub and one 2 TB WD Passport powered from the port, plus the computer has a 1 TB secondary drive from another DVR computer in the CD bay and its own boot drive, currently 500 GB until I reallocate drives and install the 1 TB Momentus XT hybrid.

That will be 12 TB all accessible at nearly the drives' maximum speed via either USB3 or the internal SATA bus, on a laptop made in 2007. The power consumption is considerably under 100W so it can run from a normal home-sized UPS and coast through perhaps an hour-long blackout unattended.

When I rearrange files from one drive to another the transfer rate is around 60 MB/Sec as the computer reads one, then writes to the other. The ExpressCard doesn't allow full USB3 speed and neither do the drives. Error scans report speeds from 70 to a little over 100 MB/S, varying with block size.

As a precaution my surfing computer isn't connected to the others and any downloads on it are carefully sanitized before I store them elsewhere. I'm careful where I stick my browser and haven't really had trouble with malware.

When I've tapped it into someone else's Comcast it didn't seem to be hindered by its 1.6 GHz single-core CPU, which is at the lower edge of being able to display HDTV.

-jsw

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

Yeah, Coombs (5th post from the top) apparently thinks that all that is bullshit, though. How do you maintain the motherboard's intended magnetic fields/temperatures?

But yeah, if you like to aimlessly tinker, then reuse processors or even something like cutting up printed circuits.

Reply to
walter_evening

...

Is that to say that no one else should have had issues, either?

(just curious)

Reply to
walter_evening

Deopends entirely on what you are starting with. A "microsoft install disk" whether OEM or retail usually works even on a different manufacturer/configuration, but an oem restore" disk generally will NOT install on someone elses system, and when it does it often will not authenticate - even over the phone. It comes up "this copy of windows is not legitimate" - and you cannot authorize it. With the "microsoft install disk" you need a key for the same version (home, pro, ultimate or whatever) of windows, and often the key for a retail version will not install an OEM version, and vice versa. Been doing this now for 26 years. Installed and re-installed at minimum hundreds of systems from DOS 2 and windows 1 on up to current - and the current UEFI stuff is a royal BITCH.

Reply to
clare

They are definitely FAST. The problem I have run into is they are sometimes incompatible with some programs and hardware - and they have a bad habit of not lasting too long. I've had a lot od experience in the past with motherboards turning to "toast" inder the chip - particularly when overclocked. I just can't be bothered with them any more - as I don't do gamer machines, and my clients generally expect the computer to keep on ticking for 7 or more years.

Reply to
clare

Second that. I bought a 3.0 GHz Pentium core 2 duo, 4 megs ram, 1 Tb HDD, WITH win 7 pro 64 bit, from them for $199 plus shipping. Added another 4 megs ram for about $30 from EBay and it's been a great computer for her.

Reply to
Steve Walker

Is there a Sweet Spot for used machines with a good tradeoff between performance and grief?

I went with the Dell Latitude D series business laptops which are very rugged and easy to work on, and parts are relatively cheap, but the performance of even the final, top-end models is on the low side for Windows 7.

-jsw

Reply to
Jim Wilkins
[ ... all of my previous text snipped -- not needed here I think ... ]

Granted. Were you the one who posted the original problem? I've lost track there. If not, does *he* really want to do anything which linux can't do for him?

O.K. I don't use VOIP so did not consider that.

But there are times when I consider a state of "no phone" to be a *benefit* when trying to work on something. :-)

O.K. Again not something which I do.

*Plain* text? Hmm ... you do know about the dos2unix and unix2dos programs? Convert the pair that MS-DOS uses to the which unix uses and back the other way. Interesting, they are not present in my Ubuntu box.

O.K. "apt-get install unix2dos" got them both, so I don't even have to bother compiling them from source.

Most word processors seem to like to keep each paragraph as a single massively long line.

Unix editors like gnu can handle any line length you can fit in the system's memory.

Jove (my one favorite editor) barfs at over 2K line length -- but an easy change to the source and a re-compilation turns it to some thing more reasonable. I forget whether the max is currently 32K or 64K but somewhere around there is enough to deal with the e-mail with the "paragraph is a single line" disease. :-)

O.K. I've never used VB. I'll bet that the PIC basic pro (or an equivalent) is available from somewhere. (It didn't *come* with the Windows box, did it?) Perhaps even the Palm basic as well.

I've written in a number of BASICs, (the best two were HP's Rocky Mountain Basic, and MicroWare's BASIC-09 for OS-9.)

Assembly language for motorola's MC6800 and MC6809.

A little FORTRAN.

Quite a bit of Pascal.

Different strokes for different folks.

O.K. Your choice. I ported a bunch of utilities which I wrote from DOS-68 to OS-9 to Unix with C only being an option in the latter two.

I find FireFox offering to sync my bookmarks and the like between systems -- though I don't know whether that translates to storing it offline somewhere *they* own. :-)

Bookmarks can easily be exported into HTML and then read into a browser on another system.

Right -- with the benefits that the virtual environment can be stable while you add or change hardware, since it is all emulated anyway, so once you have it configured, you don't need to worry about re-activating it.

Yes -- even the command-line stuff. I used a batch of unix utilities in a Windows machine at work to make myself happier. Trying to remember who the vendor was. And later, there is the CYGWIN.

O.K. Since I don't use Windows, I didn't know about that. Same thing between Any of my unix programs and the Mac Mini with OS-X. The Mac moves all the stuff which was in the top bar of programs into its own top bar, which changes depending on where the focus is. (The Mac does have a unix under the GUI, and I go to that level frequently, because *I* am more comfortable in that environment.

Nope! It is more a matter of the comfortable way.

Now where I would scream about the right way vs the wrong way would be on keyboards -- in particular the location of the "Control" key. For me, it really needs to be to the left of the 'A' key, and I could do without the "Caps Lock" totally. But this is because a lot of the programs I use require frequent use of the "Control" key. As a result, I tend to collect Sun USB keyboards and use them with the ex Windows boxes, and the Mac Mini, and everything where I can.

Actually -- it is more that it follows a *different* convention, formed by the X11 community, and things like SunTools and other windowing systems which preceded X11. For those of us who prefer unix, it is a very comfortable convention.

And -- a lot of that is selectable by which GUI you use. There are a number of them, including those which people who came to the unix world from Windows wrote to look like unix.

And the Mac can easily claim that their convention is the

*original* one, as they got the windowing system from the Xerox Star, and Microsoft got Windows by trying to copy Apple's Macintosh. (Not to mention how they got MS-DOS -- by ripping off (through a third party) CP/M-86. Go early enough in the MS-DOS world, and you will find Digital Research (CP/M) copyright notices compiled into the utilities. :-)

Well ... I recently got an e-mail which I *know* carried the "CryptoLocker" malware. It didn't do anything, because my system:

1) Does not try to run everything in e-mail attachments. * 2) Does not know how to run a ".exe" or a ".scr" file. 3) Does not know how to run Intel code. I'm typing on an UltraSPARC system. :-) * Outlook Express at least used to (unless carefully configured from the default shipped) try to preview attachments, and would often execute malware in the process.

Of course, if you don't use Microsoft's e-mail clients, you are less likely to trigger something like this -- except by careless clicking.

My biggest problem from malware was on day-one of one in particular, which was infecting Windows machines around the world, and they were *all* trying to send me copies to infect my systems too. My systems could not be infected, but 900+ large binaries really brought my e-mail system to a crawl, until I activated the "databytes" limit on qmail -- which rejected anything above the limit set in that file.

Absolutely. But if you can keep people from reading e-mail as root the damage which it can do is minimized. And not having e-mail clients which happily try to "preview" attachments by (possibly) running them is another big help.

And for systems exposed to the outside net, I run OpenBSD -- a unix flavor which is aggressively security conscious.

While I have a dedicated Windows machine which is almost never booted. Perhaps once or twice a year.

One of the other things I like about my unix systems -- I can log into any of them around the house without having to walk to where they are. I use ssh to log in (encrypted data transfer, and doubly encrypted during the login phase), and once logged in, I start a program on that system, and it pops up a window on the system from which I connected, and accepts the keyboard and mouse form that system. (There is a program to let that be done between Windows and Unix (both directions) -- but while running the Windows system from a remote machine, the Windows screen duplicates the screen seen by the remote system -- and anyone who comes by there can play with the mouse and keyboard to interfere with what you are doing. On the unix systems, not only is that a different session (no interaction), but I can use it from its own keyboard and monitor while two or three others are also using the same system.

O.K. I created a bootable thumb drive to install linux on a CD-ROM-less machine (larger than a palm-top, smaller than a laptop) using the Mac Mini. It just happened to be easier at the time.

This is one reason that I prefer OpenBSD for systems exposed to the outside net. Serious security focus, single person at the head of the project.

And yes -- I dislike later versions of Ubuntu linux for probably the same reasons that Windows users might like it. :-)

Some companies *must* have a service contract. For them, RedHat makes sense.

Not always. I get some of my hardware from hamfests, and there may not even be a disk drive in there, let alone an OS.

They may, indeed.

And mine were (in order)

1) Altair 680b (raised from a kit) 2) SWTP 6800 (also from a kit). 3) SWTP 6809 (also from a kit, and the first to run a somewhat unix-like OS -- OS-9. 4) COSMOS CMS-16/UNX (v7 unix on Motorola 68000 CPU).

And gazillions since then.

While I really liked OS-9, and from there I got access to weird unix systems at work -- being used for an e-mail system written in

*FORTRAN* of all things. But that prepared me for the unix system from a hamfest.

And all of this before I every *used* a MS-DOS machine, let along a Windows machine.

I know that *I* am. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

You have climbed the learning curve and know how to make linux do what you need. We have done the same with Windows, and I once was there on a Mac. If the set of what one does well, which isn't universal for any of them, fits your needs that's fine, but it may not be the best for someone else with different needs. They are tools, not competing religious sects.

-jsw

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

Whoa!! Terry, my, myyy !! That's a pretty heavy-hitting comment coming from a master cabinet maker (dont'cha think?)

None of this addresses modern motherboards Snag

Reply to
mogulah

FWIW

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Reply to
F. George McDuffee

You will have to define what 'modern' is and what 'motherboards' you expect.

I have a modern extensive motherboard in my PC. While it is only a 64 bit machine, I hope for a bigger one someday but this might be my last.

Motherboards are designed almost entirely in the R.O.C.

A DDR3 motherboard is modern. An i7 six core cpu running over 3.6 GHz isn't old.

Alienware

Martin

Reply to
Martin Eastburn

As a practical suggestion to the groups, if you are using the Firefox browser there are a number of URL shorteners available for installation. click on {Tools} click on {Add-ons} type {URL shortners} in search box press {enter} and pick one to install FWIW I am using TinyURL Generator 2.6.1 which seems to work well. see

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Reply to
F. George McDuffee

I've worked with corporate intranets that tolerated computers as old as Win 98SE, kept to run irreplaceable old custom software, by not allowing them access to the external Internet. Even if they aren't networked it's easy to store and transfer files on a 2TB portable drive.

I backup the 2TB WD Passport Ultra onto a pair of AC-powered 2TB drives. All three can run simultaneously on a USB3 ExpressCard in my old laptop.

-jsw

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

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