Computer!

[PhilinYuma]

Yay! Is this the coolest accessory to put on a blue-theme computer case or what?

http://www.smithsonianstore.com/catalog/pr...productId=17568

Does Victory Dance. Trips over Dog.

(So, Lemmiwinks, how old were you when Win ME came out? It was the most unstable and irritating of all the Windows flavors, much worse than Vista, but it did introduce plug 'n play and System Restore.)

 

[sbugir]

Phil, I believe I was 7 years old when Win Me came out. All I can say is, it really did suck. My whole 7 year old life was ruined by the stupid OS...Okay not really, but still. If I'm not mistaken Phil, plug n play was Win95. Actually, Microsoft took the idea of plug and play from Apple ^.^

 

[PhilinYuma]

Phil, I believe I was 7 years old when Win Me came out. All I can say is, it really did suck. My whole 7 year old life was ruined by the stupid OS...Okay not really, but still. If I'm not mistaken Phil, plug n play was Win95. Actually, Microsoft took the idea of plug and play from Apple ^.^

Haha, lemmiwinks! You laugh when I write my long, convoluted answers, and then when I write an oversimplified one, you jump on me!

You're right, of course, Win 95 had the dreaded "plug and pray", and Win 98 improveds on it. Win ME, though, introduced UPnP (Universal Plag and Play) which is still in use in W7, and is what I was thinking of in my too-brief post.

I've never checked out the idea that Microsoft "stole" the idea of PnP fromApple. It wouldn't surprise me, but I think that IBM's PS/2 (1987?) had a rudimentary integration device (a bunch of disks as I remember -- I never owned one) instead of using jumpers*, while Apple II, which was still in production in the late '80's (early 90's?) still expected wires to be soldered together to accomodate a new device! :lol:

Here's a thought for an eager computer historian such as yourself, though. Win ME required 320 MB disk space for installation. Win XP required 5X that much and Vista amazed everyone by requiring a "bloated" 15GB for 32 bit. The same pundits are now praising W7, but few mention that it requires 1GB more space than Vista for the 32 bit version, and the 64bit that I installed requires 20GB! To put that in perspective, a 20GB HDD in 2000 would have cost $250 -$300, and you would have no space left over to run any progs or store any files!

*As i write this, I have an old "Toshiba Samsung" optical drive, from late 2006 on my desk, with an IDE jumper showing it to be a "master". Some devices, which probably only had their function/value set once in their working lives, didn't even bother with DIP switches.

 

[sbugir]

Haha, lemmiwinks! You laugh when I write my long, convoluted answers, and then when I write an oversimplified one, you jump on me! You're right, of course, Win 95 had the dreaded "plug and pray", and Win 98 improveds on it. Win ME, though, introduced UPnP (Universal Plag and Play) which is still in use in W7, and is what I was thinking of in my too-brief post.

I've never checked out the idea that Microsoft "stole" the idea of PnP fromApple. It wouldn't surprise me, but I think that IBM's PS/2 (1987?) had a rudimentary integration device (a bunch of disks as I remember -- I never owned one) instead of using jumpers*, while Apple II, which was still in production in the late '80's (early 90's?) still expected wires to be soldered together to accomodate a new device! :lol:

Here's a thought for an eager computer historian such as yourself, though. Win ME required 320 MB disk space for installation. Win XP required 5X that much and Vista amazed everyone by requiring a "bloated" 15GB for 32 bit. The same pundits are now praising W7, but few mention that it requires 1GB more space than Vista for the 32 bit version, and the 64bit that I installed requires 20GB! To put that in perspective, a 20GB HDD in 2000 would have cost $250 -$300, and you would have no space left over to run any progs or store any files!

*As i write this, I have an old "Toshiba Samsung" optical drive, from late 2006 on my desk, with an IDE jumper showing it to be a "master". Some devices, which probably only had their function/value set once in their working lives, didn't even bother with DIP switches.

Phil, I never laugh at your long, over explained answers, I am boggled and amazed by them; and find them to be amusing and knowledgeable. As for jumping on you, I couldn't resist. (Okay, come to think of it, I have laughed...)

I believe you're right about IBM's PS/2 integration system, as for the Apple II's soldering wires to accommodate new devices statement, all I can say is LOL. Funny. Interestingly, the Apple II had so many external drives and inputs that it was really flexible and universal, provided you had the dough to sustain the accessories needed and of course the soldering skills needed :lol: .

As for memory being so expensive back in the day, it's amazing how cheap it is now. 2TB HD costs >$200, is that amazing or what? I recently purchased a 4TB mirrored hard drive for less than $250. And, being the Apple fanboy that I am, I have it hooked up to my Apple TV with every single song, video, and photo backed up, and ready to view/listen .

Ohhh, and I forgot to add, as for the Windows OS memory usage, I find it hilarious how much memory it does take up when virtually/essentially the OS hasn't changed much whatsoever. Seriously, it takes me 32G (to have 15GB free) to load XP onto my Mac just so I can play games via Bootcamp. Ridiculous. Honestly, Windows XP requires more space than the new Mac OS Snow Leopard (6GB). Oh, and does anyone else find the "I'm a PC campaign advertisements" funny? Recently there was a commercial where this 10 year old kid is like "Oh wow Vista! And 4GB of RAM WOW!" Seriously kid? Do you even know what Ram is? Vista practically needs those 4GB of RAM to run moderately smooth. Or how about the commercial with the Windows movie maker/picture viewer? Seriously, I just laughed when I saw a little Asian girl modifying her picture. I waited for the machine to crash. And what is even more amusing, is how they found metadata of Apple machines editing those commercials... Microsoft reacted by scrubbing the metadata after the commercials were released. Hilarious eh?

Ooo, just read your specs. I guess I missed that post lol. Seems like a good machine, just curious as to why you're using an AMD cpu? I mean, they're great and all, but you could have easily gotten an Intel for the same price and probably runs faster. And, remember how you asked about BioShock 2? You'll be needing something a bit more powerful , but I do realize you said your not exactly a gamer. I'm hoping BioShock 2 will be released in 3D, I'd love to get the Nvidia 3D vision.

Nonetheless, looks like you did well. Great machine, ha, and that's coming from an avid Mac user .

 

[PhilinYuma]

And a week later...still having innocent fun! I must confess that one of the stimuli for this project was a book on computers for "Elders". It had a simple sentence structure, a rather large font, and i think that you could redeem a coupon for hot chocolate at the back. Recently I saw a line in my huge Win7 book, warning ignoramuses, let alone Elder ignoramuses from messing around with repartitioning, so I immediately sent off for the Paragon partition manager and reduced my C drive to 100GB, just for the OS and a few start up odds and ends.

When I installed W7, it did not restart automatically during the process, and I had to do it manually. With a partion managrer, though, restarting manually SUYD (Screws Up Yr Disk). Ouch! I had to replace it with Drive #2 (easy to reformat later) and reinstall the OS with the same prob. I installed all of the cute things on the mobo disk, but nothing has changed. I still suspect a missing driver, but I'll check that on the BIOS settings tomorrow. I was also hoping to flash the BIOS (what a great thought! I even bought new underwear! ) but this one is only four mos old, so I doubt that that will do much.

But I shall most certainly prevail; it's just a matter of time, so as always, wish me luck.