OS/2, Linux, Win2000, and W98, oh my.
Current Systems History Advice SETI OS Corner Parts Box Network Connections Peripherals Technotoys
From working on bicycles and lawnmowers to modifying cars and now computers, all systems custom built by yours truly. Nowadays, I favor dual machines running Linux and Win2000, and some hot rod single-CPU machines running the OS/2 and Windows 98 fleet.
| CPU | OS | Motherboard | RAM | FSB | Disk/Vid | SETI | Etc. |
|
"Tinman" Athlon 1.4Ghz@150FSB Alpha PAL6035 cooler |
OS/2 4.0 Fixpack 14 | IWILL KK266 (KT133A chipset) | PC133 128mb Crucial CAS2 | 133 to 160mhz, woo hoo! |
3, all-SCSI, 7200rpm Matrox Mill II |
5:15 to 6:25 |
Highly overclockable, FSB to 157 but need some really high-performance RAM. KTS Main communication machine and OS/2 slickness |
|
"Lion" Dual Intel P3 866EB and 733EB CPU's |
W2K | MSI 6321 (Via Apollo Pro 133A) | PC133, 512mb, CAS3 | 143 |
IBM 75GXPs, 7200rpm Geforce 2 MX |
9:00 |
butter-smooth on all tasks Connie's home PC |
|
"Wizard" Dual AMD "Palomino" XP 1700's |
W2K | Tyan Tiger 760MP chipset | 512MB ECC Registered DDR SDRAM | 133 |
IBM 60 and 75 GXP's. Elsa Gladiac video |
4:30 |
Very high-performance, Enermax 465 PS. A bit warm in an InWin Q500 mid-tower case. |
|
"Dorothy" AMD "Palomino" XP 1700 |
W98 |
Asus A7V266-E |
Corsair Micro PC 2400 DDR SDRAM @2.5 CAS |
145 |
IBM 30gb 5400rpm ATI Voodoo 3 |
3:30 |
Micro ATX case, a bit small and warm. Main W98 box |
|
"Toto" Dual XEON 400's 1mb L2 cache |
RedHat Linux 7.0 | SuperMicro S2DGE | PC100 384mb CAS2 | 100 Scotty says she canna' take no more |
several older drives and SCSI subsystem S3 vga, Xwindows and telnet |
13:00's, bulletproof | gateway, caching nameserver, SAMBA, SQUID, network backups |
|
"Roguski" Athlon @1ghz Alpha PAL6035 cooler |
W2K | Asus A7V133 | PC133 256mb CAS3 | 133 |
IBM GXP 40gb, 7200rpm Matrox G400 dual head |
6:50 | CSR University work computer, office tasks and DVD |
|
"Scarecrow" Pentium III 866EB @140, for 910mhz |
W98 |
Gigabyte GA-6VA7+ KT133 chipset |
128mb PC150 Crucial CAS2 | 140FSB |
2gb oooooldie S3-based PCI card |
6:30 thereabouts |
Poor chipset and poor overclocker, but it is an AT form factor letting me use Ye Olde Gateway full tower case. Mika's game machine. She's had her own computer since she was 4yrs old. |
Connie's first computer was purchased to help write a textbook, the venerable 1986 Kaypro 8088 with two floppy drives running DOS and Wordstar, still her favorite wordprocessor. In 1991, upgrade fever hit and we got her a real 20mb hard drive. She resisted, but finally was convinced swapping 5¼ floppies was old-fashioined. woo hoo! Parked in a garage in Lawrence, KS.
My first computer arrived Christmas, 1990, a 286/16 with 40mb hard drive and 2400 internal modem. The 286 CPU, motherboard, and 2400 modem are currently somewhere in Russia, while the case and monitor survived several upgrades and only recently were put out to pasture. My first upgrade around 1994 was a motherboard swap to the height of luxury, a 486DX33 with VLBus graphics card and 8mb RAM to run OS/2 2.1... cause Windows 3.1 just couldn't cut it, and truth be told, I like the command line and excess mousing around is a pain in the patooty. Eventually it topped out at 20mb RAM and Warp 3, then by 1997 was too sluggish to work with. Best upgrade ever was a 14.4 ZyXEL modem, it paid for itself in reduced communications cost inside 3 months.
After careful research, a complete new dream system, Net-Express, arrived early in 1997, sporting a PPro150, 128mb ram, and all-SCSI subsystem in a PC Power and Cooling 10-bay tower case. All hand-picked components, with driver support for OS/2, Linux, and any Windows system:: Asus XP6NP6 motherboard, Buslogic SCSI, Matrox Mill. II, Toshiba 15X CD, Nokia 447xi 17" monitor. This system was balanced so well that it suited my purposes for more than 4 years, and truth be told the upgrade wasn't an absolute necessity. All parts of that system are still in use except the motherboard, CPU, and memory. Starting in mid-2000, it was finally time to upgrade the other lowly gift 486DX2/66 and aging P166MMX systems to a more modern era, having almost fully skipped the Pentium 2 series.
Enter the Celerons, P3's, XEON's, and finally the Athlon and Duron boxes. It all started innocently enough, joining SETI. Then, overclocking. Need more power! Research, build, add to the home network, migrate the oldest boxes down to the Linux network gateway box and the kids' computer. Repeat cycle. (suffer network outages, discover gotchas and incompatible hardware, etc). Next purchase: hotrod RAM for an extreme FSB overclock on the latest darling, the IWILL KK266 Athlon motherboard, which has run @1.25ghz with 157FSB, but the ram isn't stable... yet. Here comes Mushkin!
2001/11/01 The 815 board had a bad bios flash, didn't see the point in fixing it when for the same money better technology is available. Dual Tyan Tiger 760MP, AMD XP 1700's (not the fastest, best bang for the buck at the time), and a video card. Tra-lee-la, new machine. Moved some drives between systems and now Connie has the dual P3 board, more than adequate and stable for her computing needs, and for development work the Tyan moves to heavy lifting W2K photoshop and development work.
First computer. I think just getting any computer is important, so as long as it does what you want, go as cheap as possible (accept castaways) but not on RAM or your monitor if purchasing new. The main thing is to get started. A journey of a thousand miles.... Later, you can upgrade some parts to get more performance, once you develop a pattern of use and understand better where the weak points or bottlenecks are in your current setup.
Research. There are no shortage of sites out their willing to proffer their advice, some better than others. Some of my favorites include:
Upgrading. PC's have interchangeable parts, there is nothing to be afraid of inside the case that a teenager with a Phillips head screwdriver can't tackle. Just make sure the power supply is unplugged and your data backed up before you unleash the genius. Easy as pie to swap parts. The remarkable thing over 10 years is that prices for individual components of a system remain fairly constant (CPU: $70-500; motherboard: $110-$180; case: $40-$300; hard drive: $120-$$$; monitor: $200-ohmygod), but the technology keeps improving. Todays hotrod is tomorrow's (well, in 2 years anyway) "piece of junk."
Case, monitor, keyboard, printer, perhaps RAM, network/comms stuff can be reused most likely, leaving you with a CPU/motherboard purchase to the latest and greatest for less than $400 most likely. Get a new hard drive when you need one and not before, because bigger and faster within a year and still around $150 is a constant.
CPU's: I like performance computers, but I stay at least one or two steps back from the leading/bleeding edge, because the price drops just come too fast for my taste, and "ultimate" speed demons are king of the hill for about 2 months, max, yet you likely pay several hundred dollars more for that transient privilege. Currently the AMD Athlon/Duron line is more appealing to me than the aging P3 line, and the P4 design does not fit my needs, will be shortlived in its current socket, so I pass until the "Northwood" P4's with 512KB L2 cache comes out, then we see how it compares with AMD chips.
I leave my computers up 24/7, on the home network, so they might as well be doing something useful, like the seti@home project. Searching for ET, and tuning my systems for good performance. There is a wealth of information available about SETI and program add-ons, such as SetiSpy and SetiQueue
Long ago when choosing the first computer, it was IBM or Apple Mac. Not having experienced a Mac, and given the obvious advantages of lower-cost and non-proprietary hardware, 10 times more software available, and a willingness to fiddle, DOS seemed the better choice.
So why not purchase a 286 for $300 less than the new 386/16? It ran all the software then available. Silly me, leaping before learning 286 was considered "brain-dead." Win 3.0 then came out, but I persevered with learning commandline and batchfile processing. GUI's became the big thing, I avoided it for as long as possible because Win 3.1 was pretty yucky, frankly.
I heard good things about OS/2, and started using it at version 2.1 in 1994 or so. Merrily I upgraded through Warp 3.0, learned to love downloadable internet fixpacks, and now the lovely Warp 4.0. However, the world chose differently, and since development is now essentially halted I've succombed to the dark side of GPF's and blue screens of death in Windows 98, and started the Linux journey, though I must say Windows 2000 is a very nice product and eventually the OS/2 box may give way, if only I can gather together the equivalent of 7 years of OS/2 software that still does most all of what I want a computer to do.
Easing the transition, or perhaps permanently avoiding it, I've added a LinkSys 4-port Keyboard/Video/Mouse switcher, so I have the luxury of 4 computers and 4 operating systems (OS/2, Linux, W98, W2K) always on, just one click away.
Over the years, these things just accumulate. 20-30 floppy/IDE cables, AT case bits, power supplies, several ISA Soundblasters, old CDRoms, keyboards, ISA multi-IO (IDE, Com/parallel port), and lots of cables and other junk. Wish I knew what to do with it all, it isn't likely to be useful with motherboards including all the IO functions onboard nowadays. Network cards are always useful, should have kept some VGA cards as well for other linux projects.
I started a home network around 1998, it's pretty common now. The plan was to share the one internet connection via OS/2 with Connie's computer. It was a bit of a struggle making OS/2 and Windows play nice, but eventually I got it all sorted out, call me a masochist, or simply persistent. I had no idea if it was going to be useful for home use or not really, so I started with just a cross-over cable and two 10mbps NIC's. When a freebie 8yr-old Gateway tower 486DX2/66 came along shortly thereafter, Redhat 5.1 Linux quickly got installed and then the fun of setting up SAMBA, Squid, and other general configuration "issues". Of course I added a 10mbps switcher, then another 100mbps switcher, then upgrading the network cards.... well the fun just goes on, 7 computers and counting. Anyone got a spare Mac?
ISP connections, that is. First computer had a modem, so I used local BBS's, and FIDO-net came around. I loved the TradeWars online game, written by Gary Martin of Lawrence, Kansas. Heard about the internet, but it wasn't available for the general public, and I had graduated with my law degree by then. Moved to Japan, and used local BBS's, eventually FIDO-net came around. Then, TWICS offered internet connections! Whee! Joined up, but it was on a VAX/VMS system, and not even shell access... we are talking primitive, needing to set up ASCII string captures to minimize online time, because for me it was a long-distance call and EXPENSIVE. This was before PPP and SLIP came on the scene, but no problemmo, Lynx to the rescue [IMG] [IMG] [IMG]. Well. Roger Boisvert had a computer set up, with the idea of becoming an ISP eventually, so I got my USENET newsgroup fix from him, enter the land of SOUP and shell programs to download the newsgroups. TWICS was very slow in addressing my concerns of telecommuting from the relative boonies, so I moved to GOL. Then GOL never added a dial-in POP nearby, so I moved my account down to the minimal and added a local dial ISP, pretty cheap. Finally the local cable station offered 24/7 reasonably fast 128K cable ISP, so here I am, with 2 dial-up accounts and a 24/7.
Beyond a single color printer on the network, a single scanner, and one CD-recorder, haven't needed much else unless you count the Sony VBOX's that let my computer run the video editing decks, or the spare modems, ISDN, keyboard/video/mouse switcher.
I tend to resist the newest, because I know it is mucho expensive, will only get better in a couple of years, and I can generally wait.