An OCZ Vertex 3 480GB SSD to expand my array. These are getting scarce! One sees them on eBay only VERY occasionally. Hoping to spend $140 US or less.
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Have on hand for sale:
Parts Mule: A circa 2006 Dell Precision Workstation 470 that was good for its day but is presently non-functional because of leaky capacitors. One day I shut it off due to a power failure, and it never came on again. It has top of the line parts for its day - dual 3.6 GHz Xeons, 8 GB of RAM (6 slots full, so I'm not totally sure, but it's at least 8 GB), nVidia Quadro FX 3500, a DVD-RW drive, and I even have a couple of extra power supplies and a package of the right capacitors if I can find them - owing to my having started down the path of resurrecting it. No disk drives, though. It may be that with TLC it can be made to run again. If you have a Dell 470 and need hard parts or just want to upgrade the Xeons to the fastest - this is a great parts package. It's not fast by today's standards, but neither is it a slouch. It ran Vista x64 quite well for 8 years.
I can ship the whole lot to you for the cost of shipping (not cheap, since it's a big, solid desktop system, probably $75 or so depending on where you are) plus, say, $10 (which is roughly 1/500th of the original cost). Otherwise I'm going to just toss it all in the trash.
Then I found that I could buy a whole new Haswell-based small business server box for $200. A plain-Jane, low-end Dell PowerEdge T20 system that's surprisingly potent.
I added existing hardware (e.g., disk drives, monitor, keyboard, mouse that I already had) and about $150 more in SSDs for a RAID 5 array, installed a license for Win 7 Ultimate x64 I had laying around, and voila, a quite powerful modern and reliable system with 3 year factory warranty, and no additional expenditure in time just to get an ancient system working. It literally boots to the desktop before the swirly parts of the Windows 7 flag come together (something like 15 seconds).
As a bonus, the system uses like 14 watts just sitting there waiting for requests. It's literally silent and cold to the touch.
It seems a shame to retire something that's barely non-working, but at this ridiculously low price point it would have been stupid to have spent more hours to resurrect it.
<Rick> Good video. It's almost hard to believe that at one time Windows 98 was the resource hog, but even then, it still ran circles around what Windows 10 can do on today's modern hardware and look a heck of alot better doing it.
May 25, 2021 22:55:12 GMT -6
<Rick> As stated elsewhere, So much for the launch of Windows 11, "The Great Crash." Myself, I had a hard time getting into the site listed above, when I did get in, the video was partly done and then it crashed. There has been many other reports of crashing.
Jun 24, 2021 9:52:33 GMT -6
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<Rick> I see Microsoft has been very quick to pull down reports of site crashing regarding the Launch of Windows 11 on the Microsoft Insiders forum.
Jun 24, 2021 9:57:31 GMT -6
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<Rick> The rebroadcast is working okay.
Jun 24, 2021 11:00:25 GMT -6
<Rick> With reports of people being able to install the dev-edition of Windows 11 on machines not meeting spec, I thought I would give it a what-the-heck try. Lucky me, I'm caught in the downloading, doesn't meet spec, clearing, re-downloading loop on my machine!
Jul 2, 2021 7:08:46 GMT -6
<Rick> I've recently purchased a license for ArcaOS from www.arcanoae.com/ to play with. First impressions, it's still OS/2, but it now has a Linux twist to it.
Jul 2, 2021 7:32:53 GMT -6
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<dozrguy> laptop shit out and am stuck buying a new one. os win11 as fucked as win10 was?
Oct 2, 2021 12:56:10 GMT -6
<Rick> Let's see ..., my impression of Windows 11 is that it is a spruced up version of Windows 10 requiring a 64-bit processor plus a piece of security hardware that is less than 4 years old in order for it to run.
Oct 4, 2021 18:25:49 GMT -6
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<Rick> On the plus side, Microsoft is supposed to be supporting Windows 10 for some time to come for those of us still using systems with I7 or older processors.
Oct 4, 2021 18:44:35 GMT -6
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<dozrguy> i tried installing win10 om the 'shitout' pc this morning usung media creation. EPIC FAIL! went into an endless bootloop. win7 reinstalled just fine
Oct 21, 2021 11:23:38 GMT -6
<dozrguy> STILL so much bullshit and so little time for the kiddie ideas from the hill. My new laptop (MSI GE 11-UH461) would be an awesome "10" machine but because of Winblows I can only give it a "2"......wasted $3500
Oct 27, 2021 9:36:47 GMT -6
<Rick> Hello. Just checking in.
Mar 17, 2022 10:46:54 GMT -6
<isidroco> Each new w10 update adds >100000 useless files to \Windows\Servicing\LCU\Package_for_RollupFix... folders. Even in a SSD takes time to delete that stuff. In each version they manage to worsen stuff.
Mar 27, 2022 16:14:51 GMT -6
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<dozerguy> still traffic here?
Oct 9, 2022 17:32:44 GMT -6
<Rick> No, there does not seem to be very much traffic these days. I still check in from time to time.
Oct 9, 2022 20:08:58 GMT -6