There is a reason there are still 1970’s mainframes still chugging on out there. PRIMEs, System 38s, A/S 400s, God knows what out there. Running on patched power cables with hard drives the size of 90’s home PCs, in closets with holes knocked in the wall for window air conditioners. Running through multiple emulators, adding 26 years to the date to avoid 2k issues. Likely running a couple greenbar dot matrix printers. That’s on top of the systems running on old 386’s, 486’s and old Sun and generic Unix boxen.
I know of at least two Prime systems that are still running, and as of the early 2000’s Building 1 at Fort Benjamin had a system even older than that running something involving military paychecks.
With the big push to get everyone onto Windows 10 by the end of July, here’s a problem to watch out for, especially if you’re going from Windows 7 or even Vista up to 10. If you had Win 8 or 8.1, you may have already run into this.
Vista has a feature that will search the network and install print drivers for any printers it finds. It’s not on by default in Vista and 7, but is from 8 and afterwards. The issue is that the driver will be installed the Microsoft way using a WSD Port instead of a Standard TCP/IP port. Result: on at least one brand of copiers and printers, you will experience a delay in printing of 5 to 20 minutes per page as the machine just sits there waiting for data. Change it back to a Standard TCP/IP port and it transmits at full speed again.
My brother struggled to get our father’s Win7 machine upgraded to Win10 for months, but it just wouldn’t take. I think he even tried a clean install.
Yesterday he finally figured it out. The ten year old video card isn’t supported on Win10. So my brother sent Dad out to Staples to buy literally whatever video card they had. Even the crappiest unit on sale there would run circles around the 10 year old card w/ 256MB of memory that was previously in there.
Oh that’s nothing, you should have seen my Dad’s old Dell (2001 to 2014, that thing lasted too long) where the amount of time it took to even load print dialogue could be measured in minutes depending on how much RAM the print document was taking up simply by being open. Then you had to wait for the computer to undraw the dialogue, think for a while, then slow down even further, and just as you were about to restart it assuming it had crashed, then the printer would wake up…
On a more serious note, why does MSFT hate standards? Why? This is like the whole XKCD thing; trying to create another standard to take over from a handful of competing standards just makes the problem worse.
Years ago, the joke was, “Add 4MB and retry”. These days, it would be “Add 8GB and retry”.
I saw something like you described a few days ago. Customer’s anti-virus and one other program had the CPU usage pegged at 99%. The 4GB of installed RAM compounded how slow the computer was running because of those two.
My SoundBastard Audigy 2 ZS isn’t officially supported under Win10 either. With the generic MS drivers it makes the right noises but I think you need the official Creative drivers for any Audigy-specific features such as ASIO to work. Installing the latest Creative Win7 drivers makes it scream like a banshee… so I guess it’s time to bite the bullet and pull the card.
I’ve never really used expensive sound cards or speakers but I always get a shock by how appallingly bad laptop speakers are. If a set of £4.99 speakers made by the 便宜又俗气 Corporation sound better than the toilet paper cones in a £400 laptop, you know you’re ripping your customers off.
I used to have a Soundblaster 512MB card years ago. Back then, games required a bit more umph behind the sound department in order to play them (and some mother boards didn’t have on-board support). But with Realtek’s on mobo arrangement fitting 90% of the needs of computer users out there, I don’t really have a way of justifying a purchase for a sound card. I don’t record or use my computer for soundwork.
I remember when I upgraded to an Audigy card, likely from a SB16. It was AMAZING. It didn’t hurt than I had a pretty nice set of Logitech speakers - surround with sub. In the second level of Alien vs Predator, where you’re in an indoor space with corridors and stairwells, the music & ambient sounds would change based on what the echo would really be like in that space… I was blown away. It made other games like Quake more immersive, too. The newer onboard sound is pretty good, though. It would be interesting to do a side by side comparison of a current gen card vs onboard. I haven’t seen for an article doing that type of comparison, but may look when I have some free time.
I originally had a SB16 Vibra but acquired an AWE32 at one stage (the Descent and Duke3D soundtrack sounded pretty good on that). Being ISA I had to farewell the AWE32 in about 2003 when I built a new box with no ISA slots, so put a SB64 in there instead due to nothing onboard (or if there was, it was crap). The MIDI setup I was using lagged quite a lot with the SB64, so I bought the Audigy for the ASIO features.
I haven’t had a need for that for 6+ years (I use a Focusrite Scarlett 18i8 for recording nowadays) but I kept the Audigy anyway due to its superior DAC… but unless Creative comes to the party with a new driver (which they won’t because obsolete), I think it’s time to say goodbye.
Probably woefully off topic since I’m popping in 45 days later but I have upgraded all my machines to W10 with no issues. Gratch is still having issues with hers and I think it’s her hybrid drive. But it’s her machine and she can figure it out.
W10 upgrade will not be free at the end of July (?). The best plan I’ve seen to get it a free upgrade and still stay on W7 is to clone your drive, upgrade it and get the new key then reload your image back down. But YMMV.
I’m wondering what the best/cheapest way to get Win10 Pro would be. Getting it through the Windows store is around CDN$200.
I still have that gigantic kiosk computer/display with the 42" touchscreen and would like to shop it out for events as an information point. The best way to set up kiosk mode is to configure an account using the assigned access method, which isn’t available in the home version.
Then, I can lock it down to one application (browser) and that browser to one website.
I think it is about the same price everywhere. Used to be, you could get a discount if you were building a new system - you had to buy hardware at the same time, like a mobo or hard drive. I don’t recall seeing that kind of deal on Win 10, though.
@Rizak, if you don’t have Fry’s near you, if you would like, you can order it and I’ll pick it up, email you the key and a download link to the installer ISO.
If you’re in Canada, I don’t know if it would be legal to mail the physical package to you later, or if it would get blocked in customs.
