I just tried to play a CD on this P3 tower. The good thing about this is it has
two optical drives, so I can use the first CDrom drive for linux live cd and the second for a music CD. This is yet another good thing about older PCs. If you come across a spare optical drive, install it in your older PC, then you can use these to do various tasks. The CD I loaded is a piano solo from the dollar store. It took well over 5 minutes to load and was very slow to start, however, it is playing it now and is very relaxing. Need to explore this feature more. The software for this is pMusic and is a part of puppy linux OS. Edit: Wow, I am glad that I decided to play it safe and look at process info. when the CD was playing. Almost all memory was being used and CPU usage at 100% when the CD was playing. Appears this is too much effort for this old PC. Best to rip the CD\DVD and then play it from file. Don't want this PC crashing. To rip this audio CD it took almost an hour on this P3 tower. Also, the file is quite big in mp3 format. Next time if I have to do this, will try using the ogg format, these are smaller in size. However, it is playing quite well for now and this is pleasing to listen, old PC zen. :) I feel I will benefit from buying a 16 or 32G USB flash drive to use with this PC. This will be more peaceful as I can have a variety of audio etc., to listen on this. Will reserve this for the future. On a different note, I have to use a USB hub with this PC as there are only two USB ports on this one. The end of this is heavy and due to its weight, specially when other devices are attached, seems to be damaging the wire slowly and create loose contact. I got this from dollar plus store for 2 bucks. Will have to try duct tape on it in the future to hold it secure to see if this helps. Another project for the future. Edit: Even if I learn a new software or a hardware feature on this PC once a week or once a month, it will still be a good learning experience in a year. I don't have to be at this all the time. On the hardware note, the PSU fan is making noise. It will be wise to clean and oil it down the road to avoid future issues. My uptime has slowly increased after I started using this old PC. All my learning, browsing no matter how demanding for the day is done in about an hour to an hour and a half. However, when used as a media center this PC got an uptime of even ten hours recently listening to mp3s and also streaming radio. Today, I had a very sad experience, this PC stopped working when I tried to rip a CD. It stressed me so much that I overate and went to sleep. I reminded myself later that all this is an exercise for fun and I can always use a better PC if needed. So, I booted this PC fresh and tried to rip the CD to ogg format and now it seems to be working. So the lesson learned is that for hard tasks, best to reboot PC after some rest and use it for the hard task first before trying out anything else on it. Will see how it finishes the rip, the size of the ogg files and if they play on this PC later. Wow, it ripped the CD very well in about 25 minutes for the ogg format !! Quite impressed. However, the file sizes are still larger than expected. Perhaps by setting lower values for the bitrate etc., I could have reduced then further. Still it is too much to store on this small flash drive. If use a 16G USB drive, I can covert this PC into an excellent media center. Last week, they were on sale for 10 bucks each. A friend adviced me to grab 3 of them atleast and I decided not to. This week I see a real need for one of them, however they cost 13 bucks a piece now. Will reflect on this more, for now I have the last 100 Mb or so free on my 2Gb USB drive. If this PC crashes and anything happens to the data on the drive, it will be a horrible disaster. This will be one another good reason to get a 16Gb USB drive and backup everything on this USB into that one. Not backing data is one of the worst things one can do with an older unreliable PC but I am guilty of it now. For now, I will enjoy listening to wonderful vocal music by a sweet talented lady on this PC. I got this CD on the kerb a few months ago, decided to grab it before the garbage collectors took it. |
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There will be 1000s, if not 10,000+ of those old systems still in use. Yeah, some of them will even be runnign old win98 installs, and some will have 2k/XP or even BSD/linux. Quote:
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Who will be using these older PCs in North America and for what reason ? Even
a P4 gives far better performance and is so cheap. Infact, folks are even starting to give P4s without hard drive for free slowly here. There is no hard drive on this PC, so have to use a Live CD with USB. I will try Flac format next time. Thanks a lot for all this info. Edit: I found this thread with win 98 users on older PCs. The main reasons are for special multimedia software(audio, scanning) and nostalgia purposes. http://blog.oldversion.com/why-use-windows-98/ A lot of CNC machine users also seem to be using win 3.1 PCs. This is quite interesting to know: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_control This means for sure there are a lot of older PCs in use for specific purposes this I agree. However, for routine use as a regular PC with Linux, still I feel that the number of older PC users is quite limited. With all the malware around and lack of support, it would be hard to use the net with older unsupported versions of Windows like 3.1, 98 etc.,. |
This talk of Win 3.1 reminds me that I want a copy of Win 3.11 and Microsoft Bob for playing with in VMs.
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I did push this PC to the extreme by adding too many files to the USB drive.
It started to freeze very badly even after reboot. Luckily it didn't crash and allowed me to delete some big audio files I burned. So, it is working ok for now again it appears. |
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Theres still lots of pentium pro, P1, P2 and P3 systems running in odd places, like some IT places. I know of at least 3 here that have old boxes hooked up to the network. At least one of them calls them 'mystery' boxes (whats that box do? I dont know, but if we turn it off the network stops....). Besides CNC there are other industrial/manufacturing places that have systems controlled by old ISA cards. While it was possible to get ISA slots with P4s, they are super rare and were very expensive to buy, so they tend to have older systems as well. I know of a few people running firewalls on old pentium systems. Lots of 'legacy gaming' systems around as well. Early P4s are actually pretty slow, and can in many cases be slower than pentium 3s with lower clockspeeds. Quote:
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Thanks for all the above info. again.
How can a PC be used as a firewall if it is offline ? Retrogaming seems to be big and this is understandable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrogaming I knew folks also who liked them but they used emulators. Retrogaming older PCs server a special purpose and so are expected to be offline. Nevertheless, they will still be in use, agreed. EDIT: I wonder what those companies using machines will do, if those old PCs go down or their parts fail ? I hope they have upgrade plans in place. Even if one uses a PC very carefully, with time, fan, hard drive, floppy drive etc., will fail. Parts have failed on this older PC that I am using even. |
You cant use a computer for a internet firewall if its offline (though it is possible to use one as an internal firewall on a network wthout net access).
BTW, the older systems I know off being used for firewals tend to use smoothwall or a similar linux/BSD distro. http://distrowatch.com/table.php?dis...ion=smoothwall Retrogaming can work on an emulator, but there are sometimes troubles, like sound or video being bad/unable to work with the game. Its easiest to get a 1990something 'PC' game going with win9X/DOS because thats what the games were designed to work with. Many people remember what they would loved to have had at some point in the past, but could never afford at the time. AWE 64s used to be several hundred dollars, now you can get then 2nd hand for $10-20. Similar situation with video cards, RAM, CPUs.....its not hard to build a whole retrogaming system with 'top of the line' 1990soemthing parts for less than the cost of a modern CPU. The companies using ISA control cards will just have to find the parts somewhere. Its not just limited to older systems, you can even get i3/i5/i7 DDR3 LGA 1155 Q77 chipset boards with an ISA slot! http://www.adek.com/ATX-motherboards.html I havent checked the pricing, but from previous experience I'd guess that board is going to be $500+ US. |
Wow, this explains a lot indeed then. Feels good to have things that were
unaffordable in the long term past atleast today for sure. Just CDROM drives alone costed like 200 bucks + tax when they were new. No one cares for them today. By the way, I went to dollar store again today. The number of IT items there is constantly decreasing, wonder why ? Will be nice to see some old OSes at the $ store someday :) Someone offered 5 big boxes of old IT parts on freecycle yesterday. I was considered for it initially. I thought I could pick and choose what I wanted. However, they wanted that entire set gone ASAP to make space. So, I was declined for the present. This is understandable. I need some special parts and was adviced that I will be considered for these in the future, this is quite good enough. Abandonware is also very interesting and exciting. Freedos is a good example in this regard. So folks into this would also love to use an older PC.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware |
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You can download 3.11 from MS TechNet legally with a subscription.
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A colleague did once obtain Windows for Workgroups for me but I sadly couldn't get hold of DOS to run it on and it didn't run on FreeDOS. One day I'll buy an old copy of DOS and give it a go. |
@rvijay: please note forums outside of the "General forum" are meant for technical questions only. Even after cleaning up your (repeated!) excessive amount of posts, what you have posted about and the way you did that does not relate to your original question. Please confine such posts to your personal LQ web log.
Thanks for your understanding and cooperation. |
Thanks a lot for moving this thread to the General Forum. You are an awesome mod unSpawn. :)
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For those interested in this thread, here is a summary of what happened. This thread solved my technical needs. However, there are still a lot of interesting things about older PCs, I was learning these slowly and others were also sharing here. So, I didn't close this thread. However,
this path didn't suite a technical forum. I had no idea that a thread can be moved to another more appropriate forum. After I was advised of this, I reflected on this for a few days and then requested this thread to be moved to the General Forum. This request was processed almost immediately. So, this thread is open again now. For my part, I have learned all that is there to learn about older PCs and even a lot more. Also, for the tasks that I am doing currently, I need to use a more recent browser and hence a more recent PC (from 2006 or so). So, for now I have nothing else new to share here. However, if you have any info. regarding old PCs, questions or even regarding windows software for older PCs, please feel free to share here. Thanks in advance and enjoy. :) |
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