Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Doctor Gollum]

As above,

Do they have any residual value?

Currently fitted with 2 x 4GB DDR2 RAM  and a Western Digital 2.0TB SATA Hard Drive with a 64MB Cache

Originally rebuilt with Windows 8 Pro, but upgraded to Windows 10 when they were giving it away

Believe that it has been cleaned back to the bare bones.

[Shackeng]

Must be worth something, it’s got more than mine which works OK. 

[Doctor Gollum]

It was running as slow as cold grease, so God alone knows what Mother did to it

It was a significant upgrade from original when rebuilt in 2012/13 and, on paper, ought to be reasonable now

[Doctor Gollum]

Processor is one of these...

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/34229/intel-82801ibm-i-o-controller.html

[TheBoy]

Nope, sorry.  The RAM is unusable in anything remotely modern - its even too old for the desktops I use - and 2nd hand drives hold minimal value.

You didn't actually link to the CPU, but guessing from a series 4 chipset that its Intel Core Duo/Quad - which I can't give away (I have a Core Duo PC in the garage thats free to anyone if they shout before the next tip run).

[Doctor Gollum]

Ok, I'll have another go at getting the hard drive out and send it off to the tip then.

I stuffed as much RAM in it as possible when that was done post hard drive, but without updating the processor, there's clearly a limit to its ability.

[TheBoy]

Ok, I'll have another go at getting the hard drive out and send it off to the tip then.

I stuffed as much RAM in it as possible when that was done post hard drive, but without updating the processor, there's clearly a limit to its ability.

Yeah, but its RAM for a Series 4 chipset, so probably DDR2 (or at best DDR3) - you could look it up on crucial etc.  Anything bought now will be DDR4.

[Doctor Gollum]

Definitely DDR2, I acquired a pair from offtek? to try and chivvy it along a bit... It helped but it struggled with the volume of advertised shite on todays web pages.

Mother has been edumecated in how not to use it to try and avoid this. Also it transpires that she may have been running two anti virus products on it simultaneously, and it seemed to spend more time updating itself than being usable.

[TheBoy]

A Core 2 Duo cannot sensibly use sites like eBay now, due to all the embedded apps and naughty javascript running in the background.  Most of us buy ever faster machines, just so the ad agencies can suck up more of our processing capabilities to work around all the blocking techniques that we put in place to stop add agencies tracking us.

[LC0112G]

I've just updated my main works PC from a Core Duo Quad E8500 to a Core Duo Quad Q9650. That's basically the end of the line for upgrades on the LGA775 motherboards. There are a few 'Extreme' options that are slightly faster but also a lot more expensive. My main home lappy is a Core Duo T6670. So Core Duo isn't useless, but i'll admit it is approaching it's sell by date.

I would probably be better to switch to a 6th gen i3 or i5 (still need to support DOS, WinNT4 and Win2K) but the aggro of re-installing all the programs I use and finding the licence keys to re-activate everything puts me off that. Not to mention installing Win2K, Win7-32 and Win7-64 and finding all the right drivers.

What I have found is that many older DOS/Win2K programs actually run faster on my new home PC (10th gen i5 + Win10) under Dosbox, RunAsDate and sandboxie than their more modern 64 bit equivalents do natively. Crazy, and mostly due to the newer programs using effing Java to make them cross platform capable. 

[TheBoy]

Indeed, a Core 2 still has its uses - my primary laptop was still a Core 2 Duo until 2 or 3 months ago.  But popular ad laden sites used to be so desperately slow as it went off to all the various ad agencies....


With regards to modern software, the issue is 2 fold - modern millennial devs use all these wanky, inefficient languages like Go to write stuff in, which are slow, and their natural coding style is for development speed, not runtime, so you have all this bloat of massive frameworks to maintain in memory.  On the upside, its unlikely software in the future will be written in Java, due to Oracle's view on extracting as much cash from everyone.

An old DOS or 16bit Windows program had little choice but to be written in C/C++ until the likes of VB and Delphi came along. So will always run well (for those you can run through an emulator or virtualise) on modern kit, and is boosted by the improvements on modern gear.  Try something like Windows 1 or Windows 2 in a virtual machine on a modern machine, and it runs spectacularly well.

My PC in the garage - and oldish 3rd gen i5 - runs windows 10 as a general purpose OS so I can look up stuff on the internet, but also runs an XP VM for all the car diags stuff that runs better under XP.  That virtualised XP runs better than XP ever did back in the XP era.