I’ve been “outta the loop” here more than usual; mostly a combination of JimCo-related carp and extreme ire over the election malarkey.
Had a pollster ring our bell yesterday morning; I answered despite still being in my jammies with “bed-head”. (Not a purty sight.) He asked -- a bit obliquely -- who I was supporting in the Senate run-off; I responded the two GOP candidates and made it very clear the sole reason is that IMO they suck slightly less than Ossoff and Warnock.
The only other question was did I support the 2A; my answer was, “Hell yes!” 👿
Still waiting for Sidney Powell’s “Kraken” but not holding my breath…
======================
Looks like we’re heading for more of this:
A blessed Sabbath, Gerbil Nation!
Good morning, Fatwa!
Plaguie -- thank you for you offerings on the M.O. May your union with dv8 be richly blessed and may your joys be increased! You are both a blessing and rare friends, indeed.
Fatwa -- I’m glad BrendaK didn’t have to use the Rake-o-Doom on the pollster.
I have three desktop computers. Two run Win 10 Pro and one, that I built in 2007, has XP Pro. I keep this to run some old hardware and software that does not run on the newer systems. Last week I went to start the XP box and it would not boot or even post. I think the battery on the mother board gave up and it lost the bios or whatever. Because the motherboard does not post I can’t even reinstall Windows on another drive. Damn.
I did not want to buy a new motherboard and CPU, so I decided to look at the reconditioned PCs on Amazon. They are mostly business PCs that were traded in and checked out and renewed. I bought a Dell Optiflex 760 with XP Pro installed. It came with Core2Duo CPU, 4GB RAM, DVD burner, new keyboard and mouse, and USB wireless adapter. It came Thursday and it was so much better than I hoped. It is one of those compact units that can stand up or lie flat. Everything has worked great and in fact my software has worked better on this than it had for years on other XP Pro computers, more stable and functional. The only issue is a CPU cooling fan that is noisy, it makes a droning hum that gets annoying. I took it apart Friday and checked it. It is easy to replace so I wrote to the seller about getting a new or newer fan. If that does not work I see they are available on Amazon, so no problem. I put a little oil on it and it is a little better but it needs replacement. I found that CPU paste does have an age limit, it gets very thick. I tried three different ones. Guess I should get some more. I have some very nice Zalmon CPU coolers but they are far too big for the compact case, too bad. The whole package was about $98.00 so it was just over $105.00 with tax, delivered. I find it hard to believe what a deal it is. I see a lot of these with newer models and I wondered if they were a good deal. I know some people get bad ones but these were well reviewed and backed by Amazon so I thought for such a low price it was worth the risk, I could walk away no problem. I am quite impressed. I see similar models with newer hardware and Win 10 Pro for under $140.00. Very interesting. I paid $200.00 in December for a full copy of Win 10 Professional to upgrade my Win 7 box. I will see how this holds up.
I may do that, Paddy. I have a 240 GB and a 500 GB SSD in my stash, as well as many HDDs. It came with a 500 GB HDD of no name I ever heard of. It includes a reinstall CD in case it is needed, but I may use Acronis to clone the drive to one of the SSDs and see if it boots. I don’t need a big drive, I already attached an external drive for storage and back up, and there seems provision for another drive, so I could install a bigger drive inside. Given it’s intended limited use I don’t really need much. For that reason I also don’t need USB 3 on this. There are enough USB 2 ports in back for everything I need. The two in front are available for thumb drives, a card reader, or anything else I want to connect temporarily. It uses standard DVD drive so I can replace that if needed, I keep extra on hand as I used to burn them up. I also have an external USB DVD drive I can use if wanted but one drive is enough for this.
I have a Game Drive virtual emulator I have not installed on a PC for over 14 or 15 years. It lets me make virtual CDs so I don’t have to load the real ones and spin the drive. It installed easily and seems to work fine. The chip set is passively cooled and there is no graphics card, so with a quiet fan on the CPU it should be reasonably quiet. There are two PCI slots and what I think is a PCIexpress graphics slot. I checked the card from my old XP box but it just interfered with a housing. I would not use that card anyway as it is the most powerful card I use, and this only has a 230 watt power supply. I could get a board powered card but the integrated graphics seem fine so far. Most of my games are pre XP and worked on much slower hardware. I will have to see how the flight simulators work, they are old enough I think they will be OK. The PC has 4GB of RAM so it sees about 3GB, it is 32 bit so that is all it can use anyway. I thought I would want a card to have a digital output, it has only VGA analog out, but so far it seems fine with the 23 1/2″ monitor I am using for it.
It went online easily but I can’t connect to my Win 10 machines. It might be for the best. If something gets into the box it can’t spread over the network. I use thumb drives or cloud storage to transfer things to it.
Happy Husguin Sunday greetin’s, GN!
Nice to “see” Plaguie on teh M.O.!
I’ve been “outta the loop” here more than usual; mostly a combination of JimCo-related carp and extreme ire over the election malarkey.
Had a pollster ring our bell yesterday morning; I answered despite still being in my jammies with “bed-head”. (Not a purty sight.) He asked -- a bit obliquely -- who I was supporting in the Senate run-off; I responded the two GOP candidates and made it very clear the sole reason is that IMO they suck slightly less than Ossoff and Warnock.
The only other question was did I support the 2A; my answer was, “Hell yes!” 👿
Still waiting for Sidney Powell’s “Kraken” but not holding my breath…
======================
Looks like we’re heading for more of this:
The kraken thing was just more outlandishery from Trump’s legal team. Did no one ever explain to them to under promise and over deliver?
A blessed Sabbath, Gerbil Nation!
Good morning, Fatwa!
Plaguie -- thank you for you offerings on the M.O. May your union with dv8 be richly blessed and may your joys be increased! You are both a blessing and rare friends, indeed.
Fatwa -- I’m glad BrendaK didn’t have to use the Rake-o-Doom on the pollster.
Good morning, Fatwa, and Paddy -- happy Sunday.
God’s blessings on you both, Dv8 and Miss Harper.
I have three desktop computers. Two run Win 10 Pro and one, that I built in 2007, has XP Pro. I keep this to run some old hardware and software that does not run on the newer systems. Last week I went to start the XP box and it would not boot or even post. I think the battery on the mother board gave up and it lost the bios or whatever. Because the motherboard does not post I can’t even reinstall Windows on another drive. Damn.
I did not want to buy a new motherboard and CPU, so I decided to look at the reconditioned PCs on Amazon. They are mostly business PCs that were traded in and checked out and renewed. I bought a Dell Optiflex 760 with XP Pro installed. It came with Core2Duo CPU, 4GB RAM, DVD burner, new keyboard and mouse, and USB wireless adapter. It came Thursday and it was so much better than I hoped. It is one of those compact units that can stand up or lie flat. Everything has worked great and in fact my software has worked better on this than it had for years on other XP Pro computers, more stable and functional. The only issue is a CPU cooling fan that is noisy, it makes a droning hum that gets annoying. I took it apart Friday and checked it. It is easy to replace so I wrote to the seller about getting a new or newer fan. If that does not work I see they are available on Amazon, so no problem. I put a little oil on it and it is a little better but it needs replacement. I found that CPU paste does have an age limit, it gets very thick. I tried three different ones. Guess I should get some more. I have some very nice Zalmon CPU coolers but they are far too big for the compact case, too bad. The whole package was about $98.00 so it was just over $105.00 with tax, delivered. I find it hard to believe what a deal it is. I see a lot of these with newer models and I wondered if they were a good deal. I know some people get bad ones but these were well reviewed and backed by Amazon so I thought for such a low price it was worth the risk, I could walk away no problem. I am quite impressed. I see similar models with newer hardware and Win 10 Pro for under $140.00. Very interesting. I paid $200.00 in December for a full copy of Win 10 Professional to upgrade my Win 7 box. I will see how this holds up.
Sounds like a good deal, Mac! I wonder if replacing the HDD with a SSD would increase the lifespan?
I may do that, Paddy. I have a 240 GB and a 500 GB SSD in my stash, as well as many HDDs. It came with a 500 GB HDD of no name I ever heard of. It includes a reinstall CD in case it is needed, but I may use Acronis to clone the drive to one of the SSDs and see if it boots. I don’t need a big drive, I already attached an external drive for storage and back up, and there seems provision for another drive, so I could install a bigger drive inside. Given it’s intended limited use I don’t really need much. For that reason I also don’t need USB 3 on this. There are enough USB 2 ports in back for everything I need. The two in front are available for thumb drives, a card reader, or anything else I want to connect temporarily. It uses standard DVD drive so I can replace that if needed, I keep extra on hand as I used to burn them up. I also have an external USB DVD drive I can use if wanted but one drive is enough for this.
I have a Game Drive virtual emulator I have not installed on a PC for over 14 or 15 years. It lets me make virtual CDs so I don’t have to load the real ones and spin the drive. It installed easily and seems to work fine. The chip set is passively cooled and there is no graphics card, so with a quiet fan on the CPU it should be reasonably quiet. There are two PCI slots and what I think is a PCIexpress graphics slot. I checked the card from my old XP box but it just interfered with a housing. I would not use that card anyway as it is the most powerful card I use, and this only has a 230 watt power supply. I could get a board powered card but the integrated graphics seem fine so far. Most of my games are pre XP and worked on much slower hardware. I will have to see how the flight simulators work, they are old enough I think they will be OK. The PC has 4GB of RAM so it sees about 3GB, it is 32 bit so that is all it can use anyway. I thought I would want a card to have a digital output, it has only VGA analog out, but so far it seems fine with the 23 1/2″ monitor I am using for it.
It went online easily but I can’t connect to my Win 10 machines. It might be for the best. If something gets into the box it can’t spread over the network. I use thumb drives or cloud storage to transfer things to it.