Anybody remember the days...

[fury]

of when you had to tweak your system for a reason?

Like you had to tweak it to get Windows to start up in under 2 minutes?

Those were the good old days... I just had a flash back to them when I went to my uncle's to try to work on his computer.

I turned the computer on, and mistakenly assumed there was a problem since the POST screen wasn't showing up immediately. About 15 seconds later, as I had my finger hovering over the power button, it popped up, and the computer began loading Windows 98.

"Oh yeah, I forgot this was a P100"

2 minutes and 35 seconds later, the Windows desktop appears, and takes a minute to draw all the icons and the taskbar. Good GAWD this is slow!

Without even thinking, I go into the sounds CP applet and turn system event sounds off, then I go to start\run and do msconfig and turn off all the unnecessary stuff, and then I deactivate Active Desktop, turn off Show icons with all possible colors, smooth scrolling in exploder, and remove half of the mostly duplicate links on the desktop.

Suddenly it takes the computer a minute and 40 to start up.

And then there was the original problem of the printer not responding

I narrowed it down to pretty much just a faulty cable, because going into DOS and echoing something to LPT1 didn't return an error, just nothing got printed. Hopefully the cable I lent him to use until he can get a new one will work for him.

I actually enjoyed tweaking his computer though... it reminded me of where I came from. Does anybody else have any other nostalgic tweak stories they'd like to share?

 

[Gonzo]

outside of work, I saw very little reason to have one until about 3 years ago. my first was a PacBell300(cyrix) I had an AMD 350 in there in less than 3 months. I bought the pos to learn on & beat the hell out of. Now I know more & still think I should go back to my sig being-"I may not know what I'm doing, but I know how to do it"

 

[greenfreak]

My Dad handed me his computer a while ago and said, "Here. See what you can do with this." According to him, there's nothing wrong with it. He wants me to stuff it with RAM among other things, but it should be fun to play with. It's still sitting on my floor. I should really do that one of these days.

My first computer of my own was a Compaq Presario 4000 series, and I used to crash it every so often. I once compressed my files because I was lured into the 'more space' it kept promising me... Of course, it was never the same after that and it wound up crashing soon after. My friend's brother's excuse for the reason it up and crashed on me was that one of my partitions had broken down and that 'it happens sometimes'. I now know he was dazzling me with b.s., just trying to get me to shut up I guess. I was like a little kid... "But whyyyyyy?"

 

[s4]

My first computer was an Atari ST that I got in the summer of 87. It had 512k of memory and a 1.44 floppy. It was based on the 68k processor similiar to what the mac classic used. It was a pretty fast computer in its' day. I later got an emulator to run dos programs and by late 1988 was using ms dos on my Atari. I ran programs like Lotus 123, dBase and Turbo Pascal.

In those days, Windows had not yet reached the level of where anyone wanted to use it. I remember seeing Windows 2 running on an 8086 processor back in 1989. The machine had 640k of memory and was slow.

 

[fury]

Back in the days it was first unleashed, it was the fastest PC you could get