• (disco) in reply to redwizard
    redwizard:
    "Network Administrator wanted...requirements: minimum 5 years experience in Windows 95..."

    In other words: "Recently fired from Microsoft after working on Windows 95 for at least five years".

  • (disco) in reply to Tsaukpaetra
    Tsaukpaetra:
    In other words: "Recently fired from Microsoft after working on developing Windows 95 for at least five years and willing to take a downgrade in career".

    FTFY

  • (disco) in reply to redwizard
    redwizard:
    Did you ever identify what processes/services might have been causing this?

    indeterminate. no single application seems to be hammering the disk

    at this point my best guess is a dodgy SATA chip on the motherboard.

  • (disco) in reply to accalia
    accalia:
    indeterminate. no single application seems to be hammering the disk

    at this point my best guess is a dodgy SATA chip on the motherboard.

    Was it this guy? [image]

    Maybe you need: [image]

    Seriously though, if your laptop has diagnostic options for the drive, you could try that.

    I'd normally also recommend resource monitor, but IIRC you were the one who informed me about that one.

  • (disco) in reply to redwizard
    redwizard:
    Seriously though, if your laptop has diagnostic options for the drive, you could try that.

    comes up clean. :frowning:

    redwizard:
    I'd normally also recommend resource monitor, but IIRC you were the one who informed me about that on
    it's what i run.

    good news is i'm up for laptop replacement this year, sop hopefully i'll get a not dodgy one.

  • (disco) in reply to RaceProUK
    RaceProUK:
    *makes a note to uninstall the NVIDIA 3D Vision Driver from her system later*

    Yup. When it comes to video drivers, it's best to just stick with the basic driver install and not install all the bundled crapware.

    Ofcourse, sometimes even that doesn't protect you from stupid disk-churning. ATI had a nice little thing for a couple of years where whenever you'd try to play back a file with hardware assisted decoding, i.e., DXVA, it would log an error in the Windows event logs every few milliseconds for as long as the file was playing if your card or the file in question didn't properly support DXVA for whatever reason.

    It even had a dedicated Windows event log category created on the system by the driver installer specifically for this purpose, so you know some hairbrained idiot at one time constructed it to intentionally act like this and didn't think it was a problem. :crazy:

  • (disco) in reply to abarker
    abarker:
    In a day when 500 MGB drive

    i remember my first computer.....

    it had a bloody MASSIVE full height PATA hard drive that had a capacity of......

    well that depended. the sticker on the drive said 500MB, but i never could get it to recognize more than 200MB

    i got it as a frankenputer, scavenged from the IT waste from my dads work, so my best guess is someone decided it was a good ide to do a low level format on the drive and fucked something up.

    I still have the case somewhere...

    I think it was a standard ATX motherboard.... i wonder if the mount points/backplane are compatible with modern motherboards.....

  • (disco) in reply to accalia
    accalia:
    standard
    accalia:
    mount points/backplane are compatible with modern motherboards
    Probably. That would be funny, having a bomb-ass top-of-the-line PC enclosed in a clunky junky case....
  • (disco) in reply to Tsaukpaetra
    Tsaukpaetra:
    That would be funny, having a bomb-ass top-of-the-line PC enclosed in a clunky junky case....

    that was my thought!

  • (disco) in reply to accalia
    accalia:
    i remember my first computer.....

    it had a bloody MASSIVE full height PATA hard drive that had a capacity of......

    well that depended. the sticker on the drive said 500MB, but i never could get it to recognize more than 200MB

    My first PC was almost decadent in comparison; 850MB main drive with a 4GB secondary split in two.

    Ah, the wonders of FAT16…

  • (disco) in reply to sloosecannon
    sloosecannon:
    software should never do destructive actions without the user's consent.

    Paging @end.

  • (disco) in reply to redwizard
    redwizard:
    Playing Star Control 3 would stress it after about 20 minutes.

    To be fair, being forced to play Star Control 3 would stress out just about anyone after twenty minutes.

  • (disco) in reply to Tsaukpaetra
    Tsaukpaetra:
    Probably. That would be funny, having a bomb-ass top-of-the-line PC enclosed in a clunky junky case....

    Back In The Day, I built a fancy Athlon XP based system into an original IBM 5150 PC case.

    The power supply needed to be politely convinced to stay in place using duc* tape and baling wire, the motherboard stand-offs did some interesting things like not actually being screwed down to the case,I left one of the original disk drives in place just to fill some space and wound up building a new cage to hold the real drives, but at least it worked.

    I tried fitting a Hercules MDA into an available ISA slot to make everything look authentic, but was never able to get it working quite right. Eventually I replaced it all with something half the size and a quarter the weight. The old case was probably lost while moving many years ago, but I'm okay with that.

  • (disco) in reply to DCRoss
    DCRoss:
    IBM 5150 PC case

    Did you know that 5150 is the Los Angeles police code for 'criminally insane'?

    Coincidence? ;-)

  • (disco) in reply to redwizard
    redwizard:
    criminally insane

    Oh Phew. I don't have to worry about criminally insane at least...

  • (disco) in reply to accalia

    The first IBM-PC* I got had a 200 MB hard drive and 4 MB of RAM. I remember paying $100 for 16 MB of RAM, which was enough to run Doom (maybe it was Doom 2) after having run Windows 3.1 without rebooting. A month and a half ago, I paid $100 for 16 GB of RAM.

    * Some people don't really count the Commodore 64 as a PC. Those people are wrong.

  • (disco) in reply to accalia
    accalia:
    it had a bloody **MASSIVE** full height PATA hard drive that had a capacity of......

    well that depended. the sticker on the drive said 500MB, but i never could get it to recognize more than 200MB

    I had a disk like that at my first job, although it might have been ESDI or SCSI; it's been too many years ago to remember for sure. We made chips for disk drive controllers, SCSI host adapters, and the like. We just used it for testing, but it was kinda fun having a 500MB drive hooked up to a computer that shipped with a 10 or 20MB drive, or even no HDD support at all.

    accalia:
    do a low level format on the drive and fucked something up.
    It's been a few decades since I worked in that domain, so I've forgotten a lot of what I used to know, but how is it even possible to do that?

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