Unknown Windows OS?

[gore]

I wonder what it will do on a sata 3 controller.

Blue Screen?

And Nihil:

That's neat. I had some Hardware I'd keep around as well so that if something happened I'd have more hardware ready to roll, but then, I started using it up, and now I need to track down some Power Supplies for OLD ass computers and I don't really want to pay for them right now, so I'm waiting on that.

[nihil]

Hmmmm,

Oh and I ripped out the ****ing POS "Sound Card Modem" the damn thing came with.

Not sure if I am familiar with that one? I do have "voice, data, FAX" modems of that era, but you weren't supposed to use them as a system sound card, they were for phone calls.

Around 1996/7 Packard Bell were marketing "home entertainment systems" over here and in some other European countries. They had a weird combination sound and modem card that handled music, games, sound effects, and communications.

After a while they "discovered" each other and then none of them would come out to play

The solution was to replace it with independent sound and modem cards.

Regarding the Windows Experience Index: what surprises me is that SATA2 and 3 only marginally outperform a similar speed EIDE drive.

That shouldn't be so, and you shouldn't have to install an SSD or SCSI drive either, as this is a desktop operating system and most desktops don't have that technology.

Most machines don't have i7 Extremes in them either, but the much more realistic processors I use, all score quite highly (>7). If you used i7 Extremes as the standard, those scores would have to be much lower.

I haven't exactly gone for rocket science video cards either, but they also score pretty much as I would expect, assuming that this index is supposed to represent average computing experience with commonly available specification kit? I think that MS are being flattering................ there is a lot of cheaper kit that ships with onboard video these days......?

[gore]

Nihil; The card I'm talking about, is REALLY weird! The Computer it was in, was the very first Computer I ever bought; An HP Pavilion I bought in early 2000, and it came with the 128 MBs of RAM that I upgraded to 384 MBs of RAM as I said, and the 43 GB HD that I made a secondary as I said, and installed a 120 GB HD as the master and / partition, and then the video card is a 16 MB Nvidia Card, and it's got an internal CD-Writer and internal DVD-ROM drive, and a Pentium 3 @ 733 MHz.

When I first replaced the Sound Card, the person who did it for me, had left the Modem / Sound Card in there. Remember this is back when I first got a Computer, so I didn't install the Sound Blaster Live! Card myself, as I was just starting to learn about Computers in general, and, when it was finished, SUSE Linux 8.1 Professional picked up the sound card right away.

See, the Modem Sound Card I had, wasn't working under Linux at all, so I got the better card and used that.

When I finally pulled the damn thing out, which was because I got tired of having to reach back there to hook up some speakers, and sticking it in the wrong damn card, I finally got tired of it, popped it open, and then pulled the card out.

When I first pulled out the card, I looked at it for a few minutes wondering WTF it was. I mean I hadn't ever seen something like it before, and when I showed my best friend, he was amazed because he'd never actually seen a Sound Card and a Modem built into one card before.

I even showed it to other people around here, and everyone who saw it had basically the same reaction; "Dude WTF is that????" lol.

[nihil]

Interesting................

I have had a look at my kit of that era (most of it, as it goes ) and I would say that onboard audio was a common shipment back in the days of PIIs, let alone PIIIs.

I have modems that do voice and FAX that have MIC in and speaker out 3.5mm jackplug sockets as well as the phone and line RJ11 sockets. Simpler ones just have the two RJ11s.

Sound cards of the day typically had a 15 pin gameport: this would be colour coded orange. Did your card have one of those?

As for Linux, it never did play well with Winmodems.............. I recall having to buy an external US Robotics unit back then............I actually have the disks to hand : S.u.S.E. Linux 6.2, Red Hat Linux 5.2, 6.1 and Linux Pro r.5.4 I would guess they would be around 1999/2000?

IIRC the "Winmodem" isn't a true modem; it is a part hardware part software device intended to work with Windows OSes.

Back to Windows 8:

So, I dug out this Genius "EasyPen" tablet (ua549 gave me the idea in his earlier post). Sure it recognised that it was a tablet and went to look for drivers...............no luck

I then attached an Aiptek Hyper Pen 12000U USB device which is the size of a 15" monitor. It recognised that, and now pops up a black and white onscreen keyboard. The pen seems to work as well but I must find and load the management software.

As for the Genius.............well, I did have to install an independent serial port and connect it to the MoBo and it wouldn't work with XP Pro either............ I guess it is a bit too old? after all the box does have a sticker saying "Windows 2000 ready" and there is a 3.5" floppy with the Win 2000 drivers in it...............obviously added as an afterthought

More on legacy devices later...........................

Final (amusing) result:

"The operating system is not adequate for running LightScribe Applications"

[snowshell]

I have a really nice Sound Blaster Audigy II sitting on a shelf doing nothing, it's got optical in and out, little gold finished connectors, Infra-Red Controller, volume controls... Thing is the last few times I plugged it into a Box then installed Linux the damn thing wont work! Hence it's now sitting on a shelf rotting and I am making do with a card I ripped out of a Dell dimension.

Professional Video Editing Card = Working
RAID Controller = Working
Duel Screen Display = Working
US Robotics PCI with Alpha Networks Mini PCI Wireless = Working (soldered it myself!)
Audigy II Professional Sound Blaster with ALSA = Errrr... <-- I think this is going to end up in a windows box with the TV card.

Things are great on Linux when they work, when they don't and they want to be a pain, they can be a very real pain. No I wont use the Ndiswrapper and taint my box with Windows Drivers, the very idea of it makes me shudder. I'll stick it on a second hand box (Ah-ha I have a Dell Dimension for this very purpose!) then sell it for £10 bucks at the nearest garage sale. Complete with 4GB of disk space (hey, you get what you pay for!).

Will Windows 8 work on my PS2 like Black Rhino Linux? Or having given us all an after-taste of the KDE project do Microsoft now intend to leave the world with the after-taste of gnome shell 3!?

If you want to build your own super computer cluster you should keep an eye out for the Fat PS2 now that everyone in the gaming community has gone PS3 mad, those second hand PS2's all have an expansion bay and if you've got the network adapter that goes on that expansion bay you've got a MIP's CPU that runs Linux. Complete with USB slots for a Keyboard & Mouse! Monitor, well how big is your Flat Screen TV!?

Windows 8 Bleh! I'm far too busy modifying my own installs of my custom built OS that still works on aging technology like the Mac PowerPC and the Sun Ultra Sparc IV to be concerned with touch screen technology although if I do get a touch pad it'll be running the cyanogen mod and a modified version of android long before I find myself tempted with version 8 of windows.

Would you believe you can still get an up-to-date copy of an OS for the Amiga!? Do you remember those, people throw them out by the dozen who wants those old things.. Well I do.. Especially when I know I can stick AROS on-to them and still use that aging piece of equipment they so hastily threw in the trash! Have to get those licensed copys of XP from somewhere and whilst those idiots in corporate suits are busy throwing it in the trash there's really no harm in bin-diving, one mans rubbish is another mans gold.

There's really no rhyme or reason to it, I've seen huge chunks of NETGEAR IDS/Firewall equipment being tossed in the trash because it's old, no other reason except someone somewhere is convinced it's out-lived it's usefulness and they've bought something bigger and better. They don't bother checking to see if there's a firmware upgrade since they bought the damn thing.

If I had to bench mark the performance of Linux on a Box that used to run Windows 98 or XP but someone has thrown it away because it wouldn't run Vista. I would say it out performs anything Microsoft was throwing at it any day of the week.

[ua549]

I'll let others play with old technology. I'll stick with the latest and greatest (or nearly so).
I purchase equipment based on functional need. My last really big purge was a pair of clustered servers (Win2k3). I couldn't even give them away - 2 dual Xeon boxes with 4 GB memory each and 2 U160 arrays with 14 73GB Cheetah drives each. I ended up taking them to the hazardous materials depot run by the county government.

They were replaced by a single 8 core Xeon server w/32 GB memory and a 4 TB SATA II array. It should last until I no longer have a need for a home server and network.

[snowshell]

I would have had them... Lol would have paid the shipping charge too, You could have stuck DragonFLY BSD on them and they would have seen a whole new lease of life.

I am one of those rare few who quickly breaks out a screw-driver and open's that kind of stuff up to take a long hard look at the insides.

Opteron AMD "Sledgehammer" CRAY quad core 64bit @ 3000+ Mhz serves all my needs as far as fast goes, I have no desire to go faster, although I am spoilt for choice when it comes to which CPU in which box. PPC, MIPS, RISC, etc

I am always stunned by how much Apple charge for their Mac Pro with Lion Server. £4,083.00

Goto CarillonAC1 and the same motherboard with 12 Cores suddenly drops in price to: £ 1,770.00

Their not really a true 12 Core you have to read between the lines and look at the specs and then you see the words, 2 x 6-Core Intel Xeon “Westmere” processors @ 12 Threads.

I just had a friend call me up about his Laptop he bought from HP and the screen has unexpectedly died, he paid almost £ 1,700.00 for it new and its one year past it's warranty, I then researched that same laptop and found the following on the HP forums, Black Screen, Black Screen, Black Screen...

He's just rushed out and purchased a brand new one.. Can you guess what my advise is going to be? TAKE IT BACK! I'll tell him for £175.00 he can buy a netbook from the local supermarket. I don't mind paying over the odd's for a decent piece of kit but when they have a history of failure and are made for the price of a pair of trainers. You really don't always get what you pay for.

The only decent thing I've seen of late thats pop'ed out of HP was there Tablet Range which has dropped in Price from $399 to approx $80 because they've announced their pulling out of the tablet market.

I'll happily spend $80.00 on a tablet that runs Cyanogen mod Gingerbread. For that price I'll happily RISC (pun intended) bricking it. Windows 8 nah I'll pass!

Your post about Xeon processors gave me pause for thought, I have no idea which AMD Opteron I am running @ 3000+ Mhz on my Cray Inc Box that I picked up FREE.. Some dude shoved it into my hands and said "I was trying to build a super computer..." I have always just called it sledge-hammer but in truth it could be any one of a number of CPU's all I know is its quad-core and was an experimental left over from an AMD employee... Loved the words trying to build a super-computer, what stopped him from succeeding was he'd borrowed the power supply from the wrong Unit, once it was replaced it was the best FREEBIE I have ever been given.

Feel free to hate me when I say it now boasts five fan's, five HDD 2 x SATA & 3 x PATA + 6GB of RAM with Duel Screen Display.

Over-heating not @ all totally the opposite in fact, but it had one of those stupid pointless plastic funnels, you know the kind I mean, the ones that direct the air-flow at some random part of the board no-where near the heat sink. That got stripped out, had a much bigger fan put in its place, put one in front of the HDD nest and one up the back to pull the heat away from the main board.

I cant help but get the feeling someone, somewhere, in some RnD department is missing their experimental CPU. Maybe it's all just highly circumstantial that AMD announced they where working on a processor called 'Hood' back in 2006 shortly before they then announced they where recalling 3'000 opterons due to invalid floating point operation.. (get the feeling they misplaced something?) what better way to dispose of the evidence that you've accidentally blown something up, give it away for free to some computer enthusiast, little realizing that the power supply was the problem.

Interesting that the chip bears the inscription Opteron 64 and flashes up both the Opteron 64 Logo and the Athlon 64 Logo on boot.

[gore]

Nihil; Yea; WinModems are basically half hardware, half software, because they require special software to run them, and dump their work on the Processor, where as a real modem does it's own work.

[nihil]

Well, I downloaded the latest and greatest from LightScribe that is supposed to support Windows 7 and earlier (it does........I have run it on 7 and Vista)

I still get the:

"The operating system is not adequate for running LightScribe Applications"

message do you think Windows 8 will ship with a pack of CD/DVD marker pens?

The more I look at it, the more I wonder how they can avoid calling it anything but "Windows 8" as it (at this stage) only appears to be Windows 7 with some enhancements. I don't see it as being much more than the difference between NT 4.0 and Windows 2000, and that was going to be called "NT 5.0"

As for the hardware; I have a SATA III SSD on the way, so we shall see what it makes of that

All in all it doesn't seem to be that demanding from a hardware viewpoint, as it runs very nicely on a Sempron 145 (2.8GHz single core) with DDR2/800MHz RAM.

I suspect we will be hearing of a TPC version just like Windows 7?

More as the case develops.................... and I find more pre-Windows XP hardware to torture it with

[nihil]

OK folks, "another day, another dollar" or whatever.........

At this early (pre-beta) stage I am really only looking to see what the general hardware requirements for the OS are and how well hardware and software that has been around for a while are supported.

This is the AMD Sempron 145 (2.8GHz single core) machine running the 64Bit version.

The MoBo is a cheap but versatile ASRock. As is the norm for current MoBos there is no 15pin Gameport as OS support for this ended with Windows XP. It does have a serial port but no parallel port. The other test machine only has a serial port, because I installed a bracket with one on it.

One thing I notice is that you do not get the old "windows has detected new hardware" message..........just an audible notification if you do it on the fly. I can't remember what Windows 7 does as my wife has taken that machine over

The first thing I get is the message:

"VIA HD Audio Deck does not support this OS version. Please update the audio driver". The sound works perfectly however, presumably using what is in Windows 8. If I were getting an AC97 warning, then I would worry!

A serial mouse works just fine but doesn't show in the control Panel hardware section.

I connected a weird 7-button laser mouse that is recognised and works. There was no "new hardware" message, which is what I was trying to provoke, but it did create an icon for a device called "MAKS" which is described as a "keyboard, mouse"............it is a USB interface BTW.

So, what to try next?.......................a Logitech Wingman Extreme Digital 3D joystick................ it has a 15 pin Gameport connector, but comes with a USB adapter............ that'll get it

Arrrrrrrgh!!! no such luck............it recognised it for what it is and even created a swanky icon for it in the devices section of control panel. Hah! gotcha! the icon is quite clearly the control console for an XBox360, and not a joystick.

This calls for desperate measures methinks? how about a 1995 Microsoft SideWinder 3D Pro engineering sample? it's a 15pin Gameport device so I attach the USB adapter from the Wingman Extreme.

"The last USB device you connected is not recognised......."

Muhahahahahahahahahahaha!

Looking at it, the SideWinder male connector only has 10 pins whereas the Wingman has 15. I guess it goes back in the corner with my Windows 2000 legacy support machine. However, a Maxtrol JSK 13A with 15 pins got the same message?

I must reboot now.................