[Kosh]

jr2 made a very valid point. There was this one time when my school computers were infected with the username virus. However, because the older computers had dual cores on HT, and the newer ones had quad cores on HT, the virus only succeeded in holding up half of one of the CPUs. In other words, it had almost no effect on system performance whatsoever.

Wait a minute, schools have up to date computers now? Can't be true........

[Ghostavo]

Only the last few Pentium 4 and the Core i7/i5/i3 (not all of them though) have HT.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

Wait a minute, schools have up to date computers now? Can't be true........

Bear in mind that I'm in a film and media school. We need up-to-date computer hardware and software in the world in order to keep up with the film industry.

[Kosh]

Oh, so it's a private school?


When I graduated from high school in 2003, half of our PCs were donated late model Pentium MMX's and early "Klamath" model Pentium 2's, of course they maxed out the ram to a whopping 128 MB to make windows XP barely work on them.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

Oh, so it's a private school?

It's not a private school. It's one of eight public schools in a public institute. However, it is owned by a non-profit company in Singapore, which spends 25% of its annual profits on the school.

[S-99]

Good stuff to hear kosh. Why bother upgrading them to xp, what a waste of money the school put into those old ****ers. Just leave 98 on there! Although i bet the hard drives in those computers were so old as to just give up the ghost at some point in 2003.

Then again, the one thing in the world that haunts me till today is those horrible looking dell clamshell desktop pentium 4 machines.
They're always on the floor!
Never put any computers on the floor.
They're always dirty as hell!
Because of the fact that they're on the floor all the time which makes the psu fan a little vacuum cleaner (i'd be happier if these computers weren't bagless).
They always looked like ****!
They had a great color scheme going on, but it looked cheapie, and it was. That's if anyone managed to not break the case opening or closing it with those ****ty tabs.


The people who use these computers are usually those who just know how to check email and use a word processor along with a spreadsheet program. I keep putting the desktop on the desk and hooking it up right telling them that this will prevent the problems of the computer overheating from sucking in constant dust that turns into mounds all over heatsinks and instead insulates. I come back a week later because there mouse isn't working. Lo and behold to find out that they moved the computer back to the floor, despite how much unused desk space there was. They forgot to plug in their mouse. And i come back a month later to clean the dust bunnies out again with them begging me if there is a way to prevent the dust causing overheating problem from ever happening again. Usual ineptitude for most of the people with these computers at my old college tech support/systems administration job.

I hate them damn dell p4 clamshell desktops, what was even worse was the mini tower clamshells. Even more fragile, and had they sucked at expelling heat, but in fact did a great job overheating itself from how tiny dell shouldn't have made a desktop. It drives me bat**** insane. What's even worse is that these dell p4 clamshell desktops are sure to still be in use for a good long time in the future. And the cycle will continue.

[Bob-san]

Good stuff to hear kosh. Why bother upgrading them to xp, what a waste of money the school put into those old ****ers. Just leave 98 on there! Although i bet the hard drives in those computers were so old as to just give up the ghost at some point in 2003.

Then again, the one thing in the world that haunts me till today is those horrible looking dell clamshell desktop pentium 4 machines.
They're always on the floor!
Never put any computers on the floor.
They're always dirty as hell!
Because of the fact that they're on the floor all the time which makes the psu fan a little vacuum cleaner (i'd be happier if these computers weren't bagless).
They always looked like ****!
They had a great color scheme going on, but it looked cheapie, and it was. That's if anyone managed to not break the case opening or closing it with those ****ty tabs.

<img>

The people who use these computers are usually those who just know how to check email and use a word processor along with a spreadsheet program. I keep putting the desktop on the desk and hooking it up right telling them that this will prevent the problems of the computer overheating from sucking in constant dust that turns into mounds all over heatsinks and instead insulates. I come back a week later because there mouse isn't working. Lo and behold to find out that they moved the computer back to the floor, despite how much unused desk space there was. They forgot to plug in their mouse. And i come back a month later to clean the dust bunnies out again with them begging me if there is a way to prevent the dust causing overheating problem from ever happening again. Usual ineptitude for most of the people with these computers at my old college tech support/systems administration job.

I hate them damn dell p4 clamshell desktops, what was even worse was the mini tower clamshells. Even more fragile, and had they sucked at expelling heat, but in fact did a great job overheating itself from how tiny dell shouldn't have made a desktop. It drives me bat**** insane. What's even worse is that these dell p4 clamshell desktops are sure to still be in use for a good long time in the future. And the cycle will continue.

Agreed. Plus they die slowly. We thought we had a hard drive problem in one and it's now gone through both myself and my uncle trying to fix my stepdad's. Random crashes and all, very reminiscent of a bad hard drive... except apparently it's not.

By the way; the ultimate solution could/would be to CHARGE THEM FOR SERVICE. And TELL them that having it on the floor will clog it with dust, so they either put it up on the desk or have to clean a LOT to keep it from overheating.

[Kosh]

Good stuff to hear kosh. Why bother upgrading them to xp, what a waste of money the school put into those old ****ers. Just leave 98 on there! Although i bet the hard drives in those computers were so old as to just give up the ghost at some point in 2003.

It's because of liscensing. The school bought the liscence for XP "in bulk", since half of the PC's were much more up to date (P3's) than those. The old PC's were most likely donated, and broke down constantly. Personally I felt the ideal OS choice was NT 4.0, but you have to use what you have. I volunteered time in the second half of my senior year to repair them. Man, every day I would go around and find yet another one of them isn't working, either it had an intermittant motherboard, stupid kids magnetizing the monitors (all monitors were CRT), stupid kids stealing RAM (until the cases were locked), the occational dead part.

I also checked out donated PC's for use in some of the offices and classrooms, most of it was old but we ended up with some interesting things sometimes, like a pair of HP Kayak workstations (early P2's but with SCSI hard drives), something old with a very old PCI FireGL, and even a then early model P4. More than a few donated PC's were early Pentium one's (pre-MMX). One time I was also called in to install a new printer for the Sherrif Deputy's computer. Given that he was running a then fantastically obsolete win95 laptop it's no surprise he was having trouble.

[jr2]

Agreed. Plus they die slowly. We thought we had a hard drive problem in one and it's now gone through both myself and my uncle trying to fix my stepdad's. Random crashes and all, very reminiscent of a bad hard drive... except apparently it's not.

Try memtest86+, then try replacing the PSU.

[chief1983]

Memory could fail tests because of power issues, FYI, even if the memory itself is good.  So if you can check the voltages reported by your motherboard somehow, ideally under load (Prime95 or the like, or some other benchmark test running would do the trick) you may be able to rule the PSU out before the ram.  PSU monitoring isn't an exact science though, so try to be as thorough as you can.  Maybe test a suspect PSU in another box even.

[Kopachris]

AMD Athlon II X4 630, Quad-core 2.8GHz.  64-bit processor, but I run FS2_Open under 32-bit Linux.  I mainly use 64-bit for video editing and 3D rendering.

[Mongoose]

*stuff*

Um...I own one of those Dell clamshell P4s myself, and it's been my only machine for almost six years now.  I've never removed it from the floor in all that time (how the hell am I supposed to fit something like that on a small desk?), and yet I've never had a single overheating issue.  The only major hardware issue I've ever had with it was the original hard drive succumbing to the Click o' Doom, but with that replaced and a big RAM upgrade, it's served me well over its lifespan.  (*knocks on head*) I'd like to think I can do a bit more than check my e-mail and use Word, too.

[Bob-san]

Agreed. Plus they die slowly. We thought we had a hard drive problem in one and it's now gone through both myself and my uncle trying to fix my stepdad's. Random crashes and all, very reminiscent of a bad hard drive... except apparently it's not.

Try memtest86+, then try replacing the PSU.

We've done it all. It just randomly crashes (regardless of load) about once every other month or so.

[S-99]

Simultaneous cough-burp-fart

FEEL OFFENDED WHEN YOU FULLY FIT THE CRITERIA OF MY SCENARIO.
I still don't recommend it being on the floor. Having it on the floor in your case doesn't not keep the psu fan from becoming a vacuum cleaner for floor dust. I don't like dealing with dusty computers, so i just don't put them on the floor.

On the floor there's dirt. The floor is where your feet go. The floor is where constant dust and dirt get stirred up into the air because of peoples feet doing something called walking. The floor is where your computer is with fans, and it's sucking up all the nummies

You're an outlier because you take care of your computer whereas people in my scenario don't. But, i'd still take your computer off the floor, it is sucking up dust for sure. It's basic computer handling, don't put your computer on or near a dusty floor mat and don't put your computer on the floor. Because having your computer on the floor and you take care of it doesn't mean that it's a good idea to have it on the floor.

[chief1983]

I spent a summer servicing white box computers that were out on the shop floor, and I mean on the floor.  They were full of not only dust but metal and plastic shavings and grease and whatever else was in the air in that area of the factory, and the ones on the floor were consistently the worst.  My boss made me relocate the office ones from the floor to the desk too when I swapped them out with new ones.  Not that I needed to be told twice, the ones on the floor were filthy inside.

[Mongoose]

FEEL OFFENDED WHEN YOU FULLY FIT THE CRITERIA OF MY SCENARIO.
I still don't recommend it being on the floor. Having it on the floor in your case doesn't not keep the psu fan from becoming a vacuum cleaner for floor dust. I don't like dealing with dusty computers, so i just don't put them on the floor.

Hey man, when you insult my pride(?) and joy(?), even when directed at another party, I have to step in and defend it.

But seriously, I literally could not physically put my computer anywhere else but the floor, even if I wanted to.  My desk is small and tucked in the corner of my room, and the vast majority of it is dominated by my big-ass 19" CRT monitor.  I doubt the desk would take the weight of my monitor and computer combined anyway, even if it was bigger, as it's old and on the rickety side.  Hell, even my family's computer downstairs sits on the floor; it's set up at an older dedicated computer desk, but between the widescreen monitor and the huge HP printer/copier/scanner, there's nowhere else it could fit.  We don't all have 10-foot-long uber-desks that we can stow a tower or two on, after all.

(And besides all of that, I think my desk is far dustier at the moment than my floor is. )

[Mongoose]

Well yeah, I won't deny that the case is a fairly crappy design, but it's managed to work reasonably well for my purposes over these past six years.  The only thing that's given out on it are the clamps which snapped down the swing-out USB/headphone port door on the front, which I managed to break when kicking the thing in some fit of rage or other.

[Wobble73]

Just "upgraded" from an Athlon XP 1800 to a Pentium D 3.0ghz (single core).

Go ahead, laugh at my obsolescence!  
 

[Bob-san]

Just "upgraded" from an Athlon XP 1800 to a Pentium D 3.0ghz (single core).

Go ahead, laugh at my obsolescence!  
 

What? Is this 2006? And how do you have a Pentium D that's single-core?

[Wobble73]

My mistake I was reading the Computer Properties wrong.