What was your most interesting recent non solar project?

[fatjay]

Loved windows 7 but HATED windows 8.

10 sucks but with mods its ok. 11 is just 10 with more stuff needing to be modded

The sledge hammer program is a must for 10 and 11. Lets you turn off windows update and then manually update only what want to update. Nothing microsoft can do about it either. Love that part

Loved win7 but hated win8, until i got used to it. I actually went to win8.1 and then win10 and when win11 came out i went back to 8.0 because i realized there was a lack of control.

Now my web browser says my windows is out of date but it can fuck itself.

 

[littleharbor2]

Attempted to move the Starlink base unit more centrally in the house. Thought I could bring it in through the HVAC roof blower vent location,
made a drill extension on the lathe tapped set screws and welded on the drill receptacle, and then machined the weld down , nice perfect clearances and the drill bit ran true.

Great.

Measured and drilled down to route the dishy cable down to where the router will be going.

Great.

Wife comes out while I am still on the roof, and says you just drilled a hole through the shower ceiling....

Not Great.


There are days I shouldn't touch any power tools SMH.

On the other hand the chargeverter install went ok and made up the "missing" bracket and also a couple standoffs to increase the air movement around the verter.

You might look into a Motorola mesh system. It'll really help extend your range and you can place the little pucks where you want the best signal I've got much of a computer guy but when I added this to my Starlink system it it improved it

 

[Chispas]

Loved win7 but hated win8, until i got used to it. I actually went to win8.1 and then win10 and when win11 came out i went back to 8.0 because i realized there was a lack of control.

Now my web browser says my windows is out of date but it can fuck itself.

I had a “Grey market “ Win 7 Enterprise install done by a mate & it was the best, on an old Compaq laptop that lasted for 10years. XP. aside, peak Windows imo.

 

[Zwy]

Loved win7 but hated win8, until i got used to it. I actually went to win8.1 and then win10 and when win11 came out i went back to 8.0 because i realized there was a lack of control.

Now my web browser says my windows is out of date but it can fuck itself.

I have that everyday on Win 7 Pro in the office. I finally switched the default browser to Firefox on my office desk.

Yes, Gates can go f#ck himself.

 

[Dagoth Ur Does Solar]

Years ago when I saw Windows 11 was going to serve ads within the OS in the start menu and such, I finally said I was done with it.

I switched to Linux on my desktop 4 or so years ago and have never looked back. It just works, it's free, it doesn't shove ads in my face... No complaints.

I keep an external SSD for my laptop that has Windows 11 on it that I can boot to for the once in a blue moon time I need some Windows program that doesn't run on Linux. Usually something with specific weird drivers.

 

[JanisD]

Said GoodBye to Windows some 15 years ago (was forced to run WinXP in virtual machine for a while) going to Linux both at work and home.

Last fun was to get rid of insides of my home desktop and set up small, nice N100 system with max 30 W consumption and DC power input from 11 till 20 Volts. Guess what happened with electricity bill

 

[Kirkstone]

Said GoodBye to Windows some 15 years ago (was forced to run WinXP in virtual machine for a while) going to Linux both at work and home.

Last fun was to get rid of insides of my home desktop and set up small, nice N100 system with max 30 W consumption and DC power input from 11 till 20 Volts. Guess what happened with electricity bill

I still have a machine loaded with Win7 that has a virtual machine running XP for some legacy software I still use.

 

[JJJJ]

Sounds like some great legacy systems out there!

 

[skyking1]

No pictures of this one.
I am doing some remote consulting on a large grading construction project for a church camp. They brushed it off and burned trees, and are now ready to strip soil and balance out ~3 acres for ball field and activity field. It has cuts and fills of about 6 feet, or so they have represented.
The tricky part is to conserve the best topsoil while doing this. Without the topmost layer the ground will not grow vigorous and drought hardy grass for the play surface.
They got a bit too much snow last week and now they have to wait for it to dry out. I'll make a day trip over there to check it out and make some plans with them.
They have a D4D to work with, similar to this D4C I used at the cabin build last summer.

 

[green mountain boys]

Sometimes it's just the stupid little victories...

I've been upgrading the same computer since 1992, i.e., I've never purchased a whole computer after that, but obviously everything has been swapped out multiple times.

It's basically the cadillac of 2012... an AMD FX-8350. At one point, it was liquid cooled - not for performance but for quiet.

TWO liquid coolers failed over the years, and I just stopped caring, so now it has a traditional cooler on it. A couple weeks ago, I noticed it was running pretty hot, throttling itself, and the CPU fan was working hard and loud.

My first solution was to use AMD Overdrive to cut the CPU frequency in half to 2GHz, so it didn't cook itself. Temps improved, but I really noticed the slowdown.

Tonight, blew the whole case out - SO MUCH DUST - and discovered two of the 120mm inlet fans needed lube. Pulled the CPU cooler and discovered dust packed into the fins immediately below the fan. This stuff was dense and hard to blow out... covering almost the entire area between the fan and the cooler fins. Fresh paste in between the cooler and CPU for good measure.

With everything back together, CPU temps are CRUSHED to just above ambient. At half speed and choked flow, my idle temps were 20°C higher. Can only conclude the CPU cooler was little better than passive with the blockage between fan and fins.

All this really means is that I'm more confident that I'll make it to the Win 10 end of support in October... Don't meet Win 11 hardware requirements...

I am still running a 25 year old, Lian Li PC-60 server case that I modified to improve airflow. I have three 120mm case fans installed. Every once in a while I upgrade the components. It needs to be upgraded now, but I have been holding off, hoping the GPU market comes back down from the stratosphere sometime. I also have the FX-8350 running. I had it liquid cooled but have gone back to air cooling for the simplicity. Noctua CPU cooler and case fans, SSD drive for OS, 4 mechanical WD black hard drives, LG blu ray drive, Seasonic 700W modular power supply, external switches on the front of the case for manual control of case fan speed (off, low, high), an old GTX 760 GPU. An I am still rocking windows 8.1!!!

 

[sunshine_eggo]

I am still running a 25 year old, Lian Li PC-60 server case that I modified to improve airflow. I have three 120mm case fans installed. Every once in a while I upgrade the components. It needs to be upgraded now, but I have been holding off, hoping the GPU market comes back down from the stratosphere sometime. I also have the FX-8350 running. I had it liquid cooled but have gone back to air cooling for the simplicity. Noctua CPU cooler and case fans, SSD drive for OS, 4 mechanical WD black hard drives, LG blu ray drive, Seasonic 700W modular power supply, external switches on the front of the case for manual control of case fan speed (off, low, high), an old GTX 760 GPU. An I am still rocking windows 8.1!!!

Damn... it sounds like we followed similar paths and ended at similar points w/SSD and multiple HDs. At one point, I had a hot swappable RAID, but I decoupled the drives a number of years ago.

At the time of the CPU/mobo upgrade in 2012, I found a cheap server case that had wicked ventilation. It has space for 5 120mm fans, which was key when I was using the liquid coolers.

 

[Dagoth Ur Does Solar]

Man you guys are crazy (in a good way).

I am trying to think of the oldest system I still have actually in service.

I have a 2013 Chromebook Pixel (it's x86 based) that is running Ubuntu that i use strictly for a backup that stays directly plugged into my server rack. It's basically just for having a system ready to go if I need to manage something right at the rack.

But even then, the thing has a 64GB SSD (it's a crappy soldered eMMC chip, I think), 4GB of RAM, and a really low power dual core Intel chip. It's pretty rough even browsing the web on it. I could probably put a lighter weight Linux distro on it, but Ubuntu actually has all the strange one-off drivers the thing used, so it basically functions 100% out of the box.

Anything older than that is long retired. I could see how one of those high end FX chips might still be viable if you have enough RAM for modern day usage. The FX was waaaaaay out of my reach at the time. I think the first PC I built from scratch was like, an AMD Athlon X2 3400+ or something. That was close to 20 years ago, I think. I probably rebuild the core components of my PC every 4-6 years, depending on what I need it to do and what the market on parts is like.

 

[Zwy]

I have a dedicated Win 98 laptop on a piece of equipment due to the software only runs on Win 98. It doesn't get connected to the web or anything else. I've owned it after XP was out. It won't work in compatibility mode.

 

[Crowz]

The oldest machine I still have going all the time that can get to the internet and such is a 386 33 mhz machine running wildcat bbs. My grandkids play some of the games in the "doors" on it. You have to be very old to understand.

 

[Q-Dog]

We dumped our last Winders PC about 10 years ago. I think it was still running XP.

Last week I blew out the fan on the Mac Mini because it was getting louder. It's a 2012 Server version (the 2 hard drives were handy for video editing) and just keeps chugging along. I filled up the RAM When it was new and swapped the spinners for solid state drives a few years ago. We don't need any big iron since I don't really edit much video any more.

 

[JJJJ]

My first computer was an IBM personal computer. The serial number was hand written. 64 k Ram, monochrome monitor, 164 k floppy disk and an adventure game. A bargain at $3,300 dollars Lol. But I was the first one on the block to own one. The sales person had to ask how to wring it up. She was only used to cooperate accounts.

 

[Crowz]

My first computer was an IBM personal computer. The serial number was hand written. 64 k Ram, monochrome monitor, 164 k floppy disk and an adventure game. A bargain at $3,300 dollars Lol. But I was the first one on the block to own one. The sales person had to ask how to wring it up. She was only used to cooperate accounts.

Ive got a few of those.

I really need to make a museum page for all of this stuff. I wanted to open a real museum for people around here to see how things have changed over the years. Just never got around to it.

 

[Crowz]

Ive got another rare one I got burned on so to speak.

I bought the first amd dual processor motherboard you could buy.

Paid $1300 for the motherboard alone.

Soo proud of that one. Was a powerhouse for the time.

2 weeks roughly after buying it and a new game came out and it required SSE2 to play.

The new $2500 worth of hardware I had bought was rendered useless because an old original pentium 4 cpu had SSE2 but the new athlons didn't

I wouldn't touch amd products again until I bought a ryzen alienware. It had pissed me off that bad...

I can't remember the game that changed it all for everyone. Was a big name one but I can't remember what it was.

 

[JJJJ]

amd

Memories. I thought it was something because my Amd had a turbo button that took it to a blistering 40 megahertz.

And now my old cell phone…. Lol

 

[Crowz]

Looking at the game releases around the time I would of bought that board it seems Doom 3 may of been the stake thru the heart of my amd server.

This was in 2003 best I can tell.

 

[Crowz]

Ok more research (this has been bugging me to death trying to remember the game that had sse2) seems to point to dead space being the game that did it.

Its release date shows 2008 though. Seems like it was the game though best I remember.

 

[Dagoth Ur Does Solar]

Looking at the game releases around the time I would of bought that board it seems Doom 3 may of been the stake thru the heart of my amd server.

This was in 2003 best I can tell.

Ok more research (this has been bugging me to death trying to remember the game that had sse2) seems to point to dead space being the game that did it.

Its release date shows 2008 though. Seems like it was the game though best I remember.

DOOM 3 is one of those games that I think got crapped on by a lot of people at the time, but is now more fondly remembered...

...but you definitely missed out on way more not being able to play Dead Space at the time. Great game. As expected of EA games, the sequels were comparatively bad.

 

[Crowz]

DOOM 3 is one of those games that I think got crapped on by a lot of people at the time, but is now more fondly remembered...

...but you definitely missed out on way more not being able to play Dead Space at the time. Great game. As expected of EA games, the sequels were comparatively bad.

Yep the sequels were not near as good. I oh I didn't miss out on playing it I just had to build another system to play it with all the while cussing amd

 

[sunshine_eggo]

LOL... I really debated posting this relatively triviality, but it appears to have brought all the old computer nerds out of the woodwork!!!

The Bard's Tale anyone?

Just bought 6 new fans for like $25 total. I've been lubricating these things for years, so I should have replaced them long ago. 4 of 6 installed, and it's nice and quiet. The other two are for this, but it's solar related, so nobody talk about it...



I know. Wrong blue...

 

[Daddy Tanuki]

LOL... I really debated posting this relatively triviality, but it appears to have brought all the old computer nerds out of the woodwork!!!

The Bard's Tale anyone?

Just bought 6 new fans for like $25 total. I've been lubricating these things for years, so I should have replaced them long ago. 4 of 6 installed, and it's nice and quiet. The other two are for this, but it's solar related, so nobody talk about it...

View attachment 287245

I know. Wrong blue...

i am looking for 120/240v 4-5" fans or something that I can put a speed controller on. I want to take a spare transmission cooler and use it as a heat exchanger for hot coollant. got an ideas on a good place to search for fans?