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Raistline on 23 June 2016
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Ganoncrotch said:
Raistline said:

I remember that DELL BS all too well. Gateway Computers also did the exact same thing.

A fond memory I have from back in the day was purchasing a CD-Burner. The CD burner did not list it's requirements on the box. At the time I had a PII 233 OC'd to ~266 (FSB Jumber Oveclock), I don't remeber how much RAM I had, but it was probably 32MB. So I went ahead and installed the CD-Rom which used the 33Mhz IDE standard (this was the first time IDE was keyed that I experienced). The mobo only had 1 IDE port and 1 Floppy port so I had to figure swap the jumper to set the CD-Burner as SLAVE. I could not use Line becuase it was in the 1st position on the cable. After installing the drivers from the Floppy disc I found I forgot set the HDD as Master and the CD-Burner was not recognized. 

I got that solved and everything was working except for one critial part. Burning CD's were running at .3X on an 8X burner and I constantly got Buffer Underrun errors. I had to call the support line for the drive and found out that the reason it did not work correctly was becuase the minimum requirements was 66mhz IDE and at least a 300mhz CPU with at minimum 512kb l2 cache, and 32MB of memory. I had to suck it up and return the CD-Burner, but I was able to find a 4X burner that met my system requirements. In the end my CPU was a tad too slow and the IDE bus was 1 step short. The CPU speed caused the slow burning and the IDE speed caused the buffer underrun errors. Oh Fun times.

Ouch and at a time too when you couldn't buy a stack of 100CD/DVDs for €15 I'll bet, a bad learning experience. PC's really have gotten a lot more user friendly to upgrade and repair alright, people should be thankful if they don't know anything about phrases like Memory timing or even speeds (since most will just run at the lowest speed now if you mismatch RAM).

One thing weirdly which has gotten harder is upgrading CPU's, I guess it's down to them requiring heavy duty heat sinks to be bolted on really tightly but when I was upgrading my old AMD 700mhz to a massively more powerful AMD 750mhz processor it was about as hard as changing a game on the megadrive.

Chip and Heatsink were all just one big cartridge type thing which slotted right onto the board, easy as pie compared to ripping out some of the Intel heatsinks in use today.

.....

Of course it was less powerful than my phone today... but still, was easy!

Yeah, it would be nice if we could have 5Ghz CPUs that could be passivly cooled instead of worrying about huge fan/heatsinks or watercooling. Wasn't there a CPU release recently that came with closed loop liquid cooling unit isntead of a heatsink/fan combo?