How Crap is your rig?

[RichL]

In response to the "How Phat is your Rig?" threads, I was wondering whats the lowest spec PC you have in current use as your main workstation? (For example - The PCs I use for burning CDs or watching TV are low spec, but they are practically a single function so dont count)

Mine would have to be my works PC -

Compaq Deskpro EN 6400/6
Intel P2/400, 128mb Ram, 6 gb hdd (split to 2x 3gb partitions), ATI 3d Rage Pro 4mb, 24x CDrom, Madge 16mb TOKEN RING (!) networking, Compaq S700 'Extra reflective low resolution' 17" monitor, running Windows NT4/SP3.

I hasten to point out this is a Company Standard PC, which is why its lumbered with a dual partitioned HDD and NT4 : the standard company config is for a 3gb hdd, I had to use drive manager to enable the other 3gb.

I did put in a request for a decent 17" Ilyama monitor and a Marox G450 as I have to do all our network diagrams, but the request was denied.

[VJ]

A Pentium 166, 16 MB, Matrox Mystique, 2+5GB harddisk. It is my system at home, merely used to read emails (through modem). My "more decent" rig is in my "student room".

And then: a 486DX2-66, 8MB, 2x420 MB harddisk, S3 2MB videocard, 14" svga display

I have two of those setups (well, the second has a mono 12" vga display), one at home, and one where I reside during the week. They run (well, euhm, "walk" ) linux and both have a removable harddisk-rack. The drive is mounted over network, and thus I can connect/disconnect the harddisk without having to reboot my regular rig (usefull when exchanging large data, the Pentium 166 cannot read cdrw).
If needed, I can also use them to display manuals (pdf), refs when developing software (VNC for controls: 486 plays server).
And if I really let myself go, then I can use the 486 as a VNC-client to my PII, set the PII-desktop to "horizontal", and have the 486 display the "hidden" portion of the desktop (who needs dualhead ? ).
But it is also interesting to be able to experiment with various network settings and cross-platform protocols (samba, nfs, ...)

The 486's are not used as primary workstation.


Jörg

[Tempest]

At my parents' place the main computer is a 75@120 MHz Pentium with 48 MB of RAM and a 640 MB hard drive. It's running 98Lite and is used for word processing (Office 97) and HTML (and maybe some occasional DOOM II, Tempest 2000 or Sam&Max =) so it doesn't need a lot of horsepower.

[cbman]

Gotcha Beat

My "Crap Rig" isn't the one in my sig.. its the one I set up for grandma and maintain for her.

Compaq 510CDS all in one toasterbox

Intel 486SX/33
20MB FPRAM
220MB HD
Cirrus Logic Video W/512K Memory
2X CD-ROM
ESS Sound
13 or 14 Inch Monitor built in
Speakers Built in
14.4 Modem Built In
1.44 MB Floppy
Windows 95
Office 97
Some Card Games

It was my first Intel System (previous system was Commodore 128)

[Bohrn]

here at work, it is a P166/32megs/1.2gig hd, 4xCDrom, NT4.0, 14" monitor, and GAG, a VirgeDX4meg.

at dads, its an Apple 2GS laptop LOL! He tried to sell it last year for $1800 LOL! He doesn't understand computers at all. He paid $1800 for it 8 years ago, and to him that is not that long I guess.

And in the basement, I have a 486DX 66 with 8megs, 540 meg hd, and a Tridend VLB 1meg video card.

[MadScot]

My abacus runs at 3 "ReallyHurts"

Every hour I hurt my finger 3 times...

MadScot

___________________________
Asus P2B-LS, Pentium II 400Mhz, 256Mb PC100 CAS 2, Matrox Millenium G400 DualHead AGP, RainbowRunner G-series, Creative PC-DVD Dxr2, HP CD-RW 9200i, Quantum V 9Gb SCSI HD, Maxtor 20Gb Ultra-66 HD (52049U4), Soundblaster 128, ViewSonic PS790 19", Win2k

[Dr Mordrid]

Numerically slowest system in the house;

Amiga3000T
Workbench 3.5
PPC 604e 200mhz (CyberStorm PPC)
128 megs RAM
40 meg Quantum SCSI boot drive (yes, 40 MEGs)
NewTek Video Toaster editing suite
Two Pansonic AG-1970 editing decks

I say "numerically slowest" because it isn't the slowest system in the place. It can run more programs simultaneously than most Windows systems, and in less RAM (lots of machine coding done for these things), not to mention not being any kind of slouch.

This pup is still pretty darned fast.

Dr. Mordrid

[efty]

My main and only riq

PII300@450
Abit BX6 MB
IBM 40GB HD ( that I am about to send back for replacement)
WD 10GB HD
Maxtor 20GB HD
512 MB RAM P100 Cas2
Matrox Marvel G200
17" ViewSonic E771 Before that used to have a CTX 17" which blew up

System Before this one:
P1 90
16mb or ram
1gb Seagate HD
Data Experts Motherboard Triton Chipset

I used to play Quake and Duke3d with this one

And since Dr. M mentioned the amiga, I will mention my ancient
386SX 16Mhz 1mb ram and 45 mb HD. I used to fight with a friend of mine whose computer is better. Mine or his Amiga 500.

Btw can someone explain how the amiga worked and with such an ancient machine u could make full scale presentations and effects using scala ?

I tried scala on my current PC and in some places there was jerkyness.

Also is there something comparable in the pc(nowdays) with the HAM (not sure of the spelling) mode of the amiga?

[Dr Mordrid]

Because the Amiga had multiple device processors and a truly multitasking OS...in 1985.

These co-processors shared the bus with the CPU on a time sharing basis and could communicate between themselves without CPU intervention. As such the CPU was freed to do other things while disk I/O, mouse, joystick, audio and video were being processed. It even did animated overlays...multiple ones...in the hardware.

It also had a true auto-configuring bus and later models had 32 bit card slots (some ISA's too), and a dedicated 32 bit graphics slot. Not bad for those days....

One thing that was also cool was built-in support for putting live video on the desktop, replacing the background color. Run a full-screen animated title with transparancy and you had an instant title generator.

It's multitaking kernel, EXEC, was written in highly optimized code, as was most of the rest of the OS. In fact the whole OS; REXX scripting, command prompt, device drivers GUI and everything would run on just 512k and boot from a floppy disk. This because most of the GUI and I/O functionality for most programs were in the system itself and its libraries. You could create a whole GUI for a program using nothing but system calls and perhaps a few small bitmaps.

What also helped were programming languages like E. E was a high level language similar to a mix of Basic and Pascal, but it was set up to do all the system calls with very simplfied code. But...once you compiled it an E program ran VERY fast and was VERY small. Again, a high degree of optimization all the way 'round.

Programs were so small that if you had a 10-20 meg HDD you could install every major program you had and have room left over for downloads. With this storage you could multitask quite nicely on a 7 mhz, 2 meg RAM Amiga. With more it would fly.

I have a 3D program for the Amiga that defies logic in terms of its size. Aladdin4D was, and is, VERY cool...and all of about 2 megs on the disk, including demos and support files.

It could run on 2 megs of RAM (8-10 was better, of course) and do 3D modeling in a very responsive 3D workspace. You could spin things around in the modeler just like you could in trueSpace today, use procedural textures, animated textures, what we now call bumpmapping and all manner of neat stuff. It also rendered fast.

Dr. Mordrid

[Novdid]

Well let's see...

AMD K6-2 450
128MB SDRAM
i430tx chipset (Shuttle HOT566 )
Riva TNT
Aureal SQ2500 (Vortex 2)
20,4 GB seagate u10 (i think, can't remember)

Not that bad actually.

[Greebe]

my gateway...
Inwin A500 case, Mtech Mustang r581a mb, Cyrix PR166 OC'd to pr233 (188.5mHz woohoo!), Millennium G200 agp, dual pci nic's (el cheapo's) Vortex 1 pci sound card, Asus 40x cdrom, 196 megs pc100 mem fsb@75mHz , Fujitsu 3.2gig ide hd and one funky Plaquard Hell 14" monitor... Ya BayBay

[NetDisruptor]

Just let a friend take my slowest system a C128 with printer, 2 small monitors and a modem lol now just need to loose 3 486's
and 2 p120's and replace my main rig with a new one (this will happen in the next few months I hope)

My main rig:

P2@450mhz
Soyo SBA+
256mb pc100
Voodoo3 3000
SB live Platinum
48X 16xDVDrom
40gb IBM ata/66/100
9gb WD ata/66
Promise Ultra66 IDE controller
2 Linksys 10/100 NIC's

Running: 98se/Win2k Pro/WinXP Pro/and StormLinux
Becuase I can't make up my mind.

Runs MaxPayne and RTCW just fine I was shocked..
Won't be so lucky with Unreal2 I'am srue.