Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Brother Word Processor

Here is an old Brother word processor I came across and it even still works correctly. The printer even still has ink and functions. I remember back when I took some college classes (87-88) we had something similar to this we had to use.This isn't quite that old, this is circa 1992. I was surprised to see that i can still get ink for this reasonably cheap.




Sunday, August 30, 2009

Zenith Mastersport 386SLe

Look at this old timer a ZENITH Mastersport 386SLE , It has a 386 16MHZ cpu I think, that was the specs from a similar one I found with a 30MB hard drive.

It has windows 3 on it I have the 6 floppy disk's with windows on it as well. I actually used this thing for a while back in the 90's for some documents and stuff. Heck my Palm Treo has more capabilities than this thing. Wow have we ever came a long way with electronics since these days.

Friday, August 14, 2009

Terminal Screensaver


This is How to make a screen saver in UBUNTU that looks like a running terminal program the easy way.

First of all you want to make sure you have Xscreensaver-data and Xscreensaver-data-extra.

If not you can simply paste this code in a terminal. Or go to synaptic package manager.


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Sudo apt-get install xscreensaver-data


sudo apt-get install xscreensaver-data-extra

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Now you will want to go to the menu bar and select (system,preferences,screen saver) now select Phosphor if you go to advanced you will see you can choose a simple text file to use for your scrolling text to simulate a terminal program running. I just made my own with my text editor and saved it as a text file. Any type of text will work so you can pretty much customise it any way you wish.Good luck and enjoy.




Thursday, August 13, 2009

Entre Dropping

This is how I do my Entre Drops, I have a 22" wide-screen next to a 19" wide-screen and since I have two blogs and linked them in Entre card I can log into one on each computer and drop on both linked blogs at the same time. I usually load one and while its loading I will drop on the others then switch back.

Sunday, August 9, 2009

Long Time Ago


I was looking for something today and found this old hard drive among some spare parts. Its circa 1988-89 from what I found, 40-49 mb of storage, I found an old advertisement listing it for around $399.00. I cant believe the size of it for what it is. kind of funny now we can put 8 GB in something 31.3 MM long. wow we have come a long way in 20 years. I also found my old copy of Liesure Suit Larry, wow that was a long time ago before I had kids and all, I had a comadore 64 and a Tandy 1000 back in those days. Ok I feel old now guess its time to go.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

AMD or INTEL?

This is in reply to a comment from yesterday asking who is better AMD or INTEL, its not really a question of who is better since both manufacturers have a good product, but a matter of what works for you better with whatever you use your computer for, I know for instance that some pc based video surveillance (DVR) cards don't play nice with AMD and other things that just don't work with INTEL. But I do have one complaint with INTEL even if it is a minor flaw, their method of securing the CPU heatsink could use a lot of work.
those little plastic things tend to break. this picture is of an aftermarket heatsink but it has the same plastic clips as the OEM fan that had failed on mine.


Here is an AMD AM2 heatsink you can see the mounting hardware they use, the motherboard has a bracket screwed in place and the heatsink has a metal retaining system.


Here is an INTEL setup that has failed you can see the bottoms of the 4 plastic pins they use and note the red circle as this one is broken. this caused the system to overheat and fail over time.I took 4 small screws and nuts and replaced the plastic clips on one intel heatsink and that seemed to work fine. My INTEL system is what I use for games as it seems to out perform the AMD's in some games but INTEL seems to cost more than AMD for comparable CPU's.

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

XFX 8200

I built a computer for someone back a few months ago with an XFX Geforce 8200 motherboard and a Phenom x4 cpu, at first everything was fine but after a few weeks it began acting up. It even fragged the Linux kernal on one install, it had multiple problems listed in the logs most of which led to the cpu.After giving it some thought I got a new Asus motherboard identicle to mine I use every day and bought an Athlon 64 X2 7550 cpu. I swapped the motherboard out and put the XFX one with the new cpu in my second computer I use for my personal weather station and stuff because I wanted to get to the bottom of the problem, Well its been about 3 weeks and so far I have had no problems at all with it. The CPU I put in it is a screamer it has the KUMA core and 3 MB cache. I even overclocked it some to try and get it do do something but so far its been running fine and I even like the motherboard and its features. I also put 2 GB of the OCZ SLI memory in it and that even works like a charm. After not finding anything wrong with my new setup I decided to just keep it and see how things go. That left me with a pile of spare parts laying about so I built a Frankenputer with all of it and handed it off to my youngest son.