FYI: TH-cam has gone back to its old trick of not fully processing a video until after it's made publicly viewable -- except now they don't give any warning to the viewer or uploader that this is taking place. Even once all of the expected resolutions are available, that does not necessarily mean that processing is complete, since TH-cam now provides multiple different codecs, such as WebM/VP9 and H.264. On longer videos, processing can take up to several _days_ to complete. So one cannot accurately judge TH-cam's encoding quality until adequate time is given to let it sort everything out. Back to the topic at hand... I've never heard of SolydX before, which isn't surprising considering that there are hundreds (if not thousands?) of distros out there, so once you get past the first few dozen, you've pretty much reached the asymptote of notability. And get ready for the obligatory "Linux is a kernel, not an operating system!" comments...
+vwestlife That would explain why my videos have always looked like crap until I published them. I waited a whole day for one to finish processing and got nothing, so I said "to hell with it!" and published it as is. Conveniently finished processing not long after. Not that I mind, but it would be nice if a warning were available for the purpose of avoiding comments asking why the video looks so bad.
Harrison Rose I wish it were funny, but ContentID has to be the biggest waste of computing power on the planet. Google is talking out of their asses when they claim "greenness" and their other politically correct nonsense. We have the computational resources to put a man on the moon and this is what they squander it on.
I agree google is using their $10,000 server resources for "Preventing copyright Infringement" Where as they should use it for stuff that actually matters.
Bill, never commit to a schedule like many channels. As you mentioned it then becomes "work" and the quality suffers. Committing to a schedule is the TH-cam equivalent of "Jumping the Shark".
The Molex to SATA power adapter is indeed an HP Part, P/N 5188-3214, which lists on HP's PartSurfer as "SATA hard drive power cable - With latch and dongle, 3.93-inch (100mm) in length".
+jaykay18 Since making this video, I've come to wonder if someone didn't swap the power supply out of another Dell, and scrounged up a SATA adapter however they could. This is the first and only Dimension 8300 I've seen with a 250 watt supply.
Twice i have dabbled with linux, twice the most simple thing left me with high blood pressure! I can't remember the first failure, but the second was spending two days trying to get a flash player working with Firefox. Gave up after that trying to use Linux for my desktop OS.
100SteveB You should give it another shot, Linux mint cinnamon is quite modern and very easy to use and install... The developers of it pride it for being easy for beginners. And if you get stuck, I'll personally offer help in getting it working... Once you get going with linux, you rarely look back.
+Jacob's Channel In my commitment to doing nothing less than the best to maintain and repair my fleet of computers, that is indeed a folded over sheet of paper covering up the open drive bay. If I get to feeling really fancy, by which I mean "finding an insufficiently guarded laminating machine", I'll make a much nicer replacement.
Always fun to see you bring the dead (PCs) back to life, +uxwbill. I have been working on old computers and have a few notes: I've found as you have that many of the video cards/chips are not well supported Very frustrating. Other than that, those old systems do pretty well. I used to use DVDs or CDs to run or install Linux, but I've found that USB keys are much much faster. Particularly when you have a utility distro that you use all the time (like PartedMagic) it's nice to have them boot in 45 seconds rather than 5 minutes. (OTOH, it's great to have a use for those piles of unused DVDs). I think that SolydX is only based on Debian these days - not on Ubuntu. I have been using Point Linux which is similar (Debian with a MATE desktop environment) and have been very happy with it. It is more streamlined that Ubuntu distributions, boots faster, and seems to support most hardware w/o problems. I think beefing up the RAM would make a big difference. 1 GB is pretty sparse, especially when running current memory-hog web browsers. I notice a big difference when upgrading from 512 MB to 2 or 3 GB - from painfully slow / unusable to almost comfortable.
USB flash memory keys are great *if* the system you're using can boot them. With anything made before 2005, and a few things after, this isn't necessarily guaranteed. Intel's integrated graphics work the best of anything in a Linux or BSD environment because Intel actually released full documentation about almost all of them, and in many cases they wrote an open source driver too. nVidia support with open source drivers is pretty awful, as are pretty much all of the Taiwanese/Chinese chipsets with integrated graphics (SiS, ALi, VIA, etc.). ATI/AMD have released some stuff, so at least the situation there isn't as dire -- though I find their graphics cards quite slow in 2D mode under Linux or BSD with open source drivers. I had plans to beef up the RAM (3 or 4 GB) and CPU (P4 Extreme Edition) in a future video. That hasn't happened yet. For the sake of this demonstration, I wanted to see how well one could get along with what the machine had in it when I started. It worked better than it should have.
Thanks uxwbill. I've just been exploring computers of this vintage, and you are an excellent guide to those regions. I find that the farther back you go, the more outdated standards you encounter (e.g. IDE hard drives, DDR memory). It's interesting from the viewpont of archaeology, but can be hard to get a version of Linux running. In my experience: Core 2 Duo: a shoo-in Core Duo: pretty solid but may encounter a few problems (32-bit, IDE drives) Pentium M: usually okay, with a few problems, such as having to use the "forcepae" boot parameter on Banias systems. Pentium 4. can be okay, or can encounter "interesting" issues. uxwbill territory. Pentium 3 and earlier. A true challenge. K Mandla territory.
I love playing old computers when I happen to curious of what can I do to the hard wares and soft wares, for example the 1998 Compaq Presario Windows 95 desktop, I like play around on DOS games and do a DOS like doing Scandisk on HDD and Floppy Disk to see if they got a bad sectors on it. I love the old DOS when checking the Hard Drive and Floppy Disk when I like to know what does contain on the hard ware, and it's too bad that I couldn't use SATA connection for an old PC but to use IDE plug. By the time when I got the RAM from my cousin, I check all the RAM include the DDR and DDR2, most of them passed and one of them failed because I inspect them carefully and noticed the traces is cracked, nothing I can do other than to replace the RAM, and as soon as I was going to check the RAM and see it passes, and found out when it had an error, the contact is dirty. How to do it by prevent an error from RAM? I use the Eraser, clean them up, test them out and it did passed the test.
Before school. WHOO ANOTHER UXWBILL COMPUTER VIDEO! After school. Straight away watching and enjoying :D My favorite linux distro has to be Fedora, because of how "finished up" it is, Its also relatively stable, but for older machines I go with an old distro called "knoppix" with the KDE desktop, although I prefer GNOME to KDE, Xfc, etc. Regarding AGP/PCI Video Cards, I do own an old NVidia GeForce 2 MX 400 with 64 MB Video Ram. The latest drive for that I believe was a Forceware 94.00. I used it in an old Shuttle cube machine. As well as owning an older competitor, the AMD/ATI Rage All In Wonder 128 Pro with 32mb video ram. It seems to never pick up/allow 1366x768 resolutions.
+daniel15092 Fedora's entirely OK, if anything I guess I'd call it "unexciting". Which can certainly be a good thing. Knoppix is one of my favorites and so far as I know, was the distribution that kicked off the whole Live CD thing. I would certainly hope that something like the nouveau driver could handle a card as old as the GeForce 2! Even though the cards you mention came well before the age of widescreen aspect ratio displays, I would have expected that their clock generators and DACs would be flexible enough to handle any resolution that fell within their frequency and bandwidth limits. Freely programmable video hardware isn't exactly a new idea -- though it could be that the drivers simply aren't new enough to be willing.
I wish I could put my thoughts into words as effectively as you did for the first 8 minutes. Well said, all around. Especially about Linux. I'm actually running Mint 17.3 on my Precision M4700, and while it's a wonderful OS, it did require some work to get going perfectly even though Dell has been very supportive of Linux on their systems. My wireless card required some terminal fun to get working out of the box, and it was something I had to go googling hard for. I know Linux fans keep pining for the days of ubiquitous Linux usage, but you nailed it as to why it isn't yet. If those of us who screw with these things for a living have some amount of trouble getting things functioning correctly, our parents and your average Joe is probably going to give up and beat a hasty retreat to Windows. Though the fun thing that everyone seems to forget is Linux technically is pretty ubiquitous; The Android OS is technically a form of Linux, as it uses a Linux kernel and is based on Linux. Kind of in the same way the iPhone/iPad run OS X in a stripped down form.
I'm glad you made this video on this computer. I used to see a lot of these computers being replaced when I was in high school several of these machines had their ram and hard drives removed. I managed to only grab a CRT and Keyboard as well as the Dell Dimension while I saw the PC tech guys stacking these machines out side of the school. I wanted to get more parts, but it would only anger my father; he saw them as trash. Though as of today I rarely see these Dell Dimension in schools and offices.
I have just finally got around to watching this video, and I found your rant reasonable, and maybe a little humorous. I enjoy your knowledge and insight on computers and audio equipment. I am a computer hobbyist, and I enjoy the knowledge you have, and have used it for my own problems. Keep making videos, in your time, not anyone else's. :-)
Hey Guy, Sorry about the comment in your other video. Watching videos out of order. Love fooling with old hardware myself. Really miss the late ninety's to early oughts in hardware. Back when you only had 15 IRQs, like the machine you were using in the other video. Really enjoy the videos whenever they do come. Keep up the goofing off. Add: One of the things that makes your computer videos very enjoyable is your extensive knowledge of the machine types that you do tend to have many of. The PS/2 machines and the Dells. Very cool man.
So, I have returned yet again, this particular video never gets old for me. Anyhow, the 8300s were truly tanks, I got one a few days ago that had been literally smashed until the case was a two piece unit, and it actually works perfect.
Thank you for doing what you do. You inspired me to work on my Dell Dimension 4500 to test out the SATA connections. Again, thank you for doing all that you do.
Hi Bill; I have for Many Years, Really Enjoyed Your Video's.. They are Great, Keep up the Good Work.. I look forward to seeing a new Video all the time.. I am also a Lover of Really Old Computers (Heaters), in fact my current Heater that I am working on Here on the Kitchen Table and in a Homemade wooden case, and am trying to fix it's latest problem, is my (1972) PDP 11/45.. Which does a Great Job of keeping the Kitchen Warm, when it is running.. THANK YOU Marty
+Marty Geist I really appreciate your taking the time to write. I'm always honored to hear from people who have followed what I've been up here on TH-cam for a long time. I've never had the fortune to find something like an early minicomputer system (nor have I ever been offered something like a mainframe , which is probably just as well since I'd have nowhere to put and no way to power it). As something of an unintentional computer historian and preservationist, I do appreciate the contributions such early systems made and perhaps one day I'll happen across one and get it back in working order.
I love your videos and have learned a few things about repairing things around the house. Just wanted to say thanks, you've saved me a few hundred dollars on computer repair and appliance repair.
There are and were many different efforts for ATI/AMD drivers on Linux throughout the years, thus the confusion of the information. I ran Linux quite long ago on quite old ATI hardware and have in fact used ATI up until my very most recent GPU purchase, and while I haven't made it through the entire video, just to disclaim I'll try to explain the differences: Back before the AMD acquisition there was the open source original "radeon" driver, which was typically tasked with running 9000-series ATI products, and RAGE products. You may remember a time around 2004-5 when these 3D accelerated graphics desktops on Linux were all the rage, and this interest birthed the closed source FGLRX project, which limps along to this day for those who prefer or are forced to use a closed source driver (as you seem to be from 2013) Of course running a driver from 2013 has its own problems, and a closed source driver yet more, FGLRX will run you with full acceleration and an attempt at stability, but you will run in what's called a "tainted kernel" state, and lose the support of most diehard Linux kernel side support. You've injected closed source software into the kernel and some of the hardcore users are less likely to help you. I can't really blame them a ton recollecting the state of the closed source drivers about ten years ago. But by 2013 they were pretty stable. If you know how to recover or uninstall them by hand if something goes wrong you can get back to a clean state (or find someone who isn't a jerk. :P) At some point another open source project joined "radeon" "radeonHD" which most likely if you could find a package for it, would support your 2400. As FGLRX got more advanced, radeonHD stagnated and was shelved. All the effort returned to "radeon" or at that point sometimes known as the Xfree86-ATI project. As far as I know, radeonHD was based on some kind of quiet licensing deal, or somehow leakage of ATI API information. Once the information dried up the project was unable to continue, thus the maintainers returned to reverse engineering like they always have on the radeon/xf86-ati project. This kind of strange naming neuroticism is kind of an issue for open source projects in general. A lot of people struggle the way you had without knowing the lay of the land for so damn long.
Bill, thank you *so* much for mentioning VideoReDo! I used to use it all the time back when I worked in public access TV in the mid-2000's. It saved a lot of headaches when dealing with less-than-standard MPEG streams. I wonder if I still have the registration code...
I installed Linux bodhi 2.0 on a dell similar to this. I use Linux zron as my main PC. I like old PC I just put a 40gb HHD in a dell but after words I found patch for win 98 se to make it work with HHD over 32gb do I needed it for win98 se to work right. I like old PC and CRT monitor. good job on the video
thank you for all the help with my cd issue the media player is fine now but I had to eplace one of my cd/dvd writer drives because it was tempermental. it was really great ideas . and it helped as well as replacing the drives I bought two and put them both in so that there is no problem with dealing with how long one will last .once again thank you very much all the best great video as always
My 2011 era MacBook Air is a fantastic thigh warmer, especially when you're playing games on it. And it's a particularly good thigh warmer on hot Summer's days.
I found your channel while surfing youtube. Having started my computing journey on a 386sx many years ago, your video's of older hardware are very interesting. That I also live in Illinois may have something to to do with it also. As a long time Linux user, who only runs linux now, I was happy you found a disrto that you like. I also run the xfce desktop in Xubuntu.Both your distro and Xubuntu are Debian derivatives. Xfce is a good low resource desktop and is pretty newbie friendly. My wife had really no interest in computers, but one day I got her a laptop from ebay without an os and installed Linux and gave it to her, she is in her 50's and didnt use it for a few years, then she found out about the evil that is Facebook from a friend. The laptop came out and while there were questions, I expect they would be similar to sitting someone who had never been in front of a Windows or Apple computer before. Linux has come a long way.even in the last 10 years. Unless you are a gamer and you just surf and write some documents they are suitable for just about everyone. With Steam releasing a linux client and a linux powered game machine it may not be to long before that changes. As the IT for my small church/school that runs on nothing but older hardware that has been donated Linux is invaluable to me. You could try the LXDE desktop, it will run on real low resource hardware, but it isnt as newbie friendly, but I think you would have no problems. You almost have me wanting to dig out the 386 from the basement and see if I can get it running. I could never find myself parting with it because of all the hours of fun it gave me. But newer machines I have built myself have taken its place many times over. Ignore the complainers, keep doing what you do and enjoy, there are viewers who like what you do and dont care about the background, or the video quality.I have watched most of the video's you have uploaded, and I hope more will come along when you have the time.
As a sidenote you can play media that is copyright protected under demonstration purposes and so long as you don't play any whole article under the demonstration act clause of the DMCA rules. So, as long as you don't play a whole movie, TV episode, or song, you are completely safe.
Used to be the case, but these days you can't even play a song for 20 seconds anymore without getting a content ID match in which the music companies makes money off 20 seconds of a song. It's pathetic really.
i got very fond memories of my ibm slimline office pc that i had a 2.8 ghz pentium 4 with hyper treading over clocked to 3.4 i took a 5 inch hole saw cut out the side of the case stuck a cooler that was off a early quade core that got hit by lightening on it had a slot cut in it for the video card sliced out of the case and a external mounted full size 500w psu all on a stained and varnished plywood base hung on my bedroom wall was my free pc build in 2009 ish used it untill late 2013 ran ubuntu 10.04 like a drem
+Atif Munir Thank you for watching. The thing attached to the telephone receiver is a pad that makes it easier to cradle on your shoulder while using your hands for another task, such as data entry or looking something up in a file.
The best consumer grade room heaters come with Pentium 4 Prescott heating elements :) I run mine only in winter (no not because I don't want the chip to overheat, I don't want myself to overheat in summer sitting in a small dorm room). I'm using an Asrock heater control unit which allows you to set the output temperature by changing the clock frequency. It's a very nice feature so you can dial in the temperature you like and have a nice warm room.
I have a Dell Optiplex 170L waiting for a project. I think I will give SolydX a try. I have another with a Prescott 2.8Ghz and 2GB RAM and that is currently running Lubuntu which has been brilliant. It is using the standard Intel graphics (No AGP, but very pretty solder pads for it). Works on 360p, 480p and 720p dependent on the video.
I feel like Linux has came a long way with it’s usability since I started using it in 09, but Im somewhat of a command line addict since I figured out how to use it effectively One of these dell machines was first computer I really used, don’t remember if same model exactly but it was the same case. I also remember it using ECC ram.
@@connorm955 it might of been fully buffered dimms I don’t remember I just remember the ram being more that normal lol I believe it was a dimension 8200
I don't really like Linux as a desktop OS either, but what's probably the best feature about it is how resource efficient it is. I run Lubuntu on my Netbook which used to run Windows 7 Starter. In Windows 7 it used to be at least 60% RAM being used. In Lubuntu, it was more like 30% even with Chrome open.
Zandman26 I'm not sure really, I just don't find it as user friendly. Probably because when you run into problems, which is quite often when setting up a machine with Linux, you have to go and use the terminal which I don't really like. Don't get me wrong, I have started using it on two of my PCs and find it a quite good OS, but I just prefer Windows 7.
+Ashton B. Ok. If you run into problems during installation of the OS then I don't have a GUI solution for you. As it's limited to the GUI of the installer.
I am pleased to find I am not the only one who is a little underimpressed with Linux OS. I have tried any number of the different varients and found them not easy to run. I want my old XP back on my laptop. Should have had it dual boot I guess -too late now!
I can say that with an optical disk reader and an empty USB card reader, when you click on those with no media inserted on the Linux Mint Debian Edition with the MATE desktop, this doesn't happen, there's no message of any descripton. Of course a floppy drive could work very differently, but I find it odd that LMDE would work differently to Ubuntu based Linux Mint.
I'd see about picking up GPU-Z (I'm sure there's a linux equivalent out there); that would let you see how much the GPU is helping with youtube video playback.
The user interface doesn't make that clear, and no tooltip or similar indication ever came along to expand the entries so that one could see the differences.
@@uxwbill Chances are that if there were a simple way of making the options clearer, without sacrificing detail, it would have been implemented. No one has found it yet, or found the job to be worth their time.
Great and intuitive video. I have recently tried to install many different Linux systems on my current AMD FX8300 Pc Rig. Via VirtualBox and the BIOS bootup. I have had many different driver and hardware problems, with USB3.1, Network drivers etc. Main problems I have had is through the graphic hardware, using with my Old Nvidia GT 610, AMD R9 280 or even my new AMD RX 480, with driver issues. I found the open source AMD Radeon graphic drivers with Ubuntu 16.4 and with Linux Mint 18. However, couldn't get out of standard 640x480 or 800x600 resolution on the display setting. Also couldn't find how to install the driver on the OS. Utter mind field. Is there anyway to install linux on my modern system as a duel boot without any graphic compatibility problems? Or will I have to build a retro build system or this task? I really want to start experimenting with linux as a self confessed tech geek lol
+doomloop1977 That is one of the things that makes open-source cross platform application software so beautiful. Suddenly one's choice of operating system...well, "doesn't matter" might be a little strong, but "matters less than it ordinarily would" is certainly plausible.
regarding ATI/AMD Radeon video cards, you may want to give Oibaf Open Source PPA drivers a whirl. These drivers are made to make use of your video card's accelerated video functions. I have been using Oibaf for my HD5450 with Xubuntu, Peppermint, and Ubuntu Studio for about 2 years now. I have found not many issues and seem to render HD and other video formats faster, these days it's all about if you have enough L2/L3 Cache IMHO. I've been distrohopping over a decade now, I always come back to Debian/Ubuntu ;)
I have 32gb of ram in my Mac Pro and it is currently using 14gb. So while looking at the memory usage on your Dimension 8300 I thought it was extremely low before realizing there is only 1gb installed.
I have a Radeon HD 2400 Pro PCI-E version that was an OEM dell version with the DMS-59 port on it and i know that when i was using it last year it was listed by AMD/ATI as Legacy so they probably dont have any modern Linux ported proprietary driver though they might have something on their website
Okay okay okay My grandmother had a Dimension 8300 for the longest time and I don't think I EVER saw that part of the panel flip up.. I don't know why, but that is equally awesome and unsettling to me.
It wasn't Dell's best design ever. Although there are USB ports and a headphone jack under there, the USB ports in particular can be difficult to use, especially the upper one. The angle is sharp enough that not every device will make reliable electrical contact.
Now when you say I can download your video and properly interject the term GNU / Linux when you pronounce like you do, do I have a Creative Commons Left license to do so, or perhaps GPL v2 or GPL v3 license?
+HandyWyo The commentary is meant to be sarcastic in nature, although I do not care nor can I stop anyone doing whatever they want with a video for their own personal private use. And if you really must do that for your own personal private use, go right ahead. More serious answer: Monetizing a video on TH-cam seems to preclude any ability to enable copyleft or Creative Commons. I maintain copyright on my videos and certainly do not expect to see them uploaded in their entirety elsewhere without my permission. All of that said, I do not care if people use portions of my videos as part of a greater whole, so long as the work in question isn't disparaging, illegal, shocking, or distasteful. And even though US copyright law allows such, I'd really rather not have my work parodied.
It's a pitty even the lightweight GNU/Linux distros are getting past the 256 MB of RAM mark for being usable on older systems as I think there would be a market for a very lightweight distro for very basic web tasks and word processing (I know Puppy Linux does that and today's websites wouldn't be too happy on 256 MB of RAM). I managed to get PCLinuxOS 2009 which funny enough was the best thing I got to run on my trusty old Sony VAIO PCG-FX401 with a Duron 800 MHz, 256 MB RAM ,ATI Rage Mobility 8MB GPU and a 15 GB HDD and DVD-ROM drive. Ran very well watching DVDs and doing basic stuff but everything else was abit fussy especially GNOME and even XFCE. Might do a video of the Sony someday.
I think its funny that people say how power inefficient old computers are. Yes newer ones do more with less watts, is it really that much better. For an example if you have a old computer that pulls 150 watts from the wall, to "upgrade" to something that can do a little more and pull 90 watts may not be worth it. My main computer is way newer but leaving to idle in a average size bed room could make someone die of heat stroke, let alone have it under load.
+Bobo91ism You are right, and there's more: a lot of older computers don't actually take very much power and even if they are utilizing it less efficiently, it matters little if you don't actually *need* that much computing power to accomplish a given task. The Pentium 4 is a notable exception, but it supports things like the HLT instruction and later versions also have a rudimentary version of SpeedStep.
Dell used to have some really nice upgrade/add-on options. until about 2008 I think. What I love about this model though is that it has an actual slot for a video card. I always go to upgrade the video card on these older systems just because I have so many of them laying around and whenever I get the 3000 I always get angry because I can't upgrade the gpu but the 8300's always make me happy because I can. Just because I have so many AGP cards.
you doing a video on a pentium 4 reminded me of a thing, that thing is even a core2duo laptop when placed on a persons lap can keep them kind of warm from my experience, with a macbook a1181 mid-2009 and a dell latitude d630 late-2007
I came here for the complaining, but stayed for the video. By coincidence, I was mulling over SolydX for use as a live distro just a couple of days ago. I normally use Mint XFCE for this purpose, but it's been behaving strangely of late. Not sure if it's because of the low-end system (Intel Atom, 1GB RAM) I was using it on, or the file manager's fault, but it seemed to freeze during file copying. I wondered if even XFCE was getting a bit too 'big' for lowlier computers, and to finish the task I fired up a Puppy derivative, Slacko. I don't care for the file manager, but it got the job done with no freezing. I may give SolydX a go 'live', to see how it fares.
Memory usage there is certainly impressive. Impressive enough to make me load Task Manager on my PC (Windows 10). Well with the usual background stuff and Chrome with just TH-cam on one tab open... I'm using 3.2GB of RAM. Nice.
first thing I noticed in this video was that APC UPS....it looks identical to one I got at the recycling center. They gave me two of them since there was no batteries. You can get batteries for them pretty cheap (even if it still winds up costing almost as much as a "cheap" UPS). But the APC ones are built like a TANK and won't go out in 2-3 years. Seems that modern day UPS devices are like printers. Once the batteries go out, people just toss 'em and buy another UPS (like with printers, you can get a cheap $30 printer with ink and toss it when the ink is out b/c it would cost you just as much money to buy ink)
+DvdXploitr That's a Smart-UPS 1500 I bought for $5 on eBay, supposedly dead. Of course, the trick here is that any of the Smart-UPS models (and a few of the Back-UPS units as well) must have a good battery or they won't do a solitary thing. Lately I've found that picking up these cast off units, going over them and selling them as refurbished units is not a bad business at all. "There's a uxwbill video for that." And yes, it's another rambling one. :-P th-cam.com/video/X8GjEAHOBSY/w-d-xo.html
+DvdXploitr And now it has occurred to me that more than APC product is visible in this video. The RS1500 visible at times to the left of the Dim8300 has come up with an annoying thing to do. After it has cooled down, it will refuse to switch off of the battery. As it warms up, it gradually starts to operate more and more correctly. I suspect bad caps. And when it finally dies, I guess I'll see about repairing it. There is another identical unit in the Computer Mess Room that will be the subject of a future video. That one has a flaky linear regulator and will periodically drop dead. I never recommend those cheap "plugstrip" UPS units to anyone, and I've collected a whole bunch of them after the batteries gave out and their owners got tired of the five minute runtime even when they were new. There's probably a black hole forming somewhere in that stack. I have sometimes used them for low power backup needs, but there are only so many of those around. Perhaps I should dispense with a few of them in the microwave?
I just went and looked at the APC UPS I got from the recycling center and it is the XPS 1200...I do believe it requires two batteries in it. Not sure how long the run time is since I haven't gotten around to replacing the batteries in it yet.
I thought this was very funny. Didn't realize I wasn't the only one using older Dells as space heaters. The Pentium 4 variants are especially warm. Call em the Snuggleplex series.
I'm very tech orientated, but Linux still throws me completely. It's just so alien to me, and the vast array of flavours is just boggling. I do, however, use it as a LiveCD OS for testing things, in Knoppix form... which works on about 25-50% of the systems I've owned. As for old systems; whilst they may be less efficient, they already exist and have offset their manufacturing carbon footprint a lot more. Not to mention that running a couple of old P4-era systems under load will probably reduce your heating bill!
In 2008 I bought a used, ~2002 slim tower OptiPlex (GX260 if I remember correctly). It served me until 2013, when I bought a Dell Vostro 14" laptop... which has been dead for a year now. Been thinking of digging out the old OptiPlex from my parents' closet for the nostalgia :)
Yano Bill you could line up and arrange a big group and make a workbench from them, just screw the bottom of the top one to the top of the bottom one, if you wanted to you can stack another row in front of the first and have a "double wide", maybe do some arranging to make a "knee hole" to scoot up to, and have all the "heaters" point at your feet. like lego blocks. :-)
I too have been messing about with Linux this weekend. I tried Debian Stretch Testing with the Xfce on an AMD AthlonXP 2400+ box (2.0GHz) with 1.5GB of RAM, and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised that this 'fresh from the oven' operating system was able to run so beautifully on hardware of this vintage. However the only issue I had is that the computer in question has an nVidia GeForce 7300GT, and as such, the Nouveau drivers are pure garbage, but they do work, unlike nVidia's own proprietary legacy drivers which completely broke the graphical display syste. nVidia issues notwithstanding, I found that Debian Stretch Testing with Xfce has made this old computer useful once again, at least for basic office tasks and light web browsing. As someone who reconditions old hardware and gives it to people who need, but cannot afford a computer, I am very thankful that there is a linux distro out there that can really eke more life out of otherwise old, and sometimes frail computer systems.
I have a quick question for you hopefully you can answer my sister in law has an HP all-in-one computer and when she turns it on blue screen with the letters HP and nothing else happens what do you think is wrong with the computer just guessing
BTW.. I put a elderly couple in front of Ubuntu Studio and Puppy Linux, they figured it out real quick. They loved how fast it was and the wife loved all the editing tools of Studio. She loved Pinta and GIMP, also with certain clients on a Fixed Income, Linux is a great choice, thus far no complaints :) As long at the Start Button/Menu button is at the bottom Left most users can figure it out real quick! I am with ya, Older computers are great!
Bill I remember selling HP systems of that age once upon a time. I don't believe that SATA drive is from the factory. In the case of the HP systems, they would have SATA ports on the board, but were completely kitted out with PATA ODD's and HDD's. The SATA ports were present but unpopulated. The same case may be in your Dell!
+2dfx The SATA drive definitely isn't original. I had to surrender the machine's original hard disk before I was allowed to take it. I probably should have said "I don't know" and left it at that, although I'm not sure I'm allowed to do that as a male. I think it's some kind of requirement that I at least try to come up with some ridiculous theory that sounded good when I came up with it. :-P This system has two PATA channels and two SATA connectors. When I ordered my own Dimension 8300 new, there were PATA hard drive options. The much newer Optiplex GX620 is the first Dell system I'm aware of with enough SATA connectors to install all-SATA hard and optical drives. (A Dimension 4600 has solder pads for four SATA connectors, but only two are populated.)
That HD2400 looks like a Visiontek card. I recently bought an HD2600XT AGP of the same brand and was impressed with it's build quality. It has a nice heavy heatsink and Sanyo solid polymer caps. I tried the mentioned HD2600XT on a Dell GX270 board, which is generally similar to this system (it uses an 865 chipset though). OSes I've tried are WinXP and Linux Mint 17. I found that the AGP HD2600 works fine in linux at a 2D desktop, but the open source driver's performance in 3D is quite poor. There were no glitches, it was just very slow. Apparently the open source driver doesn't fully support the card's capabilities in 3D. This could be a dealbreaker to anyone who cares about running games under linux. In contrast, I also tried an nVidia 7600GS AGP card, which is an older/slower card than the HD2600XT. It performed beautifully under linux using a closed source driver that was readily offered in Mint. The 7600GS was able to play a DirectX 9 game via WINE very well. The same game was unplayable on the more powerful HD2600XT, due to the latter card's lack of a fully featured driver. For linux usage, I think nVidia cards have excellent support while ATI is pretty spotty. I did some searching and found a very long discussion thread about these cards which an AMD/ATI rep got involved with. The rep claimed that they were "working on" a closed source linux driver for the HD2xxx AGP cards, but it seems it was never released. I noticed the same as you did that when you try to find drivers for these cards, the offerings dry up when you specify that you have the AGP variant. Under XP, I used the latest AGP driver offered from the Visiontek web site. It seems to work perfectly well in all respects that I've tested. The AGP versions of these cards were apparently notorious for broken drivers for quite a long time. Some say that using the board partner's driver is the best course of action, but perhaps the latest ATI branded driver that clearly specifies AGP support would work just as well. In any case, the latest Visiontek driver worked fine for me. It turned out to be Catalyst 10.4. I think your video playback was running in software mode. It's performance looks about consistent with the experience I've had with Northwood CPUs. I have found that H.264 decoding performs better on Prescotts. Hyperthreading also helps, but Prescott seems to be the bigger factor. Prescott+HT is the best case scenario. In other respects the Northwood might be superior, but it seems that doesn't apply in the case of H.264. These cards have first generation H.264 acceleration. I think ATI called it "UVD" (aka UVD1). This is not supported under VLC Player and I don't think it works in a web browser. The linux "mplayer" application might be able to utilize it - I haven't tried. It probably requires changing a setting to enable the feature. Under WinXP, I have had success with the video player "MPC-BE". This seems to be a descendant of "Media Player Classic". The "MPC-BE" version is the one that can accelerate H.264 on these cards. The "MPC-HC" version cannot. The fluidness of H.264 acceleration is quite nice on an AGP era system. It's just unfortunate that software support for this capability is so elusive. Many people bought these cards back in the day and never did get it to work. In "MPC-BE", I don't remember if there were any tricky config options involved. I do see that under "internal filters" there are entries for "H264/AVC (DXVA)" and "VC-1 (DXVA)". I believe those DXVA entries are the ones that utilize the first-gen hardware acceleration on these cards. The HD2400 should have the same H.264 capabilities. That was a key marketing point that it had for HTPCs when new. I think it was only the high end HD2900 cards that omitted the feature (I suppose it was deemed a waste of silicon for the HD2900's target market).
+yorgle11 You'll be happy with your nVidia card under Linux until support for that GPU family ages out of the proprietary driver. And then you'll have nouveau, which is a complete helping of fail. My experience on this system with the Radeon 2400HD has been almost the exact opposite. 2D performance is particularly laggy, with CPU usage spiking to or near 100%, suggesting that all the rendering is being done in software. 3D stuff works great, and is clearly being hardware accelerated. The only bridged to AGP ATI graphics card that I've had in long term use is a Radeon X1300 that I bought when the factory supplied GeForce in my Dimension 8300 died from faulty capacitors. It was an ATI retail packaged card and has always worked flawlessly with the current release of their drivers for as long as it was supported. Given that the bridge chip was designed by ATI along with the GPU, it's not clear why there would be problems with the card you've got. (PCI video cards with a bridged design tend to use a third party chip, but I've never seen that done on a bridged AGP card.) Video decoding in software ought to do a lot better on a Prescott, having the added cache and (especially!) SSE3 instructions would certainly help. I have something along those lines for this system that will be featured in a future video.
+uxwbill At least in the case of Mint, older nVidia cards continue to work using various "legacy" proprietary drivers. I'm not sure which if any of their cards are limited to nouveau. On that Mint 17 install, I did try an FX5700 which was definitely in the "legacy" proprietary driver category. That card was unexpectedly slow in 3D though, and I'm honestly not sure if it was "normal" for that card or if it's because the proprietary driver no longer enabled full acceleration with it. I saw a comment from an ATI rep which claimed they were taken by surprise when some board partners started shipping AGP versions of the HD2000 cards. Supposedly they had not expected the AGP "Rialto" bridge to be used past the X1000 series, and so the drivers for the HD2000 cards initially did not work well with AGP bridged versions. I think they did get the problems (under Windows) sorted out eventually, but there was a long period of internet drama surrounding those cards in the meantime. Sadly they never did ship a linux driver though. Under Windows I'm very impressed with the late ATI AGP cards, and I'm grateful they were produced because AGP systems can definitely benefit from them. They add a lot more capability than what was possible with the last nVidia AGP cards. I don't know much about the open source ATI drivers, but I think mine called itself "Gallium". Perhaps that's different from the "Radeon" driver that you use?
+yorgle11 That is certainly interesting. It runs counter to the common argument against closed source drivers: that major changes to the system architecture could keep the closed source driver from working and there'd be no (easy) way to fix it. It's been a while since I set up Linux Mint on a system with nVidia graphics and maybe a bright or very dedicated someone figured out how to make it happen. I'm also rather surprised by the ATI rep's statement about the AGP bridge. If I'm not mistaken, nVidia supported bridged GPUs through at least the GeForce 8 series, if not a bit later than that. While it might have been a small market of people looking to put more contemporary graphics adapters into an old system, I would think that ATI/AMD would have wanted to compete for their share of that market as well. Unless they just didn't think it was worth doing, and their card vendors disagreed, which I suppose is possible. I spent some time looking around the documentation for the ATI/AMD open source graphics drivers back when I shot this video and it started to look a lot like that old saying about how sausage is made. I saw the Gallium software mentioned in there, though the details were not clear to me. Documentation seemed to suggest a kind of higher level hardware abstraction layer for applications wanting to implement 3D graphics...?
***** I think the "Gallium" reference I saw came up when I was running an OpenGL benchmark (glmark), so it may well be a 3D specific thing. Maybe it's not the actual video driver - I don't know much about it. nVidia actually didn't support bridged GPUs after their 7000 series. The most powerful commonly available AGP nVidia card was the 7800GS. In addition, there were some rare AGP cards based on more powerful members of that generation, but I don't remember exactly what models they were. When the HD2xxx-4xxx Radeon AGP cards came out, they stood alone for AGP - nVidia didn't compete with them. If the ATI rep is to be believed, I guess ATI didn't intend to have AGP cards at that level either, but I'm glad it happened, especially for the purposes of H.264 capability (tricky though it may be to enable via software). The oldest nVidia card I have that's compatible with the machine running Mint 17 is a Geforce2 MX. I should try plugging that in sometime and see if it still has a proprietary driver or just nouveau.
Hey uxwbill, what are your opinions on the more recent Dell/HP small form factor desktops? I last used them while they were still using the early Pentium dual-cores as the CPU.
+MetallicBlade I don't know much of them. Even the business line models are little more than cheap home grade computers with a somewhat better grade of support over time. The closest thing I've got for comparison is an Inspiron 660s. I've been perfectly happy with it, even though it is nowhere near as well made as an older Dimension or Optiplex.
I have been wondering why it'd been so long, but I figured you were busy and would get to it. I've never actually messaged any of the channels that I follow regularly when they seem to have a drop off in video making.
i can tell you why the ram slots are like that, it's cause of the bulky psu cable hitting the ram when you close the case, i know this cause some times my GX270 has problems with the psu cable hitting the ram causing some of it to not work un less you reseat it but even with the ram slots like that, i still have the problem with my 8300 cause the main cable is more bulkier then the one in this video as mine has the 305w psu.
Just this week i slapped together a cheap atom 330 mobo winsys case and old hp psu with a few ide combo drives and a few 2.5 sata1 hdd's. 1 hdd runs win xp and the second runs manjaro 18 like a champ..
Question: is it a good idea to install a Pentium 4 HT in a Dell Dimension 4550? I recently got one for $20 at a thrift store and it's in great shape (dead CMOS battery included), never been upgraded in anyway shape or form, and it has a floppy drive as quoted by uxwbill: "All real computers have floppy drives!" Good thing I have a spare PSU to use in the desktop in case the one doesn't work in the system. And it looks like it hasn't been used in about 3 years when I tested the CMOS battery with a tester and it read very low voltage. Heck, my ThinkPad R40 had a dead CMOS battery, and luckily, I had a battery plus the wiring harness from a Presario C700 that suffered a display loss, removed the old battery, switched the battery pinouts since the laptop has the exact opposite polarities than the Presario C700 (luckily same size connector) now I need to recalibrate the laptop's battery since it dies after 30 minutes and it only has 50 cycles for the 13-14 years it was used (found out it was used as a business laptop between 2003 to 2014 when they retired the laptop).
The only Pentium 4 HT processor supported in a Dimension 4550 is the 3.06 GHz/533 MHz FSB Northwood, having S-Spec number SL6PG. Processors with an 800 MHz FSB are not supported.
Bill I love your videos and I have watched dang near all of them. I agree with all of the things you bring up in videos except for a few minor ideas. Mainly; I just don't find the new firefox UI to be that bad. I've been using firefox since 1.5.012/2.0.012 and I have adapted to the UI as it has changed pretty easily.
Hi Bill; Thank You for Your Prompt Answer.. Actually my 11/45 is powered from an Old PC Switcher, +5, +, - 12 volts, (300 Watt).. I don't have Core Running at the Present, as I need to save my Pennies for a modern Switcher with + 20 and -5 volt supply.. But, Thank You again for Your Favorable Response.. And have a good and Great day.. THANK YOU Marty
Hi Bill this is Terry all I want to do is say thank you because I like making old computers work as well and you have been a big help to me my newest computer is in OptiPlex 780 door core it serves me well but it's 10 years old I have upgraded it and I am pleased with I started out with a dimension 4600 and it is still working I had it built for me the motherboard has the ability for Sata two of them and I have bought all of the connections but have been unable I guess to adjust the bios to accept them. Maybe someday you can make a video on that. But you will get only gratitude from me. Terry
Hey, uxwbill..... I have a question. I have seen on a TON of ancient computer's disk drives a "volume" nobby. What is it used for and why does it look like volume control? Thanks, TLD
+The Liquid Diamond This is an audio volume control. When asked to play an audio CD, older CD-ROM drives did all the needed decoding internally and sent audio out via several different connectors, two of which are on the drive's back panel. The third is a headphone jack on the front panel, and the volume control lets you control how loudly an attached pair of headphones would play. This feature disappeared from CD-ROM drives in the early to mid 2000s, and ultimately so did any capability that the drive had to decode CD audio directly. Some older drives also had basic play/pause, track skip and stop controls on their front panels. There are a few drives whose volume control governed the output level of both the headphone jack and the rear panel analog audio output.
I have a 5 year old elitebook i still use its been threw so much and still works. i cant say the same for newer laptops. From motherboard problems to hinge problems are common in todays laptops. i,m use the elitebook until i cant fix it. if and when it stops working. Nice video BTW.
I still have Linux installed on my Playstation using the kit they used to make available. But you should install older versions of Linux on old hardware.
Those USB placements (35 minutes in) were the worst. Not a single thing was easily inserted into them and more often than not, it was impossible to use both slots at the same time.
Having a Radeon HD 4650 in my main machine and running Xubuntu, I actually use the open source drivers even for gaming, and they work perfectly well even for that. I can't proclaim to understand why I would go out of my way to install fglrx when the open source drivers work perfectly well for what I do.
This isn't exactly a nouveau situation, the open source drivers are perfectly stable in this case. I'm on mobile, or I would just edit my prior comment.
+Norry Fox I mostly play older games like Half Life 2 and its derivatives, though I do enjoy some Borderlands 2 and Civ 5 every now and again. I'm running what I perceive to be a pretty heavy install of Xubuntu (I run things like Skype, Steam, and Teamviewer on startup) and on boot up my RAM usage is something like 450MB. Like I said, I have a 4650, not a 7950, so the drivers may be better optimized for my older card.
My very first PC in 2006-2007 or so was given to us by a family friend, I believe they had it in a closet or sitting in the corner of a home office, but it made its way into our hands instead of the dumpster where it probably should have gone anyway. That computer was a Dell Dimension 8100, and let me tell you, that was one of the largest hunks of crap I've ever had the displeasure to work with. Being 9-years old at the time, I knew very little in the way of how computers functioned anyway, but this thing was non-functional from the word go, after what I assume to be many years of lack of maintenance and grueling servitude to whatever life it had before us. Its Windows 2000 OS was broken, plain and simple, with a lack of updates for years and likely every bit of malware under the sun. Its 256mb of ram and Pentium processor was pathetic even 10 years ago, and our technical ignorance led us to dropping it off twice at local PC shops to have it "fixed" only for it to be returned in literally identical condition with us footing the bill. Bad times. Dark times. Apologies for the long comment, but these early Dimension systems bring back memories.
+Wobbled As a finn (Linus was born, raised and studied in Finland) I have to say most finns I know pronounce linux very much like Bill. I dont off the hand remember how Linus said it but I bet he says it very close to way Bill says it, so way BILL says it is for certain one of the common ways to pronounce it. Now you're right who cares how you pronounce it as long as we are able to understand that you re talking about linux or gnu/linux.
+Wobbled It's not a big deal, but I think it's because Linus explicitly said "Linux is always pronounced Lin-icks". It's sort of like when people call their wireless internet "wiffy" or say they need a "see poo" with a larger cashay, or that they are having problems with their foxfire. It's fairly easy to figure out what they are saying- but they still said it incorrectly.
Without trying to be a stickler of minor bits of info... SolydX and K were originally spin-offs of Linux Mint Debian Edition, which didn't offer Xfce or KDE. Later they switched to Debian proper as their base. So they were never based off Ubuntu. Just thought I'd menti-...Sorry...
+SavageArms357 No, that's fine. If I've legitimately got something wrong, I certainly don't mind such being pointed out. I didn't know there was a "Debian" edition of Linux Mint.
+uxwbill Yep. I believe the Mint team decided to have a functioning Debian based version in the sidelines as insurance, just in case Ubuntu decided to implement something that made spin-offs like Mint impossible to continue.
Now I know you hate phones but I couldn't help but notice the Lucent/Avaya Partner 18 phone sitting on top of one of your computers which would connect to a Partner ACS phone system. Do you actually use it to take and receive calls or do you just use it to play around with the features on the ACS system?
FYI: TH-cam has gone back to its old trick of not fully processing a video until after it's made publicly viewable -- except now they don't give any warning to the viewer or uploader that this is taking place. Even once all of the expected resolutions are available, that does not necessarily mean that processing is complete, since TH-cam now provides multiple different codecs, such as WebM/VP9 and H.264. On longer videos, processing can take up to several _days_ to complete. So one cannot accurately judge TH-cam's encoding quality until adequate time is given to let it sort everything out.
Back to the topic at hand... I've never heard of SolydX before, which isn't surprising considering that there are hundreds (if not thousands?) of distros out there, so once you get past the first few dozen, you've pretty much reached the asymptote of notability. And get ready for the obligatory "Linux is a kernel, not an operating system!" comments...
+vwestlife That would explain why my videos have always looked like crap until I published them. I waited a whole day for one to finish processing and got nothing, so I said "to hell with it!" and published it as is. Conveniently finished processing not long after.
Not that I mind, but it would be nice if a warning were available for the purpose of avoiding comments asking why the video looks so bad.
+Kocayine
Maybe if they didn't waste so much computing power on ContentID, the processing could happen a bit more efficiently.
+Channel 2012 Ha Ha!
Harrison Rose
I wish it were funny, but ContentID has to be the biggest waste of computing power on the planet. Google is talking out of their asses when they claim "greenness" and their other politically correct nonsense. We have the computational resources to put a man on the moon and this is what they squander it on.
I agree google is using their $10,000 server resources for "Preventing copyright Infringement" Where as they should use it for stuff that actually matters.
Bill, never commit to a schedule like many channels. As you mentioned it then becomes "work" and the quality suffers. Committing to a schedule is the TH-cam equivalent of "Jumping the Shark".
The Molex to SATA power adapter is indeed an HP Part, P/N 5188-3214, which lists on HP's PartSurfer as "SATA hard drive power cable - With latch and dongle, 3.93-inch (100mm) in length".
+jaykay18 Since making this video, I've come to wonder if someone didn't swap the power supply out of another Dell, and scrounged up a SATA adapter however they could. This is the first and only Dimension 8300 I've seen with a 250 watt supply.
Twice i have dabbled with linux, twice the most simple thing left me with high blood pressure! I can't remember the first failure, but the second was spending two days trying to get a flash player working with Firefox. Gave up after that trying to use Linux for my desktop OS.
100SteveB You should give it another shot, Linux mint cinnamon is quite modern and very easy to use and install... The developers of it pride it for being easy for beginners. And if you get stuck, I'll personally offer help in getting it working... Once you get going with linux, you rarely look back.
Linux suck
On that Dell System behind the Dimension 8300 (The beige one) it looks to have either a really messed up blanking plate or there's just paper there.
+Jacob's Channel In my commitment to doing nothing less than the best to maintain and repair my fleet of computers, that is indeed a folded over sheet of paper covering up the open drive bay.
If I get to feeling really fancy, by which I mean "finding an insufficiently guarded laminating machine", I'll make a much nicer replacement.
Always fun to see you bring the dead (PCs) back to life, +uxwbill. I have been working on old computers and have a few notes:
I've found as you have that many of the video cards/chips are not well supported Very frustrating. Other than that, those old systems do pretty well.
I used to use DVDs or CDs to run or install Linux, but I've found that USB keys are much much faster. Particularly when you have a utility distro that you use all the time (like PartedMagic) it's nice to have them boot in 45 seconds rather than 5 minutes. (OTOH, it's great to have a use for those piles of unused DVDs).
I think that SolydX is only based on Debian these days - not on Ubuntu. I have been using Point Linux which is similar (Debian with a MATE desktop environment) and have been very happy with it. It is more streamlined that Ubuntu distributions, boots faster, and seems to support most hardware w/o problems.
I think beefing up the RAM would make a big difference. 1 GB is pretty sparse, especially when running current memory-hog web browsers. I notice a big difference when upgrading from 512 MB to 2 or 3 GB - from painfully slow / unusable to almost comfortable.
USB flash memory keys are great *if* the system you're using can boot them. With anything made before 2005, and a few things after, this isn't necessarily guaranteed.
Intel's integrated graphics work the best of anything in a Linux or BSD environment because Intel actually released full documentation about almost all of them, and in many cases they wrote an open source driver too. nVidia support with open source drivers is pretty awful, as are pretty much all of the Taiwanese/Chinese chipsets with integrated graphics (SiS, ALi, VIA, etc.). ATI/AMD have released some stuff, so at least the situation there isn't as dire -- though I find their graphics cards quite slow in 2D mode under Linux or BSD with open source drivers.
I had plans to beef up the RAM (3 or 4 GB) and CPU (P4 Extreme Edition) in a future video. That hasn't happened yet. For the sake of this demonstration, I wanted to see how well one could get along with what the machine had in it when I started. It worked better than it should have.
Thanks uxwbill. I've just been exploring computers of this vintage, and you are an excellent guide to those regions. I find that the farther back you go, the more outdated standards you encounter (e.g. IDE hard drives, DDR memory). It's interesting from the viewpont of archaeology, but can be hard to get a version of Linux running.
In my experience:
Core 2 Duo: a shoo-in
Core Duo: pretty solid but may encounter a few problems (32-bit, IDE drives)
Pentium M: usually okay, with a few problems, such as having to use the "forcepae" boot parameter on Banias systems.
Pentium 4. can be okay, or can encounter "interesting" issues. uxwbill territory.
Pentium 3 and earlier. A true challenge. K Mandla territory.
i like what you do with old machines,keep it up m8
I love playing old computers when I happen to curious of what can I do to the hard wares and soft wares, for example the 1998 Compaq Presario Windows 95 desktop, I like play around on DOS games and do a DOS like doing Scandisk on HDD and Floppy Disk to see if they got a bad sectors on it. I love the old DOS when checking the Hard Drive and Floppy Disk when I like to know what does contain on the hard ware, and it's too bad that I couldn't use SATA connection for an old PC but to use IDE plug. By the time when I got the RAM from my cousin, I check all the RAM include the DDR and DDR2, most of them passed and one of them failed because I inspect them carefully and noticed the traces is cracked, nothing I can do other than to replace the RAM, and as soon as I was going to check the RAM and see it passes, and found out when it had an error, the contact is dirty. How to do it by prevent an error from RAM? I use the Eraser, clean them up, test them out and it did passed the test.
Before school. WHOO ANOTHER UXWBILL COMPUTER VIDEO! After school. Straight away watching and enjoying :D
My favorite linux distro has to be Fedora, because of how "finished up" it is, Its also relatively stable, but for older machines I go with an old distro called "knoppix" with the KDE desktop, although I prefer GNOME to KDE, Xfc, etc.
Regarding AGP/PCI Video Cards, I do own an old NVidia GeForce 2 MX 400 with 64 MB Video Ram. The latest drive for that I believe was a Forceware 94.00. I used it in an old Shuttle cube machine. As well as owning an older competitor, the AMD/ATI Rage All In Wonder 128 Pro with 32mb video ram. It seems to never pick up/allow 1366x768 resolutions.
+daniel15092 Fedora's entirely OK, if anything I guess I'd call it "unexciting". Which can certainly be a good thing. Knoppix is one of my favorites and so far as I know, was the distribution that kicked off the whole Live CD thing.
I would certainly hope that something like the nouveau driver could handle a card as old as the GeForce 2! Even though the cards you mention came well before the age of widescreen aspect ratio displays, I would have expected that their clock generators and DACs would be flexible enough to handle any resolution that fell within their frequency and bandwidth limits. Freely programmable video hardware isn't exactly a new idea -- though it could be that the drivers simply aren't new enough to be willing.
I wish I could put my thoughts into words as effectively as you did for the first 8 minutes. Well said, all around. Especially about Linux.
I'm actually running Mint 17.3 on my Precision M4700, and while it's a wonderful OS, it did require some work to get going perfectly even though Dell has been very supportive of Linux on their systems. My wireless card required some terminal fun to get working out of the box, and it was something I had to go googling hard for. I know Linux fans keep pining for the days of ubiquitous Linux usage, but you nailed it as to why it isn't yet. If those of us who screw with these things for a living have some amount of trouble getting things functioning correctly, our parents and your average Joe is probably going to give up and beat a hasty retreat to Windows.
Though the fun thing that everyone seems to forget is Linux technically is pretty ubiquitous; The Android OS is technically a form of Linux, as it uses a Linux kernel and is based on Linux. Kind of in the same way the iPhone/iPad run OS X in a stripped down form.
I'm glad you made this video on this computer. I used to see a lot of these computers being replaced when I was in high school several of these machines had their ram and hard drives removed. I managed to only grab a CRT and Keyboard as well as the Dell Dimension while I saw the PC tech guys stacking these machines out side of the school. I wanted to get more parts, but it would only anger my father; he saw them as trash. Though as of today I rarely see these Dell Dimension in schools and offices.
Even when the pentium 4 becomes entirely unusable they'll always make good room heaters xD
I have just finally got around to watching this video, and I found your rant reasonable, and maybe a little humorous. I enjoy your knowledge and insight on computers and audio equipment. I am a computer hobbyist, and I enjoy the knowledge you have, and have used it for my own problems. Keep making videos, in your time, not anyone else's. :-)
Hey Guy, Sorry about the comment in your other video. Watching videos out of order. Love fooling with old hardware myself. Really miss the late ninety's to early oughts in hardware. Back when you only had 15 IRQs, like the machine you were using in the other video. Really enjoy the videos whenever they do come. Keep up the goofing off. Add: One of the things that makes your computer videos very enjoyable is your extensive knowledge of the machine types that you do tend to have many of. The PS/2 machines and the Dells. Very cool man.
So, I have returned yet again, this particular video never gets old for me. Anyhow, the 8300s were truly tanks, I got one a few days ago that had been literally smashed until the case was a two piece unit, and it actually works perfect.
Finally got around to watching this. only about a year late. still very enjoyable
Merry Christmas and Happy holidays
Thank you for doing what you do. You inspired me to work on my Dell Dimension 4500 to test out the SATA connections.
Again, thank you for doing all that you do.
Hi Bill;
I have for Many Years, Really Enjoyed Your Video's..
They are Great, Keep up the Good Work.. I look forward to seeing a new Video all the time..
I am also a Lover of Really Old Computers (Heaters), in fact my current Heater that I am working on Here on the Kitchen Table and in a Homemade wooden case, and am trying to fix it's latest problem, is my (1972) PDP 11/45.. Which does a Great Job of keeping the Kitchen Warm, when it is running..
THANK YOU Marty
+Marty Geist I really appreciate your taking the time to write. I'm always honored to hear from people who have followed what I've been up here on TH-cam for a long time.
I've never had the fortune to find something like an early minicomputer system (nor have I ever been offered something like a mainframe , which is probably just as well since I'd have nowhere to put and no way to power it). As something of an unintentional computer historian and preservationist, I do appreciate the contributions such early systems made and perhaps one day I'll happen across one and get it back in working order.
I love your videos and have learned a few things about repairing things around the house. Just wanted to say thanks, you've saved me a few hundred dollars on computer repair and appliance repair.
As usual I totally enjoyed this video. Thanks for your efforts. It was the first time I had seen this distribution of Linux installed.
There are and were many different efforts for ATI/AMD drivers on Linux throughout the years, thus the confusion of the information.
I ran Linux quite long ago on quite old ATI hardware and have in fact used ATI up until my very most recent GPU purchase, and while I haven't made it through the entire video, just to disclaim I'll try to explain the differences:
Back before the AMD acquisition there was the open source original "radeon" driver, which was typically tasked with running 9000-series ATI products, and RAGE products. You may remember a time around 2004-5 when these 3D accelerated graphics desktops on Linux were all the rage, and this interest birthed the closed source FGLRX project, which limps along to this day for those who prefer or are forced to use a closed source driver (as you seem to be from 2013)
Of course running a driver from 2013 has its own problems, and a closed source driver yet more, FGLRX will run you with full acceleration and an attempt at stability, but you will run in what's called a "tainted kernel" state, and lose the support of most diehard Linux kernel side support. You've injected closed source software into the kernel and some of the hardcore users are less likely to help you. I can't really blame them a ton recollecting the state of the closed source drivers about ten years ago. But by 2013 they were pretty stable. If you know how to recover or uninstall them by hand if something goes wrong you can get back to a clean state (or find someone who isn't a jerk. :P)
At some point another open source project joined "radeon" "radeonHD" which most likely if you could find a package for it, would support your 2400. As FGLRX got more advanced, radeonHD stagnated and was shelved. All the effort returned to "radeon" or at that point sometimes known as the Xfree86-ATI project.
As far as I know, radeonHD was based on some kind of quiet licensing deal, or somehow leakage of ATI API information. Once the information dried up the project was unable to continue, thus the maintainers returned to reverse engineering like they always have on the radeon/xf86-ati project.
This kind of strange naming neuroticism is kind of an issue for open source projects in general. A lot of people struggle the way you had without knowing the lay of the land for so damn long.
Bill, thank you *so* much for mentioning VideoReDo! I used to use it all the time back when I worked in public access TV in the mid-2000's. It saved a lot of headaches when dealing with less-than-standard MPEG streams. I wonder if I still have the registration code...
I installed Linux bodhi 2.0 on a dell similar to this. I use Linux zron as my main PC. I like old PC I just put a 40gb HHD in a dell but after words I found patch for win 98 se to make it work with HHD over 32gb do I needed it for win98 se to work right. I like old PC and CRT monitor. good job on the video
thank you for all the help with my cd issue the media player is fine now but I had to eplace one of my cd/dvd writer drives because it was tempermental. it was really great ideas . and it helped as well as replacing the drives I bought two and put them both in so that there is no problem with dealing with how long one will last .once again thank you very much all the best great video as always
"been there done that and gotten the t-shirt" This quote made my day LOL XD
My 2011 era MacBook Air is a fantastic thigh warmer, especially when you're playing games on it. And it's a particularly good thigh warmer on hot Summer's days.
I found your channel while surfing youtube. Having started my computing journey on a 386sx many years ago, your video's of older hardware are very interesting. That I also live in Illinois may have something to to do with it also.
As a long time Linux user, who only runs linux now, I was happy you found a disrto that you like. I also run the xfce desktop in Xubuntu.Both your distro and Xubuntu are Debian derivatives. Xfce is a good low resource desktop and is pretty newbie friendly. My wife had really no interest in computers, but one day I got her a laptop from ebay without an os and installed Linux and gave it to her, she is in her 50's and didnt use it for a few years, then she found out about the evil that is Facebook from a friend. The laptop came out and while there were questions, I expect they would be similar to sitting someone who had never been in front of a Windows or Apple computer before. Linux has come a long way.even in the last 10 years. Unless you are a gamer and you just surf and write some documents they are suitable for just about everyone. With Steam releasing a linux client and a linux powered game machine it may not be to long before that changes.
As the IT for my small church/school that runs on nothing but older hardware that has been donated Linux is invaluable to me. You could try the LXDE desktop, it will run on real low resource hardware, but it isnt as newbie friendly, but I think you would have no problems.
You almost have me wanting to dig out the 386 from the basement and see if I can get it running. I could never find myself parting with it because of all the hours of fun it gave me. But newer machines I have built myself have taken its place many times over.
Ignore the complainers, keep doing what you do and enjoy, there are viewers who like what you do and dont care about the background, or the video quality.I have watched most of the video's you have uploaded, and I hope more will come along when you have the time.
manjaro or lxle or linuxlite for a machine like that..xfce takes low memory and has modern support for things like bluetooth
As a sidenote you can play media that is copyright protected under demonstration purposes and so long as you don't play any whole article under the demonstration act clause of the DMCA rules. So, as long as you don't play a whole movie, TV episode, or song, you are completely safe.
Used to be the case, but these days you can't even play a song for 20 seconds anymore without getting a content ID match in which the music companies makes money off 20 seconds of a song. It's pathetic really.
i got very fond memories of my ibm slimline office pc that i had a 2.8 ghz pentium 4 with hyper treading over clocked to 3.4 i took a 5 inch hole saw cut out the side of the case stuck a cooler that was off a early quade core that got hit by lightening on it had a slot cut in it for the video card sliced out of the case and a external mounted full size 500w psu all on a stained and varnished plywood base hung on my bedroom wall was my free pc build in 2009 ish used it untill late 2013 ran ubuntu 10.04 like a drem
Good job. Well done....!!!! I am user silent viewer :) What is that thing attached to your telephone receiver??
+Atif Munir Thank you for watching. The thing attached to the telephone receiver is a pad that makes it easier to cradle on your shoulder while using your hands for another task, such as data entry or looking something up in a file.
+uxwbill Thank you very much :)
It appears I never commented on this video. Clearly I'll have to fix that by leaving a comment in the video description below.
The best consumer grade room heaters come with Pentium 4 Prescott heating elements :) I run mine only in winter (no not because I don't want the chip to overheat, I don't want myself to overheat in summer sitting in a small dorm room). I'm using an Asrock heater control unit which allows you to set the output temperature by changing the clock frequency. It's a very nice feature so you can dial in the temperature you like and have a nice warm room.
I have a Dell Optiplex 170L waiting for a project. I think I will give SolydX a try. I have another with a Prescott 2.8Ghz and 2GB RAM and that is currently running Lubuntu which has been brilliant. It is using the standard Intel graphics (No AGP, but very pretty solder pads for it). Works on 360p, 480p and 720p dependent on the video.
I feel like Linux has came a long way with it’s usability since I started using it in 09, but Im somewhat of a command line addict since I figured out how to use it effectively
One of these dell machines was first computer I really used, don’t remember if same model exactly but it was the same case. I also remember it using ECC ram.
Might of been something else, to the best of my knowledge, the Dimension series never used ecc ram. Might of been a PowerEdge.
@@connorm955 it might of been fully buffered dimms I don’t remember I just remember the ram being more that normal lol
I believe it was a dimension 8200
I don't really like Linux as a desktop OS either, but what's probably the best feature about it is how resource efficient it is. I run Lubuntu on my Netbook which used to run Windows 7 Starter. In Windows 7 it used to be at least 60% RAM being used. In Lubuntu, it was more like 30% even with Chrome open.
(It had 1GB RAM)
+Ashton B. Just curious as a Linux user myself. What is it you don't like about it?
Zandman26 I'm not sure really, I just don't find it as user friendly. Probably because when you run into problems, which is quite often when setting up a machine with Linux, you have to go and use the terminal which I don't really like. Don't get me wrong, I have started using it on two of my PCs and find it a quite good OS, but I just prefer Windows 7.
+Ashton B. Ok. If you run into problems during installation of the OS then I don't have a GUI solution for you. As it's limited to the GUI of the installer.
Zandman26 It's not the installer or installation I have problems with.
I am pleased to find I am not the only one who is a little underimpressed with Linux OS. I have tried any number of the different varients and found them not easy to run. I want my old XP back on my laptop. Should have had it dual boot I guess -too late now!
I can say that with an optical disk reader and an empty USB card reader, when you click on those with no media inserted on the Linux Mint Debian Edition with the MATE desktop, this doesn't happen, there's no message of any descripton.
Of course a floppy drive could work very differently, but I find it odd that LMDE would work differently to Ubuntu based Linux Mint.
I'd see about picking up GPU-Z (I'm sure there's a linux equivalent out there); that would let you see how much the GPU is helping with youtube video playback.
57:15 It's giving you the choice of using any of the sound devices in either playback-only, record-only or duplex mode.
The user interface doesn't make that clear, and no tooltip or similar indication ever came along to expand the entries so that one could see the differences.
@@uxwbill Chances are that if there were a simple way of making the options clearer, without sacrificing detail, it would have been implemented. No one has found it yet, or found the job to be worth their time.
It would have been extremely simple to make the options clearer, just by displaying them in their entirety!
Great and intuitive video. I have recently tried to install many different Linux systems on my current AMD FX8300 Pc Rig. Via VirtualBox and the BIOS bootup. I have had many different driver and hardware problems, with USB3.1, Network drivers etc. Main problems I have had is through the graphic hardware, using with my Old Nvidia GT 610, AMD R9 280 or even my new AMD RX 480, with driver issues. I found the open source AMD Radeon graphic drivers with Ubuntu 16.4 and with Linux Mint 18. However, couldn't get out of standard 640x480 or 800x600 resolution on the display setting. Also couldn't find how to install the driver on the OS. Utter mind field. Is there anyway to install linux on my modern system as a duel boot without any graphic compatibility problems? Or will I have to build a retro build system or this task? I really want to start experimenting with linux as a self confessed tech geek lol
welcome back. good to see another computer video from you.
Hello, i´m sure windows 7 32bit with 2gb optimized can do the same thing as linux
+doomloop1977 That is one of the things that makes open-source cross platform application software so beautiful. Suddenly one's choice of operating system...well, "doesn't matter" might be a little strong, but "matters less than it ordinarily would" is certainly plausible.
Bill I'd just like to say that I honestly enjoy your videos, especially the unnecessarily long ones such as this one.
Keep on smoke testin' brother.
regarding ATI/AMD Radeon video cards, you may want to give Oibaf Open Source PPA drivers a whirl. These drivers are made to make use of your video card's accelerated video functions. I have been using Oibaf for my HD5450 with Xubuntu, Peppermint, and Ubuntu Studio for about 2 years now. I have found not many issues and seem to render HD and other video formats faster, these days it's all about if you have enough L2/L3 Cache IMHO. I've been distrohopping over a decade now, I always come back to Debian/Ubuntu ;)
My WD 160GB HDD makes that same sound during a S.M.A.R.T. Test, too! Except it seems to be much louder.
I have 32gb of ram in my Mac Pro and it is currently using 14gb. So while looking at the memory usage on your Dimension 8300 I thought it was extremely low before realizing there is only 1gb installed.
I have a Radeon HD 2400 Pro PCI-E version that was an OEM dell version with the DMS-59 port on it and i know that when i was using it last year it was listed by AMD/ATI as Legacy so they probably dont have any modern Linux ported proprietary driver though they might have something on their website
the old dimensions had sigmatel audio and soundmax i believe, correct if wrong? yamaha and creative's cards then were pretty good
Okay okay okay
My grandmother had a Dimension 8300 for the longest time and I don't think I EVER saw that part of the panel flip up..
I don't know why, but that is equally awesome and unsettling to me.
It wasn't Dell's best design ever. Although there are USB ports and a headphone jack under there, the USB ports in particular can be difficult to use, especially the upper one. The angle is sharp enough that not every device will make reliable electrical contact.
Now when you say I can download your video and properly interject the term GNU / Linux when you pronounce like you do, do I have a Creative Commons Left license to do so, or perhaps GPL v2 or GPL v3 license?
+HandyWyo The commentary is meant to be sarcastic in nature, although I do not care nor can I stop anyone doing whatever they want with a video for their own personal private use. And if you really must do that for your own personal private use, go right ahead.
More serious answer: Monetizing a video on TH-cam seems to preclude any ability to enable copyleft or Creative Commons. I maintain copyright on my videos and certainly do not expect to see them uploaded in their entirety elsewhere without my permission.
All of that said, I do not care if people use portions of my videos as part of a greater whole, so long as the work in question isn't disparaging, illegal, shocking, or distasteful. And even though US copyright law allows such, I'd really rather not have my work parodied.
It's a pitty even the lightweight GNU/Linux distros are getting past the 256 MB of RAM mark for being usable on older systems as I think there would be a market for a very lightweight distro for very basic web tasks and word processing (I know Puppy Linux does that and today's websites wouldn't be too happy on 256 MB of RAM).
I managed to get PCLinuxOS 2009 which funny enough was the best thing I got to run on my trusty old Sony VAIO PCG-FX401 with a Duron 800 MHz, 256 MB RAM ,ATI Rage Mobility 8MB GPU and a 15 GB HDD and DVD-ROM drive. Ran very well watching DVDs and doing basic stuff but everything else was abit fussy especially GNOME and even XFCE. Might do a video of the Sony someday.
I think its funny that people say how power inefficient old computers are. Yes newer ones do more with less watts, is it really that much better. For an example if you have a old computer that pulls 150 watts from the wall, to "upgrade" to something that can do a little more and pull 90 watts may not be worth it. My main computer is way newer but leaving to idle in a average size bed room could make someone die of heat stroke, let alone have it under load.
+Bobo91ism You are right, and there's more: a lot of older computers don't actually take very much power and even if they are utilizing it less efficiently, it matters little if you don't actually *need* that much computing power to accomplish a given task.
The Pentium 4 is a notable exception, but it supports things like the HLT instruction and later versions also have a rudimentary version of SpeedStep.
Dell used to have some really nice upgrade/add-on options. until about 2008 I think. What I love about this model though is that it has an actual slot for a video card. I always go to upgrade the video card on these older systems just because I have so many of them laying around and whenever I get the 3000 I always get angry because I can't upgrade the gpu but the 8300's always make me happy because I can. Just because I have so many AGP cards.
+nol also A Dimension 4600 is probably what you want, as it was the "full featured" version of the 3000, complete with video expansion slot.
i have never got sound to work on dell. tried on dell dimension 8200 i have.
you doing a video on a pentium 4 reminded me of a thing, that thing is even a core2duo laptop when placed on a persons lap can keep them kind of warm from my experience, with a macbook a1181 mid-2009 and a dell latitude d630 late-2007
I came here for the complaining, but stayed for the video.
By coincidence, I was mulling over SolydX for use as a live distro just a couple of days ago. I normally use Mint XFCE for this purpose, but it's been behaving strangely of late. Not sure if it's because of the low-end system (Intel Atom, 1GB RAM) I was using it on, or the file manager's fault, but it seemed to freeze during file copying. I wondered if even XFCE was getting a bit too 'big' for lowlier computers, and to finish the task I fired up a Puppy derivative, Slacko. I don't care for the file manager, but it got the job done with no freezing. I may give SolydX a go 'live', to see how it fares.
I have a Dell Dimension 8400 and it's gone through a lot, and the hard drive failed, but it still runs perfectly!
We used to have that exact type of white Dell that's behind other the black one.
Memory usage there is certainly impressive. Impressive enough to make me load Task Manager on my PC (Windows 10). Well with the usual background stuff and Chrome with just TH-cam on one tab open... I'm using 3.2GB of RAM. Nice.
first thing I noticed in this video was that APC UPS....it looks identical to one I got at the recycling center. They gave me two of them since there was no batteries. You can get batteries for them pretty cheap (even if it still winds up costing almost as much as a "cheap" UPS). But the APC ones are built like a TANK and won't go out in 2-3 years. Seems that modern day UPS devices are like printers. Once the batteries go out, people just toss 'em and buy another UPS (like with printers, you can get a cheap $30 printer with ink and toss it when the ink is out b/c it would cost you just as much money to buy ink)
+DvdXploitr That's a Smart-UPS 1500 I bought for $5 on eBay, supposedly dead. Of course, the trick here is that any of the Smart-UPS models (and a few of the Back-UPS units as well) must have a good battery or they won't do a solitary thing. Lately I've found that picking up these cast off units, going over them and selling them as refurbished units is not a bad business at all.
"There's a uxwbill video for that." And yes, it's another rambling one. :-P th-cam.com/video/X8GjEAHOBSY/w-d-xo.html
+DvdXploitr And now it has occurred to me that more than APC product is visible in this video. The RS1500 visible at times to the left of the Dim8300 has come up with an annoying thing to do. After it has cooled down, it will refuse to switch off of the battery. As it warms up, it gradually starts to operate more and more correctly.
I suspect bad caps. And when it finally dies, I guess I'll see about repairing it. There is another identical unit in the Computer Mess Room that will be the subject of a future video. That one has a flaky linear regulator and will periodically drop dead.
I never recommend those cheap "plugstrip" UPS units to anyone, and I've collected a whole bunch of them after the batteries gave out and their owners got tired of the five minute runtime even when they were new. There's probably a black hole forming somewhere in that stack. I have sometimes used them for low power backup needs, but there are only so many of those around. Perhaps I should dispense with a few of them in the microwave?
I just went and looked at the APC UPS I got from the recycling center and it is the XPS 1200...I do believe it requires two batteries in it. Not sure how long the run time is since I haven't gotten around to replacing the batteries in it yet.
+DvdXploitr Same with me!!! I got mine about a year ago from the recycling centre and it also works perfect.
I thought this was very funny. Didn't realize I wasn't the only one using older Dells as space heaters. The Pentium 4 variants are especially warm. Call em the Snuggleplex series.
I'm very tech orientated, but Linux still throws me completely. It's just so alien to me, and the vast array of flavours is just boggling. I do, however, use it as a LiveCD OS for testing things, in Knoppix form... which works on about 25-50% of the systems I've owned.
As for old systems; whilst they may be less efficient, they already exist and have offset their manufacturing carbon footprint a lot more. Not to mention that running a couple of old P4-era systems under load will probably reduce your heating bill!
In 2008 I bought a used, ~2002 slim tower OptiPlex (GX260 if I remember correctly). It served me until 2013, when I bought a Dell Vostro 14" laptop... which has been dead for a year now. Been thinking of digging out the old OptiPlex from my parents' closet for the nostalgia :)
Yano Bill you could line up and arrange a big group and make a workbench from them, just screw the bottom of the top one to the top of the bottom one, if you wanted to you can stack another row in front of the first and have a "double wide", maybe do some arranging to make a "knee hole" to scoot up to, and have all the "heaters" point at your feet. like lego blocks. :-)
old computers with pentium 4 processors like that old dell make very good heaters, but it takes a while for the room to heat up
Nick Wood Same is true of Pentium D processors, especially in a small bedroom like mine.
sweet! a long video rambling. I always enjoy a good uxwbill ramble. :-)
I think Matlock should be your official test DVD, since I've seen you use it for that three times now.
I too have been messing about with Linux this weekend. I tried Debian Stretch Testing with the Xfce on an AMD AthlonXP 2400+ box (2.0GHz) with 1.5GB of RAM, and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised that this 'fresh from the oven' operating system was able to run so beautifully on hardware of this vintage. However the only issue I had is that the computer in question has an nVidia GeForce 7300GT, and as such, the Nouveau drivers are pure garbage, but they do work, unlike nVidia's own proprietary legacy drivers which completely broke the graphical display syste. nVidia issues notwithstanding, I found that Debian Stretch Testing with Xfce has made this old computer useful once again, at least for basic office tasks and light web browsing. As someone who reconditions old hardware and gives it to people who need, but cannot afford a computer, I am very thankful that there is a linux distro out there that can really eke more life out of otherwise old, and sometimes frail computer systems.
Finally, someone who shares my views on Linux!
I have a quick question for you hopefully you can answer my sister in law has an HP all-in-one computer and when she turns it on blue screen with the letters HP and nothing else happens what do you think is wrong with the computer just guessing
BTW.. I put a elderly couple in front of Ubuntu Studio and Puppy Linux, they figured it out real quick. They loved how fast it was and the wife loved all the editing tools of Studio. She loved Pinta and GIMP, also with certain clients on a Fixed Income, Linux is a great choice, thus far no complaints :) As long at the Start Button/Menu button is at the bottom Left most users can figure it out real quick! I am with ya, Older computers are great!
Thank you for making me aware of this Linux distro. You are a gentleman and a scholar.
Just Shazammed that, not realizing that you'd share the artist info 😂
Bill I remember selling HP systems of that age once upon a time. I don't believe that SATA drive is from the factory.
In the case of the HP systems, they would have SATA ports on the board, but were completely kitted out with PATA ODD's and HDD's. The SATA ports were present but unpopulated. The same case may be in your Dell!
+2dfx The SATA drive definitely isn't original. I had to surrender the machine's original hard disk before I was allowed to take it. I probably should have said "I don't know" and left it at that, although I'm not sure I'm allowed to do that as a male. I think it's some kind of requirement that I at least try to come up with some ridiculous theory that sounded good when I came up with it. :-P
This system has two PATA channels and two SATA connectors. When I ordered my own Dimension 8300 new, there were PATA hard drive options. The much newer Optiplex GX620 is the first Dell system I'm aware of with enough SATA connectors to install all-SATA hard and optical drives. (A Dimension 4600 has solder pads for four SATA connectors, but only two are populated.)
That HD2400 looks like a Visiontek card. I recently bought an HD2600XT AGP of the same brand and was impressed with it's build quality. It has a nice heavy heatsink and Sanyo solid polymer caps.
I tried the mentioned HD2600XT on a Dell GX270 board, which is generally similar to this system (it uses an 865 chipset though). OSes I've tried are WinXP and Linux Mint 17.
I found that the AGP HD2600 works fine in linux at a 2D desktop, but the open source driver's performance in 3D is quite poor. There were no glitches, it was just very slow. Apparently the open source driver doesn't fully support the card's capabilities in 3D. This could be a dealbreaker to anyone who cares about running games under linux.
In contrast, I also tried an nVidia 7600GS AGP card, which is an older/slower card than the HD2600XT. It performed beautifully under linux using a closed source driver that was readily offered in Mint. The 7600GS was able to play a DirectX 9 game via WINE very well. The same game was unplayable on the more powerful HD2600XT, due to the latter card's lack of a fully featured driver.
For linux usage, I think nVidia cards have excellent support while ATI is pretty spotty.
I did some searching and found a very long discussion thread about these cards which an AMD/ATI rep got involved with. The rep claimed that they were "working on" a closed source linux driver for the HD2xxx AGP cards, but it seems it was never released. I noticed the same as you did that when you try to find drivers for these cards, the offerings dry up when you specify that you have the AGP variant.
Under XP, I used the latest AGP driver offered from the Visiontek web site. It seems to work perfectly well in all respects that I've tested. The AGP versions of these cards were apparently notorious for broken drivers for quite a long time. Some say that using the board partner's driver is the best course of action, but perhaps the latest ATI branded driver that clearly specifies AGP support would work just as well. In any case, the latest Visiontek driver worked fine for me. It turned out to be Catalyst 10.4.
I think your video playback was running in software mode. It's performance looks about consistent with the experience I've had with Northwood CPUs. I have found that H.264 decoding performs better on Prescotts. Hyperthreading also helps, but Prescott seems to be the bigger factor. Prescott+HT is the best case scenario. In other respects the Northwood might be superior, but it seems that doesn't apply in the case of H.264.
These cards have first generation H.264 acceleration. I think ATI called it "UVD" (aka UVD1). This is not supported under VLC Player and I don't think it works in a web browser. The linux "mplayer" application might be able to utilize it - I haven't tried. It probably requires changing a setting to enable the feature. Under WinXP, I have had success with the video player "MPC-BE". This seems to be a descendant of "Media Player Classic". The "MPC-BE" version is the one that can accelerate H.264 on these cards. The "MPC-HC" version cannot. The fluidness of H.264 acceleration is quite nice on an AGP era system. It's just unfortunate that software support for this capability is so elusive. Many people bought these cards back in the day and never did get it to work.
In "MPC-BE", I don't remember if there were any tricky config options involved. I do see that under "internal filters" there are entries for "H264/AVC (DXVA)" and "VC-1 (DXVA)". I believe those DXVA entries are the ones that utilize the first-gen hardware acceleration on these cards.
The HD2400 should have the same H.264 capabilities. That was a key marketing point that it had for HTPCs when new. I think it was only the high end HD2900 cards that omitted the feature (I suppose it was deemed a waste of silicon for the HD2900's target market).
+yorgle11 You'll be happy with your nVidia card under Linux until support for that GPU family ages out of the proprietary driver. And then you'll have nouveau, which is a complete helping of fail.
My experience on this system with the Radeon 2400HD has been almost the exact opposite. 2D performance is particularly laggy, with CPU usage spiking to or near 100%, suggesting that all the rendering is being done in software. 3D stuff works great, and is clearly being hardware accelerated.
The only bridged to AGP ATI graphics card that I've had in long term use is a Radeon X1300 that I bought when the factory supplied GeForce in my Dimension 8300 died from faulty capacitors. It was an ATI retail packaged card and has always worked flawlessly with the current release of their drivers for as long as it was supported. Given that the bridge chip was designed by ATI along with the GPU, it's not clear why there would be problems with the card you've got. (PCI video cards with a bridged design tend to use a third party chip, but I've never seen that done on a bridged AGP card.)
Video decoding in software ought to do a lot better on a Prescott, having the added cache and (especially!) SSE3 instructions would certainly help. I have something along those lines for this system that will be featured in a future video.
+uxwbill
At least in the case of Mint, older nVidia cards continue to work using various "legacy" proprietary drivers. I'm not sure which if any of their cards are limited to nouveau.
On that Mint 17 install, I did try an FX5700 which was definitely in the "legacy" proprietary driver category. That card was unexpectedly slow in 3D though, and I'm honestly not sure if it was "normal" for that card or if it's because the proprietary driver no longer enabled full acceleration with it.
I saw a comment from an ATI rep which claimed they were taken by surprise when some board partners started shipping AGP versions of the HD2000 cards. Supposedly they had not expected the AGP "Rialto" bridge to be used past the X1000 series, and so the drivers for the HD2000 cards initially did not work well with AGP bridged versions. I think they did get the problems (under Windows) sorted out eventually, but there was a long period of internet drama surrounding those cards in the meantime. Sadly they never did ship a linux driver though.
Under Windows I'm very impressed with the late ATI AGP cards, and I'm grateful they were produced because AGP systems can definitely benefit from them. They add a lot more capability than what was possible with the last nVidia AGP cards.
I don't know much about the open source ATI drivers, but I think mine called itself "Gallium". Perhaps that's different from the "Radeon" driver that you use?
+yorgle11 That is certainly interesting. It runs counter to the common argument against closed source drivers: that major changes to the system architecture could keep the closed source driver from working and there'd be no (easy) way to fix it. It's been a while since I set up Linux Mint on a system with nVidia graphics and maybe a bright or very dedicated someone figured out how to make it happen.
I'm also rather surprised by the ATI rep's statement about the AGP bridge. If I'm not mistaken, nVidia supported bridged GPUs through at least the GeForce 8 series, if not a bit later than that. While it might have been a small market of people looking to put more contemporary graphics adapters into an old system, I would think that ATI/AMD would have wanted to compete for their share of that market as well. Unless they just didn't think it was worth doing, and their card vendors disagreed, which I suppose is possible.
I spent some time looking around the documentation for the ATI/AMD open source graphics drivers back when I shot this video and it started to look a lot like that old saying about how sausage is made. I saw the Gallium software mentioned in there, though the details were not clear to me. Documentation seemed to suggest a kind of higher level hardware abstraction layer for applications wanting to implement 3D graphics...?
*****
I think the "Gallium" reference I saw came up when I was running an OpenGL benchmark (glmark), so it may well be a 3D specific thing. Maybe it's not the actual video driver - I don't know much about it.
nVidia actually didn't support bridged GPUs after their 7000 series. The most powerful commonly available AGP nVidia card was the 7800GS. In addition, there were some rare AGP cards based on more powerful members of that generation, but I don't remember exactly what models they were.
When the HD2xxx-4xxx Radeon AGP cards came out, they stood alone for AGP - nVidia didn't compete with them. If the ATI rep is to be believed, I guess ATI didn't intend to have AGP cards at that level either, but I'm glad it happened, especially for the purposes of H.264 capability (tricky though it may be to enable via software).
The oldest nVidia card I have that's compatible with the machine running Mint 17 is a Geforce2 MX. I should try plugging that in sometime and see if it still has a proprietary driver or just nouveau.
Hey uxwbill, what are your opinions on the more recent Dell/HP small form factor desktops? I last used them while they were still using the early Pentium dual-cores as the CPU.
+MetallicBlade I don't know much of them. Even the business line models are little more than cheap home grade computers with a somewhat better grade of support over time.
The closest thing I've got for comparison is an Inspiron 660s. I've been perfectly happy with it, even though it is nowhere near as well made as an older Dimension or Optiplex.
I have been wondering why it'd been so long, but I figured you were busy and would get to it. I've never actually messaged any of the channels that I follow regularly when they seem to have a drop off in video making.
The html5 youtube player in Chromium/ Chrome is a lot faster than in Firefox for some reason (in Linux at least).
Animae Firefox is doing almost a complete rewrite for Firefox 57 and 58... It's touted to be lighter than chrome
Can you put the time links in the description?
i can tell you why the ram slots are like that, it's cause of the bulky psu cable hitting the ram when you close the case, i know this cause some times my GX270 has problems with the psu cable hitting the ram causing some of it to not work un less you reseat it but even with the ram slots like that, i still have the problem with my 8300 cause the main cable is more bulkier then the one in this video as mine has the 305w psu.
Just this week i slapped together a cheap atom 330 mobo winsys case and old hp psu with a few ide combo drives and a few 2.5 sata1 hdd's. 1 hdd runs win xp and the second runs manjaro 18 like a champ..
Question: is it a good idea to install a Pentium 4 HT in a Dell Dimension 4550? I recently got one for $20 at a thrift store and it's in great shape (dead CMOS battery included), never been upgraded in anyway shape or form, and it has a floppy drive as quoted by uxwbill: "All real computers have floppy drives!" Good thing I have a spare PSU to use in the desktop in case the one doesn't work in the system. And it looks like it hasn't been used in about 3 years when I tested the CMOS battery with a tester and it read very low voltage. Heck, my ThinkPad R40 had a dead CMOS battery, and luckily, I had a battery plus the wiring harness from a Presario C700 that suffered a display loss, removed the old battery, switched the battery pinouts since the laptop has the exact opposite polarities than the Presario C700 (luckily same size connector) now I need to recalibrate the laptop's battery since it dies after 30 minutes and it only has 50 cycles for the 13-14 years it was used (found out it was used as a business laptop between 2003 to 2014 when they retired the laptop).
The only Pentium 4 HT processor supported in a Dimension 4550 is the 3.06 GHz/533 MHz FSB Northwood, having S-Spec number SL6PG. Processors with an 800 MHz FSB are not supported.
Bill I love your videos and I have watched dang near all of them. I agree with all of the things you bring up in videos except for a few minor ideas. Mainly; I just don't find the new firefox UI to be that bad. I've been using firefox since 1.5.012/2.0.012 and I have adapted to the UI as it has changed pretty easily.
36:30 holy moly.....that's a lot of computers in the background, can I have 1?
I don't think he does offers over youtube
Hi Bill;
Thank You for Your Prompt Answer..
Actually my 11/45 is powered from an Old PC Switcher, +5, +, - 12 volts, (300 Watt)..
I don't have Core Running at the Present, as I need to save my Pennies for a modern Switcher with + 20 and -5 volt supply..
But, Thank You again for Your Favorable Response.. And have a good and Great day..
THANK YOU Marty
love the videos, Bill. Keep being awesome.
Hi Bill this is Terry all I want to do is say thank you because I like making old computers work as well and you have been a big help to me my newest computer is in OptiPlex 780 door core it serves me well but it's 10 years old I have upgraded it and I am pleased with I started out with a dimension 4600 and it is still working I had it built for me the motherboard has the ability for Sata two of them and I have bought all of the connections but have been unable I guess to adjust the bios to accept them. Maybe someday you can make a video on that. But you will get only gratitude from me. Terry
Hey, uxwbill.....
I have a question. I have seen on a TON of ancient computer's disk drives a "volume" nobby.
What is it used for and why does it look like volume control?
Thanks,
TLD
+The Liquid Diamond This is an audio volume control. When asked to play an audio CD, older CD-ROM drives did all the needed decoding internally and sent audio out via several different connectors, two of which are on the drive's back panel. The third is a headphone jack on the front panel, and the volume control lets you control how loudly an attached pair of headphones would play.
This feature disappeared from CD-ROM drives in the early to mid 2000s, and ultimately so did any capability that the drive had to decode CD audio directly. Some older drives also had basic play/pause, track skip and stop controls on their front panels.
There are a few drives whose volume control governed the output level of both the headphone jack and the rear panel analog audio output.
Thanks. That was helpful!
I have a 5 year old elitebook i still use its been threw so much and still works. i cant say the same for newer laptops. From motherboard problems to hinge problems are common in todays laptops. i,m use the elitebook until i cant fix it. if and when it stops working. Nice video BTW.
That's not true !
I have an elitebook 8540w. It's actually the most powerful laptop i have. Good enough for me.
I still have Linux installed on my Playstation using the kit they used to make available. But you should install older versions of Linux on old hardware.
Those USB placements (35 minutes in) were the worst. Not a single thing was easily inserted into them and more often than not, it was impossible to use both slots at the same time.
Having a Radeon HD 4650 in my main machine and running Xubuntu, I actually use the open source drivers even for gaming, and they work perfectly well even for that. I can't proclaim to understand why I would go out of my way to install fglrx when the open source drivers work perfectly well for what I do.
This isn't exactly a nouveau situation, the open source drivers are perfectly stable in this case. I'm on mobile, or I would just edit my prior comment.
For some ungodly reason, I just can't stand Linux Mint. I don't know why, if you asked me why, I couldn't tell you. It just rubs me the wrong way.
+Norry Fox I mostly play older games like Half Life 2 and its derivatives, though I do enjoy some Borderlands 2 and Civ 5 every now and again. I'm running what I perceive to be a pretty heavy install of Xubuntu (I run things like Skype, Steam, and Teamviewer on startup) and on boot up my RAM usage is something like 450MB. Like I said, I have a 4650, not a 7950, so the drivers may be better optimized for my older card.
My very first PC in 2006-2007 or so was given to us by a family friend, I believe they had it in a closet or sitting in the corner of a home office, but it made its way into our hands instead of the dumpster where it probably should have gone anyway.
That computer was a Dell Dimension 8100, and let me tell you, that was one of the largest hunks of crap I've ever had the displeasure to work with. Being 9-years old at the time, I knew very little in the way of how computers functioned anyway, but this thing was non-functional from the word go, after what I assume to be many years of lack of maintenance and grueling servitude to whatever life it had before us. Its Windows 2000 OS was broken, plain and simple, with a lack of updates for years and likely every bit of malware under the sun. Its 256mb of ram and Pentium processor was pathetic even 10 years ago, and our technical ignorance led us to dropping it off twice at local PC shops to have it "fixed" only for it to be returned in literally identical condition with us footing the bill. Bad times. Dark times.
Apologies for the long comment, but these early Dimension systems bring back memories.
Only problem I had with Linux is the wireless network card . Have to go thru alot red tape to get it. But fais to run
I don't know why so many nerds care about how we pronounce Linux anyway, it's not like it really matters.
***** Aye
+Wobbled As a finn (Linus was born, raised and studied in Finland) I have to say most finns I know pronounce linux very much like Bill. I dont off the hand remember how Linus said it but I bet he says it very close to way Bill says it, so way BILL says it is for certain one of the common ways to pronounce it. Now you're right who cares how you pronounce it as long as we are able to understand that you re talking about linux or gnu/linux.
+Wobbled It's not a big deal, but I think it's because Linus explicitly said "Linux is always pronounced Lin-icks". It's sort of like when people call their wireless internet "wiffy" or say they need a "see poo" with a larger cashay, or that they are having problems with their foxfire. It's fairly easy to figure out what they are saying- but they still said it incorrectly.
IT MATTERSSSS!!!
Linox.
I think I giggled for a solid 5 minutes when the new Dell heater was introduced.
Cool heater! I wonder how many watts it draws. :-)
Apparently, 250w (that's the power supply rating)
Without trying to be a stickler of minor bits of info... SolydX and K were originally spin-offs of Linux Mint Debian Edition, which didn't offer Xfce or KDE. Later they switched to Debian proper as their base. So they were never based off Ubuntu.
Just thought I'd menti-...Sorry...
+SavageArms357 No, that's fine. If I've legitimately got something wrong, I certainly don't mind such being pointed out. I didn't know there was a "Debian" edition of Linux Mint.
+uxwbill Yep. I believe the Mint team decided to have a functioning Debian based version in the sidelines as insurance, just in case Ubuntu decided to implement something that made spin-offs like Mint impossible to continue.
Now I know you hate phones but I couldn't help but notice the Lucent/Avaya Partner 18 phone sitting on top of one of your computers which would connect to a Partner ACS phone system. Do you actually use it to take and receive calls or do you just use it to play around with the features on the ACS system?
Nope, it came in a lot of other stuff and was eventually sold.