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Of all the machines an Emachine. Those were the cheapest and worst built computers ever. They were often obsolete the moment they were sold.
I guess that makes the irony even more delicious.
They were never obsolete because, as it says on the sticker (that no one on the internet can ever seem to be bothered to read), that you can replace it every 2 years for new, more modern system for only 99 bucks.
and quite frankly, thats a fucking steal, considering what PC prices were like back in the late 90s, and with how fast technology was advancing.
The trick was closing down your PC company before the two years are out.
For crying out loud, thank you!
Power users didn’t flock to these, but they were awesome for a certain demographic. Low skill early tech adopters. Grandma, grampa, mom and dad. Dudes out in rural areas, like my friend’s dad, who only needed to use the PC for 30 minutes a day to keep his farm operation running and couldn’t give 2 shits.
Yep.
Several family members had these exact 433mhz emachines with the stickers. They were not power users, they were not gamers… They were people who typed with one finger chicken pecking to check email
Ah yes, totally legible sticker
I used to be a retail PC service tech back when these things were new. I remember scoffing at the “never obsolete” tag. They were obsolete while still new in the box.
I worked in retail sales at the time.
customer: “What’s the catch?”
me: “It’s pretty slow now, if you keep it a couple years, you get to buy someone else’s post upgrade for cheap assuming the company is still around, you don’t get the replacement from us”
customer: “So what about those Compaq’s?”
It’s literally a computer. In your home. What would you even upgrade? Get two of them maybe?
During the era it wasn’t rare to upgrade components on the motherboard and ISA/PCI bus cards. We’d had some relatively stable CPU socket standards and you’d do things like change out CPU and ram for upgrades.
Was this a stupid marketing gimmick? Oh yeah. Was it unreasonable to talk about upgrading a system at home? Not really. We did do it for a while.
My dad is still running this exact computer, but he only uses it to print one certain thing a month
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I remember these shit boxes. Fuck these shit boxes. Set that fucking thing on fire and throw it off the overpass.
As much as love the clarity of modern high resolution LCD, I still miss the slightly fuzzy effect CRTs had on the displayed graphics. It was almost artificial AA. When I play old games I wonder why they look crappy. It’s because I can see the sharp edges vs the “soft filter” the CRT added.
It was truly amazing how great SD looked on a 25" tv. 525 scan lines. Bright enough to sear your eyeballs. In a vacuum, they didn’t even look fuzzy. But you put a 1080p full screen even on my WQHD and it looks like absolute trash :)
It’s like DVDs. DVDs looked great in 2002, compared to VHS or even broadcast TV, your new 32 inch “big screen” never looked as good playing a DVD over S-video. That same DVD in that same player attached by HDMI to a 45 inch 4k LCD looks grainy and horrid.
When I was in highschool we installed StarCraft on the school network drive and played it fairly often. One time we were in the design class which has 1 set up with a CRT (I’m not sure why)
Naturally, I launched StarCraft on it and that game fucking came to life on a CRT, the color vibrance was much better, and there was a higher fidelity and depth to the graphics.
I use that case for my work computer! It has a ryzen7 and RTX 2080. I had to hack the front USB to connect it with a modern mobo header, but it works…
I’ve always wanted to build a sleeper PC
I tried building a sleeper PC once but kept getting disturbed by trains.
I want to do it in an old 8086 or maybe an IBM PS/2
Sleeper PCs are an art form
Where’s the radiator?
Right here, next to the fan:
Don’t give LTT any ideas…
Take the upvote and gtfo ;p
Does your fan not have its front shield or is it just a bad angle? If it doesn’t I’d suggest you put it on, from experience those fuckers can break skin.
It doesn’t, no. I accidentally put it on crooked when assembling it and bent it when trying to correct my error to the point that just taking it off was the only logical solution.
This one doesn’t break skin, though. In fact, my cats have accidentally gotten their tail into it several times and reacted with only slight annoyance.
To put it another way: a toddler could stick their head into it and not cry when it hits them, it’s THAT good at stopping gently when it encounters resistance 😁
Damn, I don’t know what it is, but your house looks completely Danish.
It’s an apartment, but it’s not so weird that it looks completely Danish since it IS completely Danish. As am I 😁
Amazing! I don’t know what makes it look so Danish, maybe the wooden floor? The window shape? The Danfoss radiator valve?
Then I saw your username and I was like: aah, he’s surely a Dane ;)
Nååååå, aha!
How could you tell?
At first I noticed the wooden floor style, then the Danfoss radiator valve, which is very common in Denmark. Even the window shape. I wouldn’t have bet my life on it, but I had a feeling it was Danish.
Maybe I should start playing Geoguessr…
I’m just glad you didn’t notice those horrific vertical blinds 😄
Whatever you do, do NOT get vertical blinds. You will rur the day! In fact, I ruedva bit again just now, 13 years into mistakenly getting them and then being too executive dysfunction plagued to replace them with something sane 😬😄
By the woodwork duh.
It’s upward inside the drive bay, using a single 120mm fan and rad, then I perforated the case’s top sheet metal with a new grid of holes for outlet airflow. Definitely not amazing cooling performance but hey. I had to slice the CDROM drive in half to make room for it… the floppy drive actually works but not the giant CDROM lol
Clever!
How’s airflow?
Is the floppy drive hooked up? I have a floppy drive in my modern machine.
You need to get with the times, grandpa. Get yourself a Zip drive.
Do Zip drives work with Linux?
It looks like you could, but probably requires you to build a kernel that supports all the old crap they took out years ago.
If they ever remove floppy support, I’ll be sad.
I had the WORST luck out of those. I had a dozen zip disks go bad and 1/3 Jaz drives.
I guess the material of a floppy disc coupled with near HDD densities wasn’t a good combination. Floppies would just randomly go bad at the best of times.
Yes I made the floppy drive work! There’s a USB adapter hidden in the back, and modular power supply makes it simple to hook up. I actually use them at my job (machine shop) though we normally just use an RS-232 cable connection to transfer files, so disks don’t get any actual use. I really wanted to ensure the 3.5 drive worked even though the CD-ROM doesn’t work, I had to put the AIO radiator up there instead.
I haven’t seen an FDD header on a motherboard since my P6T (with an i7-920). And even then, it wasn’t worthwhile to use it.
Do you have a usb-fdd adapter? Or just a USB internal floppy drive?
https://www.ebay.com/itm/404725379529?_skw=floppy+drive+usb+adaptor https://www.ebay.com/itm/271698611804?_skw=usb+header+to+usb+adapter
This is pretty similar to what I use
Never say never. The Ship of Theseus is never obsolete as long as regular maintenance occurs
120 is a steal!
Take me back. I don’t like it in the future…
Encarta was absolute fire back in the day, seriously
It’s a jungle out there and I oughta know
I know a guy who can take you back for $120
Even when these first came out you had to know it was silly
Correct me if I’m wrong but I think this was a programme where they would upgrade/replace your setup for free every year or so.
That’s right. There’s an insightful blog article if you want to learn the full story.
You could get your PC upgraded for $99 if you also bought 24 months of dial-up Internet service through them. But you also had to pay shipping both ways, and be out the use of your computer while you did it! That seems so inconvenient I imagine almost nobody bothered. eMachines certainly expected people wouldn’t, making the whole thing little more than a carefully calculated marketing tactic. And it worked.
That said, their machines were very competitively priced even without the upgrade deal, and it really disrupted the incumbents, making them good value machines even if you didn’t take them up on the dubious “never obsolete” offer.
Run protoweb on that bad boy, and keep it alive 😎
Is that like Compuserve 2000?
It’s a proxy server that works kind of like an Advanced version of the Wayback Machine. So old PCs like this, can connect to something like what the internet would’ve been like when they were first made.
I have the Protoweb browser on my Linux mint machine, running through wine. It’s fun to poke around at, and great for internet archaeology
And just like that, the e-machine continues to fulfill its intended purpose: browse the internet like it’s 1998. It’s never obsolete, but you do need a time machine to take full advantage of it.
viewsonic made some damn fine CRTs…
Mitsubishi Diamondtron or Sony Trinitron. That’s where the good stuff was.
iirc Silicon Graphics crts were actually trinitrons after 92-3. of course a 21" crt weighed fuck all lol
Weight aside, those took a lot of space too. Almost every CRT from that era was put in a desk corner, swivelled sideways, forcing you to turn sideways too - and many of those were 15-17". Now imagine 21…
at one point I had a 17" (no name) and a 21" view sonic on the same desk bench, connected to a dual p2 (tyan mobo) machine I built running windows 2000, the first os I used that supported multiple monitors. our engineer custom designed the benches out of steel square tubing and laminate wood, they were great.
Fuck yes. My first PC. It got me into It when I needed to fix the hdd when Windows 2k crashed.
Well I mean it’s true if you also belive trigger’s broom in only fools and horses is still the same broom.
Probably only older people from the UK will get the reference. Sorry.
No need with the “older” there, mate.
