YVR Cockroach

How much is practically nothing to you? I have 3 Lenovo S30s with "only" 16 GB of RAM (4x4GB), space for 8 modules - more computer than I'll ever need especially if I doubled the RAM. They can handle 256GB each but 16-32 GB modules in bunches f 4 aren't cheap.

YVR Cockroach

And if he/she came back we could even let him know what "HAL" stands for.

gfunkdave

The corporate-grade laptops made by Lenovo and Dell can stand up to more punishing treatment, though.

I personally like the Lenovo ones better...they still seem better made. This is probably going back to when they were IBM ThinkPads.

YVR Cockroach

The mid-level government near me has been replacing its fleet of computers. Lots of Lenovo laptops, primarily T430s, T440s, T530s and X230s but with only 4GB (fine for Win7 but less so with Win 10). Occasioanal Panasonic Toughbook too.

Error 601

When it was priced out it was a little less than half the cost to upgrade systems using DDR3 than those using DDR4. It cost about $220 USD per 8-slot machine to get to 128GB.

Found an invoice, the modules used were Kingston KTM-SX316/16G.

nkedel

What sort of hungry applications? "several browsers each with multiple tabs open" doesn't sound like much.

High end office-style (non-gaming) desktop prices have cratered, and even low end desktop processors today are extremely fast by the standards of a a few years ago. Dell and Lenovo both sell refurbished desktop machines for a song, and unlike laptops they are trivial to upgrade. $400 gets you a decent quad or 6-core i5 or Ryzen chassis with same as new warranty, and probably 8GB ram in it, maybe a small SSD or maybe a 500GB hard drive. Another $250 each gets you a 1TB NVME SSD and 16GB of RAM (depending on the model, that may bring you up to 24GB.)

The one thing that won't have is a discreet graphics card for gaming (or 3D modeling, or certain kinds of photo/video editing although IME for most people that's overkill), It may or may not have a large enough power supply to put one in. If it's a regular mini-tower, it's pretty trivial to swap in a bigger PSU if needed, but it's probably better to aim for a generation-old workstation-class machine or an on-sale gaming one at that point.

[Edit: or if adventurous, an older workstation-class machine, although how much you care about the machine being quiet and how much electricity it uses, going at least moderately newer is a good idea. OTOH, a 3-6 year old machine is still going to be very cheap, and have most of the power advantages. Or if you are looking at building your own, you can build something ridiculously powerful for $400-500 - look at the Ryzen 3 3200G, currently under $100 on Newegg.)

Nope. The Space Shuttle Orbiters had an cluster of specialized IBM aviation computers, closely related to IBM 360-series mainframes, and did so for their main flight control until retirement. The engine controllers were originally mainframe-related Honeywell systems, but they were replaced during the first mid-80s round of modernization with a 68000-family microprocessor. So far as I can tell from published sources, the only Intel chips used in in the space shuttle orbiter was part of the avionics display modernization starting in the terminal 1990s I think, which used already-by-then obsolete 386 (and MIPS) processors.

A lot of the reason why spacecraft use much older processors is that it's very expensive to build radiation-hardened chips, and they are typically many generations back in their feature size (and thus number of transistors.) https://arstechnica.com/science/2019...-into-space/3/

Neither; gfunkdave's link covers most of it, but to restate - it was a limitation of the PC platform as IBM initially designed it; the processor could go up to 1MB accessible at a time - the space between 640K and 1MB was reserved for ROM and IO cards, and most notably, the better kinds of color video parked right at the 640K mark, or A0000 as it was known in the hex memory maps of the time - older graphics standards would let you go to 704K) Plenty of machines with processors more basic than the 8086/8088 used bank switching to allow more memory, and had IBM put in a bank-switching mechanism out of the box, people would have used/cloned it. On the other hand, when the PC first came out, you had to have an add-in card to go all the way up to 640KB to begin with.

There were attempts to bring bank-switched memory that to the 1MB-limit 8088/8086 PC platform - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_memory was the one that came closest to catching on - but it really only became successful on later hardware that went beyond the original PC specification (the 286 could address up to 16MB, and the 386 up to 4GB although the 386 would be long obsolete before anyone built consumer or regular office use motherboard that could usefully hold that much [around 2003].) Technically that includes the 2nd-generation IBM 80286 models (AT and XT/286) that gave us the "ISA" architecture that still lives on in small parts of present PCs, but in practice it was only the later 80286 machines that coexisted with pricier 386 machines in the terminal 1980s that were actualy used with it and which gave us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_memory beyond the 1MB mark (and more importantly usefully, beyond the 640K or 704K mark.) Expanded memory became MORE common once 386s came into use because it could emulate Expanded memory in software and really until Windows took over in the early 1990s, expanded memory (whether with a board in a XT or 286, or emulated in a 386) was much easier to companies to convert their software to use a larger data set than to rewrite them to the by-then-going-obsolete 286 protected mode or to require the still expensive 386s.

Between Windows 3.0 having really caught on (Windows 2.x had special 286/386 editions which could use over 1MB; Windows 3 in 1990 was a single edition and just ran better on a 286 or 386) and the prevalence of 386 "DOS extenders" (which largely worked around the traditional PC platform AND a lot of DOS) somewhere around 1992 the 640KB limit was dead.

DYKWIA

Not sure why you bothered. The OP hasn't been back to the thread since he started it a month ago

DYKWIA

That brings back some memories...

I remember the QEMM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMM) product that was advertised on the back of virtually every PC magazine at the time. This opened up memory above the 640K mark. It was very expensive for what it actually did (about £60 I think).

Then came along DR-DOS which had the same functionality built in as standard.

Anyone remember Microsoft deliberately crippling Windows 3.1 so it wouldn't run on DR-DOS? That was my first ever call to a support "hotline". It was a pre-recorded message saying DR were aware of the W3.1 issue, and would send out a patch disk. I just had to leave my name and address. A couple of days later the disk arrived, and all was good.

nkedel

I remember ads for that and for DesqView; I don't think I used it much, and had never purchased my own copy - my folks were late to getting a 386 and my own personal systems were older generations well past the point at which MS-DOS came with EMM386.

Dubai Stu

I was in my 20s at the time and was going through the same thing.

puchong

I am looking for a desktop PC, either new or refurbished with a warranty, which can be used for day trading during the day and DTP work (various Adobe applications) at other times. It must be able to support multiple monitors as well as serious multi-tasking. Reliability (of the hardware) is important. I would like to spend around $1,250 but not a whole lot more; obviously, the lower the better.

PS. I did ask this question earlier but was then struck with illness that kept me from responding in time.

garykung

When you say Adobe, my first thought was Apple. But with a $1,250 budget, it would be barely enough.

Perhaps a Dell Desktop? I saw one at Dell Outlet (as of the moment of this post), there is a Dell G5 with 9th i7 8 core with SSD and a nVidia graphic card. The bad news is it is scratch and dent and it only has 8GB of memory. It costs $784.

Personally, I prefer XPS. But with that price, I believe this is something worth to be considered.

UA Fan

The one thing I like about XPS is are the USB-C ports on each side which helps place the charger on the more convenient side. Can't find laptops like that.

garykung

I mean desktop...

puchong

How does the AMD Ryzen 7 chip compare with all the Intel i7 8 core? Is there any general reason to prefer AMD chips?