Intentionally using a slow computer

[Crayon Shin Chan]

I just discovered I have this little fetish.

I have 74 episodes to reencode in H.264 with Handbrake. I have a X6 1055T. But I transfer it all to my 'leftover parts build' Sempron 145, and then make it encode everything. I wake up in the afternoon, check the encode queue, see that only 27 episodes have been done so far.

And then I go "Awesome!!!"

Am I alone in this?

[bthylafh]

Paging Starfalcon. Starfalcon to the white courtesy phone.

[just brew it!]

Am I alone in this?

Quite likely yes. Maybe bhtooefr or Starfalcon will chime in, they're the resident obsolete hardware collectors!

I did until quite recently have a couple of old Socket 754 Athlon 64s running Folding@home. Not quite the same thing though...

[kvndoom]

If by "intentionally" you mean "haven't upgraded yet," then count me in... My personal box is still sporting a dual core Socket 939. I remember I used to build a new system at least once a year; I'm totally out of the loop with a 6 year old motherboard/CPU combo (Geforce 8800GT graphics to boot)! I will be asking questions aplenty this fall when it's time to upgrade this baby!

[DPete27]

I'm definetly addicted to performance (though I cannot always afford it). But I will agree that it is somewhat satisfying to make an obsolete rig do some "modern" computing as long as you're not pressed for time and there are no errors/quality loss. Although, if I were doing a lot of re-encoding, I would definetly do it on a better system. There's a thin line between amusing and annoying in this case.

[Anarchist]

"... And then I go "Awesome!!!""

is there a reason for it being "awesome"?

[Crayon Shin Chan]

Nah, 'intentionally' as in I have a faster computer, but I give the heavy lifting to the slower computer to do. It somehow feels awesome because more time is spent encoding each episode, I suppose. I don't know why I feel it's more awesome. Maybe it's because I did something compute intensive with cheap hardware.

[JustAnEngineer]

Is there a reason for it being "awesome"?

Maybe it's unusually cold in Malaysia right now, his central heating is broken and he needs the heat from the low-efficiency processor to keep his home warm. Maybe the white noise from the cooling fans is soothing to him and he'd be unable to sleep with silence.

[Anarchist]

Nah, 'intentionally' as in I have a faster computer, but I give the heavy lifting to the slower computer to do. It somehow feels awesome because more time is spent encoding each episode, I suppose. I don't know why I feel it's more awesome. Maybe it's because I did something compute intensive with cheap hardware.

I suppose utilizing what is an outdated hardware to do something useful is indeed "awesome".

[flip-mode]

"... And then I go "Awesome!!!""

is there a reason for it being "awesome"?

I think it's pretty well implied, and it's one of those things where if you don't get it and you have to have it articulated for you then you're not going to appreciate it regardless.

[JustAnEngineer]

Maybe his electricity is free.

[Starfalcon]

I swear that phone is always for me.....heck, I used to fold on my BP6, until it couldn't make the deadlines. I also use a dualie P2 for a FTP box, and my dualie 1.2 MP box for torrents. It wuld do a better job with barton MPs, but I am stuck with slow pallys.

[etilena]

I used to get a kick out of running a bare Linux OS on older computers and it was so cool to see me more productive on that than on a Vista machine (booting, loading time etc was horrendous).

[dragmor]

I switch between a 6+ year old A64 3500+ (socket 939 2.2ghz single core on an NF3, see sig) and an XS35GT (dual core atom+ion completely passive) shuttle as my two main systems. They have different strengths but are mostly comparable. The WHS box is a pentium C2D. I'm fixing a C2D E4700 system for the wife to use for work. $50 for second hand P190 case, 450w PSU, CPU, 4GB DDR2, P35 mobo, 7900GT (will be swapped with a passive 7200GS). Spent $100 of Win7 HP OEM, and $140 of a 2TB HD = one new fast box.

I was going to pickup an ivy bridge in the new shuttle 77R5 case but the C2D and a new Ipad will allow us to wait until Haswell. I've got kids so no time for gaming.

I've also recently given away several C2Q and Core iX stuff, in a sort of "no man without porn" donation. Giving old fellas (70+) at the lawn bowls club PCs so they can skype their grand kids, waste time on youtube and giving them access to the world of free porn.

[flip-mode]

I switch between a 6+ year old A64 3500+

I remember when that was a TechReport editors choice or something like that.

[pikaporeon]

I'm more nostalgic for a time I never truly experienced, where command line was king and hardware knowledge was more important. I started computing in 1993, so I caught glimpses of the age before my time but never interacted with it, but hearing about it I feel like I just missed a very exciting time. I never got to see the old-school BBSes, or understand what usenet was all about back in the day, and I wish I could have. That said I don't think I would have been ready to go in 1993 because I was 5 so I can't be too upset at having missed my opportunity.

Instead I just stick to playing Digital: A Love Story and reading the Jargon file.

[bthylafh]

pikaporeon: Emulators are my friends & can be yours. In no particular order:
Applewin
WinVICE
SIMH
Hercules

among others. Good ways to experience the old days without needing to dig up ancient hardware that may no longer work.

[Crayon Shin Chan]

I live in Germany now, as a university student. Electricity is free in the dorm! I tried folding on the Sempron 145 too, but it turned out that even my PS3 could make more PPD. The Sempron box is also almost silent. I remind myself from time to time that this is way faster than the Athlon XP 1800+ I had back in 2003 (I joined TR to research the parts I wanted in that build!) and I'm always happy that I have it as a companion to my 6 core beast, even if it just sits there idling most of the time.

I don't know how you can be nostalgic for a time that you never experienced yourself. pika, ever tried building a computer? Like, the memory select circuitry, running individual lines to serve as the bus, setting up the timer, writing your own ROM etc.

[flip-mode]

I don't know how you can be nostalgic for a time that you never experienced yourself.

Really? I think all that is required for that is a good imagination.

[pikaporeon]

I don't know how you can be nostalgic for a time that you never experienced yourself. pika, ever tried building a computer? Like, the memory select circuitry, running individual lines to serve as the bus, setting up the timer, writing your own ROM etc.

Closest I've come was wiring some ICs to an 8088 in class

[Crayon Shin Chan]

I don't know how you can be nostalgic for a time that you never experienced yourself.

Really? I think all that is required for that is a good imagination.

No, then it is no longer nostalgia. It is worshipping an ideal that never was romanticism. At least nostalgia is grounded in something concrete in your past.

[flip-mode]

I don't know how you can be nostalgic for a time that you never experienced yourself.

Really? I think all that is required for that is a good imagination.

No, then it is no longer nostalgia. It is worshipping an ideal that never was romanticism. At least nostalgia is grounded in something concrete in your past.

Ah, romanticism. You're terminologically correct.

[Welch]

I'm surprised bhtooefr hasn't said anything yet.... Resident obsolete hardware collector doesn't begin to describe it. masochist begins to break ground for the proper classification for this type of Gerbil. He once described to me how he was getting this laptop resurrected that had a Risc processor in it. I was assuming he meant something useful until he mentioned he was excited that a few hours later it was able to pull up TR forums only after a few hours, but with some errors due to plugins not being available for things like flash (for the advertisements) BUT.... it stopped close to loading fully because it didn't have the ram to do it. The thing is so old that when I mentioned some OLD SCHOOL 1991 IBM laptop, it looked like a Crysis gaming system in comparison. I don't even recall what it was he was bringing back to life.

All of that being said, I used to enjoy doing stuff like that, mostly because it made me feel "Cool" to be able to free up my main system (back in the single core days) and have a dedicated "Server" to do everything else for me. Now I find it hard to go through the trouble of pushing tasks like that to a secondary system when I've got enough main rig to be 3 or 4 computers compared to those spares.

[ludi]

I finally started peeling away my the last bits of my old hardware collection once I realized it had been occupying shelf space for 2+ years without being booted. Just recycled the last 486 system a couple months ago, and that little guy had already been upgraded (by me) with some sort of Evergreen-branded overdrive unit. The last PentiumMMX system left the building a long time ago and I'm thinking the Super-7 system needs to leave next.

[flip-mode]

I finally started peeling away my the last bits of my old hardware collection once I realized it had been occupying shelf space for 2+ years without being booted. Just recycled the last 486 system a couple months ago, and that little guy had already been upgraded (by me) with some sort of Evergreen-branded overdrive unit. The last PentiumMMX system left the building a long time ago and I'm thinking the Super-7 system needs to leave next.

Yeah, unless you have more storage space than you know what to do with some of that stuff that will never be turned on again seems pointless to keep. But I just got donated a Skt 939 X2 4200 system with 2 GB of DDR than I think could still have some long years ahead of it. Only thing that actually worries me is the chipset fan on that Nforce 4.

[Scrotos]

I finally started peeling away my the last bits of my old hardware collection once I realized it had been occupying shelf space for 2+ years without being booted. Just recycled the last 486 system a couple months ago, and that little guy had already been upgraded (by me) with some sort of Evergreen-branded overdrive unit. The last PentiumMMX system left the building a long time ago and I'm thinking the Super-7 system needs to leave next.

Aw man, you're getting rid of Good Stuff (tm)!

[nerdrage]

I still use a Gateway laptop from the late 90s on almost a daily basis for checking email/IM and streaming Pandora to my home theater system (via its built-in optical output!). It's a Pentium III 700MHz (upgraded from a 366MHz PII) with 288MB PC100 RAM running a heavily stripped-down install of XP. After bootup, XP only occupies 80MB or so of the RAM, which leaves enough to run a browser (Chrome or Firefox - one tab at a time of course!) or the PandoraOne standalone Adobe AIR app. Surprisingly, the AIR app only uses about 10-20% of the CPU. But attempting to use any kind of Flash on a webpage really kills it and running WindowsUpdate causes the RAM usage to spike to 300-400MB, so horrible disk-thrashing ensues

[nerdrage]

Only thing that actually worries me is the chipset fan on that Nforce 4.

I used one of these on an nForce4 back in the day, with good results. Still using it in my sig system today.

[halbhh2]

I still use a Gateway laptop from the late 90s on almost a daily basis for checking email/IM and streaming Pandora to my home theater system (via its built-in optical output!). It's a Pentium III 700MHz...the AIR app only uses about 10-20% of the CPU. But attempting to use any kind of Flash on a webpage really kills it and running WindowsUpdate causes the RAM usage to spike to 300-400MB, so horrible disk-thrashing ensues

cool!

[halbhh2]

So, the deal is, he's running software that actually puts that processor to full use, not just for a moment. It feels like full utilization, like you'd get on a faster machine analyzing chess positions, folding, etc.