1st Gen Lunchtable Thread - General Discussion

100pct all the time, it would make a good space heater if you didnt already live in the desert

 

Tell me it has Winamp! Pretty sure I got it from you when I asked around

 

My family had an ME PC briefly. It included a free upgrade to XP as soon as it was available.

 

It was a version we completely glossed over in my household growing up. We had Win 98 on a pretty nice compaq Presario multimedia PC for probably longer than would be advisable and then switched to an HP Pavilion with Windows XP sometime around 2002.

Honestly it's the worst of both worlds, Win ME is based on Win9x codebase and is super legacy essentially still having a DOS backbone. Win NT 4.0 and Win 2000 had already been out forever and were fully compatible with all Windows applications and had a good DOS compatibility layer built in. Like why would you make one more Win9x based thing when you already knew all the drivers and applications would be leveraging WDM and NT? Win ME could have been a great way to ease people into all the new backbones with old styling still.

 

I've got all the old versions of stuff. I can show you how to setup the inode to use the old Internet if you want. You can even still use Winamp on old computers and stream current streams

 

Fired up the old rig

I forget how noisy these can be

 

I swap fans in my old stuff to help with that a bit, I don't mind the spinning hard drive noises but fans from over 10yrs old are usually in need of lubrication and get loud. The Vantec Stealth fans are old style but super quiet.

 

These bad boys are Noctua, it's actually the air cooler I forgot about that's louder than my AIO



I'll probably get it to roar once I open up Fusion and play with it a bit

 

According to the Wikipedia history, it wasn't supposed to exist. Windows 98SE was supposed to be the last 9x system, followed directly by XP, but XP's schedule slipped enough that management panicked and tried to fast-track another 9x-based system to avoid going too long between new OS releases.

ME was only in the market for a year before XP became available, so I'd wager it was a net loss to Microsoft between bad press and wasted energy/resources.

 

That thing won't have any issue with fusion, won't use both cards, probably wont even use one card much at all, but that computer isn't wildly out of date really. Fusion is pretty low end in terms of their use of modern CPU instruction and GPU instruction set encoding. It really is designed to work with some seriously low end systems. As long as that CPU has SSE 4a I bet it works, hell Fusion might not even need 4a it might only need 3

 

Being free, I can see how they gotta keep resource utilization low

Solidworks must be a bit more challenging?

 

SolidWorks used to be really bad on resource usage... I'm not sure if computers got exponentially better or they just finally wised up and started using the GPU compute features of consumer cards more. SolidWorks use to deny you GPU compute and rendering on consumer cards, would only enable those enhancements with a FireGL or Quadro vector card back in the day. So anything more than a simple 3D part or a small 3D assembly would bog down the display really bad. But now it seems to work really well with consumer grade nvidia cuda and whatever AMD rebranded their compute library as. I can still bog it down but it takes a pretty big assembly to do it.

 

Ahh the good ol' Quadro cards

Those fuckers were always jam packed with twice the vram as their consumer grade variants

 

Yeah and back in the day the CUDA cores were totally unlocked on those Quadros to do compute tasks and the consumer cards could only use the CUDA stuff for PhysX and DirectX/OpenGL rendering. That's probably why SolidWorks didn't work with them but honestly even using 1/3 of the CUDA core power (that's all they could used for non approved compute tasks) on a consumer card would have been better than CPU rendering everything.

 

For an old rig, it opens and runs CAD just fine!

As for CAM, it uses a BIT more resources for simulation and CAM otherwise damn even a poor computer can run it

That's 4th Gen goodness right there



And only on DDR3, it still only used 8gb



GPU usage is really just for rendering/simulation so I did expect a little usage here



I just didn't think the second GPU would be used at all damn



Realistically though, we can ignore all that RAM usage due to stuff in the background like Steam.

 

Yeah, the resource usage barely changed when Fusion was closed vs opening and running a simulation







Aside from free, no wonder it's wildly popular.

 

baby foot toe beans

 

My main PC is the only one that's got a pic of the little dude as my background, not the rest though since they're expendable

Fuck kids grow up fast

 

Yeah their little feet are cute until they start walking and wearing shoes all while refusing to wear socks and when the shoes come off at the end of the day those little feet become means of biological warfare

I had to start sneaking foot powder into Sofia's shoes

 

Windows NT bring back memories of Dave Cutler, Lou Perazzoli, and the VMS boys from DEC in Maynard MA. I loved that OS.