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Geek Culture / Yikes!

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heartbone
21
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Joined: 9th Nov 2002
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Posted: 30th Jun 2003 23:51
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From my local hardware shop I just bought a $199+tax= $213 box.

AMD Duron @ 1.4 Ghz
w/ 128 MB RAM
10 GB Hard drive
1.44" floppy
56x CD Rom
MicroATX Amptron 810CLM4 266Mhz FSB
Builtins: Sis730 Video/Network card
2 PCI slots (1 free 1 used by included 56K modem)
case and power supply
Keyboard and mouse
phone cable and power cord
Factory sealed in a box direct from CHINA.

In addition I recieved 2CDs (1 drivers and 1 office suite)
NO Operating system included of course.

I told the saleslady that I was going to swap in the disk
from my wife's 333MHz setup and I hoped that
Windows 98 was going to be able to handle it.

She looked at me in an odd way and said that
"All that you need is in the box".

I wondered if that meant what I thought it meant.

The darn thing booted to Windows 2000 Professional!

What should I do?
The more you see, the more you know.
The more you know, the more you see.
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the_winch
21
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Joined: 1st Feb 2003
Location: Oxford, UK
Posted: 1st Jul 2003 00:06
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You mean they are selling them from china with win2000 installed on the hd?

Leave it on.
Since you have already paid for a ms os and wouldn't have repaced it with win2000 in the future ms looses no money from you.
If you report the company eho sold it to ms of not is up to you.
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ReD_eYe
21
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Joined: 9th Mar 2003
Location: United Kingdom
Posted: 1st Jul 2003 00:11
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thats pretty lucky for you isn't it, i'd probably keep it

hi guys
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Shadow Robert
21
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Joined: 22nd Sep 2002
Location: Hertfordshire, England
Posted: 1st Jul 2003 00:13
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Not bad... but put in a better Gfx ASAP!

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Kangaroo2
21
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Joined: 26th Sep 2002
Location: United Kingdom
Posted: 1st Jul 2003 01:11
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Being Micro ATX, depending on the model and case there may not be A spare PCI slot, let alone AGP Cool bargain tho, being that you got it from CHINA I would expect nothing less than thousands of pounds worth of pirated software - I once bough a NES with 500 games built in lol

Bunnies aren't just cute like everybody supposes, They got them hoppy legs & twitchy little noses,
And what's with all the carrots? What do they need such good eyesight for anyway?
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heartbone
21
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Joined: 9th Nov 2002
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Posted: 1st Jul 2003 03:30
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I have decided to remove the 10 GB W2K hard drive and save it. She was going to use it as a music and picture repository, but I decided that I may want it in the future, although I have no need to play with it right now.

I will be inserting the Win98SE drive as soon as I get all the drivers downloaded (if I can find my screwdriver from where she has hidden it).

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heartbone
21
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Joined: 9th Nov 2002
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Posted: 8th Jul 2003 22:18
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I got the Win98SE disk to recognise the new motherboard. Probably took about 4-5 reboots for everything.

Later I switched the desktop from 800x600 to 1024x768 and the video signal went out. Even though the new mobo has the same onboard video chipset as my other computer, I determined that the drivers didn't work right after installation. Took me a long time to sort out a combination of driver install(s) to get that onboard video card to work correctly under Win98.

Her new system now works perfectly, but it sure does not seem 4 times faster, (333MHz to 1.4 Ghz) not even close. So I don't even know if it was worth the $213 that I spent. Even though she got better USB functionality and access to a network card, I'd say the speed, USB and NIC upgrades were worth up to $100 at most.

I didn't transfer the TNT2 video card or Montego sound card because she won't miss them.

I now realize that unless I pop that Win2K drive back onto the same motherboard I'd need a Win2K install disk to make it happy. Oh well easy come, easy go.

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Mentor
22
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Joined: 27th Aug 2002
Location: United Kingdom
Posted: 8th Jul 2003 22:42 Edited at: 8th Jul 2003 22:55
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repeat after me "thank you mr Gates" , now you know why windoze is claimed to be a resource hog, when I upgraded from P300 celery to AMD1200 athlon I didn`t see a 4 times increase in speed on most things, most of the time the PC can chug through data faster than the HD can get the information to it, most of the time it is waiting for data writes to finish or information to come from the drive, but install something like vue de esprite and render a scene, you will notice a massive difference in the render times, most of the time it`s just that swapping the data about is the bottleneck, for desktop use for letters and running a 56k modem you need no more than a p300 (thats what my old one does now), your gonna be one hell of a typist to outrun a 300mhz cpu , (and windoze still manages to grab huge chunks of the system for it`s own weird purposes, more you give it more it takes)

Mentor.

ps: re your win2000 drive, you may find that all the windoze files are in cab files inside the windows folder or a folder inside there, windows will look there and use those files to handle updates etc, first thing you should do is backup the whole windows installation by Norton Ghost to another cheap hd or a cd/dvd drive, since 2000 isn`t a current OS (in the sense that xp/me are selling better and more modern) it MAY be that it is licenced legaly from MS at a discount, my original machine came with 98 when I bought it in 1998 for a bargain price and I have a manual with the code on and the fancy anti piracy strips on the cover, all legit and a full OEM disk to boot, just cos it`s cheap doesn`t always mean it`s dodgey

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Ian T
22
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Joined: 12th Sep 2002
Location: Around
Posted: 9th Jul 2003 00:07
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My god... I mean, that's a cheap machine (obviously, a good cheap machine, but still not a $2000 one) but the processer is still better than mine

--Mouse

Famous Fighting Furball
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lcfcfan
21
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Joined: 19th Feb 2003
Location: North East, UK
Posted: 9th Jul 2003 01:17
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Think your mistaken with the cpu there is no 1.4ghz duron they stop at 1.3 do you mean athlon 1400+?

not that it matters in the slightest

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heartbone
21
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Joined: 9th Nov 2002
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Posted: 9th Jul 2003 22:09
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lcfcfan your information is outdated.
typical AMD DURON 1400 SYSTEM

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