Now I have 4 speakers.

I can now choose not only between quality (my old speakers) or volume(crap built-in screen speakers), but quality and volume.

I honestly didn't expect that, considering how laptops these days are pretty much as locked down as phones in terms of upgradability.

BUT.

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Went straight into my oldest PC, and bumped the memory from a lowly 64mb to 160mb.

Now I can launch Google Chrome in less than ten minutes!

Now, the biggest problem is the 166mhz CPU bottlenecking literally everything. And maybe the buggy display driver that gave me a BSOD while I was trying to play a .mpeg clip.

Either way, it loads Fimfiction, so that’s certainly an improvement.

I stole it back from the guy who took it, but turns out they formatted the drive to put a pirated copy of Halo on it, overwriting around a quarter of the several hundred files I had on the drive. While nearly all of the files were archived assignments, I often use them as reference for future assignments or to study from for tests and quizzes.

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I've found the charger for one of the first smartphones my family ever owned, back from around 2007/2008.

Additionally, I've found pictures of myself, my sister, and my dog when we were all kids/puppies.

It took a frustratingly long time with the $2 soldering iron I have in my shed, but at least it works now.

I've ordered a motherboard with the well-known VIA MVP3 chipset for my project builds, so hopefully being able to support 500mhz+ CPUs should help video playback be buttery smooth on my first PC. Though, it's got ATX support, so I could maybe even put it in a different case and use it as a backup PC of sorts. 166Mhz actually worked pretty well for day to day tasks if you weren't watching video.

Drooped a few places, proceed to regain them all in a crazy record-breaking act.

I get Windows 2000 installed.

Works fine now.

Go to Win98 to check if things still work.

They don't.

Windows protection error.

I know exactly what caused it, too. I swapped the Sound Blaster Pro 2 in the system for an AWE32 so that I could get sound in Win2k. I uninstalled the Pro 2 drivers in Win98, installed the AWE32 drivers, and rebooted.

And then the install did the dead.

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My robotics team is currently at 7th place, out of a total of 48 teams!

Yeah, that was just a one-night thought. I'm feeling fine now. :P

Time to kick off my capstone project. :,raritywink:

Specs:
AOpen AP53-1 mobo, Baby-AT form factor, using a BIOS from a later revision for K6 support.
AMD K6/233 underclocked to 166mhz due to motherboard limitations
160mb of EDO 72-pin SIMM ram
ATI Rage XL gpu, ~8mb VRAM (I think), supports up to OpenGL 1.4 depending on which driver is used
8gb SD card used in an SD-to-IDE adapter as main boot drive.

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It's been nearly 3 years since I've had one, but I finally have a mousepad that isn't a piece of paper taped onto a clipboard again.

I still have no idea what happened to my old one though...

my strategy is to make fun of my own lisp until maybe it finally goes away :P

Does it have to do with AMD's recent announcement of the RX 6000 series? Yes.

Does it look like I can afford one? Nah.

Also, my video editing skills are slowly increasing!

Seems like BSOD-ing with an nv4_disp.dll related error is relatively common. I'm gonna try some of those fixes and see if I can get the Fx5200 to run properly.

At least I have a dvd burner and a stack of blank CDs still.

This is also the reason why I'm glad I left the ethernet card in the system. If I absolutely have to, I'll resort to network sharing.

So y'know how I was gonna use Office XP?

Oh boy... product activation.

Not fun to do on a computer with an ethernet card that can handle at most 10Mbps.

I'm just gonna see how well things fare in Windows 2000. At least there I'd be able to transfer files more quickly over USB, and I could probably get quite a few more programs working.

Yup. Yet another 'puter.

And holy heck does this thing need a new keyboard. This blogpost took faaaar longer than you might think it would've taken.