Old 'puters, are a little ornery. You get what you get, and then scrounge for parts to upgrade. With luck it all works out in the end, or you die trying. Serial and parallel ports are a major constraint, then adding in USB will get interesting. Most of my old desktops came with almost no memory. In fact I've used these old biddies with as low as 500k of RAM, which will run Puppy Linux and an old browser, from a CD boot. You will need to see if you can combine new and old worlds of PC components. Usually I cannot even do a Linux boot from a USB drive. Let me check my stash of old PC carcasses.. Don On Fri, 13 Oct 2023 at 09:30, Karen Lewellen <klewellen@shellworld.net> wrote:
Good morning sir. Don of the possible rescue! Let me be forthright. I have not bought a computer off the shelf since my very first one. Instead my machines have been built from scratch, or provided with alterations made to them.
What that means is that my dictionary may not match yours perfectly, but I will try...when I doubt ask. First at least a Pentium 3, I can be flexible on processor speed as I have utilities working around some of the DOS barriers. As much memory as possible, my previous machine had almost 800 meg of ram, again managers made it work, even had onboard graphics memory although that is less important. A dvdr or combination cd and dvdr would be appreciated, or at least room for both. a 3.5 floppy is a must. serial, USB, and parallel ports are also a must. Slots, PCI are a must, if there is a single ISO slot it would be helpful, some of the alternative synthesizers are full size boards, but that again is not mandatory. In case I messed up that term, think soundblaster pro live. I have a dream-audio 2496 soundcard I still intend finding. I have d-link <spelling> ethernet cards, those sorts of things. Honestly? what this entire situation has taught me is that I need both a spare and a laptop smiles. Still, does that help? I have a combination of DOS programs and adaptive hardware, including sound Ethernet cards and so forth. Unless your items firmly have DOS drivers that is less of a concern. As for hard drive size, well I always have more than one drive, so room for more than one. 20 gig or higher at least. thanks for even offering! Karen
On Fri, 13 Oct 2023, Don Tai wrote:
What type of old computer do you seek? Please be very specific, as I have a couple. Circa year, specs, etc
On Fri, 13 Oct 2023 at 02:12, Karen Lewellen via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
Hi everyone, will ask the question simply, as it is not one I have needed to ask for a good decade. Need a resource for older computer hardware, freecycle was terrific for this sort of thing, as was the talent who would build mine. Unfortunately a visit by someone from renew computer technology Ontario, www.rcto.org damaged my main computer, at least the motherboard, possibly the hard drive. I have a bandaged machine, does not boot to the c drive, using a floppy, with the second drive from my main placed in this unit. Now some of my critical synthesizer files are being damaged as well. screen reader utilities..so far at least. While I do have talent, quality talent to help me with the construction, finding say a p3 or p4 may be the challenge. Any ideas? Cheers, Karen
--- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk