Ideas for keeping dust from entering case

[EarthDog]

It's not just games.
Some of us work remotely from home and manage databases / networks as admins, where you have to remain signed in and ready to deal with problems on a moments notice.
When your computer is shut down, meaning you're unavailable and offline, they know it.

Totally get that! Plenty of valid reasons. I just asked what it was and you came out with 'games taking an hour to load' (among a generic 'lots of reasons')...

....so just seeing what game(s) take "an hour" to load/switch IDs at this point.

 

[Evilsizer]

fastest loading pc? dos 6.22?

 

[magellan]

@Evilsizer
Getting to the DOS prompt didn't get you much though. After the 80386DX came out I even remember some games requiring messing around with config.sys to use himem.sys to try and load device drivers (for mice, soundcards) into upper memory because some games required having most of the 640KiB address space for themselves. I believe the original DOOM was one of those titles. I don't think there were any games that could use 3D accelerators to game under DOS either.

At my work, for a joke, someone loaded a small executable via config.sys and himem.sys that would initiate a system reset -- it provided 5 minutes of laughs until the target broke out his DOS diskettes.

 

[Evilsizer]

thats funny ****! when i was younger, my dads friend. either he or one of his kids put in a line that would auto launch heretic when they booted the pc. i kind of think it was him but who knows... took me a few minutes to through all the lines in the autoexc.bat file to fix it. they thought i was some genius or some ****. my dad and his friend had been using computers long before i was born. my first pc was a 386sx or dx but 6mhz or 8mhz. dual MFM drives, double spaced! LOL, i am only 42.

 

[magellan]

@Evilsizer
Life was a LOT worse for computer users when all you had were floppy drives and even worse for people who only had tape decks (as in cassette tape decks) to load/store your OS and programs (and that was before my time).

We had an even better prank we used to play on another guy who we didn't report to but treated us like his personal servants. One of my friends could see his office from our cube and whenever he left his office I would ring the bastage's phone on our extension -- as soon as he reversed course into his office we would hang up.

 

[Kenrou]

@Evilsizer
Life was a LOT worse for computer users when all you had were floppy drives and even worse for people who only had tape decks (as in cassette tape decks) to load/store your OS and programs (and that was before my time).

Spectrum 48k user here, I feel your pain, especially when on occasion my mother recorded her music over my games because she couldn't be arsed to go to the shop and get new ones

 

[Evilsizer]

PXL2000 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[freeagent]

Man, that seems like a lot of regular maintenance, and having to power down the system frequently to clean it.

If you mean once every month or two.. then yeah sure.. clean your house man lol, it will help

I suppose I'm a bit lazy in that regard, and need my rig running 24/7/365 where cleaning filters & air dusting is only done every 6 months to a year when I do shut it down, do hardware upgrades / repairs, etc.

I run my system all the time too. Old habits die hard. If its on I know its running lol. I dunno. Filters get covered quick, so you have to clean those, and still dust the case out. Bah. I have different CPUs, and a bunch of different fans and coolers that I am always swapping in and out, my system stays clean because I am Anal. My computer is my tinkerbox. Its my benchmarking machine, my gamebox, my communication with fellow tuners.. its a little older now but its still a badass machine.

Post magically merged: Dec 21, 2023

fastest loading pc? dos 6.22?

I know it sounds pretty funny when you say it, but I think I recall it loading pretty much immediately after a few keystrokes..

 

[Evilsizer]

as a kid, i remember flipping the big red switch on the psu. watch the ram count then be at the C promt waiting for me, i dont recall how long the autoexe.bat file took to load. keep in mind i first started this pc had no sound, one birthday i was at summer camp. Came home and my computer had sound! i think it was the first gen sound blaster but by the time i got it SB had the new one out.

 

[magellan]

@Evilsizer
I believe the original Doom would use the PC speaker to generate sound effects in the absence of a soundcard. Soundcards were a major evolution for PC gaming.