Advice on a new PC motherboard 'bundle' Featured

Mine did: 28 with POTS, which fits with the graph for 1km from the cabinet; now seeing 48.

Not necessarily

Vuescan should work on all platforms. Its a free download. Try it on windows first, if it works there it will work on Linux.

It seems that they are but typically only on FTTC SoGEA connections.

Yup Gfast goes quicker, although I have not seen more than about 160Mbps so far.

This setup has a pair of normal lines from the cab about 100m away. One was upgraded to GFast, but the other is ali cable, and so is not up to it!

Update. Its not free if you want all features, including slide scanning :(

If I set up a new machine, I would want to do a clean install and then gradually move things over on to it. I have "apps"[1] and data scattered around on 5 HDDs & SSDs - some of which I haven't used in more than a decade, so a lot of housekeeping really ought to be done. It's that housekeeping which I regard as a hassle.

Mention of dotty fonts brought back memories of my first (dot matrix) printer. Cost me a fortune and didn't even do proper descenders (only 7 pin).

The Firewire interface shows up as a PCIe device, so if Virtualbox on Mac will let you do PCIe passthrough then it might.

Another option is just to buy an old Intel Mac Mini with onboard Firewire and then install Windows on it. I think they may have only supported Win7 natively but it may be possible to upgrade it through 10 to 11.

The last Mini with native FW was the Late 2012 and people have got W11 working on 2011s/2012s. They start at about £40-50 on ebay.

Theo

I agree with you, for those tasks.

I bought an N100 machine, and for a bit of light word processing and browsing, it's not really slower than my current desktop (i7). The N100 uses far less electricity.

Modem firmware can make a big difference too. eg when I had a BT Homehub 5a running OpenWRT I could load different firmware for the VDSL modem part of the chip and it would change from 55 to 72 Mbps depending on the firmware version.

When using a ISP Broadcom-based router (where there's no open source OS with DSL support so I'm using the ISP's OS) I get 76, so obviously there's been some tweaking - it seems like the preferred firmware varies depending on whether you're on a Huawei or ECI cabinet.

So it's possible a router swap can also affect your line speed, if you changed that at the same time as switching to SOGEA.

Theo

It's £100 if you want slide scanning. But it could be a price worth paying compared with buying more hardware.

Although you can buy Firewire PCIe cards for a tenner on ebay, so a modern machine with PCIe slots may well be able to run the Windows software (assuming it still works under W10/11).

Theo

Be grateful that you never had to develop an interface for daisy wheel printers - timing the hammer fire and wheel rotation was a nightmare. ESD wasn't completely understood and a discharge during printing often resulted in showers of "petals" - but the print quality was great. Swing the lamp!

I have a machine that had one of those bodges. It stopped working when MS did an update. I wouldn't count on them working indefinitely.

A significant problem with Linux, is video card support. It's been undermined by the delivery of binary blobs. Nouveau could have been the answer... if we could get hardware specs.

I looked at this, to address the "how much help will I give to the 400,000,000 people throwing away computers". And the mish-mash of unnecessary standards changes, makes the scavenging of machines labour intensive.

Here's how it goes. Kernel 5.15 *works* for old hardware. But it is going out of support soon, and if I sell some victim needing rescue on that, they'll be back in a year, two years, with a "I just installed this new thing, and my machine won't...". Then what do I do for an answer ?

The expectation of the people, is we will keep this perfectly adequate material running forever. And sadly, that's not how the Linux ecosystem sees it (Wayland, UEFI, GOP video cards, Secure Boot...). That's no way to rescue hardware. PCi Express cards, the user could be holding one in their hand, the slot in the machines will be PCI Express, but the cards can't be moved just anywhere. And the industry had a hand in ensuring they broke that. It's what you expect of scumbags.

As a "simulation" of a rescue, I took a 7900GT PCI Express card from my dead motherboard, put it in another box and tried to "rescue" the other box. Linux booted, the screen froze with some graphics on it. The card is out of support from a DKMS perspective (no NVidia driver). and it's a legacy VBIOS card. If I buy a 2025 motheboard, I can't even reuse that card. Windows 10, running on that simulation setup, ran the video card OK... but it's on a hairs edge of being out of support.

Just the collecting of information and handling of details, will slow down the rates for the rescue operation. It would never have been possible to rescue 400,000,000 machines -- it would require too much organization to do it properly. But even piece-meal rescue, it's just not going to work.

Google makes ChromeOS, a follow-on for Neverware CloudReady. I installed CloudReady on one desktop - it worked. I tried on a second NVidia machine, it didn't work. Batting average 0.5 . Well, the Google version of this

Paul

The Refurbisher OS supplied by commercial refurbishers, is under Microsoft terms. They're not particularly allowed to "hack" an OS in with Rufus. The hardware for Windows 11 should be compliant enough, that an Upgrade Install would work on it.

TPM support is tricky. The BIOS only supports fixed versions of it. My machine across the way, the BIOS can only do attestation with a TPM 1.4. If I plugged in a TPM 2.0, it would not Secure Boot. It is apparently possible for a motherboard with a TPM 2.0, to run a TPM 1.4 (assuming you could actually find a module, used). You can also "flash back" a TPM 2.0 chip, to be compatible with TPM 1.4.

My Dell Optiplex 780 (a "simulation platform for rescue"), it supports a TPM 1.4, there is a TPM module in it, but the BIOS does not have attestation. This means it would not have Secure Booted with the TPM 1.4 standard. All you can do, is support BitLocker with it (whatever primitives Bitlocker might have used).

The TPM issue is *not* as simple as it looks. The Refurbisher is going to be shipping machines of a more recent vintage, with a full BIOS support for TPM 2.0. Otherwise, there would be rough edges for the customer to cut themselves on.

The suppliers of the motherboard across the way, they didn't even offer a TPM 2.0 for sale. At first, we thought they were just laggards. But those people already knew that the BIOS would not know what to do with a TPM 2.0 module, and the support for TPM is unlikely to be available in source code form, to the motherboard manufacturer. The BIOS would be well out of support, and even if they wanted to do it, the BIOS company (Award, AMI, Phoenix, Insyde) would have to help them do it (for a price).

Paul

The Windows was supposed to remove the *network* driver for Firewire. A mode of operation that is pretty obscure (it could work point-to-point or the hardware could work with a Firewire router box). The other modes would still be there. As a joke, I was looking in DriverStore, and there is a 68881.sys in there, which is one of the old Firewire drivers. It's getting hard, on the Internet, to even discover what the names of the old Firewire drivers were. The

If you are using virtualization, there has to be a passthru or an emulation to the host side.

If Windows will run straight on the hardware (and the Mac is using UEFI), it just might work with one of the remaining Windows drivers. If we happened to discover what driver makes a scanner work.

Generally, for virtualization, I remain somewhat hopeful that a minimal USB capability might exist, but other standards I generally expect there won't be a mechanism for it.

Running a slide scanner, it's worth keeping an old computer around to run it. The scanner in front of me, it's been driven by an old computer (and async SCSI), and that's all the old computer is there for. Is to run that scanner. I considered moving it to some other computer, but it would be nothing but a continuing hassle to keep running. A computer with a frozen OS, is perfect for the job.

Paul

The thing is, I don't think VMs or rendering video are general usage.

The usecase for VMs massively decreased with Docker, and the main constraint was RAM not CPU. I used to use them all the time, but not so much in the last 10 years. Now we have WSL2, pretty much never.

I'm not sure why people would render video. I last bought a DVD 15-20 years ago. If I were interested, I suspect I would be looking at offloading that onto a purpose designed machine with an appropriate video card.

If I was transcoding, it would probably be on a lot of the time and I would be concerned about electricity cost. Not something I would use a general purpose PC for.

So it feels like requirements for powerful hardware are "you ain't going to need it" for most people. It's like advising a fat middle-aged cyclist to buy a £5000 carbon Bike, or an amateur golfer to buy professional clubs.

The thing is, I'm sitting using an Orange Pi5, which is a 2-watt toy. The problem isn't that it feels slow, it doesn't. The problem is that the OS is buggy, not fully implemented.

I think Apple got this right, switching to an Arm chip for the Mac Mini. That is what the common man wants. So we should be careful when we offer advice on which PC to buy.

My first printer was a Smith Corona daisywheel (I've still got it somewhere!). For reasons long forgotten I decided that I didn't want the font that usually came with it, so I bought "Tempo". I really liked it, and, as you note, the print quality of a daisywheel was superb.

Huh? WSL2 VMs sit on top of Hyper-V ...

Huh. Be grateful you never had to develop on an Elliott 803B. 8k of store, the only I/O device being a slowish 5-hole paper tape reader/punch, the only way of developing source tapes (using Elliott Autocode, which itself was pretty limited), being a teletype which occasionally mispunched the typed character onto the tape.

My first exposure to a real computer, however, so it was still fascinating.