IT... Computing....

[Reese Riverson]

That's correct, and when I force it off and back on again, things behave like nothing ever happened, until it just happens again at any given time. Be it in an hour, a few hours, or a week or so.



I just realized too, the one thing I forgot to copy off that machine... my fonts.

Also, I can't believe I'm saying this, but I find myself missing Windows 10 already...

[Hunchman801]

I miss Windows XP.

[dr_st]

I miss Windows XP.

Why miss it? I still have Windows XP on 3 laptops in my house, and a couple of systems at my parents' place. All of them are used very infrequently, and mostly just to test some old Windows games.

[Hunchman801]

Are they connected to the internet though?

[dr_st]

Are they connected to the internet though?

Well. Most of them are laptops that most of the time are not connected to anything, not even power.
Those that are connected to power are off 95% (in some cases 99%) of the time.
When they are on - they automatically connect to my LAN, so yes, they have internet access from behind the router.
They are also mostly patched to SP3 and beyond.
I feel there are no genuine security issues in this setup. It is not like these computers are running servers.

However...
It seems that 50%+ of the modern web is other not functioning well on old XP-compatible browsers, or is simply too heavy to run at adequate speed on these old systems. The newest of them is a Core 2 Duo 2GHz laptop. The rest are single-core Pentium M / Pentium 4 PCs.

[Hunchman801]

Yeah, that's probably the main issue here. We need more PluMGMKs in the world to develop modern browsers for Windows XP.

[PluМGΜK]

We need more PluMGMKs

You buzzed?

[Reese Riverson]

Yeah, that's probably the main issue here. We need more PluMGMKs in the world to develop modern browsers for Windows XP.

I'm still waiting for him to give me a fully working browser for Windows 3.1.

[PluMGMK]

I don't do browsers. Way more trouble than they're worth, with an attack surface like activated charcoal...

[dr_st]

True. In Web 1.0 a browser was a simple application - essentially an HTML parser and renderer.
Now it's a freaking OS within a sandbox with a bunch of internal clients and servers and multimedia engine and what not. It's sandboxes all the way down, man!

[Reese Riverson]

I'll admit, I do miss the simplicity of the older internet we had in the 90's / 2000's.

In other news, I got my hands on a Dell R740XD, that I migrated to from a Dell R730. I now have full NVMe support in the front bay. All 24 of them for 2.5" U.2 drives. Which I've only got a few 960GB Intel Optane 905P drives in there and a couple of 3.2TB Kioxia drives in there as well. Then I have Sparkle Intel Arc A310 ECO and an old EVGA NVIDIA GTX Titan X (Maxwell) card installed. I put in a pair of Intel Xeon Gold 6244 Processors and the 256GB of RAM I had in the previous system, which was originally my VM box.

I plan to swap the Titan X for either a 2070 Super or a 3070, and I need to get my 25Gbit fiber adapters installed later so I can get it off 10Gbit networking and onto 25Gbit with the main network switch.

But for now it's up and running as-is!

[Hunchman801]

If it weren't for the storm-related power outages, you would have the perfect setup to host RPC.

[Reese Riverson]

If it weren't for the storm-related power outages, you would have the perfect setup to host RPC.

Hahaha, well, given I'll be getting fiber soon, the outages should become more minimalized, I'd hope.


But the server's certainly more than capable of running the entire site, and with the Optane drives a database structure would be insanely smooth. The endurance alone was one of the main reasons for me choosing them.

I'd like to get some Optane memory modules, which basically puts SSDs into the RAM slots.

[Hunchman801]

RAM is not the limiting factor in our architecture, but this will certainly come in handy for your use cases!

[Reese Riverson]

RAM is not the limiting factor in our architecture, but this will certainly come in handy for your use cases!

Well, actually with the Intel Optane Dimms, they're persistent memory.

There's some information on how those operate.

Basically I can install 12 of these sticks into the RAM slots in my server, which can treat them as an SSD of 1.5TB worth of capacity and I can say toss a Steam library on there, or use it for game servers or database purposes. There's just a lot of potential. It's a shame they're no longer being made. It's some really cool stuff with what it can do overall.