A very long time between drinks

[unacceptable_risk]

Hi all, Its been a very long time between posts for me. Just taking this opportunity to pop in and say G'day.

Life has taken me away from Internet access and PC's as a hobby. I still have the old p5b+intel Q6700 rig from years ago, but for a few years now its sat at a relatives house a couple of hours drive away. It gets used for recording/dloading tv shows for me to watch on my old ghetto projector at the farm.

Until this week it was still water cooled too sporting two of the dodgy cheapo h20 systems that have served me so well over the years.

Anyway its nearing the depths of winter here and I just happen to live in one of the few parts of Australia that one might actually notice the cold. So I'm up in the city working on a rebuild of my solar power systems, with a view to bringing computers back into my life.

I do love living in the bush with my wildman beard and lack of neighbours. However I miss the social aspects of the internet. So along with more solar panels and batteries, I'm planning to fit a satt dish to the treehouse in the next month as well. All going well a PC upgrade too

Hope everyone is happy and well.

Cheers,
U_R.

[Synthohol]

hey glad to se ya still kicking about!
if solar panels were not so expensive here i would have thrown a couple on my roof and started making money off them. my break even point was over 7 years so it was not worth it.
anyhow, glad to see ya around!

[Flybye]

Glad to see ya doing well!

I'd still like to see pictures of that container home.

[Player0]

Nice seeing you again! Pics would be awesome!

My computer is like 5 years old now and still plays all the modern games so I haven't had a reason to upgrade yet. So the house and porsche get all the attention

[DCMan]

Good to see you still around U_R

[Flybye]

I was going through the garage just throwing stuff away, and across I came a few boxes of old computer stuff.

Ah look at that. Its the manual to my 1993 Packard Bell 486L system. I can't believe there was a time when I actually bought a boxed computer.

486-SX @ 25mhz upgradable to the Pentium overdrive processor
4MB of ram upgradable to 32MB
512KB of video ram upgradable to 1MB
8KB of cache memory upgradable to 512KB
170MB hard drive
CD-ROM with no speed designation meaning its a single speed
800x600 at 256 colors or 1024x768 at 16 colors.

I'm going through the manual and I feel as if I was looking at the motherboard yesterday. I remember starring at the video ram upgrade slots and I'd fall into a day dream of how cool it would have been to upgrade the video memory.

I remember the riser card with its 3 ISA slots being such a cool thing to give space to all the other stuff on the motherboard. And staring at the manual wishing I could afford the new Pentium chips.

I find it quite interesting how the manual goes in depth about what IDE and flippy cables. They actually show what each cable in the ribbon cable is for.

The motherboard was just a miniature city of jumper switches.

Manual: Make sure computer power is OFF before connecting the printer!

Oh my.