Hoyt

Oof. I hated that trend of coating stuff with rubber. After a few years it got so sticky you couldn't do anything with it except for maybe try to scrub it off. I've got a couple of controllers that were really nice until that coating got sticky. At work we've still got a few of the old Hovercams with that coating on it and everything sticks to them.

I remember when I got my SECOND Voodoo 2 and paired them in SLI. Running Quake 2 at 1024x768 was awesome. I also had the newly released Nvidia TNT as my 2D card, just cause I could. I can't believe what old Sound Blaster cards are going for on eBay. I believe I've still got an original AWE 32 with the SIMM memory on it and a couple of AWE 64s. Off the top of my head I think I've got several EARLY Nvidia PCI Express cards, a 6800 GT AGP, a GTX 580, GTX 260, GTX 295, GTX 680 (was an SLI pair but I gave one to a coworker), pair of GTX 980s, pair of GTX 1080s, and many others packed away in boxes. I couldn't even begin to remember all the PCs I've got stacked in the basement. Every now and then I'll pull one out and plug it up just to see what's on it. I've got a few nekkid boards and CPU combos that had the leaky caps that I'll rebuild every now and then when I want to tinker. I get what you are saying about building "ultimate" retro PCs. I've done that a time or two just shuffling parts around to see what I could come up with. An Athlon XP runs GL Quake right spiffy under Windows NT 4. I've got way too many hobbies taking up space. There's always been motorcycles, then firearms, then PCs, then unintentionally gaming consoles. Repairing those consoles for second hand stores actually got me most of the TVs and consoles we use now. Every now and then Gamestop would have a good promotion where I could trade in a few older consoles to get one of the current models, so I can't really complain.

Yeah I forgot about leaky caps. Fortunately I only saw those on the last couple of revisions of the original Xbox. I still keep one plugged into the bedroom TV running Xbox Media Center because my Wife likes to watch PAL movies her friends from overseas send her. Back in those days a friend that worked at Gamestop got wind that I was fixing those things and he sent everyone to my workplace to drop stuff off. Got annoying to my boss after a while. Oak have you found a good source for PS2 fat laser lenses? It seems they have gone up a good bit since I last ordered some.

Yeah that's where I originally got into this sort of thing. The Commodore Vic 20, Atari VCS, then 400, then 800 XL. I moved to Raleigh and worked as an electronics tech for several years and was out of that sort of stuff until the 386/486 days, then got into PCs again but never touched a console again until a customer asked me to work on her Son's original Xbox back when they were new. I do still have tons of PC parts laying around, but did a clean out a while ago. I think I still have a 1GHz or so Athlon Windows NT 4.0 workstation, a few XP machines from the Pentium 4 and Athlon XP/64 days. The very first Intel Core i7 965 is still a multimedia machine sitting behind a TV. I've still got boxes of old video cards. Even a pair of Voodoo 2s and a couple of Voodoo 3s and now that I think of it a Voodoo 5. Oh I just remembered I still have a GTX 295 in the original box (look that sucker up). It had gotten such a pain to try to sell the stuff on eBay that I just packed it up and decided to worry about it another day. I ran Nvidia SLI rigs back when they were the kings of 3D acceleration so I've still got some matched pairs laying around just gathering dust. I'd hate to just throw it all out because it might be of interest to someone into vintage gaming but nobody around here really works with that stuff. I guess maybe one day I'll bite the bullet and set up a bank account for PayPal taxes and list the stuff on eBay with the disclaimer that folks shouldn't expect super fast shipping. Our UPS drop off point is a hardware store that just does that service as a side gig when they can get around to it.

Howdy all, About fifteen to twenty years ago I used to repair some game consoles for second hand shops in my area (Southern Virginia and Northern North Carolina). Things like the original Xbox and Xbox 360, Playstation 2s and 3s, the occasional Gamecube and Wii, and even some Playstation Portables. At the time my Son was young and I would modify the Xboxes and PS2s to run the games off of their internal hard drives (the PS2s were the fat models with the network adapters which is where the hard drive plugged in) so he didn't have to handle the discs. Also the laser lenses didn't last long at all so it bypassed that problem as well. Sometimes the shops would trade me parts and equipment for my services to keep the bookkeeping simpler which was pretty cool. As a result I have cabinets full of those old consoles just taking up space. I knew things were getting out of hand when I found gun parts I had forgotten about mixed in with them, so I'm starting to sort through them to get them ready to sell to a second hand shop up the road about an hour or so. They are in various states of functionality so it will take me a bit to sort things out. The PS2s are very intricate but also easy to get going again because I had bought a few spare laser lenses when they were super cheap. The original Xboxes are a little more difficult because they used many different DVD drives and nobody really seems to have new lasers for them. One thing I noticed last night while replacing the laser and CR2032 battery in a PS2 was that my eyes were a good bit younger back then. It's hard to believe I used to crank those repairs out like clockwork. Anyhow I thought I'd post this topic just to see if anyone here had gotten into that sort of thing. It really can eat up a lot of space in a hurry.

Considering current GPU prices that may have been intentional.

Hey Squelch I have heard of NTLite but haven't ever remembered to give it a try. After you customize your install do you know if it will usually Sysprep properly?

Yeah I forgot to mention we use Barracuda for off site backups and don't have any real complaints. Restores are quick an easy but the only time we ever use it (because of the ease of shadow copies) is when we replace a file server. We tell our users that we don't back up any media files, such as pictures, audio, and videos, so when we swap out file servers we give them ample warning and just restore the content on the new server. I migrate the the empty base directories with Robocopy and export those shares from the registry and import them to the new server. When Barracuda restores the data minus the happy go lucky stuff we wind up several hundred gigs lighter on the new server. I know it's a bit off topic but I figure that illustrates the simplicity found in most of the rural school systems around here.

This right here. I've heard for years how bad RAID is and anyone that uses it is an idiot. For some strange reason I have never encountered any of the world ending scenarios that these smart folks say will befall me. If I get pressured to do something different in the future, I will, but it ain't happened yet.

Koldov you just brought something to mind. I don't really want to be the only guy who knows how things work around here, because if I was, my workload would grow tenfold. Our district is split into four quadrants with one tech in each one looking after between five and seven schools each. Being the oldest and most experienced of the four I always tell them that there is nothing I know (privileged info aside) that I do not want them to know. Unfortunately it seems these days that curiosity may have died with the cat. I get very few questions until something breaks and I get told by the Boss to look into it. Anyhow I have enjoyed this thread. I don't have any exposure to most of the topics being discussed so I do appreciate the info.

Interesting comments and analysis here. I go back to the original Pong (not straining my noodle to find the date) and did play some of the coin op games that country stores had in the back for the kids to pound on. They were cool at the time (I seem to recall Space Invaders, then Galaga I think, Defender and such) but as PCs got more advanced in the early nineties games you could play in the home surpassed them pretty easily. Apogee seemed to have a knack for bringing arcade games home and improving on them. Stuff like Raptor, Duke Nukem, and Jazz Jackrabbit. I've downloaded a few of the classics when they were on sale on Xbox Live or PSN which seems to be a good home for them. I played them a little bit but they just didn't grab me like they did as a kid in the seventies. I guess we just got spoiled a bit. That being said some older PC games are still played in my household from the nineties, so maybe there is a sort of cut off point of interaction that can hold our attention better. Games like the original Quake and Unreal Tournament are still played by my Son and I when our work schedules allow. I don't know of any arcades around here but my Son and his friends went to one last week in Greensboro NC that had classic Japanese arcade games from the eighties. I thought that was sort of interesting. The attraction of them being from Japan might be what keeps that place open. I might go down there with him next time to check it out.

It's interesting for me to see the city folks talk about staffing qualifications. As some have said the knowledge required for a lot of this stuff being discussed is just not available in certain areas regardless of salary available. Where I work I.T. staff start out at about $35,000 a year, which I guess would be about 26,000 pounds and it's a 12 month position. The type of knowledge discussed in this thread certainly will not be available for that figure. The basic RAID 5 and lately RAID 6 configs have not lost me any data in the twelve plus years I have been here using the basic Windows Server OS. I have also recovered a lot of "lost" user data using volume shadow copies without having to resort to our backups. For what I am getting paid I am happy with this arrangement. I imagine that if I can pull it off other low level techs could as well without leaving a confusing mess for someone that has to follow along behind them.

This is a pretty good site and it works well for clean installs. I was wondering though is there a way to have these settings apply when an image boots up from Sysprep?

All of our school buildings have intercom systems throughout. They just announce a lockdown over the intercom. I didn't know things had gotten so complicated. Any time students are taken outside the adult in charge carries a radio so they can be contacted if need be.

As I walk down the hallways after school and see through the door windows that the teacher's projectors are on and their email is displayed on the board, I make sure the door is locked... 😁

Petben we are somewhat jurrasic in how we handle things where I work. Sometimes when we get machines that do not like automated updates I will copy the ISO file of the version of Windows I want to update to onto the hard drive, mount it, then run setup telling it to keep all settings and data. Once I answer that basic set of questions the rest is automated. I realize this invokes more manual labor but I have had to fall back on it from time to time. Got some alerts from Sophos this week and sure enough a couple of machines failed the round of automatic updates way back when they required Windows 10 to be at version 22H2. I copied the 22H2 ISO file to the local hard drive and ran it and all went well. Maybe try to update one that way. If it freaks out and you feel masochistic take a machine at 22H2, copy the 23H2 ISO file to it and run it to see if it freaks out then. If that works just for grins next do the same thing with the 24H2 ISO file.

Petben if the 24H2 update was applied to existing Windows installations I have on occasion seen it take a long time on the first boot. I must admit whenever Microsoft comes up with a major update I just create a new image from scratch for our most popular machines using installation media at the current version. If you keep having this problem maybe carve a machine out of the herd and try that.

I remember sorting through the sales on one of the consoles (either PS5 or Xbox Series X) and saw a game about managing a restaurant. When I looked deeper into it I found that the food was actually made from ground up customers. The world looks at me like I'm lost and out of touch, but after finding that game it doesn't bother me as much.

For some reason I keep grinding away on Outriders on PC. Got five different characters I think. Over the years I dive in and out of Destiny 2 (console and PC). Played Counter Strike off and on since 1999.

Someday I wouldn't mind looking into MDT (I think I used to use it back in the Windows XP days) but we don't have DHCP on our network, and once I set up a Clonezilla server to store my images on that has worked well for the past few years.

I guess the reason we use Clonezilla with pre-configured images is we can go from power on to startup in about five minutes. I'm sure there are many ways to accomplish the same thing, but when we are dealing with pallet loads of PCs this seems to work OK for us. Keep in mind we are a rural school district that cannot attract properly trained and experienced staff. We do tinker when we have time, but we only have four technicians and seven office staff for about two dozen schools, so those times are rare.

If these laptops are on your internal network maybe you could use EMCO Remote Installer to push your activation key out using a batch file. Maybe something like this: cscript.exe "%Systemroot%\system32\slmgr.vbs" -ipk XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX cscript.exe "%Systemroot%\system32\slmgr.vbs" /ato