Update on my lockdown diversion: this morning it would not boot, freezing mid-post, unresponsive to 3-finger salute. Thought I might have done something terrible by impatiently hot-plugging a ps/2 mouse yesterday. (the k9mm-v is usb-finicky).
I decided to try clearing the cmos. Shifting the sound card and some sata cables out of the way, I had just enough room to grasp the jumper (MrsD.'s cosmetic tweezers not up to the job). After it came back to life, I ran updates on Fedora 31, installed xfce desktop to it and turned my ministrations to xp, which was mysteriously ignored by the FC31 grub two -- it's now a subitem in the Windows 7 boot menu, listed as "fucking old windows" or words to that effect. The OS that dares not speak its name.
Where Win7 was running quite snappily yesterday immediately after the install, I found it sluggish, and messed around with the memory cache settings, which seems to have helped. No doubt Win7 wants a lot more ram than xp, but the mb is maxed out at 2G :-( .
I did a brief trial run of Dead Island Riptide on it. It ran about as well as under xp on this old rig, which is to say not great, but playable. I need better headphones though.
Life, and old laptops, are like that sometimes
Still got a handful of them left, too.
Oh well that's better then. Always thought it was odd that the Pi3 added gigabit ethernet onto an already crowded bus.
Kind of stupidly amazing how much processing they've crammed into these ARM SoCs. I mean I'm considering replacing a quad core Xeon tower with something a bit bigger than a credit card >.<
I'll have a look at that. Still kinda want to resurrect the proper server, but if it's totally dead I'll remove the motherboard etc. and put a Pi4 in an IBM tower case :'-D
It all comes back to me now
41886.1
A proper MAN'S solution. None of this snowflake, nouvelle cuisine, coronavirus-catching, miniature nonsense.
I've about chalked up the Win7 experiment as a fail, due to 1) jim# likely won't pass activattion in 30-days -- though there's a hack to extend that a couple of times, and 2) the hardware's too sucky for it anyway, certainly for Steam games. Which is, after all, why I built a new one.
So I went back into xp and installed my store-bought dvd of Ghost Recon AW2 and fired that up. It plays pretty well at 1920x1080/medium settings, but could be improved with further tweaks. Game play, graphics etc. hold up pretty well for a 2007 release, plus there's a vast library of mods, including some awesome user-made missions, guns and whatnot. I've got most of it squirrelled away on disk(s), somewhere.
I think this is my best bet for gaming on the old PC.
Yeah it's nuts. If I didn't game I could probably get by with one of these things as my main PC these days.
I gave up on fiddling around; took my spare HP Microserver N54L (I have two - don't ask), bunged in two 12TB drives (shucked from WD Elements), a 2TB WD Black that I hadn't been using for ages, added unRAID and Bob's your awkward relative. Does everything fine, on the lookout for the 12TB WD Elements to drop in price again.