My Old Pc Is A Very Expensive Paperweight ive had it since the 80s

[Nintendo 0]

ive had it since the dawn of Personal Computers, since the Unix daysofc its had alot of upgrades since then, costing me £5000+it is now a VERY powerful PC running windows vista, XP and linux (tripple boot)i was on vista, and a popup suddenly appeared saying you have been haxxedthen another one popped up saying all my details, credit card numbers ectthen another one, saying "buy a new PC, i will help you"then the PC shut off, and now will not turn back on, i have no idea who the hacker was, and am worried about the fact that he has all of my detailsive tried replacing the HDD, its my absolute fav PC and ive had it for 20+ yearsat the time of this i was searching google for a Nintendo wii for my son

Edited May 12, 2007 by Nintendo (see edit history)

[SilverFox1405241541 0]

Someone did a minor Trojan.Alert the following:Your Bank;Transuinon;Equifax;the other credit thinggy;and your credit card companies.As for fixing it...I think you got it FINALLY killed.And its nice to meet Danmidas' Father

[.:Brian:. 0]

Well you should give more information,What happens when you try to power it on? Does it do anything? Or does it make noise, and just not boot up properly?

[xerxes1405241546 0]

Excuse my curiosity, but how come you have a computer that's 20 years old and you've made 5k-worth upgrades on it (now it being a speed demon), and it's still your favourite old PC? Now don't get me wrong, but is there any single piece of hardware in that machine that is 20 years old (or even 10)? Even computer case standards changed over time and new upgrades would not fit with the old ones...As for your problems, they may come again if you'll not protect your system. Install a good firewall and use a secure browser (ZoneAlarm and Firefox may serve you well). A good antivirus software. Don't rely on any security software embedded into Vista.

Edited May 12, 2007 by xerxes (see edit history)

[SilverFox1405241541 0]

I doubt this whole story.Nintendo is Danmidas from Slavehack.Danmidas is Dark_Shadow and XPkiller on Xisto.How do I know Nintendo is Danmidas? B/c that was one of his multis on SH (he tried to say it was a rl friend if it was he wouldn't be getting his son a wii as well).So I don't believe this at all. If your not dan then sorry.

[Nintendo 0]

erm, all i can think of saying to that is what the...****whats Slavehack? it sounds dodgy, also, who are you, i havent seen you before, but you seem determined to get memy real name is Andy Standringin 25, and am an absolute follower in Nintendoand am currently working in System administration

Edited May 13, 2007 by Nintendo (see edit history)

[Quatrux 4]

Excuse my curiosity, but how come you have a computer that's 20 years old and you've made 5k-worth upgrades on it (now it being a speed demon), and it's still your favourite old PC? Now don't get me wrong, but is there any single piece of hardware in that machine that is 20 years old (or even 10)? Even computer case standards changed over time and new upgrades would not fit with the old ones...

I agree with you, this sounds quite stupid, the only thing I can think of that could be 20 years old in his upgraded computer is the floppy disk drive, which is a really useless thing nowadays, I don't think anything else can be that old, due to if it runs Vista, it has to have a new CPU, lots of RAM, a better graphics card than 20 years before and all that needs a new motherboard to work, so.. it is a new computer with a 20 years old floppy disk drive if it exists, but anyway who cares..

I have an old computer, which is expanded, but it certainly can't run Vista, very good suited for Dos Games

[unimatrix 0]

I have 20 year old IBM XT clone that works as paperweight. Actually it still boots with 640k of ram and Microsoft Works 1.0 (the one that existed before the invention of the mouse). Oh and Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0 in all it's EGA graphics goodness. Heck I think it even has some of the classic Microprose games too. Bring this up to today, I can't run to the store and pick up an EIDE Harddrive anymore. Found that out replacing one this weekend. They only had 1 in the entire store on the shelf. (granted best buy, but only option in these parts). Now I have met one computer science student who took an old Apple IIE and installed the guts of an old G4 tower and has it running OSX 10 for kicks, but that was with some heavy case modding and I think he had to create his own interface for the keyboard....or drivers or something...still...

[Grafitti 0]

why would you spend 5g on upgrading computer parts, when you can spend less than half on a new equivalent system? Every single piece of equipment in there has got to be changed from the original, including power supply and case. The floppy could theoretically be that old... though it would have to be the 3.5 inch model, not the 5 incher, which seems to have been the rage those 20 years ago. Even a regular floppy would be broken or nearly so, simply because of wear and tear on mechanical parts. If you were truly on Vista, i imagine it was a pirated copy and you used an infected bios patch.

[Nintendo 0]

actualy, she looks very much like she did back theni managed to get her working again, turns out that the bios got nackeredthe terminal is sat in my living room, now running windows vista, she has 5 HDD's, 1 of which is the origanal, and the earliest dated file on it is a .txt from1996I open it every week to make sure it is still in working order, and believe it or not, i still have the origanal motherboard (there are special parts that you can get which fit in it)

[ginginca 0]

why would you spend 5g on upgrading computer parts, when you can spend less than half on a new equivalent system? Every single piece of equipment in there has got to be changed from the original, including power supply and case. The floppy could theoretically be that old... though it would have to be the 3.5 inch model, not the 5 incher, which seems to have been the rage those 20 years ago. Even a regular floppy would be broken or nearly so, simply because of wear and tear on mechanical parts. If you were truly on Vista, i imagine it was a pirated copy and you used an infected bios patch.

I saw (last year) on the wall of a computer store a photocopy of an advertisement for a state of the art system. It was a top brand name ... likely IBM. I think I should call him and get a copy of it if he still has it. It belongs in the "remember when" days.

 

I'll paraphrase ... but it was something along the following specs (though I might be missing a few):

 

The headline read something like: Lightning Speed from the lasted in the state of the art computers

 

Full Tower Case in IBM Beige

Motherboard & CPU - this is an XT class machine (before 286's)

Motherboard cache? perhaps it was 64K or 128K (if any)

Dual Floppy drives 3.5 and 5.25

20 Meg hard drive

512 K Ram

9600 Baud USR Modem

Sound Blaster Sound Card and 2 Speakers

Video card (likely had no on-board memory)

8-bit networking card (coax)

12" Monochrome Monitor

Keyboard

MS DOS (or PC DOS)

Word Perfect

Lotus 1 2 3

Dot matrix printer

 

Sale price: $8,000.

 

 

Think of the era for those of you who can remember ... this is before Windows 3.1. A mouse connected to a MAC, an Atari ST, etc.

 

Networking was only used in offices. What was that called ... "Arc" something? The one on this machine might have been token ring. Oh it's going back a while.

 

Look at these specs and consider yourself lucky next time you are frustrated with your PC.

 

 

But today ... even my four year old computer collects dust. I keep it only for parts.

 

My most expensive was a $5,000 laptop about 10 years ago. I still have it because it runs windows 98.

[Grafitti 0]

Exactly... so I don't think there's any way it could still be around today and be a supercomputer.