The dangers of upgrading a PC

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#342
I was good at assembly (mostly IBM 360), my first compSci course, my professor was one of the authors of Algol-W, so i learned that (Pascal, a whimpy subset, was a bit frustrating), i learned a swath of languages, high level and assembly, in the end the most significant language was a very obscure language Trapeze, essentially object oriented spreedsheet-like elements database capable of creating some quite complex, and cosmetically pretty financial programs.

dave
 
#345
kodabmx said:
I'm always impressed by people who can code -- especially ASM.
I used to be good at batch files... Now I'm happy if I can make a simple shell script work.
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In 1980 I started on a Industrial electronics course.
We were given a single board Z80 computer to program.
It had a keypad and some 7 seg LED displays.
It wasn't even assembler but you had to input hex instruction codes !
I still remember some of the hex codes like 3E to load accumualtor.
21 to load HL register pair. I think C9 was return and CD was call.

In later years I wrote a PCBCAD program in 8086 assembler for DOS.
It was 300,000 lines of code.
Crashes were good in those days often over writing screen memory with random data !
 
#349
In case Y'all didn't know, you can use MS visual studio "Community" version for free. You just need the user ID that you activated a PC with. C# is perhaps the best base for today, and I used the C++ command line compiler to revive a couple old C programs I wrote back in the 16-bit days. The old *.exe and *.com files will not run, on 64-bit windows.
Ed, we are interested in your software. The only audio I programmed was a ping sound, and I ran into a nasty issue with delays caused by "enhancement" playback. You need to turn it off.
 
#354
You are correct, of course. On the other hand there is the concern that lower volume subforums might get overlooked, including the valued threads within. There is a future plan to virtually arrange subforums using a tagging system (without disturbing the current arrangement).

In the mean time it's not unreasonable to mention and link your DIY threads in other places when the topic arises.
 
#355
kodabmx said:
There is a push toward "memory safe" languages now apparently...
https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/11/nsa_urges_orgs_to_use/
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For old school C programmers like me, I heartily recommend valgrind. It watches as your program runs and keeps track of memory allocations. It helps find leaks. It also will catch almost all incorrect stack and memory allocations. Free software incredibly. Definitely slows down execution, but still usable. I'm waiting for someone to write something just as good for concurrency validation. Multi-threaded programming is a bear.
 
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#357
Tubelab_com said:
..swapping parts of machines slowly over time including the motherboard. I have had to call MS a couple times when swapping the MB and CPU at the same time.
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Another guy's opinion (he studies Windows Licensing for a living):
"...a tiny sliver of PCs are built by hobbyists or small system builders. If someone in one of those groups tries to reuse a product key inappropriately (by activating multiple PCs using the same product key in a matter of days), the activation servers will object strenuously. But if you reuse a product key months after the first use, it's likely that Microsoft's activation servers will wave you right through."
https://www.zdnet.com/article/is-your-windows-license-legal-should-you-even-care/

But I too have heard that CPU+mobo means a call.
 
#358
PRR said:
"...a tiny sliver of PCs are built by hobbyists or small system builders.
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Over here there were many small independent computer parts, accessories and custom system retailers, and even into the past decade when online sales reduced their market, their partners would do a tour cycle every 2-4 weeks. Dozens of them would visit country towns with trailers full of goods filling halls over 1000 square feet serving thousands of customers.
 
#359
Back in post #299 I posted a list of all the Windows devices associated with my Microsoft account. Some of them are nothing more than a motherboard in a box with a CPU and memory waiting for an application. #3 from the bottom is an Intel MB about 10 years old with a Core i3-3225 chip and 10 GB of memory in it. It was in a wood box with a display a couple of Laptop hard drives, a tray full of 18650 Lithium Ion cells, and some music making software and hardware, still running W7. It wound up on the sidelines when its CPU could not keep up with some of the latest software. A newer Core i7-7700T (low power) MB and chip took its place with a new W10 license.

While searching Ebay for something else, I found some used, but guaranteed Core i7-3770S chips for $35, so I got one and popped it into the old MB. I reinstalled a fresh copy of W10 expecting some grief, but it connected to the "digital license" associated with the old MB, but Windows assigned a new unique machine name (unexpected) and a new hardware ID (expected). The overall Passmark score rose from 1118 (12% VS world) to 1582 (17% VS world) which is not big, but the CPU score went from 2391 (10%) to 5704 (28%) which is good enough to make the board useful for making music again.

Most of my "new" W10 licenses are fresh downloads from MS authorized with old W7 keys. If the W7 keys were "OEM system builder" or from a boxed copy of W7 they will usually work fine to authorize W10 on just about anything. Keys from a machine once covered by a blanket license or service agreement will usually not work. Neither will any Vista keys. We did find a bunch of rack mount PC's in some NASA scrap, and the W7 keys on the COA worked just fine.
 
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