John 20
Reinstalling Windows gets easier every time! Just pop in the disc, hit enter a bunch of times, install a few drivers, and download all the silly open source stuff we use these days! Yay! ^_^
I still dread formatting the hard drive, though, because of the awful memories from my childhood. Back in my day *waves cane!* installing a new OS was a big deal! We didn’t just put in a CD, no sir! New computers didn’t know how to use the CD drive! We had boot disks, sonny! And that’s assuming the computer recognized the hard drive in the first place!
Hehehe, really though, computers are so much easier these days! I remember playing with those little jumpers on hard drives before I even had the motor skills to do it! And having to tweak the IRQs every time anything changed… I don’t even know if computers still use IRQs! And installing a fresh copy of Windows was hard, too, because you’d spend the first part of it navigating entirely by keyboard because the mouse drivers weren’t installed (this was before Plug and Play!)
Although, I guess computers have had an up-and-down difficulty level over the years. Back on my dad’s really old computer, he would buy magazines that had programs in the back that you’d type in. Then, the Commodore 64 got a bit easier, since you just have to put in a disk and type “LOAD” and some other stuff. Then the Amiga was practically an iMac… the whole PC was in the keyboard itself, including the floppy drive! You’d just boot Workbench and then play games :3 Then when PCs came out with all the different parts, it became a nightmare x_x Remember trying to get sound to work in a video game? And there was a list of like 20 sound cards that existed at the time, and then there were more settings to configure because it never just worked?
Anyways, I’m being nostalgic and weird :3 I get in a weird mood whenever I play with computers >.> *throws her PC onto the bed and humps it*
Vivian's Candy Dish 
Hah, yes computers still use IRQ addresses — otherwise it would be very hard for your hardware devices to get in touch with the CPU; they’d just have to idle until the CPU got done with each device’s request in turn, like impatient kids waiting in line to see Santa at the mall. (Which is really a gross oversimplification, but the alternative involved a Robot Santa metaphor. O_o;; )
These days most computers implement something like an APIC or the motherboard’s ACPI (I don’t know why they decided to make them anagrams of one another, but they really are different things O_o!) to manage IRQ addresses, though — so the idea is the same but there’s some middleware involved to make things Much Better In Theory™. Pretty much since the Windoze 98 SE days IRQ Address Sharing (and the aforementioned APIC/ACPI) have been handling conflicts, so you really don’t hear much about them unless you install bad video card drivers or something (in which case you’ll blue screen with IRQL NOT LESS THAN OR EQUAL).
If ever you feel nostalgic, you can start => run => msinfo32.exe and look at all your hardware — under Hardware Resources -> IRQs on the left. ^_-
What always surprises me is how small all those old games used to be! Somehow they’d support like sixteen different video cards and twenty sound card configurations and still be like less than 12MB in size. O_o;; I think they used to program in hieroglyphics or something.
… Anyway. One post about reformating your boxen and the hackers come out of the woodwork. ^_^;; Hope your holidays were well.
Heeee, yeah!! Wow, I have 22 IRQ number thingies now! I remember it only going up to 9 or something back then, hehe. I’m not reeeally a computer person, I just pretend to be :3
But yeah! I remember games fitting on a single floppy disk! And if it was a really big game, it might even have TWO! Nowadays a single texture file can take up more space than an entire game did ^_^
I wonder what the point of the video/sound card settings were in those old games. I remember most of the time, we had whatever the newest one was, and it wouldn’t be listed, so we’d just pick one at random and half the time it would work. So silly ^_^
oh man… those were the long, painful days lol.
Happy new year