Now would you care to elaborate a bit?

Silly you know, post your idea of worst computer builds and compare 'em.

386DX with a CGA card and an AWE64, running MS-DOS 4.0 on XT-IDE with a 128GB CF card, divided into 64 2GB partitions.

keenmaster486 wrote:

128GB CF card, divided into 64 2GB partitions.

🤣

keenmaster486 wrote:

386DX with a CGA card and an AWE64, running MS-DOS 4.0 on XT-IDE with a 128GB CF card, divided into 64 2GB partitions.

LoLz to dat build, but I don't see whats wrong with an AWE64.

Interesting, though I always find something good in a part, even if it's bad. Like an OAK ISA graphics card. Slow as heck, but if you want to play Wing Commander on a 486, that card does the trick 😀

The Celeron D series on LGA775 is surprisingly slow. 3+Ghz feels like a Pentium with caches disabled.

The worst of the worst I had was a gifted celeron 266mhz covington (no cache) on a motherboard with integrated Ati Rage and 16mb of ram and a notorious slow Quantum Fireball Harddrive to even slow it down more 😀

It was so bad I am thinking about rebuilding it, still got the board and the cpu, just need some 16mb sdram and a horrible slow HDD 🤣

Nvm1 wrote:

The worst of the worst I had was a gifted celeron 266mhz covington (no cache) on a motherboard with integrated Ati Rage and 16mb of ram and a notorious slow Quantum Fireball Harddrive to even slow it down more 😀

It was so bad I am thinking about rebuilding it, still got the board and the cpu, just need some 16mb sdram and a horrible slow HDD 🤣

Ho, and I thought Bigfoots were the slow drives and Fireballs were for performance.

Any laptop with passive (DSTN) screen.

Worst is build Celeron on Northwood core, only 256 MB SDRAM, GeForce FX5200 with 64 bit memory of even GeForce 4MX420 or GeForce2 MX200, slow harddisk, with XP installed, and that computer will be almost for nothing. And also my Sony Vaio PCG-F707 is very bad, because it had graphics without 3d acceleration and on other side Pentium III 600, and I can install there only 256 MB of RAM, and harddisk is on laptop center under keyboard instead of left or right like on even ThinkPad T20 or Dell Inspiron 3700.

computergeek92 wrote:

Nvm1 wrote:

The worst of the worst I had was a gifted celeron 266mhz covington (no cache) on a motherboard with integrated Ati Rage and 16mb of ram and a notorious slow Quantum Fireball Harddrive to even slow it down more 😀

It was so bad I am thinking about rebuilding it, still got the board and the cpu, just need some 16mb sdram and a horrible slow HDD 🤣

Ho, and I thought Bigfoots were the slow drives and Fireballs were for performance.

You are correct. The Bigfoot line was Quantum's slowest. He's probably talking about the Fireball lct series (low cost technology). It was a sadly neutered version of the Fireball line, with less cache and slower spindle speeds.

keenmaster486 wrote:

386DX with a CGA card and an AWE64, running MS-DOS 4.0 on XT-IDE with a 128GB CF card, divided into 64 2GB partitions.

Yeah, I hope you don't mean the Multi-Tasking MS-DOS 4.0, but the regular version.. 😉
IBM DOS 4.00 was also amazing. It had support for an installable filesystem (IFS).
Too bad it required too much memory. 🙁

Multitasking MS-DOS 4.0
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/multitasking-ms-dos-4-0-lives/

IBM DOS 4.0
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/dos/dos-4-0/

(Btw, an AWE64 can even run on a 286. Its core drivers can be loaded with an 386 emulator.)

@Jo22: Well, interesting! I didn't know that, I was just trying to pick a DOS that was just barely not quite usable for the hardware in question 🤣 Same with the AWE64, which combined with a CGA card is ridiculous.

That's interesting that the AWE64 can be used on a 286, though. I have a 286 board set up on my desk right now, maybe I should try it out and see if I can make it work! I already tried a Vibra16 with little success; I think I'm forced to use CTCM.

Pretty much the worst personal build I had was an Athlon PC.
Doesnt sound so bad when you look at the specs - Nforce mainboard, 1333 Mhz Athlon and a GF2 mx400 should make for a well rounded budget rig.

However the case and the PSU were from the 950Mhz Celeron PC I upgraded from.

I had random shutdowns, the CPU fan was always at low rpm. The fact that the PSU was positioned on the SIDE and not the top did not help as a lot of Socket A coolers didnt even fit...Im really surprised that cheapo PSU did not explode and continued to work until I got a new PC years later.
I really wish I had the picture of it I made soon before I got rid of it - with the side and top panel off, PSU taped to the top of the case and a big house fan placed next to it to keep it cool...Not to mention the bent case that was from me bashing it because a random shutdown cost me 3 hours of schoolwork...

I still remember the first computer my father put together for me.

It all hinged around a PC-Chips M598 mobo with some seriously WTF port header placement between the expansion slots, no AGP slot, integrated SiS 530 graphics that lose their 2D acceleration if you update past DirectX 7.0, a built-in CMI8338 sound codec that never worked, and for whatever reason, it could never run 100 MHz FSB stably, forcing the AMD K6-2 350 to be set to 366 MHz instead with a lower 66 MHz FSB.

Oh, and it used an AT case and PSU when the industry was already moving to ATX. In fact, the board was designed to work with either AT or ATX. The whole thing reeked of being budget-conscious.

It eventually got sent to recycling because my current family doesn't like me keeping so many computers, and I don't miss it one bit, though I did yank the 128 MB of PC-100 SDRAM, Ethernet card and SB Live! Value that were in it before doing so. Those things could find a new home in much better computers.

adalbert wrote:

Any laptop with passive (DSTN) screen.

"Better" yet, a laptop with a passive-matrix LCD, just the stock 32 MB of RAM, only 2 MB of VRAM, and the real kicker - a CPU with NO L2 CACHE.

Yeah, turns out my neighbors owned the much-maligned "MainStreet" configuration of the WallStreet PowerBook G3 line. That thing was utter crap compared to what the higher-end configurations offered, partly due to giving the CPU the Covington Celeron treatment, partly because the screen actually makes active-matrix TN LCD garbage tolerable to look at by comparison.

Not exactly a computer build, but worst hardware I'd say goes to the Quantum Bigfoot. If that drive were any slower time would stand still. Wiping the drive with Boot'n'Nuke took over 13 hours (2.5Gb) - Compare that to dual 250GB IDE drives in under 7 hours.

I find it completely baffling that one can expend considerable efforts and funds to build a PC that is twenty years out of date, and then complain that it isn't as fast as it could be.

It's much easier to take pot shots at some of Apple's catastrophic architectural decisions.
http://lowendmac.com/2014/road-apples-second-class-macs/

keenmaster486 wrote:

@Jo22: Well, interesting! I didn't know that, I was just trying to pick a DOS that was just barely not quite usable for the hardware in question 🤣 Same with the AWE64, which combined with a CGA card is ridiculous.

Nah, that's fine. DOS 4.0 was considered the "Windows ME of DOS" after all, so it does fit well here. 😀
And yes, it is ridiculous - you could also use a Hercules card instead and and run Windows 3.0 in CGA mode with SIMCGA (does that work ?)

keenmaster486 wrote:

That's interesting that the AWE64 can be used on a 286, though. I have a 286 board set up on my desk right now, maybe I should try it out and see if I can make it work! I already tried a Vibra16 with little success; I think I'm forced to use CTCM.

Good Luck! There's an emulator named EMU386 that claims to support the AWEs. I have added it to this post for you.
It works with all real address mode software for the 386 (it says so). 😀

I guess from our modern point of view, 286 PCs with 16bit cards must really look like a total overkill and ridiculous. 🤣
But back in the 90s it wasn't uncommon at all. People bought these cards for their old PCs because they were part of a "multimedia upgrade kit",
which contained a CD-ROM drive and an interface card (often a sound card). Some even had free speakers inside! Free speakers! Yoo-hoo! 😁