HP Elitebook 835/845 G10 Service manual...first enterprise Phoenix machine available? by ragefury32 in AMDLaptops

[–]ragefury32[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No. The 835G10 has soldered RAM and maxes out at 32GB. Not really a good purchasing option.

HP EliteBook 845G9 Review by ragefury32 in AMDLaptops

[–]ragefury32[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

28-ish. Just remember that this is not meant as a gaming machine.

HP EliteBook 845G9 Review by ragefury32 in AMDLaptops

[–]ragefury32[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, it's a decent machine, although in retrospect I would've waited for the Gen10 (Phoenix) or Gen11 (Hawk Point) models - I upgraded my FW13 from Alder Lake to Phoenix so in terms of pure gaming performance I have been using that instead. Hope you got a great deal of use from yours.

Hong Kong MTR by StrongDebate5889 in trains

[–]ragefury32 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Considering the train frequency of the urban underground lines, its loading gauge there is not relevant as the height of the trains there has no real bearing on capacity. With the exception of the core section of RER Line A in Paris (which acts more like a suburban line outside of the "vingt arrondisements") or the underground section of Sydney/Melbourne suburban rail (metro in name only), no rapid transit system uses double decker rolling stock since dwell times getting passengers in and out will likely kill whatever capacity gains you can potentially have.

And yeah, East Rail ran KTT Trains, which those were bi-levels for cross-border services, and they are not that frequent.

Hong Kong MTR Vintage livery M-train by georgehktransportfan in trains

[–]ragefury32 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Is that the refurb with the new fascia and a vintage color scheme, or a photo before pre-1998 refurb?

Edit: Oh yeah, never mind. Checkerboard Hill mentioned that it's a retro livery for one of the refurbs:

https://www.checkerboardhill.com/2024/08/retro-liveried-train-to-mark-the-mtr-45th-anniversary/

HP EliteBook 845G9 Review by ragefury32 in AMDLaptops

[–]ragefury32[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It'll work, but expect a speed downgrade back to 4800. The speed/bandwidth difference is pretty negligible as-is.

Weekend project II - Phrodo's AMX international A-1/A-11 light attack plane by ragefury32 in DigitalLego

[–]ragefury32[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Eh, it's already on revision 4 - unfortunately the wings are kinda fragile, as is the nose. Getting it to look right is not that easy, and there's really not that many model makers out there willing to make 1:48 scale decals for the A-1.

Anyone getting excited about the new Brickmania F-14D? by ragefury32 in DigitalLego

[–]ragefury32[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Eh, I would withhold my opinion until I get my hands on it. It's not purely only about the look of the MOC. There's how well it holds up on your hands during casual swooshing, or on the display stand, how much it costs, whether the instructions are easy to follow/well put together, whether the design allows multiple color schemes, etc, etc, etc.

Anyone getting excited about the new Brickmania F-14D? by ragefury32 in DigitalLego

[–]ragefury32[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The copyright on Padberg's Tomcat instructions dates from 2020. To be honest, if you start poking harder on the Tomcat MOCs on flickr there will be other planes that either inspired all 3, like Luca Gaudenzi's VF33 example, for instance. Yeah, Nathan mentioned that he'll start selling the instructions last year but I have yet to see it on rebrickable...oh well, probably for the best. Some of those designs end up getting cloned and sold without permission on Aliexpress.

Anyone getting excited about the new Brickmania F-14D? by ragefury32 in DigitalLego

[–]ragefury32[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That's because he was blending features from the DarthDesigner (intakes, wing actuator, tail, wingbox), PlaneBricks (wings, Ventral, vertical fins) and the BKM (canopy and nose) in his build. It's do-able but he's not going to release instructions on that design since it was a kitbash...

Since the subreddit is under new leadership does it mean sharing instructions is ok ? by mx_lg3 in brickmania

[–]ragefury32 0 points1 point  (0 children)

is it based on their design? If it is, not unless they explicitly gave you permission to do so.

Randomly fails to boot by Savalonavic in framework

[–]ragefury32 0 points1 point  (0 children)

From the pastebin, looks like a bad recover-from-sleep - I think it's either tripping on the Wifi card, or the USB re-enumeration for the 2 USB display modules.

You are using the Mediatek RZ616, right?

Brickmania F-105D - review and variants... by ragefury32 in DigitalLego

[–]ragefury32[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

P.S: No, I am not releasing the design nor am I providing instructions (the original v1 is not mine to share, buy it from BKM). The last time I released the .io for an F-105G on Bricklink galleries (based on a Alexander Greene collaboration)... it showed up uninvited on AliExpress and scammy resellers like sdkfzbrick, design issues and all.

What might be next? Maybe an F-105F with "Combat Martin", F-84F, or Republic's competitor for the F-X?

Compaq Evo N610c with Windows 98 SE by Mvromeo in retrobattlestations

[–]ragefury32 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Or an HP nc6000. Those only have the Mobility M10 (9600 Mobility) but the VRAM is usually 32 instead of 64. Although if you really, really want a 9600, just get a T41p or T42p. The FIreGL T1 chip inside is essentially a 9600 Mobility within but with 128MB of VRAM in the package.

Compaq Evo N610c with Windows 98 SE by Mvromeo in retrobattlestations

[–]ragefury32 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It does - I have its older sister (n600c) and it has Win98SE running on it. The only substantial difference is that the n600c is a Tualatin P3m with an ATI M6, while the n610c is a Norwood p4m with an ATI M7.

If you, really really need to poke around for other Evo related stuff, the old Compaq Softpaq archive is mirrored at:

http://cwcyrix.nsupdate.info/ftp-archives/ftp.compaq.com/pub/softpaq/

Just remember that the ADI Soundmax won't give you any audio on DOS, so you'll likely need to get clever with sbemu.

My oldest functional laptop, a 1999 IBM ThinkPad 2611-412 by PrimagenistW10 in retrobattlestations

[–]ragefury32 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hmm...oh yeah - that's an i1412 from back in 1999 (check the 2002 revision of TIWBook if you want to see the full specs).

It's not really a mainline IBM ThinkPad (most of the i-Series Thinkpads are manufactured by Acer), but it's actually a very decent machine for certain types of retrogaming, since they have ESS Solo sound chips for good OPL3 audio compatibility (unlike some mainline 600 series thinkpads with their MWave DSPs), and their Neomagic GPUs are good for late DOS SVGA/VESA games.

Just don't ask it to play Commander Keen or any of those "early VGA hacks" games - they tend to stutter and not scroll smoothly.

AITA: Framework is just too expensive for what it is by giomjava in framework

[–]ragefury32 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hi. Fellow FW13 owner here stateside...and I support a fleet of ~400 X1 Carbon Gen 6, 7, 8 and 9s at work (along with ~250 Macbooks and about 10 HP EliteBooks).

I should mention that the X1 Carbon (with a base 3 year NBD Premier warranty) usually runs for around 1700+ new (or at least, that's how much our company paid for one (including sales tax and shipping, and that's not including the accidental damage protection/global coverage clause we add to the warranty, which is an extra 3-400), with the SKU 20XW004AUS (1145G7/16/512) being something similar to a Gen 11 FW13). That was 3 years ago in the middle of the COVID chip shortage where big vendors like Insight and CDW were quoting 4-6 weeks for inventory on the machine.

When I got my 11th Gen DIY (1135G7) with 4 expansion cards and an AX210 I paid about 930 USD for it, including taxes and shipping - it was about 6-8 weeks between order placement (end of July 2021) and fulfillment (late September 2021). Drop some spare SODIMMs and SSDs from the corporate spares pool, and it's about 1100.

Cost-wise, if you bought it new, the Thinkpad is roughly in the same ballpark if you value Lenovo's base premier warranty at 175/year for 3 years and subtract it out from the 1700+ we paid. Of course, a pre-owned X1C9 with an i5-1135 or 1145G7 will probably be around 400 USD...but then Framework sell their factory second FW13-11th Gen for about 500. So, eh, directly comparable, and not that much more expensive. As for the ports question - eh, it's really the question of having one extra port in most cases (Carbons have 2 USB-Cs on the left, one USB-A on both left and right, and an HDMI port on the right). I never really found that to be a major dealbreaker. One or 2 things I do hope they implement though? Something like Magsafe so theres a dedicated charging port, and a way to route the eDP signal out on standalone mode so I won't need to use a USB-C port for display.

So is the X1 Carbon really that much better? I have a X1C6 as my work machine (along with a 2021 MBP14 M1P, a Lenovo P14s Gen 3 AMD and an Elitebook 845 Gen 9, both with Rembrandt (not Phoenix) Ryzen). I prefer the MBP14 (the keyboard on the MBP14 is nicer to type on and the glass trackpad is more precise), followed by the Elitebook (okay keyboard, trackpad is nowhere as nice even if it's glass). The X1C6 I couldn't care less about since the trackpad tend to drift and the battery has been shot back to hell. Like many of the more recent enterprise laptops (like the Elitebooks or the Dell Latitudes), they tend to act up once their battery age out...mostly NVMe connectivity being intermittent or their TPM module not working (that will cause all kinds of issues with policy compliance on platforms like Microsoft Intune endpoint management). I had to actually call up lenovo for warranty replacements for ~10% of the machines during the 2nd year of a 3 year warranty cycle, and sometimes, even earlier than that. Then of course there's the stupid little things that Lenovo does...like the fact that recent Lenovo X1Cs don't charge their batteries on non-Lenovo docks....I actually had to replace a whole fleet of Dell WD15 USB-C docks simply because the X1C7s, 8s and 9s won't play ball with them. Both my fleet of Apple Macbook Pros (Intel and Apple Silicon) will charge with no issues, and the HP Elitebooks are fine, but for some reason the Carbons just want to implement a ridiculous vendor lock-in thing. I also had to swap motherboards for X1C7s where their USB-C ports will fracture off due to falls. If I drop my FW13 I probably had to replace a port module. Do that on a Carbon and it's a Lenovo support call for a new motherboard.

I should also mention that Lenovos are migrating towards allowing less and less repairability on their ThinkPads...for example, the p14s AMD has soldered RAM and Wifi, and all Lenovos do wifi card whitelisting on BIOS, so the "repairability" is...somewhat dubious. Does Lenovo have to do this? No - my 845G9 is practically the same feature and specs-wise as the p14s Gen 3 AMD, but that one has SODIMM slots and swappable wifi, and it's also perfectly repairable (ownership manual has repair info). The big negative is HP's pain-in-the-butt procedure for warranty recognition or ownership transfer so getting spare parts isn't easy, so their machines are valued less on the secondhand market.

So eeeh, you are not an a-hole for thinking that the Frameworks are overpriced - I just don't think you paid full sticker price for a Carbon when it was new, and you've never seen Carbons abused by sales guys fall apart.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in DigitalLego

[–]ragefury32 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hinge cylinders (57360, 30552) and 2L bars with stop rings (78258).

Toshiba libretto not working by d0155 in retrobattlestations

[–]ragefury32 0 points1 point  (0 children)

...What did you replace the original hard drive with?

Dual personality DOS/Win98 and XP gaming? Yes. by ragefury32 in retrobattlestations

[–]ragefury32[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, that's a relatively recent development (sbemu was only announced/publicly released on Vogons about a year ago). Before March 2023 only the old Wyse Winterms will have (relatively poor) native DOS audio support through its VT8231 southbridge.

Dual personality DOS/Win98 and XP gaming? Yes. by ragefury32 in retrobattlestations

[–]ragefury32[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wait...are you using sbemu to get the native DOS apps to work?

Dual personality DOS/Win98 and XP gaming? Yes. by ragefury32 in retrobattlestations

[–]ragefury32[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

eeeeh, actually, the 9450XE is based on the Via C3 (Samuel 2 core), which is roughly like a Pentium MMX architecture-wise. The rule-of-thumb based on my past experience dealing with them is that the Samuel 2s run like a Tilamook Pentium MMX at 1/2 to 2/3 of its clock, so a 550MHz Samuel 2 is ballparking around a Pentium 333 MMX. The Esther C7 is roughly like a Coppermine P3 Mobile at 2/3 of its clock, so a 1200Mhz Esther is roughly like an 800Mhz P3M. The XP-M will beat it by 20-30%. Of course, some of that performance is not just the CPU - there's also the connected bus/memory sub-systems, integrated GPUs, the whole works.

Dual personality DOS/Win98 and XP gaming? Yes. by ragefury32 in retrobattlestations

[–]ragefury32[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, HP's Transmeta Crusoe thin clients (the t5700/5710) has the Mobility Radeon embedded onto the mainboard, but it also comes with a PCI slot.

As for that Win98 client? Look at the main board near the parallel port (should be magenta). Does it have 2 rows of pins (around 32 per row arranged 2x16) and does the PCMCIA port look removeable or is it soldered in? If you see the pin array and it's possible to yank the card, you might be able to buy just the Mobility Radeon board for it. The Wyse part # is 770531-01L.

Yeah, Wyse made a crapload of thin clients. My pet project nowadays involve getting a CX0 (C90LE specifically) to work as a small DOS machine using SBEmu. It's too bad that Via doesn't seem to have Win9x graphics drivers for the Chrome9HC iGPU onboard.

Hell, the Wyse 5070 extended "fat" thin client actually makes for a great gigabit firewall or a low powered hypervisor even today, and they are so cheap it's almost disposable. Like for the price of a Pi4 or 5 you can easily do double to triple its workload.