It goes in the USB hole
For the longest time the trickiest part was the LEDs and power buttons
Still a pain. I feel like we could surely do a better connector and layout for those by now
Seriously. There is nothing complicated about those pins either. Most of them are 5V being pulled down to ground, so there is nothing to be considered in terms of signal integrity aside from continuity. We should have standardized front panel IO connectors (obviously usb and audio connectors are standardized).
Well, at least the 9-pin layout is fairly standard these days.
You forgot the part where you have to dig into the motherboard’s software to enable Windows 11.
I love building PCs but it’s simple until it’s not.
just install a different operating system instead
My last build involved nearly losing everything on my RAID5 array.
The discs were set up without partitions, which isn’t recommended, but some guides STILL show it that way, and the new motherboard was like, “Eh, I’ll fix that for you…here’s a new partition table!” Fortunately I was able to recover it, and I rebuilt the array to use disc partitions. But for a few days there, I was nearly in a panic.
That was almost two years ago now, still using it! And making sure my backups are working.
And then navigating BIOS as a 13 year old just to play some kernel-level anticheat game
she is trying to flirt with you fool
Try that while mixing modular PSU cables for some extra fireworks. This is like the old adage of the professional who pushes a button and justifies his pay because it isn’t about how hard it is to push the button, it is knowing which button to push. Connecting cables is simple, but you have to know which ones you need to connect, which ones you need to skip, and which ones are likely to be having a problem.
the knee bone’s connected to the… something
the something’s connected to the… red thing
the red thing’s connected to my… wristwatch
Hi Dr. Nick!
Kids these days don’t know the horrors of wrangling IDE ribbon cables and fiddling with jumpers.
MASTER SLAVE AUTO (auto never works)
But yeah fuck flat IDE cables. I don’t miss old computers a single bit
MASTER SLAVE AUTO! MASTER SLAVE AUTO!
curls into fetal position and moansWhy? It was easy, one master and one slave per cable. You set it once. What’s the problem?
Except those hard drives that had a picture of the jumper positions on the sticker, and it’s not clear which end is pin 1, so you have to play around with it until it works.
Is it not working cause the jumper is in the right spot? Is the drive bad? Is a BIOS setting not right? Is that kink in the cable a problem?
Never had those problems myself, I found the instructions pretty clear. It was labeled near the pins so hard to miss.
Back in þe day, þere wasn’t much of an online to learn about jumper settings. I built a couple of PCs entirely by trial and error. I just remember back in 1990 it being a pretty horrible experience.
It was in the manual of any motherboard of the time… I built a lot of PCs before I even had internet, you just needed to rtfm.
Manuals? We don’t need no stinking manuals!
But, honestly, þere was so much going on when I was assembling þat þing, and I had no patience. And it’s not þe first drive - it was mostly an issue when I was adding additional peripheral drives, like Orb or internal Zip drives, or second HDs.
Its a problem if you don’t know to do it because the it is not intuitive if you aren’t familiar with hardware jumpers as a concept since this was one of the last holdovers from that era and befouled many a hobbyist. You build it and it “just doesn’t work” and “learn that jumpers are a thing” is pretty far down the list of things that most people troubleshoot when their new build won’t post.
Yeah you had to have a special cable or something for Auto to work.
The 80 wire one, with the blue connector inserted in your motherboard/controller card/whatever. I never had a build where the longer end of the cable fit good in that setup, so jumpered Master/Slave it was.
Was “auto” also known as “cable select”? Because if so, I’m guessing it worked fine with the right cable…
It was cable select, my bad but I’m leaving it as is
I don’t remember it ever working reliable, regardless of cable
Me wondering for 4 hours why Windows 98 isn’t booting.
Yeah I’m stupid.
You just awakened a buried trauma in my mind
Autoexec.bat, config.sys
HIMEM.sys
And if you tried to run more than one HDD and got those jumpers wrong, it would let the magic smoke out of one of your drives.
I don’t remember it being that bad. I remember the system just wouldn’t detect the drive.
Yeah, that never happened. Smoke coming out of the drive would require a short, or power where power isn’t supposed to go.
Yeah, I dunno what to say besides that it happened to me twice. Probably close to 25 years ago while upgrading my 12GB HDD to a 80GB Seagate Barracuda, I decided to try running both drives together for a whopping 92GB of storage. Whatever jumper combination I tried first ended up with one of the drives not being recognized, so I tried another combination, either both master or both slave, and the control board on the 12GB drive let out the smoke and that drive was never able to be recognized again. I don’t remember exactly what happened the second time, but I know it happened twice because I felt really stupid about not learning my lesson from the first time. Not saying there couldn’t have been something else going on, but they had keyed IDE headers that couldn’t have been reversed and no other issues until I tried the incompatible jumper combination.
My guess is that you didn’t put on the jumper properly and accidentally shorted them out. I know I shorted out things back in those days by putting jumpers on wrong. But who knows, you might be right. It was so long ago and the effects of getting a setting wrong were often so much more serious back then.
I still have some flat IDE cables in my collection of cables. Just in case…
I still have my “portable” mp3 player from 2000… It was a kit, you supply hard drive, 72-pin simm, and power supply.
Right next to my ps/2 keyboard and mouse with serial adapter cause you never know.
I carried around a floppy drive (like through moves, not day to day) for a long time after I last used it but eventually realized tech has gotten to the point where I’ll probably never use one again.
But I did get an external bluray drive instead of throwing away all those discs I burned back in the day. Even though, in the process of checking them for data loss and ripping to move them to m-discs, I realized I didn’t really care if any had lost data (though none have so far).
So you missed out on needing a manual and adjusting 20 dip switches to make your build work.
I had one of these used (think the board had 5 dip switches) but never really used it, am under 40
I’m a bit over 40 but got to have some older computers at a young age. One of my boards had like 20 dip switches on it. I overclocked that shit to… 33Mhz.
I never used CS (Cable Select) after accidentally nuking a drive because I had two of the exact same model and it flipped the order on reboot… couldn’t figure out why it didn’t boot and then noticed I cloned the blank drive to the good drive…
Right, it was cable select… Yeah SATA was a blessing. IDE / PATA really sucked
That kind of shit is why I recheck things about five times before running such operations.
Or the old power supply cables to the motherboard … black wires always to the center
Jumpers, IRQ conflicts, out of memory for your drivers and program at the same time. Still hella fun. The front panel used to be an unlabeled, unstandardized mess.
SET Blaster=A220 I7 D1 H5 P330 T6
Remember having stacks of boot floppies for each game so you could optimize memory allocation depending on the need?
Lolol stacks of boot floppies, what a casual. I had custom config.sys and autoexec.bat with a boot menu for various configurations.
This game requires EMS memory to be allocated, and this other game requires XMS memory to be allocated! Hold on, gotta edit my AUTOEXEC.BAT.
Some of us automated that shit.
There were times when writing batch files was more fun than playing some of the shitty games I had back then.
Ah yes because some things needed eXtended memory and some needed exPanded memory, and some things didn’t like drivers being loaded into high memory and some things didn’t like other things to be on certain ports or interrupts haha.
Still suffix my paradox games’ run commands in steam
Used to?
Ahaha good point it’s making a comeback!
Hon, i remember the days when we had to manually set the cylinder and head count in the BIOS
I had almost forgotten the horror that was chs<->lba translation…
Manually settin’ them IRQ’s
The first time I installed an nvme… Like a 14th century peasant standing in front of the Vegas smiley face.
Same. I was like “this cannot possible be a hard drive and it cannot possible get plugged into that thing, that’s where the wifi card goes on a laptop.”
24 pin ATX cables for the mainboard are still a pain tho. Also plugging in RAM sticks is still dangerous as fuck if you arent careful.
The good news is, as far as components go, RAM is fairly cheap… Oh no…
I was so traumatized by jumpers… when I built my first machine a few years ago, after over 20 years since the last time I looked inside one, I had to do one tiny minor thing with a jumper. I legit panicked and felt like I was about to permanently lose my brand new mobo. For absolutely no reason other than jumper involved. I don’t even recall bricking anything, maybe just my dad scaring the life out of me about it in the 80s.
And even configuring master and slave as well as irq and dma manually was never really an issue if you knew what you were doing. (except edge cases)
But every million different clone manufacturer had their own jumper settings.
You needed to have the manual for everything, because you couldn’t look it up online.
That’s what I would call edge case, I stuck to reliable ones.
But fair point and possibly the availability was different everywhere too. Also, the older stuff was the worse it was. It got better over time with prints on boards and such.
But were you around for dip switches?
Wrangling IDE cables with awkward angles so you couldn’t both see and touch the space at the same time. And the case edges were made of knives. And then, yeah, it wouldn’t boot and you’d have to figure out that your master/slave jumpers were incorrect as others have stated and have to remove, tweak and replace the drives.
Good times.
I remember my first build with SATA and being really confused when I couldn’t find the jumpers.
Back when usb was first appearing on boards, some cases had their usb port cables broken out into individual pins that you needed to place in the correct order.
Programming: designing squary holes and squary cables
USB cables fit into Ethernet ports. They will also go into HDMI ports if you force them. Source: Family
Yes. I used to work in support… I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
I’ve seen computers on fire due to dust buildup. I’ve seen usb cables glitter in the darkness, stuck inside Ethernetports.
All these moments will be lost in time, like a ticket in the support system.
I worked in automotive electronics. Our cables use asymmetrical trapezoid connectors made from heavy duty plastic with metal reinforcement. There are mechanical hinges to put things in place and lock them only if everything is aligned.
We still had to do electrical tests against wrong connections because apparently people somehow still force them wrong way around.
Whenever mankind manages to make something idiot proof, mother nature builds a better idiot.
I work in automotive R&D, it happens here as well.
I used to repair air traffic control radios and other equipment, everything from glide-slopes and runway lights to the air traffic control console itself.
I’m going to stop right there.
I worked in automotive electronics
But did you work with AUTOSAR?
I resigned about when we started the switch to AUTOSAR. I’m happily in medical tech now.
Nicely dodged a major bullet, apparently.
I have a universal hole that fits all of those.
So does my ex
We know
USB-C cable also fits into USB-A port. Don’t do it, your pc will shut down. Source: me, trying to blindly plug in the cable, twice.
deleted by creator
The round peg goes in the…that’s right! It goes in the square hole
Yes!
https://youtu.be/baY3SaIhfl0
One of my favourite videos.You mean the ethernet shaped hole?
RAM goes into debt hole
In the 90’s: “Sorry you set the CPU voltage jumpers wrong and you’ve fried it. No refunds.”
I’m in this comment and I hate it.
In the early 90s, Linux actually let you set hsync on your monitors, not just vsync. With a CRT you could literally fry it with an invalid number. Generally I wasn’t as cautious because I knew I could never really brick a computer, except for that setting.
It warned you about that, but I don’t think actually frying a monitor was common. I was cautious, but I still made mistakes and gave it values that my monitor couldn’t handle, but the worst that happened was a dangerous sound coming out of the monitor and no useful picture on the screen. I immediately shut off my monitor when that happened, but it didn’t do any permanent damage.
Probably a cheaply made monitor might have issues, but well built monitors had hardware protection against invalid settings.
Many of the older monitors could let the smoke out if you gave it the wrong horizontal frequency. The better made monitors would limit the horizontal frequency to a safe value and just not sync if the video signal was outside that range. The later monitors were smart enough to not even try to display and invalid signal and may even show an error message on screen.
Uhm… Won’t
sudo rm -rf /*also brick your modern PC, as it also deletes UEFI variables that are always mounted rw for technical reasons?Generally no. Most of those variables are mounted RO now. Additionally you can factory reset the board and recover. There were some systems a while ago when UEFI first came out that didn’t correctly manage that, but that hasn’t been a problem for years now.
I once somehow managed to plug in a molex upside down and got to watch the magic smoke escape from a 2GB Bigfoot drive. Sad day.
The Verge’s $2000 PC Build Reaction Supercut
There was a glorious time in the 90s when PC building had enough stuff going on and not yet enough safeguards that I could actually put things in wrong and start a small fire.
Those were exciting days. And sometimes expensive.
Magic smooooke
Those are the gases that made the computer engine run. You let them out and the engine dies.
One time it worked to quickly turn off and pull out the smoking chip (cpu cache extender) flip it 180 degrees and try again. No apparent permanent damage.
Any machine can be a smoke machine if you use it wrong enough.
In early 2000s I had a power supply fail spectacularly, sudden arcing, lit up my whole apartment… To be fair, it was a case & power supply from the 80s…
wait, have they finally fixed the “i can plug in my psu wrong” problem? the stress of that at my job was bad enough i don’t want to do it on my home computers now i can’t afford to replace parts if i bork em
If it was possible I surely would have for my last two computers. At least mine came with nubs and corners that enforced one orientation.
If you mix cables, between power supplies, definitely still possible
This isn’t building a PC, this is plugging one in.
And to the average person, there’s no difference regardless of how right you are.
This is the fastest part after the careful compatibility checks, purchases, opening of packages, attaching heat sink with thermal paste, and screwing in components.
