Lapis the Nevrean

@lapisnev

Don't squeeze me, I fart

she/her
dinobird.website/

Things that make you go 🤌. Weird computer stuff. Artist and general creative type. Occasionally funny. Gentoo on main. I play rhythm games!

You can post SVG files like photos on this website! Spread the word!

Lapis the Nevrean @lapisnev3/23/2023, 5:33 AM

Lapis the Nevrean @lapisnev

Lapis the Nevrean @lapisnev3/23/2023, 12:07 AM

WOW! This thing is crap!

Haha, so, one of my computers is a Dell Latitude D830 with the optional 1920x1200 screen and nVidia Quadro NVS 140M.

This GPU is so pathetically slow when used for a modern Linux desktop that Firefox is actually running faster and smoother with software rendering instead.

On a Core 2 Duo. Which moments ago had a core pegged to 100% as it failed to read and write the GPU fast enough.

... I'm actually impressed.

Edit: oh my fucking God I turned off hardware video decoding in Telegram Desktop and that's fixed too now, HOW IS THE GPU SO BAD

#computers #retro computing #this thing is 15 years old now so it counts #it's old #I'm old #mmm the sound of the goddamn fan spinning down for the first time #poor little core 2 duo #nvidia sucks

Lapis the Nevrean @lapisnev3/23/2023, 5:33 AM

Hey kids! Me again. Guess what?

I was running BIOS version A02 on this laptop. The final version for the hardware is A17. My BIOS was six years out of date. I don't know how I missed updating it first thing when I got the machine.

It's running dramatically better now. It's not totally fixed, but holy balls did it ever make a difference. I can play 1080p30 video with itty bitty audio pops or 720p60 without a hitch, and I can run Firefox with hardware acceleration! (Playing video inside Telegram with the hardware decoder is still hopeless.)

Also, where the hell are my floppies? I had to run the BIOS update from a FreeDOS USB. I have half a dozen floppy drives and not a single floppy disk. HOW.

#computers #retro computing #I fixed it #God I'm an idiot #where are my floppies tho

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in reply to @lapisnev's post:

Bleu @bleu3/23/2023, 11:16 AM

the more impressive thing is that the laptop has been supported for so long already

Lapis the Nevrean @lapisnev3/23/2023, 1:24 PM

Dell won't provide support for it running Windows 10 and Windows itself doesn't support it for upgrading to 11, but now that I updated the BIOS it rips for running Linux. If it had an SSD and literally any hardware acceleration for AES encryption, it might be hard to tell the computer is 15!

But yeah, x86 computers haven't fundamentally changed since AMD64/EM64T was added and haven't broken backwards compatibility since switching to EFI (and even then with a CSM you can boot the old way). I think a modern AMD CPU can no longer boot MS-DOS as of very recently due to dropping support for switching to 16-bit realmode but this hasn't been a wise OS to run for a very long time.

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