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Big AI has PC users furious. Nvidia and Micron's weird emotional appeals make it worse
(www.pcworld.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2026
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Technology
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Computer electronics are like my main hobby. It was expensive on a good day. This makes it unaffordable.
Switch to retrocomputing; it’s currently significantly more affordable.
Not a bad idea. How do you actually partake that hobby? Is it more the same building things or the challenge of getting old hardware/software working?
A mix of both; finding old gear and combining parts to restore functional units, repairing where needed and learning more about how the systems work in the meantime.
And older SIMMs and DIMMs are relatively cheap right now — you can create a maxed out system for its era and still do everything on the computer that was possible to do when it was new.
There’s even great web proxies for older systems now, so if you want to, you can browse the modern web on a computer from 1996.
Well hey, I appreciate the recommendation. Maybe it’s time to get back into Windows 98 gaming. Just like mom used to make.
There were actually some genuinely great games in those days, with compelling stories and expansive worlds to explore that still hold up today, it wasn't all Minesweeper and Pong.
A few highlights: Master Of Orion 2, Deus Ex, SimCity 2000 and 3000, TIE Fighter (or if you're rebel scum: X-Wing, or X-Wing vs TIE Fighter), Half-Life, Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft II, Ultima VII: The Black Gate and Ultima VII: Serpent Isle, Mechwarrior 2, Age of Empires, Fury^3, Fallout 2, Baldur's Gate 2, The Sims 2, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Total Annihilation.
Don't be misled by the fact that some of these games are obviously sequels, or had console versions, or have had other sometimes even more well-known sequels and remakes since then. There are some genuine reasons to play the original specific game versions I'm listing here, to play them exactly as they were originally presented. Many of them have unique features and aspects that haven't been repeated. It's not just a Madden 15 vs Madden 16 situation, where you've played one you've played both. There may be a bit of rose-tinted nostalgia goggles in this list, I would certainly love the chance to go back and play some of these for the first time again, but there are also many genuine outliers even among their own franchises, that are unique and incredible, and genre-defining in many cases.
X-Wing Alliance too, it's a relatively modern game, but there's something about the campaign. You really feel yourself a rebel.
They all have that atmosphere of going into the sea for real, I don't know how to describe it.
Another old game with it is Ascendancy. I always get too emotional from its style and music, somehow it reminds me of how I dreamed of future in my childhood. But I didn't play a lot of it for the same reason.
Master of Orion 2 is just very playable and comfortable.
TIE Fighter has that sense of humor similar to Dungeon Keeper in some sense.
X-Wing I like more, because of its atmosphere, again, you really feel yourself a rebel.
XvT is for a group of friends.
WarCraft II has amazing music. Other than feeling yourself in a world where moral alignment is not 2-dimensional, but 3-dimensional, chivalrous honor being the one forgotten. You might not feel yourself the good guy necessarily, but that honor you'll feel in its campaign. A bit like in Harry Potter such a character as Bellatrix Lestrange has that quality maxed out in the positive direction, which makes her an interesting character compared to most DEs who are both baddies and spineless cowards.
!patientgamers@sh.itjust.works looked smug as hell. They'd been telling everyone for years.
Please tell me more.
https://archive.org/details/win95_in_dosbox
One of the classics
I really need to get a new display replacement for my old vaio f series laptop. The screen layers are doing the funny vinegar thing. That and some sort of ssd. Maybe a USB Dom or some msata thing with a converter board.
The solution is to use an old computer?
Sounds like copium
I find it fascinating how the concept of coping with a situation has been made into a negative. "Get bent loser, how dare you try to make the best out of a bad situation". Hold on, let me unfuck the tech sector real quick.
It goes wrong when you try to convince me that retrocomputing is somehow better than building a reasonably priced new machine.
Oh Steve, you're so misguided
It is and it isn't. There's a ton of tech waste and lots of people get rid of systems that are still quite capable. Obviously there's less power but even a 6 year old gaming rig can still run most games, just at lower framerates
Not copium when the purpose is different.
it would be more unaffordable once people dont have jobs from all the layoffs.
IMHO there's much hobbiness and fun to be had with creating a second or third life for "outdated" hardware. The current RAM crisis leaves me cool, on a 2014 ThinkPad. My kitchen server was a 2008 HP laptop.
What's funny is that ding this makes it kinda obvious how incremental a lot if improvements really were. Like on paper DDR5 is MUCH better than DDR3, but somehow my old gaming machine is only a little slower than a new system playing shit that I actually run.
Software has also gone to shit performance wise, few things really get optimized anymore and there's frameworks and containers behind everything.
For sure. Buying higher performance machines didn't get us better performing games, it just got us lazy developers.
What does a kitchen server do?
Serves kitchens
"Your kitchen, sir"
"Our special today, is silverfish and granite, served with a side of wood chips, garnished with table salt."
Discworld?
?
Just sounds like a quote from Discworld. Trolls eat rocks.
Ah, never heard of it tbh, that bad humour came straight from my head.
🤔 ah, I suppose that makes sense
I used to have a static IP at home so I cold run my own physical server. I stuck it under the fridge because there were wall plugs and I didn't want it in my living room. Hence the name.
It used to serve NFS shares locally, websites and CalDAV/CardDAV globally. A dual-core-but-32-bit stone old intel processor, 2GB of RAM, and never a performance problem.