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posted by janrinok on Tuesday November 19 2019, @11:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the too-soon? dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Intel is removing drivers and BIOS for its old desktop boards so anyone running an old Pentium-based PC has four days to get hold of anything they might need.

The warning on Intel's download center page says:

End Of Life - This download, BIOS Update [RL86510A.86A] P21, will no longer be available after November 22, 2019 and will not be supported with any additional functional, security, or other updates. All versions are provided as is. Intel recommends that users of BIOS Update [RL86510A.86A] P21 uninstall and/or discontinue use as soon as possible.

Opinion on message boards is mixed, with some accepting that a 20-year support cycle is not terrible. But others pointed out that some industries like manufacturing will still be relying on old hardware to run parts of their infrastructure.

Posters on Vogon, a forum dedicated to ancient hardware and emulators that allow you to run old games on newer machines, questioned the move and how much space and storage Intel would really save by the housekeeping measure.

Various people are setting up their own mirrors and using archive.org, but the maker community noted that file names are not always obvious and downloading from mirror sites can be risky.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday November 20 2019, @01:39AM (11 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 20 2019, @01:39AM (#922192) Journal

    If a machine that old is still in use, it has likely been updated already, just as far as the owners think necessary, or wise. I think most of us have learned (the hard way, in some cases) that you don't just update your bios because there is a new one available. If your machine works, why risk bricking it with a new bios? If you have a problem which the updated bios claims to address, then, sure, you update.

    No one is actually SELLING these old machines anymore. There aren't warehouses full of them, being auctioned off, are there? It really is a safe bet that these old machines are in place, and doing whatever jobs they will do, until their individual ends of life.

    Those businesses still using these machines need to get a clue. It's time, and past time, to upgrade. Think about it. That poor little 100mhz machine that struggles to maintain an inventory ledger? You can, today, upgrade to a machine costing mere hundreds of dollars that can do the same job using far less than 1% of it's resources. The other 99+% can be harnessed for something important, like, playing solitaire.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by hemocyanin on Wednesday November 20 2019, @02:27AM (2 children)

    by hemocyanin (186) on Wednesday November 20 2019, @02:27AM (#922225) Journal

    I was over at a friend's shop recently and while he was firing up a CNC he has that's about the size of a full-size van. CRT touch screen running Windows 95. It's not connected to any network -- just that machine.

    I recently had to buy a new video card for my main desktop -- this thing is pretty old, not EUFI but because I'm not a gamer, it does everything I need it to do without a hiccup. It's certainly more than 7 years old at this point and maybe more (I have one of the 3 core AMD processors marketed as 6 core for reference). The case is probably twice as old as the guts inside it.

    Anyway -- upgrading is overrated. There was a point some years ago where aside from gaming or hardcore science, processors got to be good enough -- so long as my motherboard holds out, popping in a new drive from time to time like you change the oil in a car will keep these things going just fine. I'm running the newest version of Linux Mint off an SSD and after I type in my decryption password pre-boot, it feels like somewhere between 5 and 10 seconds later I'm ready to type in my login password. If that dropped down to 3 seconds, it wouldn't make my life any better really, but I'd spend $1000 (give or take) to get there. So I'm just going to swap cards or memory or HDs so long as this thing keeps ticking along. Oh yeah, and since I had NIB power supply sitting on my shelf since buying it years ago because it was on closeout for almost nothing in a store that wouldn't be selling that stuff anymore, I went ahead and refreshed the power suplly when I did the video card. Kind of like getting a new set of spark plugs.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Wednesday November 20 2019, @05:02PM (1 child)

      by Freeman (732) on Wednesday November 20 2019, @05:02PM (#922446) Journal

      Seems like by the time you need to replace it you'll be able to get a Raspberry Pi that will do everything you need for $35. Depending on what you're doing, you might be good to go now with a Pi4 4GB. I'd recommend giving it a go some time, if for no other reason than those old PCs pull a whole lot more juice than a Raspberry Pi.

      If you're in the USA, there's a sale on a few different models at Micro Center.
      https://www.microcenter.com/search/search_results.aspx?Ntt=Raspberry+Pi&searchButton=search [microcenter.com]

      --
      Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21 2019, @12:40PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21 2019, @12:40PM (#922965)

        When people return them, they get put up as Open Box for 20% off.

        So a $55 Pi4 4GB with $5 discount can suddenly become $40. I got mine before the discount but managed to get 3 of them as Open Box. Mix of 4GB and 2GB.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Hartree on Wednesday November 20 2019, @05:09AM (6 children)

    by Hartree (195) on Wednesday November 20 2019, @05:09AM (#922270)

    You wanna cough up the quarter to half a million to buy a new version of the x ray crystallography machine I keep running just because "get a clue and upgrade"? The control software is specific to that era of machine and thus dos.

    It still does its job fine. Ditto the large number of CNC machine tools that are still out there running fine on old embedded systems. Again, software specific to the computer they came with. I keep a half million dollar to replace (we did the costing last year) laser milling system going that is heavily used not just by our university but also groups at other Midwest universities. It runs on closed source software specific to the hardware on Win2K. It was bought with a grant that was for a professor who is no longer there and if it goes down, we don't have the money to replace it, we just stop doing laser milling. Yeah, the researchers can go with commercial facilities at massively higher cost and much longer turn around time. It's your tax dollars that are going out the window there.

    The computers in and of themselves aren't worth didly. I've got lots of old hardware (both at the school and of my own)
    The problems is they are running systems that are very expensive to replace. And before you mention DOSBox, I've yet to see it simulate an ISA slot for the custom data acquisition cards many instruments used.

    Grants for instrumentation are very competitive, so we have to make the machinery we have last.

    • (Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday November 20 2019, @06:47AM (3 children)

      by anubi (2828) on Wednesday November 20 2019, @06:47AM (#922285) Journal

      Remember when you could burn a a pair of 27256 and transfer the BIOS of your liking onto the motherboard? Award? Phoenix? AMI?

      --
      "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
      • (Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Wednesday November 20 2019, @04:28PM

        by TheGratefulNet (659) on Wednesday November 20 2019, @04:28PM (#922428)

        for a short time, there was this thing called MR BIOS (no no 'mister bios', lol, but MR stood for something else).

        you could load that bios onto asus or tyan or supermicro boards. back when running software raid was a 'thing', mr bios had that before most others, built into the bios. (I think it was 1995 or so).

        --
        "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
      • (Score: 2) by Hartree on Wednesday November 20 2019, @08:09PM (1 child)

        by Hartree (195) on Wednesday November 20 2019, @08:09PM (#922572)

        I remember poking around in the results from using the bios dump utility that came with the Sourcer disassembler.

        I knew there were some alternate bios-es around, but never messed with them myself.

        • (Score: 1) by anubi on Friday November 22 2019, @01:21AM

          by anubi (2828) on Friday November 22 2019, @01:21AM (#923255) Journal

          Those were the days!

          I could code up something for a factory using garden variety parts, have it work perfectly from then on.

          Now, Micrium OS on specialized hardware, or maybe propeller chips, are my last resort to counter the morning surprise when it's discovered the system updated last night, or some hacker has taken an interest in our system.

          --
          "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday November 20 2019, @03:04PM (1 child)

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 20 2019, @03:04PM (#922380) Journal

      Yesss, I understand all of that. It makes perfect sense. But, isn't that kinda tangential to the point I was making? Your machines are already updated just as far as you need them to be updated, correct? If you have a stash of thirty machines sitting in the warehouse for the day your active machine(s) crap out, you need to be sure their BIOS's are all updated quickly! I'll repeat the bit about "no one sells these things any more" here.

      • (Score: 2) by Hartree on Wednesday November 20 2019, @08:02PM

        by Hartree (195) on Wednesday November 20 2019, @08:02PM (#922569)

        In a perfect world they'd already be updated. And for the systems I mentioned, we have preconfigured spare hard drives in storage that we test from time to time (or at least the IT guys say they do. So far it's been truthful. :) )

        In reality, I don't necessarily have any contact with the machine until $panicked-user calls me talking about a hard drive crash on a machine they utterly depend on. The answer to asking about backups is often a dumb look and, if I'm lucky, saying they think they can still find the original floppies/cd that came with it.

        Academic users, even ones with PhDs are often just as without clue as any others. I'm thinking that by now with all the digging I've had to do, I should have an honorary appointment in the archeology department.

  • (Score: 2) by dry on Wednesday November 20 2019, @05:14AM

    by dry (223) on Wednesday November 20 2019, @05:14AM (#922272) Journal

    I bought my old machine for $20 about a year ago, Q8800 based, it is plenty fast enough for my needs. Just the other day I was at Intel checking out a BIOS update (already has the latest). So they're still being sold on the second hand market and are plenty good enough for casual use.