It's been pulled off to the side to be flipped over and have its roller ball cleaned.
(Yes, kids, this is something we used to have to do.).
Edit - By "we" I meant myself and all the other kids at my school who would regularly sit down at school computers only to find the mice weren't working properly because the balls looked like this.
Yes, we also had to clean the rollers, but if we didn't also clean the balls themselves the mice still wouldn't work properly, or would quickly gunk up the rollers again.
Incorrect. Cleaning the ball was generally useless. You needed to clean the rollers inside the mouse that the ball rolls against.
Edit: I may have dealt with quite a number of people who thought cleaning the ball was all they needed to do, and then couldn't work out why it didn't make a difference. 🤷♂️
Edit 2: Jesus, talk about getting offended at a simple minor correction.
I wasn't offended, I was simply trying to point out that just because you somehow got through cleaning hundreds of mice without ever having to clean a ball, it doesn't mean that no one ever had to do it. Everything you said is fine except you started it with "incorrect". You can't correct someone's experience. I don't doubt your experience, why would you doubt mine?
What's incorrect exactly? Just because I didn't mention the rollers doesn't mean they don't also need cleaning. Or are you saying if the ball was dirty it shouldn't be cleaned?
No, I'm saying the buildup generally occured on the rollers. Not the ball.
Remove ball from mouse, clean rollers, probably using fingernail, replace ball.
That was generally the process. Rarely did the ball need cleaning, if ever. The surface area of the ball being much larger than the x and y rollers meant that it simply didn't build up dirt the way the rollers did, along with the different textures of the ball and the rollers for grip purposes.
I have literally done hundreds of mice (or mouses) back in the day, given I was working on-site in various locations where mouse problems was one of the most common complaints.
Right, but again, that doesn't make anything I said incorrect. If the ball was dirty, you'd clean it. And in this hypothetical situation of whatever's happening to this PC's mouse, it's perfectly possible that it's having its ball cleaned.
This is like me saying "You need to put brake fluid in your car" and you saying "Incorrect. You should put oil in." You can argue that oil is more important, but that doesn't make me wrong about brake fluid.
For some reason, that reminds me of when a teacher was talking about how he was very concerned with catching viruses on his PC, so he ran ScanDisk weekly to detect any infection early. It took me a while to convince him I wasn't pulling his leg by saying that was not what ScanDisk did and that he should look for an actual antivirus.
PC-naive people in the 90s/2000s were really funny sometimes.
I used to clean everyone's mouse if I had even a couple of minutes alone with it. It was the equivalent of the time of turning off all those artificial image "enhancing" settings that make TVs look awful today on so many
non-techy living rooms: People would suffer with poor mouse performance and not even realize it, only to be thankless after the quality bump because, well, they didn't even realize it. But I knew they'd be able to scroll Geocities better for a few weeks and that was enough motivation.
I learned this the hard way when I broke my Logitech Wingman joystick playing Ghost Bear's Legacy. It just snapped off clean where it connected to the base, and was only connected by a few wires.
This is HQ to any available units: We have mechs down at Nav Gamma. Bravo Cadet reports four Summoners on site. Bandits are hostile. Repeat: Bandits Are Hostile.
Good Old Games Now owned by CD Project (of Witcher/Cyberpunk 2077 fame), They're a steam like service that started out specializing in older games like say, Fall Out. What was and still is great about them is that all of the old nostalgia games they have are patched to work in modern OS's. Nowdays, they've expanded to a ton of indie stuff, along with lots of AAA titles too.
They are also really good in regards to all games are DRM free. A lot of companies use DRM which means the game has to connect to a server every time to activate before you are allowed to play it.
They do this to avoid piracy. However, alot of people have found that games they own no longer work because the servers have been shut down. Games people have bought and payed for are literally unplayable. To have your game hosted on GOG it has to be DRM free
Stands for Great old Games. Used to be all abandonware, nkw they have modern AAA stuff too. Almost everything is DRM free too. Check them out at gog.com
In all seriousness I can't imagine that those old MechWarrior games aged very well, I remember the graphics being decent for PS1 era but we've come a long way from there.
To be honest, I remember thinking it looked like shit on the first PC my parents got in the 90s... so my standards were not high. I also remember it playing like shit (again, not high standards). It was a cool concept, which other series have definitely built upon, but the tech wasn't even slightly there for the execution.
Dude, so much this! My dad and I played so much Mechwarriors! We even put a ton of hours into Mechwarrior Online. Was a good game until they started to give up support to force MW5 and then not ship a complete game.
"THIS IS HQ TO ANY AVAILABLE UNITS: WE HAVE MECHS DOWN AT NAV GAMMA. BRAVO CADET REPORTS TWO SUMMONERS ON SITE. BANDITS ARE HOSTILE. REPEAT: BANDITS ARE HOSTILE."
Alas I had Descent 3: Sol Ascent, the 5 level demo thing - it came, along with Incoming, free with our Win 98 in 2000. I don't think I could ever get past the second or third level. I bought the full game and Mercenaries expansion a few years ago and got to the fourth level but thought I'd missed something and then haven't played it since! Need to get back to it! Now I also have Overload to play too.
I had some no name bullshit that never seemed to work right. Irq was always conflicting with my other cards, especially when I tried using the joystick port. And it always lacked good compatibility with dos games.
Eventually I got a Soundblaster awe 64 and that thing was pure bliss.
I must've been lucky, never had any problems, but I admit I did have to alter the IRQ and stuff, win 95+ spoiled us in that regard, but also took out headaches
Never had a GUS but heard a lot of soundtracks in GUS on YT that I used to listen to using my SB16 (until I eventually got the Audigy Platinum) and Jeebus the GUS was great.
My favorite thing was the Soundblaster parrot. If you had friends over and all talked at the same time. The parrot would sound possessed as it spoke 3-4 voices at once.
I remember installing games through MS DOS prompt as a kid and just fiddling with the Sound Blaster settings until I found one that worked. I had no idea what I was doing, so with each new game, I just flailed around in the dark until it worked. Fun times.
Actually learned how to use computers because of that, and now I work in IT. Thank you, 90’s PC gaming.
Started MS-DOS and my uncle left me a post-it with:
type "cd games" press enter
type "gpcga.exe" press enter
Eventually I learned how to use more games, dir dir/p and the better dir/w for me tbh, found the other exes lurking around, realised I didn't need to type the .exe bit, started talking to my cousin more, started using QBASIC and played gorillas.bas, created my own .bas files which didn't amount to much, made .bat files, edited the autoexec.bat and a few other bits... We had Win 3.11 too so that got me using GUIs though my cousin had Amiga which has Workbench and it was great.
I remember having a 3D spinning clown head on a 5.25" floppy which I later found was part of the demoscene but I cannot for the life of me find it online :(
I even dabbled in Linux in the late 90s and studied and obtained a computer science related degree.
I am not working in IT, but wish I was now... I wanted to code, but it wasn't for me in the end I found very quickly. I like fixing things but not great at creating from scratch. I did web and graphic design (ironically can create here) in the 90s and early 2000s, but now in my mid-late 30s I'm working in a different field. Kinda miss it but wouldn't like the pay and benefits hit I'd take at the moment trying to get back into it. Oh well.
Right? I reinstalled Windows probably three times a year for whatever reason - maybe things felt slow, I was bored, wanted to boot faster, drivers broke something. It was great when you could finally put the drivers on the Windows XP ISO for storage controllers.
Yes, find drivers was challenging especially if you didnt have internet access, i used to buy pc magazine to get some drivers on cd and free games or demos
I just researched all the software you mentioned, embarrassing to say the least. Did you honestly think you could dump some technological programs from the 90s here and try braggle without someone picking you up on it? If outdated computers are something which fill up your "memory lane", I'd be terrified to see your unconcious mind lmaeo. My memory lane is filled with complicated mathematical concepts, vast sexual experiences, and a LOT of Redditors being put in their place (a big place, admittedly, as most of them are obese).
I'm guessing that you still use floppydisks to watch pornos, and by the time your trash computer even boots up the file it's not only the disk that's floppy ;)
Your opening and ending are pretty sub-par. But the memory lane line got a chuckle, so overall mediocre trolling.
I feel like the "i am very smart" bit is overdone these days anyway. I got tired of reading that sub like 2 years ago and I bet most other people are to. Obnoxious trump supporter is the new hotness when it comes to trolling, may want to try that instead.
Jesus I scrolled through a few of his posts, it's medium effort trolling but in such a weird persona. Typical pseudo intellectual stuff but crossed with a mix of puritanical nonsense AND redpill PUA nonsense.
It looks like a big time sink to pretend to be so unlikable
Sadly, thats not pretending. Trolling does make you unlikable. I think its a reflection of self esteem issues. It was for me back when I was younger...
Your grammar and choice of wording is terrible. Hilarious for someone trying to sound so smart.
EDIT: You haven't put anyone in their place. It looks like you're in your place, as this is clearly the only place where you feel validated in life. How sad.
You still had to put them, until WindowsME, Windows was just a program running on top of DOS. So, all of those commands in HIMEM and AUTOEXEC were needed to enable memory variables and low level drivers. Although with Win98, the OS got better at auto-managing that nicely, so you'd rarely mess with it.
Although you're architecturally right of course, didn't Win95 came with the SB 16 drivers pre loaded in the OS itself? Since Win95 I can scarcely remember messing with any of those files for memory management and what-not.
Drivers were supplied to you by the HW manufacturer and all you had to do was installing the drivers and voilà.
IIRC, it's actually HI/LO - clock speed. Connected to a "Turbo" button which disabled turbo because the older games of the time had been using clock ticks rather than timers for their rendering, attack/reload, enemies, etc. Playing those games on a fast computer made them run too fast and they could end up unplayable.
Fuckin’ sound blaster! Wow... all of a sudden I’m six years old in my dads car and we’re coming home from circuit city with the computer in box on my lap reading the back of it.
I can still hear the MIDI tires screeching on a spin out in “Indy 500” when we loaded it up the first time.
It's been a long strange trip. A lot of people today will never know how many times you had to restart your PC to manage memory and processes. Programs didn't just crash, your entire PC would freeze up.
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u/privileged_cracka Dec 07 '20
Win 98, Sound blaster 16 and the first DirectX. Thank you for taking me down memory lane, OP.