p4.html

The garage computing effort has been financed and kept running by the generous donations of junk made to the Great God of Cargo. Offerings to the great Cargo God are made by zealots that leave large sacrificial metal containers on the side of the road or in corporate parking lots. Every 12 moons the city elders invoke the Great Cargo God by impressing on all good citizens the need to leave their cargo by the side of the road where ravenous trucks devour household effects on behalf of the God of Cargo. ( and sadly the Demon of Profligate Waste)

Given the now rather venerable age of the Intel P4 it may seem surprising that I have not yet picked up a P4 based PC carcass yet. It is true that I have picked up and examined a fairly large number of P4 based PCs but they were all discarded for a genuine reason, they were actually disfunctional, and were not discarded simply because they were no longer bright and shiny. It must also mean that for the average consumer even a 1.5Ghz P4 has adaquate performance for even the the most bloaty of Micro$ofts applications.

On the most recent hard rubbish collection I wondered past yet another PC carcass. Oh! , a P4 , and probably dead, I mused to myself. She-who-must-be-obeyed who was with me looking out for discarded dolls noticed my sideways glance at this carcass and sternly indicated that further attention to this item would not be tolerated. So I again wondered past later in the night and removed this motherboard. Most P4 motherboards that come my way like this are truly disfunctional. It appears that the earlier northbridge chips would simply overheat, or on board regulator would fail as indicated by blown filter capacitors near the P4 socket. By far the large the greatest reason that P4 motherboards are discarded is because they require the contemptible RAMBUS memory modules. I let these boards continue their journey to landfill and rightfully so. Even now a 128M RAMBUS module still costs nearly $100. Just who were they trying to fool anyway ?