Carrotjuice

she came with the video card, hard drive, and floppy drive stripped, and the sound card installed was a cheap no-name card that replicated the ports on the motherboard. the original beige dvd-rom has been a bit iffy for a while, so it's been supplimented by another beige dvd-rom i picked up at VCF a few years ago. the hard drive situation was at first remedied by a CF adapter, since i liked the idea of installing a bunch of different OSes and experimenting with each of them. eventually tho, the cramped space of most of my CF cards pushed me to install a 200gb drive for program and game storage. the CF card has been in there for nearly 3 years at this point, and i've not swapped OSes since the first few weeks of having it, so i'm thinking of replacing it with a 128gb SSD of some sort, so i don't have to perform so much file shuffling or worrying about program install location.

the graphics card is something else i'm less than happy with. the geforce fx 5500 is quite speedy for the games i'm playing on this, and it was a good price when i bought it (only $30 shipped, which was about my max budget for it), i'm not super happy with it, partially cuz it's technically uninteresting, and partially cuz it's a bunch newer than i'm aiming for with this machine. i'm a bit weird about getting matching parts and accessories for my machines, and part of that extends to the parts inside. the fx 5500 was released in 2004, and since i'm aiming for late 2001-early 2002 for carrotjuice, i would really be happier with a radeon 9700 or a geforce 4ti. those options are quite expensive these days, however, so the fx will be in there for the foreseeable future.

the sound card is now a creative audigy 1, with a front panel off a sound blaster live that i picked up for cheap at VCF. i don't have enough power jacks of the right type to power the live drive and the CF card adapter at the same time, but i have tested the front ports while booting off a cd and they do work at least! just need to locate some adapter cables for everything now. the primary reasons for picking the audigy were the firewire port on back, since i have so many firewire drives for my macs, and eax 3, which i got incredibly curious about when i was shopping for sound cards. the surround and all the fancy audio ports are wasted on me, but i'm not complaining. it has remarkably clear audio, and if i ever get some speakers set up the rear outputs will be nice to have.

i've been incredibly happy building and running carrotjuice this whole time, tho windows 98 and me have tested my patience more times than i can count. i tend to enjoy older operating systems, but getting this one pulled together in terms of drivers and essential software has been quite a struggle at times. part of this is coming from the mac, where tons of software is available easily, including tons of old versions, and part of it is the various unofficial patches and community upgrades that i tried to install at first, but there is also some of it that's just down to windows 98 being old and rather unstable. sound drivers were particularly messy by my memory. on the other hand, it's been nearly 3 years since i got that all sorted out. i've just pulled carrotjuice out of storage after at least a year, and i'm enjoying using old windows a lot more.

since getting her back out, i've changed up the window theme, picked a new background, added a bunch of utility software, imported music, and really made carrotjuice feel like home. i've also swapped the explorer to spatial mode, cuz i've been seriously enjoying that on my macs lately, so i figured it'd be good under windows as well, and i was right. she's a lovely machine to work from. one of my few complaints is that the video drivers don't seem to support the native resolutions of any of my working monitors, which makes everything look just a bit fuzzy and off. i'm def in the market for a new monitor for her, or potentially even try to fix the big crt i've got sitting around.

otherwise my complaints are incredibly minimal, and i'm quite happy working on her and using, her, going as far as to go looking for reasons to fire her up. in the process of writing this page i managed to blow up her original psu, and ended up replacing it with a more modern one i had kicking around. this has worked well so far, but it doesn't have nearly enough molex or floppy power plugs, so i'm going to have to replace it eventually. i think i'm going to use that opporitunity to fix up a number of long-standing issues, so she will hopefully be feeling rather polished by the time i'm done with her. i will update this page when i do.