Tell me about this computer in my grandmas basement

[-]

balding_git@reddit

well it’s a toshiba infinia 7202, with

• Intel 200MHz Pentium®Processor with MMX Technology • 32MB SDRAM (expandable to 256MB) • 4.0 billion byte (~3.73GB) hard disk drive • 16X CD-ROM • K56flex Modem • ATI RAGE II+ Graphics Controller • 2MB SGRAM Video Memory • 256KB L2 Plpelined Burst Cache

[-]

Tranka2010@reddit

Don't forget, bought at CompUSA.

[-]

seang86s@reddit

I used to build CompUSA's own brand with similar specs as this Toshiba. Great job during college days.

[-]

zmerlynn@reddit

I miss CompUSA. Well, I miss being near a Micro Center more at this point, but back in the day CompUSA was pretty solid.

[-]

IndianaJoenz@reddit

In the early 2000s CompUSA was my place to go see the latest Apple stuff. PoewrMac G4s, G4 Cubes, iMac G4s. Beautiufl.

2 years later, they still had those old computers on display. Never updated.

[-]

-IGadget-@reddit

I mostly loved the compusa returns shelf. All that open box tech by users not understanding what they bought.

[-]

HesSoZazzy@reddit

Remember those funky MMX commercials? They were great. :)

[-]

notoutofthewoods@reddit

Bunny suits!

[-]

Optimal_Law_4254@reddit

😂

[-]

evenyourcopdad@reddit

These are the most useless bytes I've ever downloaded from the internet. Please stop wasting people's bandwidth with comments like this.

[-]

zSmileyDudez@reddit

Came here for this

[-]

cookies5219@reddit

for some reason i thought this was a toaster/fridge from toshiba

[-]

Flybot76@reddit

How about YOU tell US about it since it's in YOUR possession? The info's right there on the box in a photo-- what else were you expecting? Try SEARCHING for info instead of expecting one dinky corner of the internet to respond to a so-what post. It's ridiculous how often people have these 'looky at picture, tell me about picture' crap posts wasting space in forums all the time while ignoring the abundance of info that already exists.

[-]

tyrandan2@reddit

Chill, bro. Some people aren't like us and they don't understand what they are looking at, so they don't even know what to Google. They just see numbers and words they don't recognize. Their brain doesn't know how to even begin parsing it.

Granted, they should try to be more technically literate, but all they did was ask a question, they didn't kill your dog. Not to mention I doubt many computer classes are teaching about 90s era tech these days anyways.

[-]

LowAspect542@reddit

Well first thing to do if you dont know a word is stick it in Google. They have plenty to start with, a whole bulletpointed list to work through. Also they arent completely clueless if they've identified it as a vintage computer, theyve already identified the context.

[-]

tyrandan2@reddit

Right, if I am completely computer illiterate, I'll just Google "what is a Pentium"

Next I'll Google "what is a mhz"

And next I'll Google "what is a MB"

And next I'll...

C'mon dude. Be realistic. It took years for us to acquire our knowledge and skill set. There's no reason to get prissy about people asking a simple question instead of spending months or longer to understand on their own what it is they are looking at.

[-]

LowAspect542@reddit

Nah, people gotta stop thinking other users are chatgpt and expecting spoonfed answers.

[-]

tyrandan2@reddit

This sub exists for people to ask questions my dude. If you are offended by people asking questions, you have a problem. You can choose to simply ignore it and move on. Their question does not in any way intrude into your personal life. The fact that you spent more time complaining about them asking a question than the time it would have taken to give a good faith answer just shows you have personal issues that you need to deal with. The person in the room loudly complaining about everyone else is the annoying one, not the person asking honest questions in good faith.

[-]

SirTwitchALot@reddit

Pretty run of the mill windows 95/98 system. This would make a nice retro gaming station

[-]

Taira_Mai@reddit

Needs more RAM if it can handle it.

[-]

giantsparklerobot@reddit

For Windows 98 you'll be fine with 32MB. More memory is fine but not strictly necessary. Unless you're using the machine to rip CDs while rendering scenes in 3D Studio while editing a novel in Word 97...you're unlikely to really be bottlenecked by the RAM.

[-]

p47guitars@reddit

My 486 has 32 MB of ram.

It doesn't hurt to have more.

[-]

alsoDivergent@reddit

640K should be enough for anyone... -BG

[-]

Evolution_eye@reddit

Oh yes, the sentence he never said.

Even more so it was not a software limitation but rather hardware limitation because it was correlated to 16-bit CPUs which had 640K of available address space. Nothing even related to Microsoft since they didn't develop hardware.

[-]

Wittyname0@reddit

Until you get to over 512mb. Then windows gets scared

[-]

p47guitars@reddit

Oh I know.

[-]

starcube@reddit

Actually, in many cases it does, especially on a 486. If you don't have enough cache memory on the board but too much RAM, the board will only cache the first 16MB of your 32MB, and if you ever need to use more than 16MB, your system will drastically slow down.

[-]

p47guitars@reddit

Well son of a bitch

[-]

starcube@reddit

The Moar You Know™

[-]

Alternative_Maize660@reddit

I upgraded my P166MMX to 64MB in 1997. It was not to much...

[-]

giantsparklerobot@reddit

Windows 9x unfortunately doesn't do much dynamic tuning when you add RAM. Without tuning Windows itself doesn't really take advantage of the extra RAM. The system will be more responsive if the added RAM keeps applications from paging but the base system speed won't improve.

However if you edit the System.ini to adjust the Vcache settings Windows will use more RAM as the disk cache. Additionally adjusting the NameCache and PathCache values using the File System settings to set the use to "Network Server". These improve base Windows performance a lot when you have more RAM available and aren't things Windows can do for itself.

No cache settings will get more FLOPS out of the CPU or make streaming disk reads go faster. They will however make it so Windows itself reads less often from the disk for a lot of low level record keeping. Reading from disk is orders of magnitude slower than reading from RAM so saved trips to the disk for frequent events add up to a faster responding system.

[-]

Dizzy_Elderberry_486@reddit

I can hear the disk thrashing as your describing those tasks running at the same time.

[-]

SirTwitchALot@reddit

More RAM is never a bad thing, but I only had 16MB around the time when this came out. I managed OK

[-]

Romymopen@reddit

I remember buying an 8mb stick of ram for my first computer when I was 18. I went to Circuit City and they asked me if I wanted the extended warranty. I was new into computers so I stopped to think about it. This little chubby kid, maybe 9 years old, was standing next to the register and he looks at me at says, "Mister, that RAM will be obsolete before you'll ever use that warranty."

I told the cashier I was gonna pass on that warranty and thanked the kid. He taught me a life lesson that day. I like to think of him as a little warranty fairy. I'm sure the cashier hated him.

[-]

IndianaJoenz@reddit

Lmao. That kid was my spirit animal.

[-]

qpqpdbdbqpqp@reddit

doesn't "need" it

[-]

tweakybiscuit23@reddit

If indeed there is one inside that box!

[-]

lordofthedrones@reddit

Needs a Voodoo 1 and it is set.

[-]

stq66@reddit

Thought the same. Or a Voodoo II would also fit. I had a II on my Pentium 200MMX. My first self assembled PC.

The ATI Rage II was a dog

[-]

lordofthedrones@reddit

The Rage II was good for 2D, really good. But yes, a voodoo would be perfect.

[-]

stq66@reddit

True. I was referring to the nascent 3D game ecosystem

[-]

doll-haus@reddit

That "Intouch module" is interesting. I don't know, but I suspect that's one of the weird add-on devices that was meant to let you check email without actually booting the machine. The nature of such things was highly variable, but they make for particularly weird devices in my experience.

[-]

AveRage-or_human@reddit (OP)

This was genuinely helpful. I was searching up Toshiba 7202 but didn’t get much of anything. The 7202 must be a version of the 7200 but with the in touch module.

[-]

codefenix@reddit

Why don't you tell us about it?

Fire it up and tell us how it goes.

[-]

Diligent-Argument-88@reddit

As if? Just tell me the important parts like how much I can sell it for.

[-]

AveRage-or_human@reddit (OP)

Realest shit I’ve read in this entire comment section

[-]

DarkerJ@reddit

I would maybe upgrade it to 128 MB of RAM. 32 ought to be okay, but the more the merrier. You’ll want to upgrade the CPU before going beyond 128 MB. Other than that, a PCI graphics card (maybe a Radeon 9200?), PCI USB card for getting files in and out easily and of course, solid state that storage. I’d recommend using like a 16 GB CF card or so.

[-]

MasterKnight48902@reddit

Average Windows 95 PC

[-]

webfootedwombat@reddit

What do you want us to tell you about it? All the specs are right there in plan sight. Are you confused when the sun comes up every morning? When the sun comes up but it’s not very bright that’s called being cloudy. It doesn’t mean the suns on dim mode.

[-]

Disinto@reddit

Omg I had forgotten about that beauty. I wanted it so badly when it was released. Beautiful design.

[-]

Olleye@reddit

Yeah, the „Touch of tomorrow“, from some years ago.

[-]

Away-Squirrel2881@reddit

I didn’t even know that Toshiba made computers

[-]

MBSMD@reddit

It's a paperweight.

[-]

-IGadget-@reddit

The best thing you can do is see if the bundled software and hardware cd's are present and toss them up on the internet archive.

[-]

Dog_vomit_party@reddit

Roller Coaster Tycoon 1 is gonna look so good on that

[-]

boluserectus@reddit

4.0 billion bytes man!

[-]

duckliin@reddit

thats way to much

[-]

Optimal_Law_4254@reddit

Yeah. Especially when you’re used to a 5MB full height Winchester.

[-]

Inevitable-Study502@reddit

how would you fit windows 95 on such drive :D

[-]

bluechickenz@reddit

My first win95 machine had a 500MB drive.

[-]

Optimal_Law_4254@reddit

I think I still have my first thumb drive. 256K.

[-]

iMadrid11@reddit

I remember spending $90 for a 1Gb Sandisk SD card for storage on a Palm Zire 71. I just laugh at how expensive that was. When you compare how cheap they are today.

[-]

homeguitar195@reddit

My dad put a 256mb SD into his Palm m505, just two years before the Zire 71 came out and that 256mb cost $90 then. Amazing how fast flash storage was getting cheaper in the early 2000s.

[-]

GareththeJackal@reddit

My stepdad bought us a new computer when I was a young teen. It had a 15GB hard drive and I remember thinking THAT IS INSANE! IT IS IMPOSSIBLE ANYONE COULD EVER FILL THAT!

[-]

mimavox@reddit

Isn't it quite odd that they chosed to spell it out in bytes like that?

[-]

Vinylmaster3000@reddit

I guess to make it appeal more, it's like saying the Commodore 64 has 64,000 bytes of ram instead of 64kb, more numbers = more power

[-]

Romymopen@reddit

Over 500,000 bits!

[-]

Ryokurin@reddit

While the lawsuits didn't happen until a few years later, they probably did it because a growing complaint that people had at the time when a hard drive was marketed as a 7GB drive but after formatting it was 6.4GB, maybe even appearing less than that due to how Windows counted bytes compared to the manufacturers.

Toshiba was sued, like most of the large manufactures were over it in the early 00s.

[-]

LowAspect542@reddit

And yet, they still continue marketing drives in this manner.

[-]

mimavox@reddit

Ah, good point.

[-]

nullstuff@reddit

Read it in Tesla's sales manager voice

[-]

Key_Hamster9189@reddit

That's 4,194,304 KB or 2,845 floppies. Wow!

[-]

Lazy_Ad_2192@reddit

Weak. I have a 2.2 trillion byte (2 TB) SSD in mine!

[-]

Fart_Bargo@reddit

You'll never fill that baby up.

[-]

monsterzro_nyc@reddit

well you can reach out to Donald Trump on it! Toshiba Infinia Commercian with Donald Trump

[-]

PunkyB88@reddit

Thanks for posting that I was wondering what the in touch unit did although I guess at least it did CD multimedia. The answering machine is pretty cool.

[-]

VivienM7@reddit

ATI Rage II+ was not exactly known for its good drivers... otherwise it seems like a middle of the road 1997ish system. Maybe a little more than middle of the road.

I am very intrigued by the "InTouch Module" though.

[-]

RupeThereItIs@reddit

200mhz in '97 was a tad above middle of the road.

133mhz was kinda middle of the road that year.

Source, I bought a PC to take with me to college in '97, it 12 133mhz and all I could afford.

[-]

PunkyB88@reddit

It was crazy how fast things were moving back then.

[-]

VivienM7@reddit

I wonder if this could be closer to 1998 then? I had a Rage II+ on an Acer IBM Aptiva K6, same as this, in May 1998. Came with 48 megs of RAM (16 more than here), 4 gig HD, etc. And that was not a high end system.

[-]

kwazycake@reddit

might be a toshiba, idk.

[-]

JustinMagill@reddit

Would make a decent vintage gaming rig.

[-]

EposVox@reddit

It’s a computer

[-]

ImHiiiiiiiiit@reddit

That k56flex was pre V.90. You'll have to check with Motorola and see if they're still ordering the software upgrade to V.90 on that modem.

[-]

HungryHungryMarmot@reddit

I remember this. Beedle everybody settled on v.90, there were two competing 56kbps standards, one of them being k56flex. IIRC the order was called x2. It was a real headache for ISPs, since the two standards weren’t compatible.

[-]

Baselet@reddit

Boy did they drop conns all the time. Hateful things.

[-]

ImHiiiiiiiiit@reddit

Yes, US Robotics had X2. AOL has to offer both k56flex and X2 dial in numbers until v.90 was rolled out.

[-]

Ok-Hotel-8551@reddit

You can play Quake on it.

[-]

Technical-Escape9596@reddit

i miss that game. Played many nights in college. Lights out with Trent Reznor soundtrack and sound effects was a little creepy. I loved it.🤙

[-]

rednifegnar@reddit

32 000 000 000 bits :D

[-]

TitusImmortalis@reddit

It's a Toshiba Infinia 7202
200MHz Pentium with 32MB SDRAM and a \~3.7GB HDD, 16x CD-ROM and a 2MB ATi Rage II+ GPU.

Glad I could help!

[-]

farbeyondriven@reddit

Did you know there's a computer in your grandma's basement?

[-]

-IGadget-@reddit

To use this computer you'll need to use the things they put on the A+ test. IRQ, DMA and I/O addressing.

[-]

nix206@reddit

Config.sys here we go!

[-]

c0burn@reddit

If this is the black model i think thats fairly rare and interesting as it came out during peak beige

[-]

-IGadget-@reddit

I miss the days of 4 billion byte harddrives. It seemed like such a massive amount of storage. Then I started working in publishing and learned that its not quite a lot.

[-]

aurizz84@reddit

Win 98 gem. I am looking for nearly exact setup for my retro battlestation

[-]

tbt10f@reddit

Unless you took it out of the box it's really a box filled with old beach towels and fanny packs. Ka-ching!

[-]

kma311323@reddit

What's that CompUSA price tag say?

[-]

new2bay@reddit

About tree fiddy

[-]

nah1982@reddit

$100

[-]

superdefence@reddit

I am pretty sure that the motherboard is an OEM Intel board and possibly built for Toshiba in their now-closed DuPont, Washington assembly plant. I think it has the Intel Triton TX chipset on it.

[-]

golieth@reddit

sounds like a solid system for the time. Google the gMes released that year and you will know what it will run

[-]

ultrafop@reddit

You posted the hardware profile so not sure what else you’d need to know

[-]

TkachukMitts@reddit

Great system for early-mid 1997.

[-]

tyrandan2@reddit

Does it make anyone else depressed to realize that was nearly 30 years ago?

No? Just me?

[-]

Worth_it_I_Think@reddit

no

[-]

DarthRevanG4@reddit

It has a 200MHz Pentium MMX, and a Rage II+ GPU probably on the board. Don't know if it has AGP or not, probab;y not though. Either way a PCI Rage 128, Radeon 7000, or Geforce 2mx would all be solid upgrades for it.

It has some amount of RAM, hopefully more than 32MB. It may support more than 256MB too, a lot of times manufacturers wouldn't put something that didn't widely exist at the time. It could possibly work with 512MB-1GB, depending on how many slots are in it. Or not.

[-]

Guilty-Shoulder-9214@reddit

Pretty standard for the age and well before Toshiba turned to shit in the 2010s.

[-]

rmbarrett@reddit

I can tell you about the era. It was a time when desktops were designed as though they were household appliances. That's why the display and control panel on the front. It caught on for a while, but they just didn't serve much of a purpose back then.

[-]

geforce2187@reddit

Around 1997 looking quick at the specs

[-]

chandleya@reddit

Probably a hundred bucks with patience. If it had a working matching monitor a little more. Will be brutal to ship .. there are lots of vintage groups and forums though

[-]

swizzle_@reddit

That's not a computer. It's a box.

[-]

_-Kr4t0s-_@reddit

The 200MHz Pentium MMX was top of the line at one point. 32MB of RAM was also pretty much the highest you’d see on gaming systems.

The video card was one of the better ones, at least until the Voodoo card came out and dominated. This system would have been a great candidate for that upgrade.

56k modems came in different flavors. If you’re going to attempt to use it you should read that.

[-]

phire@reddit

Top of the line in Mid 1996.

Based on my search in google books, this computer model seems to date to early 1998 (or December 1997). The Pentium II out was already out in at 300Mhz (or 333Mhz if you waited to the end of January 1998). You could get a 233Mhz or 266MHz Pentium MMX.

I think it still counts as a high-end computer for early 1998, especially with that pipelined L2 cache (or at least upper-mid range)

[-]

m_balloni@reddit

I had a MMX 233MHZ with 128MB Ram, this was right into my heart ❤️

It brought back many memories.

[-]

Rotflmaocopter@reddit

Never obsolete

[-]

schmosef@reddit

This would make for a great retro gaming system.

Must have been an expensive pc in its day.

[-]

Academic-Airline9200@reddit

needs a 10/100 and you're good to go.

[-]

IntroductionFluffy97@reddit

Ohh la la !!!!

Intel Pentium 200 !!!

With mmx technology!!!

It was a roll Royce back In the day !!!

[-]

BigMack1986@reddit

this would be a fun machine to tinker with that is what i think. you should do an unboxing video and some photos my Freind,

[-]

Gamer7928@reddit

Besides the specs as shown on the side of the box in your second pic? I'd say your grandmothers Pentium-powered PC was truly a powerhouse in it's day and deserves to be played on again! Enjoy the system OP!!!

[-]

Fine-Funny6956@reddit

Judging by the picture, it probably wants you to kiss it’s shiny metal ass

[-]

Jorgenreads@reddit

Hold on to it for 100 years ( by then it’s not e-waste anymore)

[-]

rgshollow@reddit

I envy you! I had one of these when I was in college and I loved it! Had the giant black monitor that came with it too and the intouch panel which for its time as very bad ass! It was a beast and I regret not hanging onto it:(

[-]

rog-uk@reddit

I am old enough that this isn't retro to me, and I'm not 50 yet. Still a nice find :-)

[-]

mousepad1234@reddit

I used to have one of these! Mine had a 2gb hard drive and ran Win95. Picked it up at a flea market for $20 back when I was 13, but the guy saw I wanted to get it working and gave me $10 back. With luck it's still at my parents house up north, but idk if they've thrown it out or not. Mine once had a TV tuner and modem in it (factory installed), but they were removed before I got it. Loved that PC though, it was the second oldest in my collection.

[-]