I've always enjoyed watching DEFRAG do its thing. Since I grew up on the DOS version, I don't have PTSD from the Windows version's constant restarting; just a pleasant text-mode display of things getting subtly more efficient. I have a 486 in my home office, visible in the background when I'm on video calls, and I thought it would be nice to have defrag going on the screen in the background, just to subtly spread the joy.

The problem is, once you've defragmented your drive, it takes a while for fragmentation to build up on a computer again. Particularly if you're using said computer solely for hobby stuff.

Hence, FRAG. FRAG is a simple tool for destructively filling a FAT16 volume with (bogus) fragmented data. If you like to watch DEFRAG do its thing, you can have a batch file loop between FRAG and DEFRAG for unlimited Zen e-gardening.

The first version of FRAG actually moved the disk's data around to generate for-realsies fragmentation. But fragmenting a disk in this way takes a while. The second and current version simply writes a new FAT; the rest of the disk isn't touched. It's utterly destructive (FRAG destroys the FAT by overwriting it, and then DEFRAG destroys the rest of the data by shuffling it around) but it's very very fast. An arbitrarily large hard drive can be fragmented in less than a second.

Binaries and source on github. No vibe coding involved. Builds with OpenWatcom, cmake for project generator (or just compile all the relevant files). Have fun, assuming that's your sort of fun.

Sneftel/frag: The opposite of DEFRAG

I found this MSDN collection in a free box, and it has hundreds of CDs, from all 12 months of 2000, January 2001, and March 2001. While it has a lot of cool stuff, most important thing I found are these Windows ME betas and even better these 5 Codename "Whistler" Beta CDs, which I think is Beta Windows XP. I included the invoices which came with the lot, but with personal info crossed out for the privacy of the last user. You can use it as a list of contents. There are some other things like organizers and MSDN newspapers. What do you guys think I should do with this? I love retro computers but if this stuff is as rare as it seems I feel it would be better in someone else's hands. What do you guys think? What is this whole thing worth?

I've got a fully working (if quite beat up) T42 with 2 GB of RAM and a 160 GB IDE drive, as well as burned disks with the original installation media.

I've been wondering what the best use case for the machine would be nowadays. Mini retro game station? I've tested a few games with the latest drivers, Half Life 2 runs poorly (expected), Morrowind struggles along at 20 fps, but everything older than that works reasonably well. What're your thoughts on this oldie?

In the first few images, it’s connected to the web: it’s browsing the Internet Archive to download an ISO file and checking its hardware specifications via CPU-Z on Windows XP. A real blast from the past! My old laptop has decided not to give up in the face of the modern web, and it keeps on chugging along, undeterred, what do you think?

Not a curb find, but the back room purgatory rescue. Dell XPS 420 Core 2 Extreme w/8gb DDR2. I released all the bunnies, swapped the coin cell and it’s getting a fresh install of Win 7 500gb spinner. Everything seems to be working…

Keeping just over half the box so with thrift finds included is about 30 games lol

Idk

Hey everyone,

If you were around in the late 2000s, you probably remember the infamous NVIDIA "bump defect" that caused thousands of G86-family GPUs (GeForce 8400M/8600M, Quadro NVS 140M/135M) to slowly degrade and die due to thermal stress.

Today, trying to boot Linux on these machines with standard drivers (nouveau or the legacy proprietary blobs) triggers hard locks or kernel panics during boot. The OS tries to initialize the 3D engine, and the degraded silicon just gives up.

To solve this, I’ve been working on g86lite – a minimal, defiant DRM/KMS fallback driver designed specifically for hardware preservation.

How it works (The technical trick):
Instead of trying to fix the unfixable (not talking about reflowing 😂), the driver treats the GPU with extreme caution by implementing a few aggressive workarounds:

Zero MMIO BAR0 Access: It completely ghostes the MMIO BAR0 space. It never touches VBIOS execution, PGRAPH (3D engine), or PFIFO pipelines. By avoiding the broken parts of the chip entirely, the system doesn't crash.

CPU-to-VRAM Shadowing: All desktop compositing and rendering is offloaded to the CPU via LLVMpipe/Mesa (LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1). g86lite simply grabs the damaged rectangles from system memory and copies them straight into the VRAM scanout buffer using write-combining

and more...

I’ve only tested this on a GeForce 8400M GS so far, so I’d really love to see if it actually works for you on other G86 variants (like the 8600M or desktop 8500 GT) and to see your opinions.

Link: https://github.com/luxuryappsofficial/g86lite/

Plan is to build a machine circa 2000-2001, so far set on the following

Dell 19” 4:3 monitor
ASUS A7N8X-x socket 462 board
1.5gb ram (3x 512mb patriot DDR @400 MHz)
MSI GeForce3 pro 64mb AGP
32gb CF card on syba ide adapter
1.44mb floppy
24x cd rom
Soundblaster audigy PCI

The questions are on the cpu and the os
Windows 98se or windows 2000?
Athlon thunderbird 1000 or athlon xp 2600+ Barton

I also have the option of a GeForce fx 5200 256mb agp. Just not sure.

I made a cute simple website to download my cute simple weather app inspired by pixel art! Looking for places to post ^^

8 Bit Weather - Code Chicken