cabbitzilla (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cabbitzilla) wrote2005-02-01 09:00 pm
cabbitzilla) wrote2005-02-01 09:00 pm
In the 'I'm still not dead' category...
Most of today was spent doing surgery on the oldest of my operational machines. Christened 'FrankenPC' forever ago due to the horrible mismatched conglomeration it was, it'd been limping along and finally never turned back on after the last power failure. The near constant struggle to keep it functional as everything in it passed well beyond obsolete had gotten to be too much.
FrankenPC is now being re-Christened 'Goliath'... named for the size (and mammoth weight) of the mid-thigh-high steel server case I inherited from Jason when he decided it was too heavy to carry back out of my house to his car. No, I'm not kidding; most cases (at least nowadays) are aluminum and plastic.... this one's steel, except for the adjustable feet underneath it. It's a mere two inches shorter than my desk, if that gives you any idea, and has a drive cage big enough to house five optical/full sized drives, one 3.5" external bay, and mounts for up to seven 3.5" hard drives... and bolt points for a secondary drive cage. Of course, you'd need that custom quad-fan 750w PSU to drive it all, but still...
At any rate, the RivaTNT video card's been replaced by a still-obsolete-but-supported GeForce2 MX400, the over a decade old 3C509-C has been replaced by a slightly newer Intel 82556-based NIC, 192mb RAM (3 64mb PC100 SDRAM bars) has been updated to 512mb RAM (1 256mb and 2 128mb bars), the Creative SB16-Value Edition's been replaced by the SoundBlaster Live! and Live!drive, and an additional 70mm fan has been mounted to cool a problem hotspot on the front lower cooler where the LED headers are. It doesn't help the buzzsaw roar of it a bit, but it runs stable now under even the heaviest load... it used to do a spontaneous reboot when the CPU load crested 92% because of the heat surge.
Yes, a heat surge. It's an Athlon-based system, but it's not the Socket A that most folk think of. It's one of the original Athlon's... the Slot A format. Worse, it's a Thunderbird processor, which ran ... 20% hotter? 22% hotter? something like that. So it's a warm critter to start with... add in the 950mhz clock speed and the 'Enhanced' monicker that noted a doubled cache, and you've got a rare beasty. From what I've been told, only 250 of these beasts (Athlon Thunderbird 950 Enhanced) got made, and lucky me I inherited it during an upgrade I did for a friend. There's only one mainboard that'll even support the 950... GigaByte's GA-7IXE. And (of course) only one of the Slot 1/Slot A coolers will keep the monster below thermal shutdown levels: Thermaltake's Slot A version of the Golden Orb. By the time I had a mainboard and CPU cooler for the chip, Slot A format was history and forgotten by most... but I can't bring myself to abandon a machine that's running at near 1ghz, which is why I'd been slowly gathering the bits and pieces to try and renew it a bit. But the damned thing is so loud that I can't sleep with it running... and any time the power waffles I get treated to ten minutes of the mainboard's heat siren informing me that things are a mite warm down processor street.
Yes, I'm babbling. Either keep reading or just skip it.
It'd been running Windows NT Server 4sp6 when I last shut it down. Of course, Microsoft is no longer doing support -or- patches -or- security fixes for NT 4 unless you pay them, so it got freshened to XP Pro. Once the security patches were all in place, it got an install of the RO client I use. All the hardware works; there're no little yellow bangs or question marks anywhere, and I even took the time to hook all the LEDs up again. Sounds like a 727 powering up for takeoff, but short of installing a liquid cooling setup that's simply not going to change. *dreams briefly of water cooling and overclocking* Anyway...
*sigh* And none of this really matters to anyone but me. I'm still nowhere near 'social' yet... this is mostly just rattling at myself. I keep wondering what it's going to take to break this and put things back to some semblance of normal, but thus far I've gotten little indication. I guess I'll go stomp spores for a bit.
FrankenPC is now being re-Christened 'Goliath'... named for the size (and mammoth weight) of the mid-thigh-high steel server case I inherited from Jason when he decided it was too heavy to carry back out of my house to his car. No, I'm not kidding; most cases (at least nowadays) are aluminum and plastic.... this one's steel, except for the adjustable feet underneath it. It's a mere two inches shorter than my desk, if that gives you any idea, and has a drive cage big enough to house five optical/full sized drives, one 3.5" external bay, and mounts for up to seven 3.5" hard drives... and bolt points for a secondary drive cage. Of course, you'd need that custom quad-fan 750w PSU to drive it all, but still...
At any rate, the RivaTNT video card's been replaced by a still-obsolete-but-supported GeForce2 MX400, the over a decade old 3C509-C has been replaced by a slightly newer Intel 82556-based NIC, 192mb RAM (3 64mb PC100 SDRAM bars) has been updated to 512mb RAM (1 256mb and 2 128mb bars), the Creative SB16-Value Edition's been replaced by the SoundBlaster Live! and Live!drive, and an additional 70mm fan has been mounted to cool a problem hotspot on the front lower cooler where the LED headers are. It doesn't help the buzzsaw roar of it a bit, but it runs stable now under even the heaviest load... it used to do a spontaneous reboot when the CPU load crested 92% because of the heat surge.
Yes, a heat surge. It's an Athlon-based system, but it's not the Socket A that most folk think of. It's one of the original Athlon's... the Slot A format. Worse, it's a Thunderbird processor, which ran ... 20% hotter? 22% hotter? something like that. So it's a warm critter to start with... add in the 950mhz clock speed and the 'Enhanced' monicker that noted a doubled cache, and you've got a rare beasty. From what I've been told, only 250 of these beasts (Athlon Thunderbird 950 Enhanced) got made, and lucky me I inherited it during an upgrade I did for a friend. There's only one mainboard that'll even support the 950... GigaByte's GA-7IXE. And (of course) only one of the Slot 1/Slot A coolers will keep the monster below thermal shutdown levels: Thermaltake's Slot A version of the Golden Orb. By the time I had a mainboard and CPU cooler for the chip, Slot A format was history and forgotten by most... but I can't bring myself to abandon a machine that's running at near 1ghz, which is why I'd been slowly gathering the bits and pieces to try and renew it a bit. But the damned thing is so loud that I can't sleep with it running... and any time the power waffles I get treated to ten minutes of the mainboard's heat siren informing me that things are a mite warm down processor street.
Yes, I'm babbling. Either keep reading or just skip it.
It'd been running Windows NT Server 4sp6 when I last shut it down. Of course, Microsoft is no longer doing support -or- patches -or- security fixes for NT 4 unless you pay them, so it got freshened to XP Pro. Once the security patches were all in place, it got an install of the RO client I use. All the hardware works; there're no little yellow bangs or question marks anywhere, and I even took the time to hook all the LEDs up again. Sounds like a 727 powering up for takeoff, but short of installing a liquid cooling setup that's simply not going to change. *dreams briefly of water cooling and overclocking* Anyway...
*sigh* And none of this really matters to anyone but me. I'm still nowhere near 'social' yet... this is mostly just rattling at myself. I keep wondering what it's going to take to break this and put things back to some semblance of normal, but thus far I've gotten little indication. I guess I'll go stomp spores for a bit.
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The iMac here has one of those. :o/
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Under normal circumstances, the Radeon 7000 would've replaced the GF2 in Goliath... but the driver finagling that had been necessary to get the GF2 working in the first place left doubts that it could be cleanly uninstalled and I really didn't want to have to do another reinstall.
And we won't even begin to discuss the Diamond Viper 770 Ultra, Diamond Viper 550, Diamond Stealth 2000 TV, trio of Tseng 9000's I have sitting in a drawer...
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The Radeon 9200 in this iBook is a bit disappointing for a brand-new machine, but it is Apple's bottom of the line laptop, so I can't expect much. Better'n PC low-end laptops, which have those horrible built-in chipsets...
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It came to me from a (quite talented) artist who'd used it for ages as her primary machine... and in its prime, it was a solid performer. But I think she's using a 1.4ghz-or-so Sony Vaio/Viao/whatever nowadays. It's a good little machine, but where I'd need an extra workhorse would be for video compression runs... and it'd take forever. So it sits in my closet and looks lonely. Poor little devil deserves better... I'm hoping to get my hands on a four port KVM, and maybe then it'll become the linux box I'm wanting...
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Good to hear from you, Elisabeth. I understand you're not feeling too communicative, so I really appreciate your posting on LJ.
I think I can beat that clunker... I've got a machine downstairs that nobody can bear to get rid of because of all the files, but is so old and overloaded to be useless.
It is an IBM PC. That's not what kind of machine it is -- that's really what it is. An original IBM PC, upgraded with the full memory complement of 640K with three different RAM cards; an an amazing 720K floppy bodged into place with a nonstandard card, special bios extension, and DOS 5.0 runtime; the optional battery-backed clock wedged between the motherboard and the bios chip, a 20MB MFM hard drive absolutely full to the gills with documents -- 0 bytes free! -- and last but not least, the 80286 bus-master board with which one last gasp of performance was squeezed from this unhappy machine. There are no slots left free. This box saw continuous office use from 1981 or so straight until 1996, after which it was replaced by a snappy P133.
I don't think I'm going to be running linux on that one anytime soon.
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For I posess ... Dun, dun, dunnnn... An Apple I.
No, not in a wooden box. Not with a keyboard. Not *assembled*. It's an Apple I. In counterstatic baggies. If I put it together, think it'll run?