Been quite a while since I've wrote in this blog but that was because I was going around with school, work and other more important things and besides I had nothing really techy to talk about until now.
Just a few days ago I bought a desktop, nicknamed Anubis from now on, from a friend, this is probably the most advanced desktop I've ever owned as I transitioned to laptops quite a while back, and I was surprised by the casing itself which looks like some sort of ship, specs were quite nice actually and once I added a few hard drives, a DVD reader and installed Windows XP, because I wanted to try my hand at something a little bit more flexible for this baby, everything looked great except for the fact that when I tried to turn it on it just wasn't working and playing around with it got it to work but I wasn't 100% sure what the reason was.
Forward two weeks later and it goes completely dead again but this time nothing I do will turn it on and it isn't until the damn things blasts my hand, the PSU that is, that I decide I've had it with the thing and decide to return it although there was the additional solution of trying another PSU but I wasn't sure I had anything for this one, specially since that PSU was 650 watts and had cables going everywhere, but fortunately I found that there was, in between all the trash I keep from old computers that I dismantle when I can't sell them, a PSU that could fit and could work for this mobo.
Two minutes later this baby is running perfectly fine, as a matter of fact it's better than before, and I just got enough cables in it to connect everything without leaving anything flying around which makes me very happy since I hate seeing crap flying around and even though it's a meager 200/300 watts PSU it is just what I needed. All in all it seems investing in ancient technology does serve you in the end!
Showing posts with label AMD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AMD. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Saturday, July 16, 2011
eMachines keeps trolling me after so many years
I have been doing IT for some 7 years now, like I've mentioned a couple of times, in different fields which range from Call Center Technical Support, the cheapo and fancy version, up to personal support to customers and companies that range between your mom and pops business up to the thousands of employees Corporation, and never have I personally found something as disgusting or annoying as an eMachines Desktop.
Yes I get the point about building affordable systems for the common user but for the love of whatever it is that you praise do it right man and I am dead serious here.
All this comes here for one reason. Two days ago I bought this old L7VMM MOBO from the guy that gives me the old computers I refurbish and let me tell you that these two last days have been terror and horror to me but also they have provoked me to look for answers to things I had previously learned and with that I had forgotten since I never used them.
I couldn't quite remember how to format a PC from a floppy, yes I am serious about the floppy thing and I have a bunch of them stored in a box, and it has been a while since I saw a FAT32 Partition in something that isn't a USB drive. That said it's also been years since I've seen a K7 in use, an AMD Duron @ 650 MHz to be precise, and I wanted to put it to use since... well the codename of the processor is "Spitfire" and using a computer with a CPU named like that sounds killer although it turned out to be a complete bummer.
How did all of this really start?
First off I placed everything in a case, that ironically states outside that it uses a P3 Celeron 600MHz CPU and that this PC NEVER goes obsolete...
Next, I try booting straight from the HDD with no luck and I start working around with it. Then I notice, in horror, that this is one of those PC's that for the life of me won't boot up from the CD-Drive and I am not sure why this is even happening but it has me terrified.
My first alternative turned out to be a Windows 98 boot floppy with CD-ROM support, because maybe you don't know it but back in the day some things weren't supported like CD-ROM drives or Floppy Drives and USB was non-existent.
As mentioned further above it had been a while since I saw a full partition of FAT32 and from there on it just went downhill. I got the CD recognized and I ran the WINNT exe to get the installation going but at first it wouldn't do it mentioning something about not enough swap space. Some ten minutes later I figured that I had to delete the NTFS partition that was occupying 99% of the hard drive... yeah I kept forgetting how the commands work.
Next stop was trying WINNT and it partially worked, then died on me, then worked, then died again, then I decided to go for Nomad, the codename for a 4GB hard drive I got laying around holding Debian 6, and it went into a deep coma state that could only be prevented if I went into the recovery state which meant I had to mess around with it a lot more than I wished for it, openSUSE laughed at me too or cried, not sure at this point, but it didn't work, Windows XP from another machine didn't work either and I've had it with this PC that will only run floppy systems, nothing bad with them but if I try and sell it to the normal customer I won't get much out of it.
Then there's the suspicion that the CPU may be damaged but I have no way to prove this since yet again I have no way to load Hirens or any other tool to test this out, RAM is also an option but that would give me a whole different bunch of errors and from what I've read, seen and understood it seems the culprit is the motherboard which has to be flashed immediately after being bought because of buggy software on the BIOS ROM which can only be done inside of Windows.
Level of Patience, almost null.
One more alternative before I give away and ask for my 10 bucks back... Windows 98 2nd Edition. May work, may not work, I don't know and I don't care but I am not letting this bad boy go out without a battle.
And in the end that also failed... that sums it up after I saw Windows 98 getting stuck several times during the installation and having to force the "restart" physically. At this point I am pretty sure the culprit is the processor and well there's nothing much I can do about this except return it and get my money back and buy a soda or something.
Yes I get the point about building affordable systems for the common user but for the love of whatever it is that you praise do it right man and I am dead serious here.
All this comes here for one reason. Two days ago I bought this old L7VMM MOBO from the guy that gives me the old computers I refurbish and let me tell you that these two last days have been terror and horror to me but also they have provoked me to look for answers to things I had previously learned and with that I had forgotten since I never used them.
I couldn't quite remember how to format a PC from a floppy, yes I am serious about the floppy thing and I have a bunch of them stored in a box, and it has been a while since I saw a FAT32 Partition in something that isn't a USB drive. That said it's also been years since I've seen a K7 in use, an AMD Duron @ 650 MHz to be precise, and I wanted to put it to use since... well the codename of the processor is "Spitfire" and using a computer with a CPU named like that sounds killer although it turned out to be a complete bummer.
How did all of this really start?
First off I placed everything in a case, that ironically states outside that it uses a P3 Celeron 600MHz CPU and that this PC NEVER goes obsolete...
Next, I try booting straight from the HDD with no luck and I start working around with it. Then I notice, in horror, that this is one of those PC's that for the life of me won't boot up from the CD-Drive and I am not sure why this is even happening but it has me terrified.
My first alternative turned out to be a Windows 98 boot floppy with CD-ROM support, because maybe you don't know it but back in the day some things weren't supported like CD-ROM drives or Floppy Drives and USB was non-existent.
As mentioned further above it had been a while since I saw a full partition of FAT32 and from there on it just went downhill. I got the CD recognized and I ran the WINNT exe to get the installation going but at first it wouldn't do it mentioning something about not enough swap space. Some ten minutes later I figured that I had to delete the NTFS partition that was occupying 99% of the hard drive... yeah I kept forgetting how the commands work.
Next stop was trying WINNT and it partially worked, then died on me, then worked, then died again, then I decided to go for Nomad, the codename for a 4GB hard drive I got laying around holding Debian 6, and it went into a deep coma state that could only be prevented if I went into the recovery state which meant I had to mess around with it a lot more than I wished for it, openSUSE laughed at me too or cried, not sure at this point, but it didn't work, Windows XP from another machine didn't work either and I've had it with this PC that will only run floppy systems, nothing bad with them but if I try and sell it to the normal customer I won't get much out of it.
Then there's the suspicion that the CPU may be damaged but I have no way to prove this since yet again I have no way to load Hirens or any other tool to test this out, RAM is also an option but that would give me a whole different bunch of errors and from what I've read, seen and understood it seems the culprit is the motherboard which has to be flashed immediately after being bought because of buggy software on the BIOS ROM which can only be done inside of Windows.
Level of Patience, almost null.
One more alternative before I give away and ask for my 10 bucks back... Windows 98 2nd Edition. May work, may not work, I don't know and I don't care but I am not letting this bad boy go out without a battle.
And in the end that also failed... that sums it up after I saw Windows 98 getting stuck several times during the installation and having to force the "restart" physically. At this point I am pretty sure the culprit is the processor and well there's nothing much I can do about this except return it and get my money back and buy a soda or something.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
One job done
Indeed, cable disconnected, CMOS battery dead, misconfiguration on the BIOS, bunch of little awkward things going on there.
To prevent any future issues I installed Dropbox, yes I know I posted an article about it saying it's not safe but I had a really short span of time to get it done, and then installed it on a Laptop then synchronized files and like magic it's all there on the "cloud"!
At least it turned out to be easier but still there are pending issues with that PC and I see it returning at least one more time this year...
To prevent any future issues I installed Dropbox, yes I know I posted an article about it saying it's not safe but I had a really short span of time to get it done, and then installed it on a Laptop then synchronized files and like magic it's all there on the "cloud"!
At least it turned out to be easier but still there are pending issues with that PC and I see it returning at least one more time this year...
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
The promised picture
 |
| Meet oldsnake |
Regardless, just today when I arrived I decided to put the old motherboard to rest, the one holding the Coppermine processor, and decided to remove it. Once done I remembered that somewhere around my old stuff I had another processor lying around and lo' and behold I found it, tried it out and now we're back in operations with a 500MHz processor and the old motherboard. Believe it or not I can notice a LOT of difference from the AMD K6-2.
Sad as it may be it's a frankie computer and if I can get more juice out of it then so be it.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Funny that is...
So I'm playing around with oldsnake, went with that name because the thing somehow reminded of the character, and a couple of things have happened since last time I posted.
Turns out some programs won't run on the AMD Processors and this is due to the fact that there's some support issues here and there for the older versions. To me that is totally reasonable as a matter of fact and yet again it adds more flavor to the battle ahead.
So far I've tested out the little thing and I'm surprised to see that it has managed to stand a bit of heavy work in a reasonable amount of time. Installing packages wasn't a bliss but it went way better than expected.
Also I found, by mistake, my internal ZIP-drive and have been playing around with it for old sakes times... feels funny to be using it since I never had a chance to own one back when the whole thing was considered to be the end of floppies and the beginning of faster and better portable media. As we now know that never happened and ZIP drives died with the 90's.
As a final note Apache with PHP and MySQL are now installed and running just fine, pending is the NoIP software and off we go with a test environment!
Turns out some programs won't run on the AMD Processors and this is due to the fact that there's some support issues here and there for the older versions. To me that is totally reasonable as a matter of fact and yet again it adds more flavor to the battle ahead.
So far I've tested out the little thing and I'm surprised to see that it has managed to stand a bit of heavy work in a reasonable amount of time. Installing packages wasn't a bliss but it went way better than expected.
Also I found, by mistake, my internal ZIP-drive and have been playing around with it for old sakes times... feels funny to be using it since I never had a chance to own one back when the whole thing was considered to be the end of floppies and the beginning of faster and better portable media. As we now know that never happened and ZIP drives died with the 90's.
As a final note Apache with PHP and MySQL are now installed and running just fine, pending is the NoIP software and off we go with a test environment!
Sunday, May 1, 2011
We got a live one!
I like to play with old hardware and I'm talking dirty here, I'm talking old school.
For some time I had this Coppermine that was giving me issues due to the fact that the thing fried at some point, incredibly the bastard kept on working.
Then Mr. Da Kid was ever so kind to provide me with the old brain and heart of Lavos, now Neo Lavos, which was a tiny Celeron Mendocino. Unfortunately I like to play around with things way too much and in between fighting to release the tiny thing from the socket and trying to put in a new one, which wasn't compatible by the way, I broke the socket bed... again don't ask me how it broke in two but it happened.
This left me without a computer to do my evil deeds, and I do like to make evil deeds with old hardware because it feels like you're making an effort to make the thing work and it becomes a challenge which ultimately leads to satisfaction, but let us forget about masturbatory geek fantasies and let us go back to square one.
I'm without a test computer... until today.
Back on friday I got around to do some stuff and one of them was getting a Socket 775 MOBO for a desktop I'm building for myself and I was also looking for a test environment which could be anything from Pentium 3 to Pentium-Not, AKA 386/486 land, but I hadn't had much luck, with either, until someone pointed out an old swap meet that handles that kind of stuff.
In I go and five minutes later and some bargaining I got this tiny, tiny for the 90's, ATX Motherboard with what I was told was a Pentium II processor of unidentified source since the BIOS lacks any useful information.
Not only did I have to rebuild the desktop from scratch, since I had to take everything off including the power supply unit, I had to reset the CMOS to get video working since it simply wouldn't bulge. Once finished it was the turn of Debian 6 to do its magic which took some noble two hours to fully install, fully means installing Base and SSH.
My biggest surprise was getting to know what kind of processor I was running on this little beast. Turns out the thing is running with an AMD K6-2 3D Now! processor which is fine with me as I had the chance to work with a K6 and many members of the AMD family many, many, years ago and I honestly can't complain.
This is how the thing ended up looking like (I'll take a screenshot later of how that looks inside):
1 x 128MB PC 133 RAM stick.
10 GB Seagate HDD (Won't boot the 40GB which leads me to believe this motherboard has issues going in for the big guys)
CD-RW/DVD-ROM (Which I had given up for dead but apparently works just fine!)
Floppy and Zip Drives (Floppy is going straight into MOBO and Zip Drive is through USB since I lost my internal 100-Zip Drive)
AMD K6-2 3D Now! Processor @ 350 Mhz
PSU @ 300 watts
Great projects are coming for this little one but that is for another time.
-Vico
For some time I had this Coppermine that was giving me issues due to the fact that the thing fried at some point, incredibly the bastard kept on working.
Then Mr. Da Kid was ever so kind to provide me with the old brain and heart of Lavos, now Neo Lavos, which was a tiny Celeron Mendocino. Unfortunately I like to play around with things way too much and in between fighting to release the tiny thing from the socket and trying to put in a new one, which wasn't compatible by the way, I broke the socket bed... again don't ask me how it broke in two but it happened.
This left me without a computer to do my evil deeds, and I do like to make evil deeds with old hardware because it feels like you're making an effort to make the thing work and it becomes a challenge which ultimately leads to satisfaction, but let us forget about masturbatory geek fantasies and let us go back to square one.
I'm without a test computer... until today.
Back on friday I got around to do some stuff and one of them was getting a Socket 775 MOBO for a desktop I'm building for myself and I was also looking for a test environment which could be anything from Pentium 3 to Pentium-Not, AKA 386/486 land, but I hadn't had much luck, with either, until someone pointed out an old swap meet that handles that kind of stuff.
In I go and five minutes later and some bargaining I got this tiny, tiny for the 90's, ATX Motherboard with what I was told was a Pentium II processor of unidentified source since the BIOS lacks any useful information.
Not only did I have to rebuild the desktop from scratch, since I had to take everything off including the power supply unit, I had to reset the CMOS to get video working since it simply wouldn't bulge. Once finished it was the turn of Debian 6 to do its magic which took some noble two hours to fully install, fully means installing Base and SSH.
My biggest surprise was getting to know what kind of processor I was running on this little beast. Turns out the thing is running with an AMD K6-2 3D Now! processor which is fine with me as I had the chance to work with a K6 and many members of the AMD family many, many, years ago and I honestly can't complain.
This is how the thing ended up looking like (I'll take a screenshot later of how that looks inside):
1 x 128MB PC 133 RAM stick.
10 GB Seagate HDD (Won't boot the 40GB which leads me to believe this motherboard has issues going in for the big guys)
CD-RW/DVD-ROM (Which I had given up for dead but apparently works just fine!)
Floppy and Zip Drives (Floppy is going straight into MOBO and Zip Drive is through USB since I lost my internal 100-Zip Drive)
AMD K6-2 3D Now! Processor @ 350 Mhz
PSU @ 300 watts
Great projects are coming for this little one but that is for another time.
-Vico
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)