Random Off-Topic Posts

[Ivan]

Today, Anna Honey and I were cleaning our yard of leaves.
She and I were both using leaf blowers; one was set for blowing and one for vacuuming.
When we were about finished I was thinking:

O, What tangled wires we weave
When first we practice to blow leaves!

- Ivan.

[smilo]

it's almost like
putting a humidifier
and a dehumidifier
in the same room
and letting them fight it out.

[Ivan]

Hello Smilo,

Actually a leaf blower and a leaf vacuum work well together.
We never actually ever got tangled up THAT badly because the extension cords were different colours.

- Ivan.

[Naismith]

I've only got a rake.

[Ivan]

Hello Naismith,

I figure that Anna Honey and I moved the equivalent of about 15-20 bags of leaves in about an hour and a half.
That simply would not have been possible without all the machinery. What we actually picked up was 7 pillow cases (size of the machine's collection bag) worth of chopped up leaves which didn't take much space in the compost.

- Ivan.

[Ivan]

Hello All,

Hopefully this won't be a long lasting thing, but at the moment, I am thinking I may be down for a bit.
My Development Computer Pentium 233MMX appears to be seriously misbehaving. (See Screenshot)
It got a LOT worse than that and CFS does not stay running for any length of time at this point.
The alternative condition is that it gives me a Blue Screen with a "Removed Drive" type of message.

Perhaps this is a fixable thing but I have to remember what the configuration currently is and whether I have spare hardware and where it might be hiding after all these years.

In case you all are wondering, the equipment in this machine is not at all easy to find any more.
The Power Supply is a custom built one (by me) that is about 135 Watt but is the Side Switch AT type.
The Case has been modified from an old Zeos box by me. A Dremel and Metal Nibbler did the modifying.
It is so tight inside that I had to cut away parts of the Case structure to install a couple of the banks of memory.
The machine has two Adaptec 2940 controllers.
One is an Ultra Wide and runs a 2GB and a 16GB drive.
The other controller is for the CDROM and external SCSI devices....

Memory is 60 nanosecond or better EDO but it is in two different forms to add up to 192 MB.

So, as you can see, this equipment is a bit less than common these days.

I haven't tried to troubleshoot yet, but memory never seems to fail its check and it is parity memory and the unmounted drive always has come back and survived a chkdsk on reboot.


The demonstration / test computer is also down at the moment.
My son has been messing around with equipment on it and isn't really all that careful.
I found it last night with the keyboard disconnected (probably accidentally).
I suspect he accidentally did that when he was testing the Ethernet Cross-Over cable he made.
....Or perhaps someone else did it when they were checking why the USB Printer was not working.....

The keyboard connection was easy to fix.

I also found my Joystick on the floor with a fair amount of stuff resting on top.
It seems to have a few issues right now with controls at full deflection.
I haven't tried to troubleshoot it yet either.


Anna Honey gets back from a trip this evening, so I should have more time soon I hope.

- Ivan.

[aleatorylamp]

Hello Ivan,
I have a cunning plan: (remember Baldrick from the series Blackadder?)

Next week I´ll ask at the post office how much it would cost for a postal packet to your area (near Chicago, unless my memory fails me), because there are quite a few things here lying around which may be interesting for you as a Christmas present.

Just off the top of my head, there´s a Pentium III at 800 Mhz with an old 256 Mb AGP accellerator card and an adaptec 2940 SCSI card running a CD-ROM reader and a CD-ROM writer, as well as a sound card and other stuff.

Then there´s a 233MMX Mhz (running at 266 Mhz) Pentium 1 with a PT5T30-A4 motherboard (PCI and ISA only) running another SCSI card for an old 8-bit scanner. This one has 128 Mb of DIMM memory and an 8 Mb graphics card, and there´s also an old Hollywood graphics DVD accellerator card with which one can watch DVD´s - connected in tandem to a 4 Mb graphics card. There´s also a spare CPU at 200 Mhz which can run at 233 Mhz.

Also, there are a number of power supplies, between 200 and 250 Watts, most are switched only by the motherboard pins, and at least one has a separate power switch on a thick black cable. I think this one has the two different types of motherboard connectors for all the coloured cables.

All this equipment was given to me by the computer teacher in the hotel school I was working for until 2007, and I was using some of it for a time, but for a couple of years now it´s just been sitting there in the cellar of the in-law´s house

With the two Pentium 4 fall-back laptops I have here and another P-4 tower, I don´t really need all this.

I could also send you the motherboard and graphics card (PCIE) of this P-4 tower at 2.4 Mhz which runs AF99, CFS1 and FS98.

Several IDE hard disks are also available.

Anyway, I thought sending you the insides of these computers for Christmas - i.e. the motherboards, some of the cards, the power supply insides with cables but without the fan. Without the metal carcasses they shouldn´t be too heavy for the post.
I also have all the drivers.

If you need more specific information I shall inspect the stuff more closely and answer any questions that need answering.

What do you think?
Cheers,
Aleatorylamp

[Ivan]

Hello Aleatorylamp,

Thanks for the offer, but please don't do that.....
I actually have a computer graveyard of sorts in my basement. There is a LOT of equipment.
The problem is that I don't really want to build another computer. I would much rather get the specific stuff to get THIS computer running properly and that is the tough part.

I have a couple extra Adaptec 2940 controllers and even a couple old 1540 series controllers lying around, but I do not believe I have the UW version of the controller as a spare and definitely do not have the Wide SCSI drives as a spare. I have several AT power supplies with the remote switch but none with the Side Switch as on the original IBM AT cases.

There are also a couple other PCs that are probably restorable if I spend the time to piece together things from various other computers, but I also really like the Desktop Cases rather than the Tower Cases because I prefer to use the Desktop Case as a Monitor Stand and the heavy (only 17 inch) CRT makes the case pretty stable when inserting or removing media.

The bottom line is that I have LOTS of equipment though perhaps not the exact equipment I might need at the moment. I should probably get rid of some of the very very old stuff that is just taking up space these days but am too lazy to go through all of it.

My Daughter is also likely to have her Laptop replaced this year and that would free up a fairly modern though abused machine for general use.

Thanks for the thought.
- Ivan.

[aleatorylamp]

Hello Ivan,

Yes, I know the sensation. There´s nothing like DIY adapted equipment!

The fast QuadCore I put together 2 years ago (luckily WinXP drivers still existed for it) sits in an old heavy desktop box, and I sawed a hole in the side for a case fan, ducting it inside with taped cardboard so that the air coming in the front would first travel to the graphics accellerator card, then to the CPU and then it splits either upwards and out the side opposite the Power-supply fan or to the Power-supply... as cool as cucumber!

Well, whatever. Luckily you can most probably manage to sort yourself out with the hardware in your basement.
Anyway, in case you don´t get a power-supply with a side-switch, I have a spare one here that I can tear the innards out and send you by post. That will definitely be a small cheap package, and wouldn´t put me out at all.

Cheers,
Aleatorylamp

[Ivan]

Hello Aleatorylamp,

I actually already ripped the guts out of a lower power Side Switch Power Supply and replaced it with the contents of a higher powered PS. It has worked for years.

I also did a bit of custom cooling options with most of my computers as well. That is why I salvage muffin fans from dead machines. They can be wired up pointing at a specific piece of equipment inside. I usually try to hold them in place with zip ties and plastic coated twist ties. Apple muffin fans don't work as well because they are speed controlled by the motherboard and when directly wired, there is obviously no speed control.
I found after replacing a couple CPU fans that they didn't last all that long. The Muffin fans last much longer.....

Hmmm.... One of the side effects of a failing fan was that the computer became quite unstable as it is doing now and there were no other outward signs. Maybe I should open up the box and check all the fans?

Assembling another computer is easy. The hard part is recovering this one without a total rebuild which is how I would prefer to do it.

We shall see how it works out.

- Ivan.

[aleatorylamp]

Hello Ivan,
A computer technician friend taught me how to re-build old computers, 486 and Pentium 1 at the end of the 90´s, and I´d give them away to friends. Students would also give me old hardware when they upgraded. Remember the "fantastic" long VESA LOCAL BUS cards?
The fun bit was to get around compatibility issues between graphic cards and memory brands for different makes of motherboard, so it was difficult to decide if a part was faulty or not, and fans could be quite treacherous. Motherboards always had separate sound cards too, and some even had a separate IDE controller card.
I collected muffin fans too, prefferably ones with at least 0.17 A - the smaller 0.11 ones were quieter but didn´t blow enough. Mostly there was no speed control at all... That was really a real DIY time! I even remember my brother actually selling one or two of them for 75 dollars!
Cheers,
Aleatorylamp

[Ivan]

Hello Aleatorylamp,

I figure I have built at least a couple hundred PCs over the years though only about a dozen or so were for my own use.
It is hard to determine when a repair starts to become a rebuild.
I know I built at least 70-80 back in college when I worked for a department that was selling IBM equipment to the students.
Back then, every machine came in with NOTHING installed. All the other equipment was packed in its own box, even disk controllers, hard drives, graphics cards, etc..... So it really was building each and every machine to specification.
Because all the expansion slots were empty, there were slot covers for every slot.
I saved at least one slot cover for each machine I built because otherwise it was just so much scrap metal.
I have been using them for other machines I have built since college. The IBM slot covers were much better quality than what you would typically find today. Even the screws were not the goofy triangular ones you typically find today.

I remember the VLB graphics boards pretty well. I am sure I still have a machine somewhere with one installed, though I am not sure where. I even tool a few old 30 pin SIMMs and installed them on one card. It worked pretty well and was actually higher speed than the board really needed.

Regarding muffin fans, I prefer the ones that are around 0.15 Amp. Apple fans are typically 0.31 Amp and are way too loud where they are running full speed without speed control.

- Ivan.

[aleatorylamp]

Hello Ivan,

I also saved slot covers for a while, and still have a little collection! You´ve had a whole lot of interesting experiences, and enjoyed the earlier times when the whole computer concept was meant for much more specific purposes, and an end user with a bit of knowledge was more important for the machines to do what they were required to do, if not vital.

Now they are everywhere and it´s hard to find something that works without them. A broom, perhaps? But they do get annoying, don´t they? The artificial stupidity - sorry, intelligence embedded in things like Word 2007 - which tries to ruin the page you are trying to type properly every time you do a carriage return, and to switch off such "help" you have to do a course. There are even Japanese computerized water closets i.e. toilets... How lazy will we get? Anyway, nothing is perfect, so there´s always a kicker to keep us on our toes.

I wonder why power supply fans are called muffin fans? To cool its muffins?
Cheers,
Aleatorylamp