Post #434,743
6/24/20 9:30:48 PM
6/24/20 9:31:55 PM
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So I've been clearing out the old junk ...
Last year I got a 3TB USB external drive. That's more total storage than all the old boxen and orphaned drives I've still got lying around. I figured I'd dump /home from everything and finally unload it all.
Along the way I found the old low form-factor HP desktop that had Ubuntu 10.4 on it. After the extended saga of trying to update to a recent distro (turned out to be straightforward and non-destructive once I figured out the right method) I finally got it running again with Lubuntu.
The only problem has been, every time I did anything even remotely taxing - display multiple animated gifs, any video at all, even pages with heavy javascript - it sounded like a jet warming up to take off.
Tonight I plugged in the larger HP desktop to see if it had better specs. Figured I would just swap the HDs between them if so. At first glance it didn't look significantly better, but while plugging it in I noticed quite a bit of dust in the exhaust grill. It had an easy-open case so I popped it open and holy crap that was a lot of dust.
After a few minutes cleaning it out, I figured I'd find similar in the other one. Because of the smaller case it was harder to get into, but still tool-free. (Corporate buyers apparently had the purchasing power to dictate easy maintenance designs.)
After pulling most everything off, I still hadn't found major dust. I was about to give up when I looked closer inside the shroud around the CPU heat sink. What I thought was the back wall of the shroud was actually the leading edge of the heat sink fins. It was so caked with dust that it looked like solid aluminum.
Thirty seconds later I had a 2-inch square piece of felt sitting on the floor next to it. Got it all put back together and I'm writing this on it right now, with a video playing on another tab, and can't even hear the fan spinning.
Guess I'll keep this one after all.
PS: This one has the onboard speaker that plays some system sounds
Edited by drook
June 24, 2020, 09:31:55 PM EDT
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Post #434,744
6/24/20 10:13:59 PM
6/24/20 10:13:59 PM
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Felted heatsinks . . .
. . are something I have found in many client machines, so I always look for it first off - on mine too.
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Post #434,745
6/24/20 10:28:12 PM
6/24/20 10:28:12 PM
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Prompts a similar heads-up (if ya gots an iMac.. maybe other all-in-ones?)
Those small-round holes in the bottom-piece--abetted by outflow from any furry critters as like to sit nearby and watch you finger things--are easily plugged. (Had they opted for oval? better I think)
Run damp finger along bottom of screen: base yor Alarum! on what it is covered with. A toothbrush is fine, followed by some powerful-Dyson-like sucker, applied to all air orifices (that long slot across top of the plastic back).
Like when you clean up your car ..it just seems to run Happier, if it was found over-due :-)
Carrion ..sometimes it's inanimate.
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Post #434,753
6/25/20 8:01:56 AM
6/25/20 8:01:56 AM
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HP dv7 laptop
Took one of those apart last night for the same reason. 40 screws to get the thing disassembled to the point where the main board can come out. The only saving grace is that on this particular model, the fan assembly is taped to the fin blocks so it can be pried out without needing to break the CPU/heatsink thermal bond.
The dv7 is a general population model, but the .biz units are the same these days (or worse, as some do require taking the heat pipes off the CPU to get to the fin blocks.)
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Post #434,772
6/25/20 11:45:58 AM
6/25/20 11:45:58 AM
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All old geeks turn into museum curators for obsolete tech.
Glancing briefly around my den I can lay eyes on 4 way-too-old machines gathering dust, including an original MacPro 1,1 and the old IWETHEY server from pre-DigitalOcean days. Regards,
-scott
Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
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Post #434,773
6/25/20 11:52:32 AM
6/25/20 11:52:32 AM
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There's a TRS-80 in the box, with manuals in one of our closets.
bcnu,
Mikem
It's mourning in America again.
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Post #434,800
6/25/20 3:23:35 PM
6/25/20 3:23:35 PM
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This is just the den.
I have an Atari 5200, Atari TT030, Mac SE, a Mini, and an iMac down in the basement. The first 3 are truly museum pieces. Regards,
-scott
Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
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Post #434,825
6/26/20 6:05:10 AM
6/26/20 6:05:10 AM
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I have a '4A in a box upstairs.
I also have a hobbyist Z80 dev board somewhere (from outfit in Melbourne called Talking Electronics). I used to know how to hand-assemble Z80 code... This was the sort of thing that predated the Arduino by several decades but attempted to teach much the same thing.
Wade.
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Post #434,845
6/27/20 12:26:46 AM
6/27/20 12:26:46 AM
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My grad school prof had an S-100 bus computer...
(This was in the mid-80s.) He often talked like he was eventually going get back to it, but I doubt that he ever did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-100_busHe managed to get a few HP Integral PCs for his lab. Neat machines, but ungodly expensive at the time (~ $4000, IIRC). Cheers, Scott.
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Post #434,846
6/27/20 2:01:48 AM
6/27/20 2:01:48 AM
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Yes, I still have my S100 machine . . .
. . taking up space in the garage. Mine was an 8/16 (bits, that is).
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Post #434,848
6/27/20 7:30:52 AM
6/27/20 7:30:52 AM
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So did I
Multiuser turbodos which ran cp/m programs. Each s100 bus board drove a single Televideo 910 terminal over serial line. Single 20mb Minnie Winnie hard disk that everyone shares. Ran wordstar, multiplan, and dbase, as well as a variety of language compilers. My simple favorite was pilot. Multiplan had linked spreadsheets 10 years before lotus 123. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PILOT
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Post #434,886
6/28/20 11:45:36 PM
6/28/20 11:45:36 PM
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I built one in part from scratch.
Well at least the control panel and CPU board. That included laying out and etching the circuit cards and soldering on chip sockets. The CPU board had Z-80 processor and the EPROM with a "borrowed" 4 KB BASIC interpreter and what is in effect a BIOS. As I recall, besides the S-100 board which has nothing but connectors, I bought an 8 KB memory card and a display card which attached to a TV.
The control board had umpteen switches for setting up addresses and loading data into memory. It was possible to step through one CPU instruction at a time. Also, I had circuitry to write and read data to an audio tape recorder.
Biggest problem was it was extremely noisy RF wise. You could not watch a TV anywhere in the house.
I bought a TR-80 and retired the S-100. But, I even modified the TRS-80 so it could display lower case characters. Alex
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
-- Isaac Asimov
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Post #434,896
6/29/20 8:19:14 AM
6/29/20 8:19:14 AM
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You win
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Post #434,774
6/25/20 11:56:13 AM
6/25/20 11:56:13 AM
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I'm much better than I was
I had at least a half-dozen shitty old PCs and laptops lying around, back in the day. I refurbed and gave away some, scrapped the rest. It really was just occupying space.
I seem to be the keeper of all the USB-MicroB-to-USB-A cables, though. I've got zillions of those fuckers.
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Post #434,781
6/25/20 12:38:29 PM
6/25/20 12:38:29 PM
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I just trashed a G5 cheesegrater
I got it specifically to run Final Cut Pro. Since then, other apps with way simpler interfaces have come up that do 90% of what I was using it for.
Also, a cat pissed through the front of it and it won't boot any more.
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Post #434,780
6/25/20 12:36:10 PM
6/25/20 12:36:10 PM
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Ooh, can you do me a favor?
Fooker was hosting my personal website back in the day. I lost a hard drive a while back, taking my un-backed-up photos with it. Is that old IWeThey server the one that had the other personal sites on it? If so, it's got the only photos from my oldest daughter's first year.
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Post #434,801
6/25/20 3:24:36 PM
6/25/20 3:24:36 PM
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I'll see if I can get it running over the weekend.
The main problem is that I'm not sure I have a monitor or keyboard for it.
Although now that I think about it, I have my MIL's old PC in the basement too. Those might work depending on the connectors. Regards,
-scott
Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
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Post #434,806
6/25/20 4:50:34 PM
6/25/20 4:50:34 PM
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Thanks, and sorry for the rat hole I know I'm sending you down
Unless you have far more self-control than I do, once you get it running you're going to wonder what else is on it and how to back it up "just in case".
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Post #434,813
6/25/20 6:58:33 PM
6/25/20 6:58:33 PM
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That's the main reason I keep some of these machines.
Too lazy to back them all up in a central place, too neurotic to just let them go. Regards,
-scott
Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
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Post #434,860
6/27/20 7:37:34 PM
6/27/20 7:37:34 PM
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still have my Gateway P5-75 Family PC
purchased around 1997. I still boot it up once or twice a year to play Crystal Quest, a great game that is a PC version of the arcade original, and the original's lawyers forced the gamer's version to be removed from circulation.
Satan (impatiently) to Newcomer: The trouble with you Chicago people is, that you think you are the best people down here; whereas you are merely the most numerous.
- - - Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar" 1897
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Post #434,866
6/28/20 3:31:59 AM
6/28/20 3:31:59 AM
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Re: still have my Gateway P5-75 Family PC
Consider a p2v transition, unless you're specifically attached to the hardware.
(p2v = physical to virtual, i.e. you get an image of the hard disk and use that to power something like VirtualBox or VMWare or Hyper-V or whatever)
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