F@H Slacker

Dozer

Learning Storage Performance
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Okay, I admit it...my machines have been slacking.

Seriously, I have had some troubles, but by this weekend I hope to:

1) Have a NEW XP1800+ machine up and running
2) PIII 800 MHZ
3) PII Dual Celeron
4) PIII 1 GHZ
5) PII 400 MHZ

and...(this is the only machine I have currently running :)

6) A Pentium 90 laptop.

Hopefully I can at least pull some of my weight around here :)
 

Bartender

Storage is cool
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I hope someone else will be able to pick up the slack. I'm going to shut down all of my crunching in a few hours. Our electrical grid is at a Stage 1 alert - at stage 3 we'll see rolling blackouts. I'd rather run a few fans at home then CPUs at full cycle.
 

CougTek

Serial computer killer
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Bartender said:
I hope someone else will be able to pick up the slack.
I just fired up my two other systems that have been down for almost two weeks this afternoon (Thunderbird 800MHz and Athlon 500MHz). It won't fill the hole you'll leave, but it will help a bit anyway.
 

Dozer

Learning Storage Performance
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i said:
6) A Pentium 90 laptop.



What OS are you running on that laptop?

Windows 95...

Powerhouse system, it is...Toshiba Satellite Pro 415CS P90, 40 meg RAM, 775 meg hd, Netgear 10/100 PCMCIA LAN card. Yup...that about maxes it out...good for two things: surfing the Internet and A SOLID DOOR STOP :)
 

i

Wannabe Storage Freak
Joined
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Messages
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Thanks Dozer. The reason I ask is that I've got an IBM ThinkPad somewhere in storage ... it's a 100 MHz system. It came with an 810 MB hard disk and 24 MB of RAM.

I recently found a 6.1 GB replacement hard disk, and I can apparently upgrade the RAM to 72 MB maximum. I have this crazy plan to create a dual-boot system and install Windows 98SE and RedHat 7.2 on it. I'm a very patient person so hopefully it'll be ok. :)
 

Dozer

Learning Storage Performance
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Let me know how it goes. I'm interested in possibly running Linux on the Toshiba laptop at some point. I have DragonLinux installed on one of my desktop systems as sort of a Linux learning experience, but I think I'd eventually like to try it on the Toshiba to see what kind of difference it makes in efficency.
 

Adcadet

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Linux on laptops can be nice, especially the newer RH and Mandrake distros. I'm writing this post on my Celeron 366/128MB laptop running Mandrake 8.2 while RPMing myself to KDE3.
</$0.02>
Adcadet
 

Dozer

Learning Storage Performance
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I am posting this using my brand spanking new XP1800...I installed a KCS K7S5A MB with 384 meg SDRAM, 40 GB WD HD, and a Thermaltake Volcano 6Cu+ processor fan. Running XP--everything looking great. The board is pretty nice for sub-$50--onboard sound and LAN, easy set-up. Anybody have any experience with it?
 

Dozer

Learning Storage Performance
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Still working on my other machines...The dual Celeron is out of the running for the time being (needs an OS--probably NT 4). The 800mhz with an SGI 230 motherboard needs a new PS (this machine will be an SGI 230-based machine in a Dell Dimension 4100 case--pretty wacko, huh?) Hopefully will have everything done this weekend and be crunching away by next week...
 

Buck

Storage? I am Storage!
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Dozer said:
I am posting this using my brand spanking new XP1800...I installed a KCS K7S5A MB with 384 meg SDRAM, 40 GB WD HD, and a Thermaltake Volcano 6Cu+ processor fan. Running XP--everything looking great. The board is pretty nice for sub-$50--onboard sound and LAN, easy set-up. Anybody have any experience with it?

Yes. Contrary to others in this forum, I think it is a nice, inexpensive board. I've come to appreciate ECS boards recently as they offer good pricing for a good product. I've sold a few of the K7S5A, K7AMA, and the K7VTA3 boards. None of them have failed or caused the customer any problems.
 

Dozer

Learning Storage Performance
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I am posting this using my brand spanking new XP1800...I installed a KCS K7S5A MB with 384 meg SDRAM, 40 GB WD HD, and a Thermaltake Volcano 6Cu+ processor fan. Running XP--everything looking great. The board is pretty nice for sub-$50--onboard sound and LAN, easy set-up. Anybody have any experience with it?

How could I have typed a "K" instead of an "E."

A thousand pardons...
 

CougTek

Serial computer killer
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Dozer said:
I am posting this using my brand spanking new XP1800...I installed an ECS K7S5A MB with 384 meg SDRAM, ...
You don't want to use SDRAM on an SiS735-based motherboard. You REALLY don't want to. The SiS735, while a very fine cheapset overall, is one of the slowest socket-A platform available when SDRAM memory is used. DDR SDRAM isn't an option for this motherboard, it is a requirement.

Like Buck, I've had good experiences overall with the K7S5A. It's not the fastest thing on the market, but it's reliable/stable and it's ridiculously inexpensive for the features it has (LAN and tolerable AC'97 audio).

The K7VTA3 series from ECS are ok when their BIOS are updated. The early BIOS revisions were underperforming (by 3-4%, which is huge for a motherboard of the same chipset). But since I now mainly use nForce-based motherboards (the Asus A7N266-C to be specific), I haven't tried the KT333 motherboard from ECS.
 

Dozer

Learning Storage Performance
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Cougtek said:
You don't want to use SDRAM on an SiS735-based motherboard. You REALLY don't want to. The SiS735, while a very fine cheapset overall, is one of the slowest socket-A platform available when SDRAM memory is used. DDR SDRAM isn't an option for this motherboard, it is a requirement.

Thanks for the info, Coug.
 

Buck

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Tea said:
Two boards, both unsalable because they hang and crash. Buy ECS at your own risk.

Like I've mentioned elsewhere, send them to me. :mrgrn:

I think Kristi doesn't like them and has sabatoged your lot of ECS boards.
 

Kristi

What is this storage?
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No, I didn't sabotage our lot of ECS boards (the whole two of them), but if we get any more, I might!

I took one home with an XP 1700+. It was very unstable. I tried both DDR & SDRAM, different PSU and clean install, even put the Athlon 1000 back in, but it kept crashing all over the place. The other board was exactly the same. I realise it may well have just been a bad batch, but hey, we're happy with the boards we usually get, so why get something we're not sure about?
 

flagreen

Storage Freak Apprentice
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Kristi said:
No, I didn't sabotage our lot of ECS boards (the whole two of them), but if we get any more, I might!

I took one home with an XP 1700+. It was very unstable. I tried both DDR & SDRAM, different PSU and clean install, even put the Athlon 1000 back in, but it kept crashing all over the place. The other board was exactly the same. I realise it may well have just been a bad batch, but hey, we're happy with the boards we usually get, so why get something we're not sure about?
Solution = Intel :)

[runs for cover]
 

Buck

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Kristi said:
No, I didn't sabotage our lot of ECS boards (the whole two of them), but if we get any more, I might!

I took one home with an XP 1700+. It was very unstable. I tried both DDR & SDRAM, different PSU and clean install, even put the Athlon 1000 back in, but it kept crashing all over the place. The other board was exactly the same. I realise it may well have just been a bad batch, but hey, we're happy with the boards we usually get, so why get something we're not sure about?

It is a shame to have that type of experience. If something similar happened to me, I would react the same way.
 

Buck

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NRG = mc² said:
You've all got it wrong. Solution = Tyan.

Ok, anything but ECS. :roll:

According to Kristi yes. My experience has been the opposite. Who would you rather trust, a gorgeous, intelligent young lady, or an overweight, barstool warmer like me? Uh, never mind.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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Let's not knock being overweight just yet. Just because we're built for love and not for speed...

We aren't? Oh. OK.


Anyway, I'd just like to point out that the correct spelling, after years of typing it at login prompts, is slaker, not slacker.
 

James

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I would have thought a "slaker" was something to do with "slake" as in "to slake one's thirst." Slacker is the correct spelling, surely, Merc?!

I'm very happy with my ECS K7S5A too, but I bought mine in Tokyo. Perhaps there was a bad batch sold in Australia?
 

time

Storage? I am Storage!
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Well, through Red Hill's supplier, anyway ...

Frankly, I'm not impressed by Buck and Coug's arguments. With some exceptions (Asus), you get what you pay for. Just because they work now doesn't mean they won't bite you in two years time.

Of course, I'm an incorrigible cynic and liable to be proved wrong. I just regard any free lunch with suspicion.
 

Dozer

Learning Storage Performance
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slack·er (slak'er), n. a person who evades duties and responsibilities; especially, one wno evades military service in times of war. Usage: "Dozer is a BIG slacker." (Well, not really...) :mrgrn:
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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It gets worse. I will remember 'til the day I die working with an advertising saleswoman named Cynthia Litt.

More specifically, I was working with a bunch of other IT people and someone happened to see her login name in the list of home directories and started saying some insensitive things... not realizing her desk was six feet away. Oops.
 

i

Wannabe Storage Freak
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Hi all ... just dropping in for a moment...

Dozer said:
Let me know how it goes. I'm interested in possibly running Linux on the Toshiba laptop at some point. I have DragonLinux installed on one of my desktop systems as sort of a Linux learning experience, but I think I'd eventually like to try it on the Toshiba to see what kind of difference it makes in efficency.

Dozer, I just finished my Linux install. As of today, here's my laptop's configuration:

IBM ThinkPad 560:

Pentium 100 MHz processor
24 MB RAM (will perhaps be upgraded to the max 72MB RAM)
6 GB IBM Travelstar hard disk (upgraded from the original 810 MB disk; see Hypermicro's website for some good options)
Linksys 10/100 (yeah, right) PC Card ethernet adapter (model PCM100)

Dual-booting Windows 98 Second Edition and RedHat Linux 7.3 (via GRUB)


The first thing I did after installing the 6 GB hard disk was to roughly partition it in half. I had everything I needed to install Windows 98 SE, so I did that right away. I used a parallel port Zip drive to copy the required files from the Win98SE CD onto a temporary partition on the hard disk.

I didn't have the time to think about Linux at that point, so for the past few weeks I've used this laptop as a Windows-only system. I've been really amazed at how well Win98SE is running on it. It's completely usable. That said, with only 24 MB of RAM, if I plan to continue using "big" applications like Mozilla I'm going to upgrade the RAM. But the OS itself and even things like the OpenOffice suite run extraordinarily well with only very rare hard disk thrashing.

Given how well Windows 98SE ran, I figured I'd go whole hog with a Linux distribution and get the latest version of whatever distribution I decided on.

I considered Debian and RedHat because both have the option for relatively straightforward network installations. (Remember, this laptop only has an external floppy drive - there is no CD ROM drive, nor any USB ports.)

I decided to go with RedHat because I've had some prior experience with it and because it seems to get mentioned most often in conjunction with the word "laptop", especially "IBM laptop". :)

The network install went incredibly well. Just two floppy disks was all it took. One to start the boot process, and the other to supply the PCMCIA network card drivers. Of course, this was after about 2 hours spent figuring out how to add the driver information for my particular Linksys ethernet adapter, because it wasn't recognized by the default driver disk.

The installation process took several hours (the fault of a slow network connection as much as anything), but it installed all the components I wanted right over the Internet from one of the RedHat mirror FTP sites. I was really impressed.

So that's it, you ask? Two floppy disks and a few hours and you've now got a completely functional, dual-booting laptop?

Not quite. :) After spending a few hours last night and most of today looking into it, I've discovered that at some point during the great open-source transition from XFree86 3.x to XFree86 4.x, support for the video chip that happens to be in my laptop was screwed up. As a result, I can't run X-windows.

I'm going to post a message to the XFree86 support list at some point, asking if there's anyway to restore the functionality that apparently used to be offered for my video chip in the 3.x days. If not, then I'm going to tell the webmaster of the XFree86 site to update their "compatible hardware" list to reflect the fact that my particular chip won't work with >= 4.0.

My final conclusion? It's been worth it, even if all I do is stick with Windows. I might try an older Linux distribution that uses XFree86 3.3.x to get X running on this thing. But later. It's just been too much "fun" for one weekend, you know? ;)

The only other minor thing is that I discovered this particular laptop only supports 8-bit color (i.e. 256 colors). But that's way better than some of the computers I've used in my life, so I'm not complaining. :)
 
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