I want to note that this is basically taking the innards out of an ugly broken case and putting them in a nice case. Its a learning experience for me but I also wanted to share it with you guys.
So the machines in question are the Dell Dimension 670 and Dell XPS Gen3 I have been talking about this week. The Gen3 was hit by lightning ruining the parts on board. While the processor works, or appears to, I don't want to risk putting it in a bok I do later on. Shame because its a 3.9 GHZ Pentium 4 Extreme.
Before:
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As you can see the exterior of the case is the same. The motherboards are also on these neat mounting plates so al they had to do was make the cases.
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I had a worry about the IO shield but its built into the mounting plate!!
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If anyone can tell me what these mean that'd be great. I assume just assembly codes though.
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This is the dual keon board. Its socket 604 and I can get 604 hexacores but I think I'll aim for 8 cores. If those work whenever I get around to getting them then it'll be set.
Also notice that loop on the mounting plate at the bottom of the picture? The mobo is held in by hooks and set in place with a screw. Since places like machine shops ani render farms bought these En Masse it would make senes that when the board died that they would get them in, pop the ram off, check the codes on the board after ripping it out, get the same assembly, slap that shit in, pop the ram in, ship it back.
So the rest here is just going to be the shit I did getting this all apart and back together. Took me from about 7:30 to 10.
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[image] 670
[image] Gen3
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Before I forget I was also concerned about the processor cooling fans. I wasn't sore I would be able to mount them and I had a lot of doubts. Turns out I only needed my tool kit for the one mounting screw in the 670 and everything else was tool-less mounts like this.
[image] 670 IO Plate
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Once…
I managed to find the worst dell laptop ever. An Inspiron 1000. Actually 2 of them.
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Somehow these stupid things can address ram still. Its ridiculous. And heres why
Specs: Celeron 2.20GHZ Some shit intel GPU up to 1.25 GB ram (in these units, in other units they have 2 ram slots but these only have 1) 256 mb ram onboard 1024x768? (not sure, maybe bigger? o:) A02 BIOS (I will flash to A06).
Again, if it had 2 ram slots in there, and theres actually a dedicated space were they took it off the board, it could do 2 gigs. I made one work, the other is scrap parts. From looking around in it it looks like the alternative model to this one is a work station laptop. Theres headers for two hard drives and space for a bigger heatsink, so this thing was around in the 1 year 5 month period mobile pentium 4's were new before the pentium M's came and replaced them while intel took their fist out of their ass and made actual mobile CPU's instead of flashing "LAPTOP-P4" on molten lava CPU's.
Also don't pick one of these up if its at a shop. Not for email, web, not even MP3's. I have one for a few experiments and as a notbook to toy with AROS.
Just don't.
But I thought I'd point out that this is a weird thing. A thing I am not happy to own at all, but I do anyways. As with basically all of my experiments....
Oh, and I found this in a bin.
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a 9800 GTX. Not a plus, and not a match to the other one I have, but it was in a bin.
All of my why in the world posts both have information that I have learned through projects, and are written while doing projects.
Introducing....
I want to start a thing either here or on the wiki of "Why in the world would I use this computer / those headphones / that OS / etc" with comps being the focus. Until the wiki is done and has a proper area for fun random stuff like this the blog area will have to do.
Lets do a run down of my personal Pentium M machine.
HP NW8000 - 60GB IDE HDD - 2 GB DDR Sync - ATi Mobility Radeon FireGL T2 - 5:4 TN Max Res 1600 X 1200
If you've gotten this far with intrigue to spare, yay!
Now, why the bleedy hell would anyone use one of these machines? They have modified pentium 3's with all the extra gubbins turned off at manufacture, such as hyperthreading, and don't work that well for anything anymore, assumeably. At that the video card is a dual core 9600 with 128 MB of who knows what kind of vram and ide is a joke! (you say in the back of your head.)
I don't use this machine every day, I would be mad then, but back in high school its what I had and for what it was it did everything I wanted. Quake, Urban Terror, HL2, DJ stuff, and the internet. Playing with it a few years later it still does that stuff but now I have more games to fiddle with and more things I can do with it.
Mostly at the moment the machine runs XP. This isn't a problem fr me as the only place I go on the internet on any laptop is youtube. With that the few things I can do is limited as steam and other platforms become newer and a laptop from 2004 becomes a relic more and more, but its still good. I play a lot of quake. At that I can only play quake well on an eraser head mouse. True story. Largely what I do with it is play quake because of that. I also made a podcast for the middle and high schools with it for our school district going over what students liked and disliked abut what the school was doing (the school did not care very much about what any of the students said about anything) and it was a good gap closer. About an hour of audio actually gets shot throug…
HARDWARE and linux, what OS and what else? As of now my P4 system has Ubuntu Mate installed and I actually managed to find an ATi 9600..... SE. After a littel research I found that its the exact same chip with 64 bit memory and the clock turned down. Not too worried about that since this is going to be a digital audio workstation. I also want to warn that if you didn't spend any money on the machine that you should go in expecting anything. After setting up bios and tooling everything in where need be I discovered that one of the IDE slots doesn't work. I only need one really and I can get a double cable and redo the install no big woop, I just don't have a CD drive at the moment :P So expect small things like this. Anyways, the hardware lineup is an ATi 9600SE, D-Link wireless G wifi card, Soundblaster Live sound card (I don't trust the dell chipsets for anything), and a SCSI 3 card I will most likely just play with, but it does work and if I get some drives it opens up space that I may need later. Handy. Now, as it happens the GPU is widely supported, as a matter of fact all the ATi 9XXX chips are. This is why I like them so much. If you have any wondering of "Will my GPU be supported" blah blah linux it will. 9XXX and X400/600/800 I know are. Just because I am doing audio stuff with my box doesn't mean you won't spend the 11 dollars for the computer GPU and wireless card for grandma, so I will say that it works fine with youtube. Handy. So far Ubuntu Mate is super snappy as well. As fast as my desktop and I have a sneaking suspicion its because I separated / and /home. I will add on later if I use another OS like Arch or Netrunner but for now this is fine. Follow this sorta build and you should be OK. Also if you manage to find a dell Dimension 8700 and you feel like dicking around with a computer go ahead and grab it! They're basically free now.
This is a short review of an OS that is both opensource and in it's early stages. If things change in the future, then there ya go.
So the last few days I have been traveling down the road that I wanted to wander around on as a kid. Let's call it Amiga street. I've been looking up everything I can about amiga's from the hardware (and learning an active port of debian with networking has been worked on for the 68k computers [I find this amazingly awesome and cool]) all the way down to the software and modern day things that have happened to the brand name. Surprisingly the whole shebang is still rolling albeit with a lot of the original workers on top of whoever is running the new company.
To get into amiga nowadays is rather silly, one would think. You need powerpc, and specific hardware, and this and that and whatever. Funnily enough if you wanted an amiga machine AROS is going to fit your bill and be even more efficient than your phone in resources. In a running state it uses 38 MB of ram at idle and with this at thought it doesn't surprise me that it boots almost instantly on basically any x86 or 64 machine you put it on.
AROS is fully compatible with other amiga-like OS's, such as MorphOS, and shares similar software between them such as the CSS, and either just recently or soon youtube viable, OWB Web Browser. AROS also allows you to run amiga software natively even on an X86 machine. However if you were to download the community port you could most likely run the software without emulation as you would need to on X86.
Past all of this a neat feature I would like to point out is that the system does not seem to care what you boot it on once installed to a hard drive. Much like many linux or Unix/Unis systems you can flip flop systems as they come and go and never lose anything. I find this helpful as my goal was to install AROS on a netbook that I like to play youtube, music, and emulators on as well as write stories and school papers on. Th…
I've asked on TomsHardware and didn't really get much of a response.
My mobo is Bios and my Card is UEFI "ready". Does that mean I can only use the card on UEFI boards or can I use it on a bios mobo?
I think I can dig out like 6 more of my threads but... yeah no :P these are enough to hopefully spark some interesting conversation soon?
