BYTE.com > Chaos Manor > 2005
Reports: A Report
By Jerry Pournelle
January 3, 2005
(Reports: A Report
: Page 1 of 1 )
Column 293 (Continued from the Previous
Week)
The My Computer Thing
It's paranoid to think Windows is out to get you, but every now and
then I can be persuaded…
After the D850's hard drive died, I thought to revive it by
installing a new hard drive. The result was just flaky enough that I
now wonder if the machine didn't kill the drive. I could install Windows XP on
the system, but it just wasn't stable, and since my plan was to use
this machine as part of the new backup system—possibly even as a
server—flakiness wasn't acceptable. By flaky I mean that
sometimes it wouldn't boot: The drives would spin, but there would be no video.
Jostling things, particularly the CPU/heatsink/fan assembly, would
sometimes fix that, and then the system would run all right until I
did something else to it.
I spent a couple of hours at this and came to no conclusion. My
suspicion is that the power supply is giving me problems, and I was
tempted to put a new power supply in and see if that took care of
matters, but this is a RAMBUS system; I can't replace the motherboard
because Intel doesn't sell or support D850 motherboards, and I'm sure
not going to collect any more RAMBUS memory. All in all it was time to
retire this machine.
I stripped out the major assets, such as the nVIDIA video board and
a ZIP 100 drive, and one of these days I'll recover the 2.5 GHz
Northwood Pentium 4 CPU, and looked around for some other machine to
turn into a host for network backup software. The answer was Newton, a
2.4 GHz D845 system with 2 GB of RAM that has been sitting idle for
some time. It has integral video, plenty good enough for the purpose.
The primary drive is a mere 60 GB, but once I added the new Seagate
160 as a secondary hard drive there was plenty of capacity to try the
new CMS backup software that came with the Seagate Barracuda. More on
that another time.
When I brought up Newton I was annoyed to find that there were no
icons on the desktop other than the wastebasket.
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