deadheaduk

No sooner had I got all of the PC’s sorted out then I changed them all round again but I have ended up with a much better system at the end of it. It all started when I saw an add on Freegle for a computer tower without a hard drive so I asked for it. I had noticed that the machine I was running as a webserver seemed to be slowing down and when there was a power outage it seemed to be having problems rebooting – I later remembered that when I was first given it there were issues with powering up.

At this point I had:

Pentium III 750 with 534Mb* Ram running Linux
Pentium III 866 with about 500Mb RAM running Xp
Pentium II 133 with about 450 Mb RAM running Ubuntu server
Mac G4 350 with 1Gb RAM

* Although I was convinced that there had been 700Mb in there

So my plan was to use the tower if it worked to replace the server and if it didn’t I would take the useful bits like the USB card out of it. When I picked it up I was not only pleased that it booted but that with a AMD Duron 850 processor it was faster than the machine I had running XP so I thought why don’t I swap them over. The only problem being that the tower only had 256 MB in it and only had two slots. I didn’t want to take any of the RAM out of the Apple as I had only just managed to get it up to 1GB. In any case that would still only give me 512Mb. What I really needed was a couple of PC133 512Mb memory sticks. I has a look on ebay but they were quite expensive as the were comparatively rare so I advertised on Freegle.

I had a reply from someone who had 4 256 and a 128 chip – would I like them? I thought at least that gives me the 512Mb which is better than I’ve got and it would give me some extra chips if I managed to get that spare Mac up and running so I went to collect them. I ended up coming away with not only the memory but some hard drives as well – an 80Gb, a 40Gb and two 20Gb drives.

Then things got complicated! I then got an e-mail from someone saying he had two 512Mb chips but had considered putting them on ebay. However he was after an external modem so if I had one he would be willing to swap! I explained that I’d seen his previous post regarding the modem and had looked at the time but discovered I must have got rid of the one I thought I had.

Then later the same day he e-mailed me and asked if I would be interested in a tower consisting of,…

2 Ghz CPU, 1 GB PC133 ( 2X 512) 1) DVDRW 2) CD drive. Power supply, AGP graphics card, PCI network card, PCI sound card, win XP sticker, (when I tried to boot this up, NO Post screen however not played with it!) NO HD

Erm yes!

So I now had two machines with no hard drives so I hatched a plan. If I could get the 2Ghz machine running I would swap that for the XP machine but put in the 80Gb drive. I also decided that I would swap the DVD drive with the one in the Linux machine and swap the 2 port USB card for the 4 port USB2 card. This now meant taking three machines apart. But first of all I need some space!

So I had one last attempt to fix the 17″ monitor that I had bought off ebay for £5.51 – I removed the back and disconnect the two VGA cables – I tried these on another machine and they worked fine so the blue cast was obviously something wrong with the monitor. I had been offered a refund but this meant driving back to Sittingbourne which would cost a couple of quid in fuel so it wasn’t worth it, so I put it in the back of the car to take to the dump along with the stripped carcasses of two other machines. this gave me some room to store the duron Tower and the second Mac and putting the old CRT monitor back on the desk created a bit more space and gave me room to work.

Having worked out that the 2GhZ machine was working I decided to go ahead. In an ideal world I would have left the webserver to last but in the real world I knew it had to be first. So i took out the two drives and put them into the old XP machine after stripping out all of the things I wanted out of there. I then put it back together and booted it. It worked so I stripped out all the useful bits from the old server and put that outside ready to join the others on the way to the dump.

However when I checked the web server I could access it from inside the network but not from outside! I thought about this while I went to the dump and Tesco’s. On my return I had a look and found that the network settings were set on eth0 whereas the new machine was looking at eth1 so a quick edit and Bob’s yer Uncle – up and working again and of course much faster!

So I took the Linux machine apart to swap the USB cards and the DVD burners over. While I was in there I thought I’d have a look to see if I could increase the RAM – to my surprise there was a 512Mb PC133 chip in there but for some reason it was only reading as 312Mb. I took that out and put it into the Duron tower and sure enough it took the memory up to 768Mb. It had come as a surprise also to find PC133 in there as I thought it only had PC100. So I had now found a use for the 4 chips I’d picked up the other day and bingo the machine now had 1GB of RAM. I put it back together again.

The final task was to put the 2GHz machine back together again. Once that was done I set about loading all the software again. Then disaster struck I somehow managed to get a nasty worm on the machine so I had no option but to redo the whole set up again. That’ll teach me!

While all this was going on I was having to stop every now and again and attend to the work I needed to get done over the weekend but I was also trying to keep an eye on some ebay auctions – I missed out on getting a 17″ monitor for about £15 by missing the auction end time but I had spotted that I was still winning a 15″ one for 99p. This is quite usual as sometimes I will be winning right up till the last few hours. However this one I noticed didn’t have a power supply (only noticed this after I bid on it) so no one else bid. I figured I would be able to get it working somehow and if I didn’t hey it had only cost me 99p.

It turned out that ages ago I had got a flat screen monitor from Freecycle only to find when I got it home that the intermittent fault it was supposed to have had become permanent! The backlight had gone rendering it useless. So it went to the dump but for some reason I had hung onto the power supply. that itself was in the box of bits I’d been meaning to Freecycle for weeks and luckily for me I hadn’t got round to doing. It turned out that, with a little bit of Heath Robinson that the power supply would power the monitor so that was a bargain.

So after a weekend of toil I now have:

Pentium III 750 with 1Gb Ram running Linux
AMD Athlon 2GHz with 1GB RAM running Xp
Pentium III 866 with about 500Mb RAM running Ubuntu server
Mac G4 350 with 1Gb RAM

and I’ve still got the Duron tower and the second Mac to try and get up and running. The PC is working but I need to finish putting it back together again! the Mac needs the PSU sorting out so that will have to wait!