The continuing saga ...

[unixronin]

... of the M5309 laptop continues, here in the Department of Redundancy Department.  Even after replacing the heatsink compound in the M5309, it still has continuous thermal problems in this weather.  The cooling design is totally inadequate.  Although it's no longer overheating its CPU into emergency thermal shutdown, about 15-20 minutes of running at full CPU speed will overheat the machine as a whole to the point of getting random memory errors every few minutes.  The only way to make it run stably has been to remove all the access panels on the bottom of the case and set up a fan blowing directly into the case. With that done, it's most of the way to having a functional X desktop installed, but it's going to be moot if it can't run for longer than twenty minutes in summer without overheating itself.  At this point, I'm mainly just continuing to work on the install for the sake of achieving victory.

Comments

[ithildae]

Pyhrric?

[unixronin]

I gave up on it. It was wasted effort, and we were given another laptop to use for Pirate, a Thinkpad R50.

Of course, TODAY I discovered that most Thinkpads, the T40 and R50 included, refuse to boot with an "unauthorized" Mini-PCI wireless card installed. The "authorized" list is apparently a PCI id whitelist in the BIOS, and apparently it's very, very short.

[ithildae]

AFAIK the list consists of Cisco and Atheros cards. I really like my T40 and my T43. They are solid and sweet machines. My wife has a T23 that she enjoys. They run linux well. (Right now, I have kubuntu on the laptops. I am working [sort of] on a gentoo install on the T40. xorg issues.)

At least you have more modern equipment to work with. I am finding that working on much older equipment is causing more headaches than it is solving. The costs are not really any lower for old stuff. I have three down systems with odd issues. The kids are taking it in good grace, but there are still issues about computer use. An Athlon X4 system is $100 + RAM. It is hard to justify spending $50 on an old system at that price point. The problem is that I don't really have the $50 to throw into an old system, let alone $100 for the new.

I do enjoy working with the older equipment, but it is no longer cost effective. I work on computers to keep some skills up. I am increasingly wondering what I am going to use those skills on.

[unixronin]

Yes, the "known supported" list appears to be pretty much Atheros or nothing, though I found some tables that suggested that SOME Intel ipw2100 (only) and SOME Cisco Aironet cards MAY work in SOME Thinkpads.

So I guess I need to locate a couple of Atheros mini-PCI cards, and find out how far a Thinkpad R50 has to be disassembled to get to the mini-PCI slot.

The R50 actually has a wireless card installed, but judging by how it's acting, the card's transmitter is dead but its receiver still works. It is able to see wireless networks, including ours, but the router never receives any traffic from it. The card tries to send a DHCPDISCOVER packet, but it never reaches the network.


I hear you on the old gear. I'm trying to replace all our outdated equipment with newer, better-performing, more energy-efficient equipment. But it's hard to do on an emergencies-only budget.

[xander-opal.livejournal.com]

Hm, after reading this and your previous post, I may want to disassemble RangingDrake for a cleanup, as pushing it has resulted in possibly temp-related wonkiness. And setting it first on a horizontal box-fan, and later a 'proper' laptop-stand with cooling fan made a big difference when running games and such.