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unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Unixronin

December 2012

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Sunday, July 11th, 2010 09:30 pm

... 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.

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Friday, July 16th, 2010 01:23 am (UTC)
Pyhrric?
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 01:26 am (UTC)
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.
Monday, July 12th, 2010 02:22 am (UTC)
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.