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

[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 I'm trying to replace all our outdated equipment with newer, better-performing, more energy-efficient equipment.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.