On Fri, 19 Apr 2002, Zane H. Healy wrote: I hear that. With a little bit of doing, you can make a SCSI 10. You do I have a point. I have a bunch of really nice PC's here, and they all hold their own versus various workstations. But, on the whole, the world of the PC definitely caters closer to the LCD than a lot of other kinds of hardware. Peace... Sridhar

OK, the Lowest Common Denominator arguement I can buy. I think that in this day and age there are two different classes of PC's, Consumer Grade, and Commercial Grade (and both of these are probably split into a high and low group). Looking around here, most of the stuff I've got is pretty much commercial grade stuff (especially stuff like the Quad-Pentium Pro, and Dual Xeon). A couple exceptions are would be a wierd little i810 board I have sitting in a wooden rack behind my Sparc 20 (once I got the kinks with Linux worked out it was rock solid for months, but it's been having network problems that I think is the switch, and not it). The other exception is a hopelessly overloaded Dual Processor 400Mhz Celeron. The only thing I use it for anymore is to dial into work, or to make a disk image of one of the SCSI disks for my PDP-11. The only time it seems to manage to stay up for more than 3 days is when I forget it's on. I could blame that on crappy PC hardware, but in this case I'm more inclined to blame myself (remember I said it's overloaded). The OS you have on the hardware can really be the deciding factor in how stable it is. The 1Ghz Pentium III system I mentioned in my last message that I have running Linux, and I use to run PDP-10 and PDP-11 emulators is an HP Vectra (normally I'd never get a prebuilt system, but I got it for free, and I've got to admit it's rather well built). One of the women I used to work with has one also, and it's running Windows 98. Hers crashes all the time, mine running Linux is rock solid. The other thing to consider is you get what you pay for, if you buy something like a "Packard Bell" (aren't they finally dead), you're going to have a piece of crap. The same will undoubtably pretty much hold true with any of the dirt cheap systems you find at your local computer store. The trick is to run a good OS, and carefully craft a system to run it using good parts. Zane -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

Now that you mention it I don't think my XP system has crashed once since I got the cooling under control, it has only crashed twice. The amazing thing is that the i850GB motherboard is supposed to require a minimum of 250W PS, and I've got a 240W PS with a Pentium IV, and 512MB RDRAM, as well as other bells and whistles. Up until I added a couple fans and those cool round cables you can buy now, it was having real heat problems. That's one advantage of a lot of the classic hardware, less heat problems (unless it's something like a Q-Bus or Unibus system, my PDP-11/44 can really kick out the heat). Zane

Since it's been so hot I had to pop the top off of my PC. The top of the case was getting hot!! It's an AMD K6-2 stuffed with cards, all in a desktop PC case built in 96, so it would have been designed for high power 486's or low end pentiums. I found the heatsink on my STB Velocity 4400 was too hot to touch, even with the top off, all day. Temporarily, I've got a fan sitting on top of the cards and the power supply. It's cooled off a lot!! I need to poke a hole in the case an permanently install that fan. A guy at work mentioned I may be over loading my power supply, too. I had never thought of that. I think mine is only a 230 watter. I think I may be replacing it with a higher wattage unit to be on the safe side. Chad Fernandez Michigan, USA Doc wrote:

been there, done that, kinda sucks and looks ugly. i've begun getting more creative and started using some of the sanding and rounding features with my dremel and made one that has dual fan and a HDD LED on it for a SCSI drive i had sitting in a 486- though it is long gone now. 486 died and i had decided to donate it to a friend who liked to use explosives. first time i saw a 486 CPU fly over 20 feet =) -John At 01:01 AM 4/20/02, you wrote: ---------------------------------------- Founder, Lead Writer, Tech Analyst and Web Designer Boff-Net Technologies http://boff-net.dhs.org/index.html ---------------------------------------

Doc wrote: Beats me why some heat sink mfrs. put that crappy adhesive/gum on the sweet spot. I recently built a dual Athlon 1600MP+ Thunder K7 server using an expensive, board-specific 460W supply and Cooler Master DP5-6I11A's (too tight a fit for anything bigger). As an experiment, using the hypothesis that that stuff was supposed to be some kind of heat-sinking silicone, I installed the coolers as they were. Needless to say, until I scraped that pink junk off and put a layer of heat sink compound on the dies, the system would crash once ambient air hit 80 F. or so. Wouldn't even make it through an fsck at boot. The bios hardware monitor appears way off, (52-3 C processor temp at startup) and I haven't installed lmsensors, so I don't know exactly how hot the processors were getting. 93 F today though and it's running fine. No need to tell me I need A/C :-) These women will want one for the house then. Unfortunately they won't want to pay for the juice ($100+/mo) :-( jbdigriz