Tech marches on
Thursday’s wrap
After I started looking into the Dell PowerEdge upgrade costs it all started to become very familiar. I had already done this. The conclusion from previous research suddenly hit me. The cheapest way to upgrade the Dell PowerEdge 6300/400 from dual Xeon 400s to quad 550s is to buy this for $189.95. Ridiculous.
On the Suse Linux box the news is not so good. All the extra memory I have laying around is DDR and the Linux box uses the older SDRAM. It has 256MB installed and that is abit thin for any kind of real work, but I only use it as a trainer/demo. The onboard video was being used so I grabbed an old Riva 128 video card off the shelf and popped it in. That will save some CPU clocks and 8MB of precious RAM.
I never got to test it. I think the Power supply is fried. Luckily I have a few power supplies laying around. I may have to repurpose this machine and find something a bit more capable for my Linux sandbox.
Online for today
Rebench the Suse Linux machine and replace power supply, if needed, which I am fairly certain it does. Given that it would not turn on it is either the power supply or the little wire on the front power button was knocked loose when I was fiddling around with the RAM sticks.
Hopefully my ZipZoomFly order containing the bulk of my new workstation components will arrive today but I am not so optimistic. If the order does arrive, I will be assembling the pieces into a greater whole.
I ordered all the new computer stuff this past Monday from two vendors: TigerDirect and ZipZoomFly. All I ordered from TigerDirect was the Natural Keyboard and the GeForce video card and that package arrived Wednesday. Impressive. I had been thinking Thursday delivery would be good and Friday would be satisfactory. Monday, not so satisfactory. I paid about $80 total for 2nd day delivery on both orders. TigerDirect obviously takes their 2nd day a little more seriously than ZipZoomFly.
I also have a lot of research to do in support of the report I have been working on. Maybe I will share some of that if any of it turns out to be interesting.
Of course my dead workstation is now the second most powerful machine I have in inventory. The motherboard and processor work fine so I can build around it. I think the power supply may be a little weak but luckily I have a few power supplies laying around. Perhaps it will be the new Linux sandbox?