Other Distros

[Colonel Panic]

Thanks for the info Mike. I've just looked up the power dissipation figure for my CPU (a Pentium 4 Northwoods 2.4 GHz), and it weighs in at 59.8 watts, which is not too bad (and substantially less than that for the Prescott series, which came out later).

Almost all modern processors use more electricity than mine (except for the Intel Atom which is designed specifically to use as little power as possible), though some like the dual core processors use only slightly more at 65 watts.

So, considered purely on cost grounds it looks like an argument for hanging on to my computer if possible, unless I can find a machine with an Atom inside (and then I'd want to test it to be sure that it would run the software I want to use; my Dell Optiplex wouldn't run Legacy OS2, for example).

[bark_bark_bark]

...my Dell Optiplex wouldn't run Legacy OS2...

Offtopic:

I nearly read that part as:

my Dell Optiplex wouldn't run OS/2

[mikeb]

Hmmm

well a 1GHz pentium 3 is 25 watts max consumption...

There are some i7 that are from 35 to 65 watts...bear in mind you will get much more processing per watt so actual usage would be lower for the same tasks compared to a P4. Indeed under some conditions the figures are better than an atom!

centrinos...7-27 watts

dual core atom 8 watts ... I like that figure

Me olde compaqs (P4) that are nice for 3d games with nvidia cards have 250-300 watt PSU and generate hardly any heat under constant full load.

The P4 architecture was a bit of a dead end...maxing performance by burning the watts rather than improving the design... but they wanted to recoup investment...things have improved since then.

all fun

mike

[starhawk]

I've done cap replacements, it's not that bad. First time was in a power supply for a monitor, actually.

Once it's off, they're discharged, according to my tech shop friend. Once they're discharged, they're safe to handle.

The only danger is getting the polarity wrong...

[Colonel Panic]

I've done cap replacements, it's not that bad. First time was in a power supply for a monitor, actually.

Once it's off, they're discharged, according to my tech shop friend. Once they're discharged, they're safe to handle.

The only danger is getting the polarity wrong...

Thanks for the advice, but that isn't my understanding. Capacitors store charge - that's the whole point of them, as I'm sure you realise - and only release it slowly, so the innards of a computer's power supply remain dangerous even after the power has been switched off.

I'm sorry to have to argue with you about this when you're being kind enough to offer me advice but this thread may well be read by other people who are not electronics experts, so there is a responsibility here to not advocate any actions which could have serious consequences.

[Colonel Panic]

Hmmm

well a 1GHz pentium 3 is 25 watts max consumption...

There are some i7 that are from 35 to 65 watts...bear in mind you will get much more processing per watt so actual usage would be lower for the same tasks compared to a P4. Indeed under some conditions the figures are better than an atom!

centrinos...7-27 watts

dual core atom 8 watts ... I like that figure

Me olde compaqs (P4) that are nice for 3d games with nvidia cards have 250-300 watt PSU and generate hardly any heat under constant full load.

The P4 architecture was a bit of a dead end...maxing performance by burning the watts rather than improving the design... but they wanted to recoup investment...things have improved since then.

all fun

mike

Thanks Mike. I wouldn't mind a P3 if I could get one with a reasonable amount of RAM, but RAM sticks for computers of that vintage are very expensive now.

[mikeb]

Thanks Mike. I wouldn't mind a P3 if I could get one with a reasonable amount of RAM, but RAM sticks for computers of that vintage are very expensive now,

hmm yes a bit rare now...I always got them from ebay for a dollar or 3 ...thats equivalent to the uk price.

Indeed they might be cheaper here since our stuff is usually a year or five behind the US. Post is around 5$ minimum now here to there.

Only spares i have is a couple of pc100 128 as the rest are in use (pc133/256MB).
The rule of thumb is low density seem to work on anything, high may not.

The extra ram does help I must say...mainly for frugal loading to ram...windows manages with less ok. 386MB was also a good figure and 256 okish.... some swap regardless with these smaller sizes bringing the total up to 1GB is a good worker.

First machine had 64MB ram...hopeless for most live distros..used to record and edit video with it on windows...just as an aside.


Caps..I would expect to discharge in a psu as it dies...but I would not play with a dead atx psu..might be caps...just as likely the main switching transistor...rectifiers, transformer...be safe and grab a cheap replacement as a mistake could blow up the motherboard.

I did repair them for a while for a company but i had an isolating transformer, circuit diagrams and full test gear.

mike

[Colonel Panic]

A quick update; I decided in the end to not risk meddling with it myself (especially after taking a closer look at the mess I'd made of the ribbon cabling when I originally set the machine up last year). I've called in my local IT professional to help sort it out.

Thanks anyway to everyone who's posted their suggestions and advice,

CP .

[nitehawk]

I'm here with good ol' Slackware again. Yes, it's true. My brother (an old retired byker-<slash> electronics technician),....gave me this HP Pavilion dv2500 laptop.

Anyone who has had these laptops know how "fussy" they can be about the video chipset suddenly going out and leaving them with a black screen. So far (knock on wood) this one is still showing the video. My other one he gave me went black right after I got it. My grandaugher has the same make and model,..and her's is just beginning to get "ca-tankerous". (sometimes the video will come on,..and sometimes it won't).

I am on dialup (yes,..and I freely admit it, as well) What ya gonna do? Anyhow,...I put Mageia on it,...and it was beautiful. Ran the LXDE desktop with very low resource usage. Then I used KPPP to select the ttyACMO setting to detect my USB modem for dialup.

Mageia said everything was "peachy-keen"...and I was connected. But no browsers would open.

Ah, well,..back to good ol' vanilla Slackware right now on the laptop,..and posting from it right now. It just gets the job done.

I have Tahrpup on it, as well,...however,...since VLC doesn't play videos in Tahrpup,..that is pretty well a deal-breaker for me. I don't want to try and do a lot of downloading (on slow dialup) and "fiddling" around. So may go with another flavor of Puppy on this lappy.

[starhawk]

The well-known problem with those laptops is related to the graphics chipset.

Read here --> http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/new ... -defective

tl;dr -- nVIDIA changed the type of solder used for their chips and it screwed everything up big time.

Here's the process my local tech shop uses to get things fixed. Despite sounding a little dubious, it has a near 100% success rate. Not bad!

Strip the system down to the bare motherboard. Remove EVERYTHING that can be removed. Literally.

Put a layer of tinfoil over the board. Just lay it on top, you're not wrapping a Christmas present here. Make sure there's a hole over the graphics chip, the size and shape of the chip.

Lay into it with a heatgun for 30 seconds, a full minute at most. Pretend you're drying its hair.

Let it sit until it's cool. Completely room-temperature cool. Should take about ten to fifteen minutes.

Reassemble the computer and test.

Mind you this is always (and necessarily so) a temporary fix. The problem is caused by the solder used by the manufacturer. Repeated uses of the technique here will have diminishing returns BUT it's the best you can do unless and until you replace the entire laptop.

I can imagine a way to permanently fix it. You need what is called a 'reballing workstation' -- remove the chip from the board entirely, remove all solder from the chip and from where the chip was on the board, and replace it with more standard leaded solder, then put the chip back on the board. Good luck, you'll need it. There is a very very very high chance that doing this will destroy both chip and board permanently from heatstroke. You have been warned!

[mikeb]

tl;dr -- nVIDIA changed the type of solder used for their chips and it screwed everything up big time.

blame not Nvidia...Its HP ...had the same problem with one of their netbooks.... lead free and bad heatsink design...and cheap chips.

mike

[starhawk]

Nope. Definitely nVIDIA on this one. Intel and ATi/AMD graphics chip based products universally do not have that issue -- and the HP dv* series of laptops are not the only ones affected. ANY and all nVIDIA 8xxx-based chips are affected.

Additionally, lead-free solder isn't *that* bad. Requires a higher setting on the iron, but only slightly, and if it's used right (key phrase there!) there's no loss in joint quality. It's when you don't do it right (oh hey I'm bored here in upper management let's switch to lead free solder over in production right now this very second, that'll liven things up a little) that you have major problems like this crop up. nVIDIA would've been completely fine if they'd bothered to slow things down a bit, do proper testing, and reengineer the package layout... but they decided not to do their homework that night, and everyone paid the price (including nVIDIA themselves -- they almost went bankrupt because of that, I heard).

I will say that HP makes things with an incredible lack of attention to build quality, though. Or, rather, they build everything to cost with genuinely atrocious results...

[mikeb]

I was thinking in terms of who solders the chip to the motherboard.

Curse these pertinent topics...my Nvidia mx4000 appears to have just died in one machine... its twilight zone time... don't speak ill of the video cards.....

I did try the oven baked approach but think I went a bit too far with charred results.

Actually that's because the first time it failed which I found out afterwards was HP's OWN WORKSHOP MANUAL showed the power connector going to the wrong place so it seemed like the board was a dead duck when testing...only notice when a brand new motherboard also failed to run. The second one I got as the company first time sent the wrong one...I sent back at my expense to the US...second one from another company was 50 cents over the custom limit so cost me double....mainly due to using more expensive courier...cheers people.

HP used to make brick outhouse quality gear when I was a hairy technician....used to...

mike

[technosaurus]

Installed another new distro.

From Todd Robinson of On-Disk.com (remember 31 Flavors of Fun) is SiNG one.zero.

I'm sure they would rather sell you a dvd but Sing is available as a free download.
https://singisnotgnome.wordpress.com/downloads/

http://on-disk.com/product_info.php/products_id/1626

SiNG one.zero is the first 64 bit desktop operating system release I'm aware of designed to maximize speed, and efficiency, while minimizing power consumption to extend battery life. Even more impressively, it's not a minimalist release, but built specifically for modern 64 bit PCs, Laptops, and Netbooks with widescreen displays.

The SiNG desktop is derived from JWM (Joe's Window Manager). It's impressively lean, yet beautiful. Something anyone who ever used JWM wouldn't expect to find.

The desktop is characterized by the huge application launcher (start button) in the upper right corner. At first this seemed to be overkill, but then I discovered the genius behind it. You can quickly launch the application finder without precision pointer control...great when using a touchpad.

All of the desktop controls are contained in the control bar on the right. This not only maximizes vertical screen space, but makes switching between virtual desktops, selecting minimized applications, and moving applications quicker and easier than I've ever experienced before. I even noticed that you can right click on a window in the virtual screen selector (sometimes called a pager) and drag windows from one virtual screen (virtual desktop) to another. I found this to be faster than using the menu option under the window icon decoration menu.

SiNG is built from a combination of Debian and L/X/K/Ubuntu, and is 100% compatible with the current Long Term Support Version, which provides system and application updates until 2020.

Has anyone else tried this?

[James C]

I stand corrected. I'm using Tahrpup now and it won't install to a single partition; it's the whole hard drive or nothing. Oh well.

I ran into the same problem with Tahr here...
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 881#833881

[James C]

Has anyone else tried this?

Guess I'm the only one.....

Code: Select all

admin@ubuntu:~$ uname -a
Linux ubuntu 3.13.0-46-generic #77-Ubuntu SMP Mon Mar 2 18:23:39 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
admin@ubuntu:~$ 

Seems lighter and quicker than regular 'buntu's (I use Ubuntu MATE and Xubuntu).A different implementation of JWM too.

Nice to have the loaded repositories too.

[greengeek]

I did try the oven baked approach but think I went a bit too far with charred results.

I've done a heatgun repair on about 20 HP LJP3005 printers and succeeded with all but one. As Starhawk said this kind of approach only buys you time, but hey it works for a few months. I'm of the opinion that the problem is the design issue inherent in using any BGA chip - the ball of solder underneath the contact point is always being asked to expand and contact as the chip and motherboard expand at different rates. Tthe heat is initially generated in the chip so it expands first, then the motherboard expands more slowly as the heat transfers, so there is always mechanical movement (very small) between the chip and the mobo surface, which generates dry joints as the solder composition/condition changes.

I avoid RAM chips that use BGA design for exactly this reason - it is nowhere near as good as the older chips which had legs poking out of the sides of the chips, allowing expansion and contraction to be absorbed by the metal of the legs rather than by the solder itself.

[666philb]

I stand corrected. I'm using Tahrpup now and it won't install to a single partition; it's the whole hard drive or nothing. Oh well.

hi Colonel Panic,

fll install to partition is working fine for me, but james c has also reported this happening to him as well on one of his older computers. what option did you choose in the universal installer?

also , do you know the make and type of your harddrive?
cheers

phil

[mikeb]

I'm of the opinion that the problem is the design issue inherent in using any BGA chip - the ball of solder underneath the contact point is always being asked to expand and contact as the chip and motherboard expand at different rates. Tthe heat is initially generated in the chip so it expands first, then the motherboard expands more slowly as the heat transfers, so there is always mechanical movement (very small) between the chip and the mobo surface, which generates dry joints as the solder composition/condition changes.

And lead free solder, apart from needing higher temperatures and in industry precious metal tips to avoid fast corrosion (yes there are shitty chemicals in it too), quickly becomes brittle under such thermal expansion.
The softer nature of leaded solder can handle it much much better...which is why lead free is not allowed in such as aircraft and automobile electronics...its simply too unreliable in stressful and critical applications...ok for selling equipment that will fail in a year or too to the public though.

Funny I never remember ever eating circuit boards to poison myself...same goes for automobile batteries.

My source of information...a very interesting tour around a factory that makes robot soldering equipment.....ie for the stuff you cannot flow solder... and I got a full run down of the problems introduced with lead free... seems more like a way of building in obsolescence and put up manufacturing costs in the end...just like the antistatic junk was years before even though it was a short lived problem with early CMOS.
Bullcrappo makes money....

I turned down their job offer as they paid so badly... guess they spent up on retooling (actually the boss was a tight arse...even got the company name on the cheap.)

mike

mike

[Colonel Panic]

I stand corrected. I'm using Tahrpup now and it won't install to a single partition; it's the whole hard drive or nothing. Oh well.

hi Colonel Panic,

fll install to partition is working fine for me, but james c has also reported this happening to him as well on one of his older computers. what option did you choose in the universal installer?

also , do you know the make and type of your harddrive?
cheers

phil

Hi,

It's a Maxtor and, according to my system information program (Hardinfo), it's a 6L160P0 - that is, a DiamondMax 10;

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822144181