I'm beginning to hate legacy hardware.
Apr. 14th, 2006 08:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
revchrisI've got two research groups (one is too cheap to shell out for upgrades, and the other is too poor) both running "mission critical" ISA cards.
This means I have to keep patching it up, and scrounging increasingly hard to find replacement computers. I watched the students from the "cheap" group pull an ISA card with the system live, but stopped short of putting the replacement card back in when I hollered at them. The card still works, but the ISA slots on that mobo are fried. They're both Korean, and too polite to ask for help until their boss makes them ask me to help them with whatever they're stuck on. They also don't take good notes, so sometimes it's hard to find out what they've already tried.
The other group has a 1996-vintage corrosion system that uses a pair of ISA cards (one with a slot connector, the other just uses the second slot fr mechanical support and has 5 cables linking it to the first). The prof asked me for help because it was giving him voltage output problems (bouncing around a lot). I looked at it, and suggested he clean all the contacts and replace the alligator clips. That didn't help. While I was doing this, the other of our profs who uses it for teaching (instead of research) told me the floppy drive was dead, and could I put a USB card into the system instead because the files are getting to be too big for a floppy in some of the experiments. The computer is a 486-class mobo with an Evergreen AMD K5/75 overdrive processor, running Win98SE. I got a card ($5 less than a new floppy drive), installed it, rebooted, and then discovered that not only doesn't the computer have enough spare resources for the card, the CD-ROM drive is also dead, so I can't load the drivers.
End result: (Wednesday) Borrow a floppy drive, disable the on-board IDE (to recover its resources), copy over the drivers for the PCI IDE controller (the on-board controller won't talk to the drive, but without drivers the PCI card won't talk to the replacement CD-ROM), get the CD working, reinstall the card and USB2.0 drivers, and in the process take out the corrosion cards, unplug all of the connectors, reconnect everything, restart the computer, and discover that I've also managed to fix the voltage problem (meaning it was a bad connection, but internal rather than external).
Yesterday I came in and one of the profs knocked on my door before I even had time to sit down at my desk. Her notebook was running out of power because her power supply wasn't working. I told her to check with the other profs to see if somebody had one, and I'd order her a new one and then look at the old one. She only has one power brick, and she uses it at home with the notebook and with the docking station at work (when I ordered the system, there were two power bricks, but she says she never saw the other one). I managed to take the power supply apart (something that it's really designed to make impossible), and shorten the cord to get rid of the failed wiring right at the strain relief, and get it back to her relatively quickly. She had also borrowed another power brick from one of the other profs, and they were planning to trade it back and forth as they each needed to recharge. Today her replacement power supply comes in, and I'm going to suggest that she buy another one, so that she has a spare (or one for her office and one that travels with the computer).
This means I have to keep patching it up, and scrounging increasingly hard to find replacement computers. I watched the students from the "cheap" group pull an ISA card with the system live, but stopped short of putting the replacement card back in when I hollered at them. The card still works, but the ISA slots on that mobo are fried. They're both Korean, and too polite to ask for help until their boss makes them ask me to help them with whatever they're stuck on. They also don't take good notes, so sometimes it's hard to find out what they've already tried.
The other group has a 1996-vintage corrosion system that uses a pair of ISA cards (one with a slot connector, the other just uses the second slot fr mechanical support and has 5 cables linking it to the first). The prof asked me for help because it was giving him voltage output problems (bouncing around a lot). I looked at it, and suggested he clean all the contacts and replace the alligator clips. That didn't help. While I was doing this, the other of our profs who uses it for teaching (instead of research) told me the floppy drive was dead, and could I put a USB card into the system instead because the files are getting to be too big for a floppy in some of the experiments. The computer is a 486-class mobo with an Evergreen AMD K5/75 overdrive processor, running Win98SE. I got a card ($5 less than a new floppy drive), installed it, rebooted, and then discovered that not only doesn't the computer have enough spare resources for the card, the CD-ROM drive is also dead, so I can't load the drivers.
End result: (Wednesday) Borrow a floppy drive, disable the on-board IDE (to recover its resources), copy over the drivers for the PCI IDE controller (the on-board controller won't talk to the drive, but without drivers the PCI card won't talk to the replacement CD-ROM), get the CD working, reinstall the card and USB2.0 drivers, and in the process take out the corrosion cards, unplug all of the connectors, reconnect everything, restart the computer, and discover that I've also managed to fix the voltage problem (meaning it was a bad connection, but internal rather than external).
Yesterday I came in and one of the profs knocked on my door before I even had time to sit down at my desk. Her notebook was running out of power because her power supply wasn't working. I told her to check with the other profs to see if somebody had one, and I'd order her a new one and then look at the old one. She only has one power brick, and she uses it at home with the notebook and with the docking station at work (when I ordered the system, there were two power bricks, but she says she never saw the other one). I managed to take the power supply apart (something that it's really designed to make impossible), and shorten the cord to get rid of the failed wiring right at the strain relief, and get it back to her relatively quickly. She had also borrowed another power brick from one of the other profs, and they were planning to trade it back and forth as they each needed to recharge. Today her replacement power supply comes in, and I'm going to suggest that she buy another one, so that she has a spare (or one for her office and one that travels with the computer).
