Hardware

Here are some of my experiences with computer hardware.

multivac.cwru.edu was ordered from Dell in summer 1999. It's a Precision 410 workstation, with:

• two Pentium II 400 MHz processors,
• 128 MB of RAM,
• two 8 GB Quantum Atlas IV hard disks (I only asked for two 4 GB disks),
• a SCSI NEC CD-ROM drive,
• a floppy drive,
• a 3com 3c59x Ethernet card (I use the 3c59x Linux driver),
• a 17-inch LCD Dell UltraScan monitor,
• an nVidia RIVA TNT2 video card,
• a Crystal Sonic CS4238 audio card (I use the cs4232, uart401, sound, soundcore, and isa-pnp Linux drivers),
• serial and parallel ports,
• two USB ports,
• and a 36 GB Quantum Atlas 10K hard disk which was added later.

One of the original disks had an I/O failure on 2003-01-31. Unmounting the filesystem and running badblocks resulted in a kernel panic.

teletran-1.cwru.edu was ordered from IBM in summer 2002. It's a ThinkPad A22p (model 2629USU), with:

• a 1 GHz processor,
• 192 MB of RAM,
• a 32 GB hard disk,
• a combo CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive,
• a floppy drive,
• a combo modem/Ethernet card, usable with the EtherExpress driver and the ltmodem driver for Linux,
• a 15-inch LCD screen,
• an ATI Rage128 video card,
• S-Video input and output ports (I was told S-Video is digital; it isn't),
• an audio card,
• serial and parallel ports,
• a USB port,
• and two PCMCIA slots.

Shortly after this machine arrived, the motherboard died. I scheduled a time for IBM to pick up the machine for repair. The machine made it from Cleveland, OH to Memphis, TN and back in under 19 hours, and was returned in working condition. However, it was powered on when it came back, suggesting that the repair folks didn't bother to read the shutdown instruction I sent. (The repair order form specifically asked about such instructions.)

The hard disk drive died and was replaced in 2007.

In January 2009, teletran started hanging so frequently as to be unusable, apparently due to overheating.