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Messing with old stuff!
10 years ago
General
An Old Fox's life
Well I more than likely have not mentioned that in my past I was a Dell Wage Slave.
I spent 12 years plus 2 more a security for dell. In my time at Dell I was boxing for night shift Servers. A branch that was told we would fail. Later I graduated to the build area where I excelled do to my fantastic mechanical skills. Soon I was a top builder and helping others with issues. On an average shift we had to build from 5 to 12 servers a shift. I normally had my quota done by lunch time. That included them tossing the hardest ones at me.
Later, they has openings for lead and I put in for them but was turned down. I found out later why. They needed help in the Audit area and the lead was a crazy nutcase named Max. Turned out I was like the only person that actually got along and worked well with him. Later I became lead auditor and had a great career at Dell and it included my shutting down production three time saving them millions and huge headaches. But that is another story.
I always loved building and tinkering with computers and over the years I custom built my XPS 600 that only died a year ago. It was tweaked and running windows 7 64 bit with some nice graphics. Sadly Dells Cheap Capacitors on the MB all swelled and blew up finally proving that even with the good top of the Line EXPS had them. Still rather than spending 100 bucks to replace them I decided to build a nice Top of the line system that I posted in my journal a few months back. So why mess with old stuff?
I had a running Dell 4700 that my foster child used for many years that I picked up at a Resale computer shop for 149 bucks with keyboard and monitor for her. It was sitting around gathering dust for a few years and being bored I decided to load windows 7 on it for a hoot. Thus began the year long FrakenDell project!
Frankendell was supposed to be simple and just a disk and poof done. Instead it turned out to be lots of burned Window's 7 disks and finding that the 4700 also had blown capacitors on the MB. My first attempts at windows 7 always had some strange missing file issue. So I spent hours and months trying to find a good image. Then when I had it on and loaded it would not stick I had video issues reboot issues and lots of BSOD's and that turned out to be many things.
I found the blown caps on the board and sighed knowing that having it fixed was worth more than the system. E-bay solved that with a nice running MB with a 3.2 Ht processor for 24 bucks and shipping. It arrived and I swapped things over and rebuilt things and still it had issues. After some weeks of beating my head I parked it and left things alone. Months passed and I began to go through the left over XPS 600 pieces and pulled the 4700 out from the lower shelf and began tinkering.
I again ran into issues with BSOD and graphics issues. It was obvious that the 4700 would not take 64 bit and I even tried the better processor from the XPS and it didn't even work it was not usable with the 4700 board. I went back to the 3.2 HT that came with the board and it worked but I had to do many changes and tests before It finally loaded and ran windows 7 32 bit. Somme of the things I found out were.
The memory I had... four sticks of 1gig had issues. ended up using two of the 677 dell two gig sticks in the 4700 the two 800 two gig sticks I had from the xps would not work. Nor did adding any of the 677 one gigs the system only accepted two gigs period. That was days of swapping testing and reloading windows. I had the missing file issue lots Till finally I got a factory windows 7 image that was dell to use. It installed easily.
Still Frankendell had issues I had an older GT 7900 vid card and it proved to be defective and tossed that. Pulled out a GTX 650 Pny card to find it borked also giving me black screens on reboots. I tried a simple radon card and poof things worked fine but sadly it had no balls other than basic graphics. So I walked to my closet and pulled out a Evga GTX 560 Ti card I had just pulled from my third string back up computer. It had dual 560's bridged and ran fine till about a month back when the net port on the MB took a dump. I ended up installing a Ethernet adapter on it to get around the issue and the "Holy Hell!" costly MB! God you would think that MB's for an older system would be cheap but the intel 1133 boards must be made of gold.
I put in the High end video card that just fit and fired it up and Volia it ran perfectly! Even the when it updates and then locked issue was gone! So it finished and I had a functioning system. But I noticed that it ran very hot the video card was very hot. So I went digging into my spare fan box. I used a 80MM one on the front of the case blowing onto the Hd. I used a 120 mm inside blowing on front of the card and a old Dell HV case fan on the side blowing out of the grill on the case cover.
I did have one accident I was testing fans and while holding one of the old XPS HV fans and plugging it in it slipped and bit my thumb breaking the fan and of course gashing my thumb leaving me with a painful cut to nurse. In the end it runs and runs windows 7 and actually can run Second Life well.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v.....pspe6cxyjr.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v.....psmcagri5k.jpg
I spent 12 years plus 2 more a security for dell. In my time at Dell I was boxing for night shift Servers. A branch that was told we would fail. Later I graduated to the build area where I excelled do to my fantastic mechanical skills. Soon I was a top builder and helping others with issues. On an average shift we had to build from 5 to 12 servers a shift. I normally had my quota done by lunch time. That included them tossing the hardest ones at me.
Later, they has openings for lead and I put in for them but was turned down. I found out later why. They needed help in the Audit area and the lead was a crazy nutcase named Max. Turned out I was like the only person that actually got along and worked well with him. Later I became lead auditor and had a great career at Dell and it included my shutting down production three time saving them millions and huge headaches. But that is another story.
I always loved building and tinkering with computers and over the years I custom built my XPS 600 that only died a year ago. It was tweaked and running windows 7 64 bit with some nice graphics. Sadly Dells Cheap Capacitors on the MB all swelled and blew up finally proving that even with the good top of the Line EXPS had them. Still rather than spending 100 bucks to replace them I decided to build a nice Top of the line system that I posted in my journal a few months back. So why mess with old stuff?
I had a running Dell 4700 that my foster child used for many years that I picked up at a Resale computer shop for 149 bucks with keyboard and monitor for her. It was sitting around gathering dust for a few years and being bored I decided to load windows 7 on it for a hoot. Thus began the year long FrakenDell project!
Frankendell was supposed to be simple and just a disk and poof done. Instead it turned out to be lots of burned Window's 7 disks and finding that the 4700 also had blown capacitors on the MB. My first attempts at windows 7 always had some strange missing file issue. So I spent hours and months trying to find a good image. Then when I had it on and loaded it would not stick I had video issues reboot issues and lots of BSOD's and that turned out to be many things.
I found the blown caps on the board and sighed knowing that having it fixed was worth more than the system. E-bay solved that with a nice running MB with a 3.2 Ht processor for 24 bucks and shipping. It arrived and I swapped things over and rebuilt things and still it had issues. After some weeks of beating my head I parked it and left things alone. Months passed and I began to go through the left over XPS 600 pieces and pulled the 4700 out from the lower shelf and began tinkering.
I again ran into issues with BSOD and graphics issues. It was obvious that the 4700 would not take 64 bit and I even tried the better processor from the XPS and it didn't even work it was not usable with the 4700 board. I went back to the 3.2 HT that came with the board and it worked but I had to do many changes and tests before It finally loaded and ran windows 7 32 bit. Somme of the things I found out were.
The memory I had... four sticks of 1gig had issues. ended up using two of the 677 dell two gig sticks in the 4700 the two 800 two gig sticks I had from the xps would not work. Nor did adding any of the 677 one gigs the system only accepted two gigs period. That was days of swapping testing and reloading windows. I had the missing file issue lots Till finally I got a factory windows 7 image that was dell to use. It installed easily.
Still Frankendell had issues I had an older GT 7900 vid card and it proved to be defective and tossed that. Pulled out a GTX 650 Pny card to find it borked also giving me black screens on reboots. I tried a simple radon card and poof things worked fine but sadly it had no balls other than basic graphics. So I walked to my closet and pulled out a Evga GTX 560 Ti card I had just pulled from my third string back up computer. It had dual 560's bridged and ran fine till about a month back when the net port on the MB took a dump. I ended up installing a Ethernet adapter on it to get around the issue and the "Holy Hell!" costly MB! God you would think that MB's for an older system would be cheap but the intel 1133 boards must be made of gold.
I put in the High end video card that just fit and fired it up and Volia it ran perfectly! Even the when it updates and then locked issue was gone! So it finished and I had a functioning system. But I noticed that it ran very hot the video card was very hot. So I went digging into my spare fan box. I used a 80MM one on the front of the case blowing onto the Hd. I used a 120 mm inside blowing on front of the card and a old Dell HV case fan on the side blowing out of the grill on the case cover.
I did have one accident I was testing fans and while holding one of the old XPS HV fans and plugging it in it slipped and bit my thumb breaking the fan and of course gashing my thumb leaving me with a painful cut to nurse. In the end it runs and runs windows 7 and actually can run Second Life well.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v.....pspe6cxyjr.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v.....psmcagri5k.jpg
