Zel's Fleet Blog - BX, Jag XJ-S, Sinclair C5, Mercedes 208D & 230TE, AC Model 70.

[CitroJim]

Gosh Zel

[Zelandeth]

Minimum viable system achieved. With the memory also shuffled around into the correct slots.

This should be everything we need to work.



Hard disk is just a random one grabbed from the Pile o' Drives (TM) for testing, the actual operating systems will be going on SSDs once things are properly set up. I think the contents of said pile contains capacities from 20Mb to 2Tb and interfaces including ST-506, IDE, SCSI in a couple of flavours, SATA and SAS. Oh and that weird 26-pin JVC/Ricoh ST-506-but-not-quite one that Toshiba and Grid were fans of in the late 80s.

Hey look, it's alive!



This is very much what we wanted to see here - especially that 2013 "boot block date" which shows that this is the later version of the motherboard and should be able to accept the V2 Xeon processors. Including the 12-core, 24-thread E5-2697 v2. Which originally retailed for around $1800. I just bought one for £30 including shipping. The depreciation of enterprise grade gear is just silly. 48Gb of RAM (taking us up to 64) for less than £30 doesn't hurt either.

Had it successfully booted into Mint and everything seems fine (if a little slow, running from a 2010 era mechanical hard drive). Once the upgrade bits arrive I'll look at getting things transferred over.

[Zelandeth]

It was so much fun last time, so let's do it again!



A little under an hour later the head is again off and sitting in our conservatory.



Once I've got the inlet manifold separated (again) I'll get it dropped off at Headline MK now they're back up and running again for inspection and any repairs needed.

Then hopefully we will be able to get the engine back together and turn our attention to the other issues such as the brake pedal that only starts to bite an inch from the floor and steering with about half a turn of slop in it.

Oh, and I need to address this. What is it with virtually all modern rubber parts being utter tripe?



That was fitted about a month ago. Anywhere that would be annoying, but for a part that needs the head removing to change it's downright infuriating. I'll get it measured up and see about getting a Viton or EPDM replacement which hopefully shouldn't immediately start to decompose. I will also be pinging a message to the providing supplier.

I guess in a roundabout way it's a good thing I had to pull it apart again, because if I'd had to in a couple of months for that stupid O-ring failing I would have been...annoyed. So having a more major issue is somehow less irritating.

On the computer front a couple of packages turned up through the week.

First of these was a CPU upgrade in the form of an E5-2697 V2. Changing that out was without doubt the simplest upgrade I've ever done - it took longer to walk downstairs and outside to blow the dust out the heatsink than it did to change the CPU.



As hoped this just worked.



Though having 24 logical cores does make CPU usage charts look a bit silly.



Couple of days later another box turned up which contained a fresh set of memory for it. Looks much better with the slots all filled.



Though we did have a slight issue in that one stick was dead on arrival. The plus side of course being this type of machine it tells you exactly where which makes life easier.



The remaining seven however seem to be absolutely fine and coped absolutely fine with an extended session on test.



This served as a nice thermal soak test as well. As this CPU can burn through 130W when all cores are active and it's running boosted to 3.2GHz, the thermals are something we need to keep an eye on. Highest temperatures we saw were in the mid 60s though which is perfectly reasonable. The fans weren't even running that fast either and had plenty of range left - the origins of this thing are evident if you manually ramp the fans up to full speed and it does a passable impression of a hovercraft.

The seller has been absolutely fine about it and have already dispatched a replacement for the bad stick of memory. When you're paying these prices for 13 year old hardware the odd dud is always going to turn up now and then so it's not a big deal. I really don't need bleeding edge performance, so am quite happy with my DDR3 - especially when it's cost me £36 for 64Gb rather than around £500 which it looks like DDR5 would cost me if I went out and bought it today.

The last piece of the puzzle I'm waiting on is a drive caddy which will slot into one of the 5.25" bays which will hold four 2.5" drives. This gives me a nice neat solution to holding the system SSDs, leaving all three 3.5" bays for the storage drives. Wish I'd found this a while ago as it would have made life a bit easier with my old machine as well.



This was kind of necessary as this system just predates 2.5" SSDs really taking over to the extent they have so there isn't any native support for them. It's otherwise so nicely set up though that I'm more than willing to make a bit of an effort to implement a solution for that.

Once that caddy turns up I'll look to get things transferred over. As far as Mint is concerned it should just work, Windows may or may not we'll just have to see. I'm not losing sleep over it though as that's only really there to run a handful of games so if I need to reinstall it that's not the end of the world.

Trabant was out and about a few days ago (I miss driving it too much to leave it on the drive longer than I can get away with), so have a photo of it out and about.



It's always nice when you can pull off a relatively dateless photo like that I think.

[Zelandeth]

Well I wasn't expecting the drive caddy to turn up until the end of the week, but it arrived today.

Here's a before and after between the old PC and the new one.

Old one.



New one.



That's a bit less chaotic isn't it?

The old one was originally pretty tidy, but it's evolved over the last five years or so and the case layout was never stellar to start with. All of the same drives are now in there. I've still got room for another two SSDs in the caddy as well, though given I'd never be using them for long term storage I don't know why I'd need more - though I'd always rather have more room than needed than the other way around.



The only snag so far is that the cable on the card reader isn't long enough to reach the USB header on the motherboard. Making up an extension for that's hardly the end of the world though. Oh, and Windows handled the move to a new system precisely as gracefully as I expected it to (i.e. not at all). So I'll probably need to reinstall that sometime in the near future - and play the game all over again figuring out how to stop it from overwriting the boot order to give itself priority every time it successfully boots - I had to lock down the BIOS on the old PC to stop that nonsense.

Be interesting to put the thing properly through its paces in the next few days to see how it performs relative to the old one. Even if it's only a minor improvement it'll still be worth it for having my storage properly installed rather than wedged in the corner of the case - and plugged into the motherboard SATA controller directly rather than having to use a (very slow) expansion card for it because I only had four ports on the old motherboard - I think there are eleven on this one!

Initial impressions - moving video files around is orders of magnitude faster. Encoding speed for video looks to be roughly double that on the old system. That will be a nice bonus given I've still got a load of things to go through to get the physical media backed up and on our Plex server.

Plex deserves a shout out I reckon, simply because I have tried various things to get a universally accessible media server on our local network, most of which have worked*. The * is important though as there was always something that didn't. Plex though basically just worked "out of the box" and does exactly what I want it to. The only initial stumbles just being figuring out exactly how it wanted things to be labelled and organised, especially for TV series to ensure that it picks them up properly for the library. After literally years of trying to get that up and running for the family it's really nice to finally have found a solution that works.

[CitroJim]

That's a nice, tidy looking build Zel - good to see

[Zelandeth]

Replacement for that one duff stick of memory turned up this morning, so we're now up to the full 64Gb in there.



Also managed to find a suitable cable to make up an extension for the USB header, so the card reader is now back up and running.



Aside from needing to reinstall Windows (it has not handled the move to the new machine gracefully) and figuring out how on this one to stop it from changing the boot order every time it starts up, we should be done so long as the machine behaves itself over the next few days.

Windows is going to have to wait a while though. I don't have even close to enough patience available to face that right now.

[CitroJim]

Windows is going to have to wait a while though. I don't have even close to enough patience available to face that right now.

It should not be a problem Zel. I've installed Windows 11 onto many blank hard disks and my experience is it just smoothly does the necessary and in no time it's all good to go. It seems to get smoother with every new release. Really, you won't need that much patience

It's even smoother if you have a proper Microsoft account.

How it goes with a dual boot though I have no experience.

I'd like to see how this new system of yours performs. My current best laptop is beginning to creak a bit when running some of my more demanding photographic processing software and I'm thinking I might eventually look to update to a higher performance system. Trouble is, I have no clue as to how to proceed... I know what I want but not how to get it...

That's my life in a nutshell really

[Zelandeth]

Windows is going to have to wait a while though. I don't have even close to enough patience available to face that right now.

It should not be a problem Zel. I've installed Windows 11 onto many blank hard disks and my experience is it just smoothly does the necessary and in no time it's all good to go. It seems to get smoother with every new release. Really, you won't need that much patience

It's even smoother if you have a proper Microsoft account.

How it goes with a dual boot though I have no experience.

I'd like to see how this new system of yours performs. My current best laptop is beginning to creak a bit when running some of my more demanding photographic processing software and I'm thinking I might eventually look to update to a higher performance system. Trouble is, I have no clue as to how to proceed... I know what I want but not how to get it...

That's my life in a nutshell really

It will just be Windows 10 going back on here. Despite the specs this thing isn't compatible with 11 - which really does highlight how ludicrous the minimum requirements for 11 are. There are plenty of companies who are simply going to refuse to ditch perfectly good hardware because MS are too lazy (or incompetent) to design a secure OS.

The big brother of this machine (basically same thing but dual processor and supporting up to 512Gb rather than 256Gb of memory) is still a workhorse used by plenty and they change hands for good money (around a grand) even today with W11 not being an option on them as the CPUs simply doesn't support some of the required instructions. That and there are plenty of folks who have just run out of patience with the amount of AI nonsense that MS seems determined to shove down our throats whether we want it or not. Especially in security critical situations.

Yes there are tools to strip those out and tools to make it install on unsupported hardware, but there's no guarantee that those will keep working long term - especially given they've managed to break enough of their own software with their updates, never mind third party things.

[myglaren]

I had bought my son a replacement laptop last year (second hand) that did a forced update and completely locked him out. Thought I would just chuck Mint on for him but there was so many hoops to jump through that it became practically impossible and with a serious risk of bricking it altogether.
Had to entrust someone who knew what they were doing to reinstall winderz
It is probable that I may have to invest in another machine eventually and this is a worry. I wouldn't have Windows or Mac if they paid me, just want a bare bones machine to put Mint on.

[CitroJim]

I'm running Windows 11 on two unsupported laptops and so far, I've had no issues at all. That's not to say in the future I won't but for now all is good. When it isn't I guess I'll need to reach deeply into my piggy-bank and get new hardware.

And after I moved to 11, no way could I revert back to 10. I tried it once and didn't like it.

[Hell Razor5543]

I don't intend to use Windows 11, as I am concerned that, some time in the future, it will become Windows 365 (and require a yearly subscription).

[Zelandeth]

I've only got one machine here running 11, and it is the single thing about said machine that annoys me the most. It repeatedly nagging me to connect to an online account and to set up OneDrive, Office 365 etc - and turning those notifications back on repeatedly probably being the cause of the most rage.

I do not want any of this nonsense, please kindly go away, shut up and quit hassling me. Especially quit hassling me with dialogues which cannot be removed without a mouse present.

Can't honestly say I noticed a huge difference setting it up to 10, other than them having made the control panel even more completely incomprehensible. It's a good thing there's a search feature built in as god knows how you'd ever find anything without it.

10 on my desktop literally is only there for two things - a handful of games, and Vuescan as a Linux driver for my film scanner doesn't currently exist. That's it. I hate it, but it's a necessary evil.

I have neither the time nor patience to mess about trying to cludge together ways to make something I already have zero wish to ever touch work on unsupported hardware, which may or may not work one day to the next. Especially given I had enough trouble getting a *normal* bootable device to install it to work last time, never mind one that I've made changes to.

[CitroJim]

Gosh! I can feel the hatred from here Zel I'm a pretty light user of Windows really and having fully embraced OneDrive and Windows Account sign-on, my experience is smooth and generally devoid of all that plagues you.

Vuescan would be a big problem for me if I ever tried to migrate to Linux. I have three scanners and two printers that are very unlikely to be happy under Linux. That said, I'd love to see how the two 'native' Linux apps. I make heavy use of (RawTherapee and DarkTable) would perform when running under Linux on decent hardware.

I don't intend to use Windows 11, as I am concerned that, some time in the future, it will become Windows 365 (and require a yearly subscription).

I think that's inevitable James. Almost everything is going down that road and Windows is bound to follow. When that happens will be the time to rethink... For now I'm quite happy to stick with Windows...

[myglaren]

I had a quick shufty and it appears that Vuescan is available for Linux.
But it has to be paid for.

[Hell Razor5543]

I think that's inevitable James. Almost everything is going down that road and Windows is bound to follow. When that happens will be the time to rethink... For now I'm quite happy to stick with Windows...

I hate how companies are developing the '"Let's screw as much money as possible from our customers" attitude. For example, the VW ID3 is sold along the lines of "128BHP", but is actually running about 10% lower. If the owner want the full power they have to either pay a subscription fee or a one off fee that is good for the lifetime of the vehicle. Meanwhile the insurance companies are charging their premiums based on what the ID3 is capable of, so the customer is paying premiums based on the "128BHP" and not what the vehicle actually has.