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| Author |
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| 25 new of 205 responses total. |
mdw
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response 125 of 205:
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Jun 3 00:54 UTC 2002 |
I think cyrix start off as some sort of ibm partnership; there seems to
be at least one generation of chips that might be be marked either cyrix
or ibm, but is the same chip. The 6x86 is just a marketing term for one
of these terms - they probably want you to think it's the "next"
generation after the pentium. The 6x86 has an interesting bug which
would affect running something like an open access system (like grex) on
them; read about it here:
http://www.tux.org/~balsa/linux/cyrix/p11.html
So far as clock speeds go, most modern CPU's are set to run at one or a
small number of clock speeds and multipliers, and some fixed voltage
range. Many modern motherboards are setup to accept a variety of "pin
compatible" CPUs, which may have varying voltage, multiplers, and clock
rates. It is generally best to figure out what you have and use only
what is rated. There is definitely a risk of permament harm if you
botch it--'course, if you haven't got much invested, this isn't
necessarily that big a deal. If you get the wrong voltage -- if it's
too high, you face the greatest risk of fast chip damage. If it's too
low, it most likely simply won't initialize. With the clock input -
this is *probably* less harmful. With older chips (pre-multipler), it
was generally harmless to use any clock less than rated. Most chips
would run find down to 1/10th the rated clock. Some chips would run
down to DC. The main issue is whether the registers are in dynamic ram
(as in the 6800/6502) or in static (as in the 8080/z80). If the chip is
overclocked, it may run up to some % past the max rated speed. It is
likely to get much more heat sensitive as this limit is pushed. Past
the limit, it will likely flake out & crash or hang fairly fast. As it
is overclocked, it will also run warmer -- and if overclocked enough,
for long enough, it may well cook itself. Some newer chips have
internal temperature probes and will automatically step down the clock
rate if they're running too warm. Most older chips don't -- a
non-scientific rule would be as long as the machine keeps running, and
the chip isn't too warm to touch, things are fine. With clock
multipliers, the main complication is that they generally have a
narrower range in which they'll work -- so it may not work at less than
1/2 the rated speed, for instance.
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keesan
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response 126 of 205:
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Jun 3 01:59 UTC 2002 |
With the Cyrix, it simply refused to work past 185 (cpu rated 133MHz). The
Intel would not work at any speed past the rated speed. We will run the Cyrix
at the rated speed as we are short of fast cpus and don't want to lose it.
Today we discovered that the hard drive from Jim's pentium had a messed up
file structure (the next computer could not even find c:). It took several
tries to get it to format. Then scandisk from DR-DOS refused to run on it.
So Jim went to get a boot disk for MS-DOS 6.22 and add MS scandisk but instead
he decided to make yet another bootdisk and the floppy that came to hand was
formatted for OS/2 so, using my computer, the only one still working at his
house with software, he put in the floppy disk and typed format and said yes,
erase all the files, and it did and now I have no files on c: I had kept
backup files for both drives on two other drives which fell on Jim earlier
today so he put them on a shelf - he has no idea where. Time to make me a
new setup on the DX-4 instead of the DX-2 by copying files from my office
computer and then copy those files to the home computer. I had Win31 working
on there with Netscape and Cyrillic but who cares.
Here are instructions from an expert on how to determine if the pentium is
actually dead (or maybe we can just replace the serial controller if we can
figure out the jumpers on the board to disable the onboard port controllers).
My question:
> The pentium boots and says Com2 conflict. Jim disabled Com2 onboard and
> it did not help. He removed the modem, no help. He set Com2 to auto and
> it will boot, but every time you boot it says 'incomplete prior boot, hit
> F1 to continue or F2 to run setup'. So every time you have to hit F1 to
> boot. Is this a sign that the CMOS is going bad?
His answer:
There are several possibilities, none good.
1) The com port is defective.
2) The CMOS RAM is defective.
3) The BIOS ROM is defective.
The operative word is "defective". It's never going to work right.
If you want to use it. Set the com port to auto. Test the com ports to
see which shows up. Set the modem to one that's available. Sometimes
PS/2 mouse ports show up as com4.
For the incomplete boot, go into the setup and restore the default values,
save them and shut off the computer. Turn it back on and go into the
setup and change whatever you need to, save the changes and turn off the
computer. If this doesn't fix it, it's not fixable.
The F1 to continue problem can be lived with if need be but the lack of
ports cannot so we will try all of these. If the computer is dying we can
use the fast 60ns RAM in the motherboard from Jep instead of 70 ns RAM
that I was going to rob from the DX4.
Why do things tend to go wrong all at once? Why did the hard drives have
to fall on Jim TODAY?
His room is now jammed full of broken laptop computers that he does not
want to give up on (plus five that work that we never use).
.
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keesan
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response 127 of 205:
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Jun 3 17:21 UTC 2002 |
Jim says he thinks the BIOS/CMOS is defective but will attempt to find a
working serial port. He thanks Marcus for the information and asks what is
this PR business? The AMD and Cyrix both had PR ratings higher than the clock
speeds but they tested slower than an Intel cpu set to the same clock speeds.
What sort of task might the Cyrix 133 Mhz PR166 perform at 166MHz equivaent
speed? Ours is labelled IBM.
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mdw
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response 128 of 205:
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Jun 3 20:16 UTC 2002 |
Beats me; everyone, including intel, likes to "lie" on their benchmark
results. Benchmarks are actually quite complex because it's not a
simple linear relationship so it's quite easy for A to be faster than B
on one thing, and slower on another. A lot depends not just on the
chip, but on the motherboard, cache, clock settings, support chips,
dram, & other factors beyond the control of the chip maker. The numbers
you see on the chip are "just marketing" -- but they *may* indicate that
in a laboratory machine, with the right cache, clock, & support chips,
on a given benchmark, it performed "as fast" as the supposed intel
competitor, which in turn is equipped with its own possibly different
cache, clock & support chips.
If you're really worried about performance, forget this used
trailing-edge pentium business, go out & find a nice new >2GHz AMD
athlon machine or possibly pentium 4. This will definitely scream.
Tomorrow is another matter, there will be something faster, & in 2 years
time, you'll have to upgrade, if you don't want to be left completely
behind in the HP race.
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keesan
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response 129 of 205:
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Jun 3 22:48 UTC 2002 |
We are perfectly happy upgrading to something 3-4 times as fast as the 486s
that we were using, just trying to learn from the experience.
Today we selected a video card and a hard drive for this new computer.
We had four PCI video cards, one S3 and three Trident, all of which were 1M
but we could add 1M so we moved it around. No point in adding the 1M to the
Trident as it did nothing but permit 1024 at 256 instead of 16 colors. Adding
to the S3 let us do 1024 at 64K and 1280 at 256 colors as well as 640 at 16
million colors.
Trident has drivers for DOS that will let you do 132 columns, and also for
WP51/DOS to do the same. S3 does not.
S3 is fully VESA compatible, i. e., in VESA mode it shows all the resolutions
and colors found in S3 mode (up to 1280). The Trident cards go up to 1280
in Trident mode but only 800x600 in VESA 1.2 mode (one does 1024 too). Two
of them will not do 16M colors, it comes out grey with a pink tint (the
monitor tends to be pink on black), while one does 16M at 640. Since my DOS
programs all work in VESA mode the Trident cards will not show very high
resolution (one goes to 1024) but at least they will do 132 columns - this
is also helpful when looking at PDF files converted to text, or running W3M
in DOS or at grex using lynx. So we put the S3 card in the WIn95 computer
(since it is no good at 32 columns) and will use the DOS computer for 132
column stuff and not expect as many colors at 1024 resolution.
We tested Seagate, Caviar, Conner and Maxtor hard drives for access time and
transfer rate. Seagate tests at 8400 K/sec transfer, Caviar/Piranha (W.
Digital) at about 5500-6000 K/sec, Conner at 3500-4700 K/s and Maxtor (212
and 245M drives) at 178 and 177 (sic - it also took much longer to test).
We will use Seagate and a Nidec which is fastest yet (13,250 K/sec).
THe older smaller drives tend to have slower access times (19 instead of 13
ms). Jim is trying to make two Seagates work together but the machine will
recognize only the master. Playing with jumpers - go to go look them up.
Our largest drive is 540 and we consider 340 pretty good - hardly cutting edge
but my software (without the installation files) fits comfortably in 200M or
less.
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keesan
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response 130 of 205:
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Jun 3 23:03 UTC 2002 |
We have video cards that fit in ISA slots (most of them are not VESA compliant
but one Trident 8900 and one S3 Orchid are - and these also go past 256 colors
whereas the others need to run univesa.com to be VESA 1.2 compliant and
univesa only works up to 256 colors). We have several VLB (longer) cards
which are mostly Cirrus Logic (no CL short cards) and are better quality than
our PCI cards (they seem to be more VESA compliant than the Trident cards).
And the PCI cards. The Pentium computers do not offer VLB slots, the 486s
often have them. Jim's AMD 5x86 (486 with a fast cpu) has PCI and VLB. How
do these differ other than size of pins.
We set the Seagate jumpers as advised and it will recognize the master (larger
drive) but not the slave. We will try them individually as singles. Unlike
the other computers MA and SL differ. For one drive it is
single none, master 3-4, slave 1-2 but the other is
single 3-4, master 3-4 5-6, slave none
3-4 is labelled Master so we will try the drive as a single to see if it
works before forcing it to become a slave.
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keesan
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response 131 of 205:
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Jun 3 23:26 UTC 2002 |
Jim has a computer with Win95 on the c: drive and he did sys to the d: drive
and now all his files are gone. I think I read that Win95 won't let you have
two drives with system files on them. What does he do next?
We could not get the smaller Seagate to run as anything but single so we put
in a COnner as slave. The BIOS autodected them both this time, correct sizes,
but when I type c: or d: it says invalid drive specification. So Jim went
to get fdisk from his computer to format c: and d:. I don't know why he wants
two bootable partitions. He will attempt to undo what he did so that we can
format the new drives and put files on them to replace the computer that he
formatted c: on. Bad luck comes in more than threes this week.
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keesan
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response 132 of 205:
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Jun 4 00:56 UTC 2002 |
Our older Seagate drive simply refuses to run as anything but a single, so
we are using a Conner instead as the slave. The BIOS recognizes both drives
but when I type c: it cannot find the drive, d: it can find. Eventually we
ran fdisk and discovered c: was a non-DOS partition (that pesky LINUX?). We
made it into a DOS partition and then discovered it needs to be formatted
before we can split the 340M into three partitions (all primary - only Win95
and later need them to be extended). It is being formatted now.
I have no idea why the second Seagate drive won't act as a slave.
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bdh3
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response 133 of 205:
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Jun 4 07:04 UTC 2002 |
Because it is a republican?
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keesan
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response 134 of 205:
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Jun 4 15:42 UTC 2002 |
The other thing we needed to do for it to recognize drives was to reconfigure
to 'fail-safe'.
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keesan
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response 135 of 205:
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Jun 4 16:14 UTC 2002 |
Today we recycled Jim's pentium as the boot problem was even worse.
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keesan
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response 136 of 205:
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Jun 5 14:05 UTC 2002 |
Jim reports that his missing files on the Win95 computer have returned but
along the way he lost a couple of them because he had duplicates so he deleted
one and the other turned out to be zero length. Good thing we have copies
elsewhere. He is thinking of setting up a second computer for his own
personal use and letting Win95 have this one as it will not let him do what
HE wants, only what IT wants. Yesterday my brother called and he has WinXP
and says it is worse. He could not find any backup program to install, and
the OS with associated files is 5G. I thought the 6M required by Win31 was
bad! We can run DR-DOS in a few 100 K and 1M is more than adequate to do all
we want with it. The complete download is 7M but Jim is using 1.4M (he can
fit it all on a floppy disk - he included lots of things he does not use).
He added 4DOS (annual updated version) which is another 1M. Lots of this
consists of large help files. He uses maybe half.
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jep
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response 137 of 205:
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Jun 5 16:55 UTC 2002 |
It's fine on a home machine to squeeze all you can out of a low-power
computer with not much disk space, if your time doesn't matter too much
to you. It angers me, though, when my employer expects people to spend
effort and time on saving disk space. I think they figure it costs $50-
60 per hour to keep an employee in the office. To expect everyone to
spend a couple of hours per *week* in clearing out old (and *hopefully*
unneeded, but you never know...) files, so the company doesn't have to
spend maybe $1000 on adding a new hard drive, is abysmal stupidity.
It's *common* stupidity. Over the last 12 years of working in
technology companies in support positions, I've objected to this sort
of thing at every place I've worked. It didn't even make sense 12
years ago. It makes much less sense now. It's not how I want to spend
my time at work, dangit! I wanna help customers, not maintain hard
disk space.
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keesan
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response 138 of 205:
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Jun 5 19:55 UTC 2002 |
How can a new hard drive cost $1000?
A computer from UM that we were given seems to have had most of the programs
removed before it was given away, but not the personal stuff - including a
bunch of letters about a divorce and a set of naked ladies. So people do
remove some old files but I think they don't really know how to do it.
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jep
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response 139 of 205:
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Jun 5 20:48 UTC 2002 |
I guess business hardware costs more. I don't know what a new hard
drive for HP/UX or DEC Alpha costs, but I know it would almost
certainly turn out to be a better investment than having people
spending time cleaning out hard drive space.
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jp2
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response 140 of 205:
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Jun 5 20:49 UTC 2002 |
This response has been erased.
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jmsaul
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response 141 of 205:
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Jun 5 21:10 UTC 2002 |
Re #138: When did they get that computer from UM?
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mdw
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response 142 of 205:
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Jun 5 21:18 UTC 2002 |
HP and DEC no longer exist as such. But the respective hardware is most
likely using stock SCSI, or possibly IDE -- in either case, it will be
standard stuff. The only interesting problem may be preparing the
low-level partitioning stuff - Apple is not the only company that has
weird licensing issues with the boot code that goes on a disk drive.
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keesan
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response 143 of 205:
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Jun 5 21:21 UTC 2002 |
Just recently people in the office admitted that they were never going to use
it again (it was a 486) and let one of them take it home for us. I removed
all the personal files I could find on that hard drive before reusing it and
eventually just wiped it clean as we cannot load our later Win95 over their
earlier one. We put the hard drive into a pentium which was two years older
than the 486. First thing we do with a hard drive is usually reformat it.
We are having a fun new problem. An intermittent modem problem went away.
(We had to disable Com2 in setup, even though it used to work enabled, but
Kermit was still not finding the modem even tho PCPlus and Syschk found it
- tried two copies of Kermit). We have a computer (with the flaky modem) that
has two floppy drives, a: 1.44 and b: 360. I thought we had a problem with
a: but the disk had some bad clusters. B: worked until this morning most of
the time, but not always. Now it works once in a while but otherwise says
general failure reading drive b:. I put teh same disk in another computer
and it reads it. I run scandisk and it says the backup FAT is messed upa nd
fixes it. I put teh disk back into the first computer and it won't read.
I put it in the second computer and it wil read. Another floppy disk also
developed the same or similar FAT problems, and yet another could not be read
on either computer (I had been using it until today).
Is this a problem with teh onboard controller or the floppy drive? I will
try switching a: and b: to see if the intermittent problem follows. WOuld
cleaning the drive help? We have only one spare 360 left. Luckily we have
lots of spare 360 disks to sacrifice (the ones I lost had possibly useful
files on them, though).
Second time the bad computer would not read the floppy disk, scandisk did NOT
find FAT problems. As I said, this is intermittent.
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keesan
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response 144 of 205:
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Jun 5 21:22 UTC 2002 |
How does one low-level format a drive that got messed up by the CMOS in the
computer that we recycled? We have nothing to lose by trying as it will not
work at all right now.
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keesan
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response 145 of 205:
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Jun 6 01:53 UTC 2002 |
We did a switch of a: (1.44) and b: (360) floppy drives in setup to b: (1.44)
and a: (360). B: (1.44) worked fine, a: (360) had general failure reading
drive b. So we replaced the 360 floppy drive. Now a: still works (we
switched back) but b: (360) now says not general failure but seek failure
reading drive b, and our intermittent modem problem is worse - not only Kermit
but PCplus and Syschk cannot find the modem. Kermit tells me:
?Warning: unknown hardware for port. Using the Bios as BIOS2
Unimplemented speed
?Cannot use RTS/CTS on non-UART ports
Smile!
Might it be a bad floppy drive cable or something not plugged all the way in
and if so why is the modem also affected? We have one hard drive and one
CD-ROM drive on IDE controller 1 and 2 is disabled. We have two floppy drives
plugged in to the floppy drive controller. Jim left a terminator on the 360
since it is b: - should that have come off? It is a new error, anyway.
So now we have one recycled and two non-usable computers and two in progress
and one that still works.
I wonder if this floppy drive ever worked. The modem worked until today.
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keesan
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response 146 of 205:
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Jun 6 02:25 UTC 2002 |
Now a: does not work - Sector not found. Help! I am thinking of putting this
hard drive into some other computer if changing cables does not help. Jim
wanted to try booting from floppy with no autoexec.bat but we cannot even do
that now.
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jaklumen
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response 147 of 205:
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Jun 6 11:30 UTC 2002 |
resp:142 Yeah, I am aware HP was merged with Compaq. Not sure about
DEC, though.
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keesan
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response 148 of 205:
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Jun 6 11:33 UTC 2002 |
Does anyone have an old pentium board that they don't want? Someone thinks
that we have a motherboard problem. Today the modem works again, with teh
computer cooled off.
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slynne
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response 149 of 205:
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Jun 6 12:20 UTC 2002 |
Sindi, you should just post your address and then people might start
dropping off old stuff for you in the same way that people drop off
kittens at farms.
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