PC building

[JohnRoberts]

Yesterday one of my very old PCs started locking up, while i was trying to use it to do my taxes... I use a very old version of excel. My speculation is perhaps a bad memory chip... I need to try to extract anything of value, it has my only working eagle license, etc.

JR

[edit- just ordered a USB external solid state drive so I can grab several decades of engineering files, even though I don't expect to do much. I have a more recent PC that I haven't turned on for years. This old PC is past it trash by date./edit]

 

[Joey777]

Hi JR,

You could download Hirens Boot CD ( although CD is just a name ) There are loads of tools for recovery, testing and what-not on there. Also you can check your RAM. Bad ram could also be caused by other elements not just the ram module itself. I have seen bent cpu socket pins cause ram errors and reflowing solder joints on the ram sockets also worked one time. Hirens Boot CD can help identify alot of problems and reading between the lines helps the most. Win PE, hirens and a few other boots could help you out.

Stay lucky.

Joey

 

[JohnRoberts]

thanks... it is still working briefly, but after a while detects an error and does a memory dump?

I could probably boot it up in safe mode...

I have 3 different PCs on my LAN and this one is old and tired (like me)....

I have thousands of lines of microcode on PC #2 worth backing up

I probably need to start using the newer PC .... while the mac mini is completely adequate for www com

JR

 

[Joey777]

Your very welcome. Sounds like it's time to do a treble backup. Old PC's are really good for building a NAS Super simple to deploy and runs on minimal hardware. Maybe don't throw it out just yet....LOL

Stay lucky,

Joey

 

[JohnRoberts]

About the only thing I use it for is playing solitaire but I can live without that mindless time suck.

JR

 

[Bo Deadly]

If you want a cheap but powerful PC, get a Dell Precision 3420 from a refurbisher. Those machines are the business class small form factor workstation of choice for enterprise customers and when they go out of support they're dumped for pennies to refurbishers. I just got a 4 core XEON E3, 16GB RAM, 256GB solid stated drive and Windows 10 Pro with power cord and more for $167 USD shipped from Texas to NJ. The machine itself was very clean. Near mint. The keyboard and mouse they gave me had some coronavirus and coffee on them so they went in the bin. There are piles of these machines on Ebay. Add a 500GB NVMe drive (the M.2 slot is hidden under the drive bay). Note however that these workstations do not have VGA ports (although you can get a cable assembly that adds one). They have HDMI and DisplayPort so figure out how your display is going to work.

Note that if someone is reading this years later, the standard SFF business class workstation model will be different. Right now the modern equivalent seems to be the 3450, 3460, 3240, ...

Another recommendation: When you create the initial Windows account during installation, use a generic name like "sys" or "install" and login with a Microsoft account so that the digital license is associated with your MS account. Then download and install the latest Windows 10 from Microsoft and install that to purge any crap from the refurbishers image. Log in to the clean install using the Microsoft account and activate the license (license activation is key'd by hardware and not the installation so unless you do something drastic like change the mobo, it should activate [1]). Then change the "sys" account to use a local account and set the password. Do not use a PIN. MS tries very hard to capture identity information so it can be a pain to actually use local accounts but with some care it can be done. Then create a second local user account with non-admin privileges and use that for day-to-day. Using a local non-priviledged user account is much safer. If you need to do something as an administrator like installing software, log out and back in as "sys" or right-clink on something and "Run as Administrator".

PS: Most Dells have vulnerabilities in their BIOS so the first thing you should do is update the BIOS firmware by going to dell support, put in the service tag (on the sticker on the top of the case), go to downloads find and install the BIOS update.

[1] I actually just swapped the Windows license to another machine entirely by first booting the drive in the other machine and logging into MS from that machine. Worked fine. Then I used the 3420 as an ESXi server.

 

[industrialarts]

I just took a quick look at MXLinux. Which desktop did you pick?

My shop PC is really old hardware so I just used the stock XFCE. KDE's reputation of being heavy is not really the case anymore but I like the simplicity of XFDE environment. The package manager has other desktop as well

Two of things I like about MXLinux are the Package Manager and how easy it is to reconfigure the Menu. One small thing I don't like is when I add an application to my launch panel it ends up on the right hand side and I have to drag it to the left, which is really a small deal.

I have attached a screenshot of the package installer, the Popular Apps and Stable Repo are about all you need. One thing, thought they may work, Ubuntu PPAs are not recommened. However, the forum is excellent and you will find it easy to get help with most of your questions.

 

[JohnRoberts]

my old pc that is getting flakym is a HP/compaq running windows XP with a few decades on it... BTW for about the last year or so the PS was a little flaky starting up. It should start from a quick button push... sometimes lately I have to hold the button down a few seconds until it takes.. Probably a dried out capacitor.

I just started it up for chuckles and it decided to run chkdsk probably because I unplugged it a couple times to restart it after it locked up. CHKDSK finished 100% complete so the hard disk is not the problem.

booted up and now running... I'll share the message next time it crashes

coincidentally all three of my PCs are HP... Over the years I have owned other brands I recall buying a compaq back in the early 80s

maybe I should fire up solitaire to see it that crashes it... it has a tablet controller so I can play solitaire without using a mouse.

===
the watched pot didn't boil (crash), but I can hear a strange noise from the innards (could be something mechanical or electrical, but no bueno), so I will shut it down for now... After I get the external drive I will grab an image of all my files.and fire up #3... I have a 4 computer DVR switch so that part is easy.

IIRC I have excel on PC #3 so I can recover all those all tax accounting data. I have a multiple sheet file of old passwords , etc.

JR

 

[ccaudle]

After I get the external drive I will grab an image of all my files.

If it really is the RAM, power supply, etc. giving up on the older system, you can stick the HDD in an external enclosure and pull files off that way. If it's that old, don't rely on the HDD lasting much long either, but just wanted to point out you don't actually need the system running to get your files off.

 

[gswan]

I always get a good and somewhat over powered power supply with dedicated rails when I build.
My sons are gamers and their builds suck power like crazy. We keep an extra power supply in the house because when you have random glitches that are hard to figure out, we swap in a known good power supply to eliminate guessing.

Many Dell power supplies are somewhat proprietary which can be problematic. But, you can use another power supply externally (without mounting it in the case) to test.

Dell. I would never touch anything Dell.

 

[JohnRoberts]

I have a dell laser printer and it is superior to the HP ink jet printers that ate ink cartridges for snacks.

 

[Joey777]

Don't know about not touching Dell.....but I would not ever buy anything from HP. Apart from their incredibly sh*t assembly and QC any HP related software/firmware, should be treated like malware of the highest caliber and their firmware is likened to RootKits

 

[JohnRoberts]

Don't know about not touching Dell.....but I would not ever buy anything from HP. Apart from their incredibly sh*t assembly and QC any HP related software/firmware, should be treated like malware of the highest caliber and their firmware is likened to RootKits

my several HP computers have been serviceable for decades..

opinions vary

JR

 

[Joey777]

Sorry JR. Your right, opinions vary and I was having a bit of a rant. In my case "Opinions are like arseholes, everybody's got one" that probably defines me at times.......Sorry about that
I have seen quite a few of HP pc's and laptops for repair and not had good experience with build quality. The drivers and such are like some of the worst to remove and clean from the system. They embed themselves every bloody where and are indeed almost viral technically....LOL
Maybe HP should be treated as spyware in the future.........ah sh*t where did I put my tin-foil hat....ha ha

Stay lucky,
Joey

 

[boji]

Not sure what [refurbished] Dell to get

I've a decade of experience purchasing and upgrading all makes and models of OptiPlex's for small business / office customers.
+1 on them as a recommended brand because of the high availability of parts and ease of swapping.
Refurbed Latitude series LT's are a good value too...
I imagine DIY is still the preferred method for building a win-based pro media editing / design workstation. Was forced to upgrade my DAW last month and went with an Intel i9 / DDR5 for under 2k.

​

​

 

[ccaudle]

because Debian does not include any proprietary software, there are no drivers for the GPU in the AMD Ryzen CPU on either motherboard.

I also just found out (or was reminded if I knew in the past and forgot) that Debian also does not ship vendor firmware packages which most modern devices need. I'm pretty sure that the past couple of generations of graphics cards need to have the driver load firmware to get the full feature set running, so that would be another reason not to use base Debian on that system. I think there are some non-free repositories you can add to get the proprietary firmware packages, which are needed even with the open-source drivers. Or just use Ubuntu, MX, Mint, etc. that already includes that stuff.

 

[ruffrecords]

I also just found out (or was reminded if I knew in the past and forgot) that Debian also does not ship vendor firmware packages which most modern devices need. I'm pretty sure that the past couple of generations of graphics cards need to have the driver load firmware to get the full feature set running, so that would be another reason not to use base Debian on that system. I think there are some non-free repositories you can add to get the proprietary firmware packages, which are needed even with the open-source drivers. Or just use Ubuntu, MX, Mint, etc. that already includes that stuff.

That's right. It was because the initial Ubuntu installs were so flaky and my recent experience of Debian stability that I decided to try Debian. But stability comes at the price of not supporting bleeding edge GPUs. I have tried MXlinux which worked very well with no stability issues but I am not a fan of its desktops. So, last night, after a lengthy struggle with boot media, I was able to do a fresh install of the latest Ubuntu iso. This seems to be very stable; I just get a occasional tearing near the mouse pointer but none of the crashes I had before. So I think I will stick with this and hope the gpu firmware improves in time.

Cheers

ian

 

[Bo Deadly]

So, last night, after a lengthy struggle with boot media, I was able to do a fresh install of the latest Ubuntu iso.

Define struggle?

Most distros have a tool specifically for writing iso images to USB drives. On Fedora it's called Fedora Media Writer. If other systems are similar, you would go to the ISO using the file browser, right click on it and select something about opening it with another application and then select the "media writer" application. Select the USB drive and run it. It's that easy. That will create a live bootable image. This is not the same as dd.

Note that your BIOS needs to be either MBR or EFI to match the distro. If the distro is vaguely modern, it's probably EFI. You can tell by loopback mounting the ISO and looking for a directory like EFI/something or boot/efi or similar.

Note that the "media writer" app does not work with Windows ISOs. For that you can use WoeUSB on Linux.

 

[ruffrecords]

Define struggle?

I will. I downloaded the latest iso and burnt it to a DVD. I booted from this and waited for it to begin the install. Half an hour later, after much DVD thrashing, and a bunch of text messages, it ground to a halt with a FAIL message (I forget the actual message). So I tried it again but this time I selected safe video mode but the result was identical. Next I tried the 21.04 DVD I got in a previous issue of Linux format, in case my DVD was corrupted, but with exactly the same result. I tried it in both regular and safe video mode. Lastly I burned the iso to a USB stick and booted from that. This time it worked. I have never ever had this much trouble installing Linux on any device.

Cheers

Ian

 

[ruffrecords]

Throughout this 'journey' I have played around a lot with the Raspberry Pi 400 and the plethora of operating system variants available for it. The other night I stumbled upn Twister OS. It interested me because it comes pre-installed with box86, which allows X86 programs to run on ARM hardware, plus Wine which allows you to run Windows programs under Linux. There are only three windows programs I absolutely have to be able to run; LTspice, FreePCB and Lin4Win (for my Lindos audio test set). So I burned an SSD with twister OS and plugged it into the Pi 400. It has a range of desktops to choose from including win95, XP, 7 and 10. For fun I chose to use WIn XP. I downloaded LTspice and it installed without a hitch. I ran it and it offered to update itself which it again did flawlessly. I then plugged i my CTC USB stick which contains all my sims and picked a couple. Both ran perfectly well; not as fast as on my desktop but not noticeably slow. Then I tried FreePCB which I run direct from the same USB stick. It worked fine and I was able to load and edit my PCBs. All I need to do now is check out Win4Lin.

I continue to be amazed by this modest desktop computer. It has four ARM cores running at 1.8GHz so it is not blindingly fast but no worse than many more expensive Celeron based laptops. I even managed to install all the command line AVR tools for programming the Atmege328P and wrote a bare metal LED blinking program that I successfully downloaded from the Pi 400 to an Arduino. Home computing just became fun again.

Cheers#

Ian