Lawrence "The Dreamer" Chen's Blog

After having had some time to lick my wounds from trying to upgrade 'lhaven'. I decided to take the plunge and try again.

So, I went back on to eBay....and bought another 1GB stick of memory, from the same seller as before...so that I could take the system fully to 2GB. And, while I was there, I bought another Athlon 3000+

And, then it was wait for another Sunday where I would have time to do upgrades....

...well, the upgrade went well this time. I took 'lhaven' down...opened 'er up. Swapped the 512MB DDR400 stick for the 1GB DDR333 stick, and swapped the Athlon 3000+ in for the Athlon 2000+, moved a couple of jumpers and turned the power back on.

It POST'd, and I checked the bios for a bit...watched the system monitor screen for a while, and shutdown again.

So, I closed up the case and put the computer back in its usual spot and let it boot all the way up.

Once settled, I checked BOINC. It didn't see the CPU change, so I forced it to run CPU benchmarks.

Athlon 2000+ == 997 floating point MIPS (Whetstone) 3376 integer MIPS (Dhrystone)
Athlon 3000+ == 1312 floating point MIPS (Whetstone) 4446 integer MIPS (Dhrystone)

And done.

...was less than successful.

Back following the icepocalypse, I resurrected 'lhaven' by changing its motherboard. The new motherboard was an upgrade to the old one, but I wasn't taking advantage of any of it. But, in my mind I thought that someday I might.

Having finally upgraded the OS from RedHat 7.3 to Ubuntu 10.04....and being able to participate in all BOINC projects again, I decided that I might look at upgrading it finally.

So I went looking for the fastest FSB 333MHz CPU that I could put into it. And, went looking on eBay for one. After a few unsuccessful attempts, I went and bought an Athlon 3000+ (and an Athlon 2400+). And, while I was on there, I got a new CPU Heatsink and Fan and a 1GB stick of DDR333 memory.

I wasn't sure what kind of memory was in the machine, but somehow I thought it to be a 1GB stick of DDR333 (since I for some reason had an extra DDR333 1GB stick that I gave away recently)....but memory told me the machine had two slots, so I'm not sure why I didn't upgrade the memory to more than 1GB...

Well, turns out my memory was faulty (as was lshw)...the machine had two 512MB DDR226 memory sticks. Which I makes sense, since the old CPU was FSB266 (a 2000+)....guess that means I shouldn't have given away that 1GB stick of DDR333.

What I did was upgrade the memory to 1.5GB by putting the new 1GB DDR333 stick in the first memory slot, and a 512MB DDR400 stick in the second slot. I then looked at the CPU.

First I put the Athlon 3000+ in....and the new CPU heatsink/fan. It is a touch bigger, actually its a lot bigger than the old....not quite compatible with my case...though it should be a simple enough mod once I get everything working again. Except I didn't. No POST.

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