May 28th, 2024

Oversized Towers.

It's Texas sized.

I decided to go ahead and stick with Tuesday for blog posts here on this blog. So here’s the stuff I want to share from this past week:

Oversized Tower Project:

I have gotten many old computers over time from friends and family. The next door neighbor had some old computers she didn’t want anymore. I got these sometime in March. In the lot, there were several old computers, including a huge tower, by far the biggest computer I have. As far as I’m concerned, it also will be better than my laptop. The tower has a Intel Core i7 920 quad-core CPU with hyperthreading, 6GB of RAM, and a Nvidia GTX 260 graphics card on a Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R motherboard. Yes, the thing is old. And I decided, for the fun of it, to upgrade the RAM and GPU. I’m going to put 16GB of RAM, and a AMD Radeon RX 570 card in that machine. I already ordered the parts. It’s just a matter of waiting for them to show up. They’re supposed to be here by Tuesday next week, so I doubt they will be covered in the next blog post.

So far, I have gotten Kubuntu to run ok-ish on the Tower, but it still has issues, and I don’t think KDE cares for the GPU and the Nouveau drivers in use. The Tower did have three hard drives in it when I got it, and I did wipe them. It had a 120GB Intel SSD of some sort, a 500GB Western Digital spinny hard drive, and a (I think) 320GB Seagate spinny hard drive, which went into another one of the computers I got from that lot that had no drive. I ended up putting Windows XP on the Intel SSD, Windows 7 on the spinny drive, with room to spare for other Linux distros, and sticking a 1TB Western Digital SSD I had laying around in there and putting Kubuntu on that. Windows XP on a computer with the amount of power as this tower is quite a neat experience, especially since I am used to XP hanging quite frequently on the majority of my computers. This thing blows through XP and 7 like nothing, and I expected it to before I even turned it on for the first time.

Nvidia 304 drivers:

A good chunk of the machines I have contain old Nvidia chips for graphics, such as the GeForce 6100. These older chips user the Nvidia 304 drivers. And, of course, being some ancient thing of the past, they don’t get support any more from Nvidia. For using Windows XP, Vista, or even 7, I don’t have problems. Quite often, though, I do want to install a up-to-date Linux distro on these machines. And since Nvidia does not update the driver for newer kernels, I can’t use the driver, and have to rely on the Nouveau driver, which isn’t that great, especially on these ancient chips. However, I did come across something that may or may not work: A patched driver that supposedly will work with Kernel 6.8 or older. I’m currently putting Debian 12 on my Sony VAIO PCV-RZ44G so I can test this out. It has a Pentium 4, 1.5GB of RAM, and a Nvidia GeForce FX 5200. I’ll share the results when I get them. Debian takes time to install since I like to install all the bells and whistles included on Disc 1 because I sometimes regret not installing KDE for no good reason. I’m hoping this driver patch thing works. It’d be nice to see if I can get my Athlon 64 X2 Lenovo PC running modern Linux decently once again.

Pictures to Go Along with Blog Post

The Oversized Tower Thing:

Grumpy Agathae for comparison:

Thrift store Sony VAIO that's getting Debian installed on it:

Thank you for reading this blog post.

JM.

P.S.: I would like to add this: I know the tower is not that big. Compared to my other towers, it is bigger and heavier.