A couple of bits of retro activities - firstly, got myself a little 17-compartment organizer to store all my various computer bits and catalog their location, rather than have them scattered in numerous places. So I've filled it with various DIP chips, processors, RAM, adapters, brackets etc. At least now I'll know where some of my useful components are, as well as finally having a record of the DIP & PLCC chips I have (ie. EPROMS, SRAM, DRAM etc etc)
The other activity is a bit more interesting - on a whim I decided to have another look at my Devon IT LT310 Thin Client, with Via C7 (Esther) 1.0GHz CPU & 512MB RAM.
I'd put it away a couple of years back due to it being faulty. After some time switched on, I'd start getting random errors and crashes. I ruled out the PSU at the time, as the motherboard inside took a standard ATX connection and so I was able to test a different PSU easily. This left overheating and the addition of a CPU fan didn't seem to make any difference, hence I figured the motherboard was bad and shelved it.
Fast forward to today, I tested it out booting from Hiren's Boot CD. Sure enough, the same symptoms reappeared. Prime95 would fail with a "hardware failure" and S&M Stress Tests indicated errors with L2 cache before giving a BSOD before completing all of it's tests.
I realised the only thing I hadn't tried, as I didn't think it would be the cause, was to look at the RAM. I was going to replace it with a different DDR2 module, but then first decided to head into the BIOS and set the RAM timings manually, just to see if it would make any difference. Well, I'll be damned, it worked - it's now stable! I guess the BIOS on this thing, when left at automatic timings was getting them wrong and leading to instability.
EDIT to add: I went back into the BIOS and set the timings back to automatic, but left the RAM manually underclocked rather than automatic. Automatic was setting it to 266MHz, but it only seems happy at 200MHz. So maybe it was a speed issue, as opposed to just timings. I guess this motherboard doesn't really like DDR2-667 memory sticks, hence being limited to 200/266.
Of course there could be other things wrong with this still, I'll have to add an SSD and try to install an OS to be sure. But it's sure looking promising so far, Prime95 has been running successfully for hours and S&M passed all of it's tests.