Frankenstein.

I hit another sale recently and hauled a lot of fun stuff away with me. I was lucky to get all that I did. I was only there for one particular item, which I got. Everything else was a bonus.

I was about 20th in line so I knew my chances were great. I hoped that nothing had been messed with overnight and, to my delight, my target was on the table where I left it. I grabbed it and headed over to the broken laptop table to scavenge. I picked up two Fujitsu Lifebook S7010D systems and a Gateway Solo at $1 each. I headed toward the back to stake my gathering spot.

On the way, I saw a Dell 1800FP in broken form that was worth the $1 asking price. I grabbed that. On the way further back, I saw what appeared to be a 17" iMac G4 and grabbed that, too. My arms were full. And I was stuck, but I found my spot. From my base, I spied two IBM servers I thought would be snapped up quickly at $5 each. They were still there. With my eyes always on my haul, I made the move to get the servers and ended up carrying both back to join the rest of the group. Interesting I found out later that the minimum weight for each server is 85lbs.

With my claim ticket and all my stuff taped off, I looked around for more goodies, grabbing an 8-port KVM switch with seven cable sets for $10, a VXA tape drive for $1, a few AC adapters for Toshiba laptops at $1 each and a VGA to 5 BNC adapter cable (rarely useful, but when you need one, there's no substitute). As I made the rounds to check out the Apple airports, I saw another 1800FP that had been left behind, likely due to the scrape down the front of the display. I grabbed it. It can be a lot of fun waiting for people to change their minds about things.

While looking around, I saw the guy who grabbed the huge plasma TV pushing it around in a cart with stuff stacked on the display panel. "More power to him if he wants it shattered," I thought.

The iMac G5 I had seen hiding under a table while I looked at servers and pulled out to look at was nowhere to be seen. It wasn't all that big, anyway. But well worth the price.

It took two hours to get out of there, but I was very pleased with the results.

My target:

Toshiba Tecra M2 (display not working)
Pentium M 1.5GHz Dothan CPU
512MB PC2700 DDR SDRAM
80GB 5400RPM hard disk (Right on!)
DVD-RW drive (hell yes!)
Nvidia GeForce FX5200 Go GPU (nice!)
14.1" SXGA+ LCD (Sweet!)
adapter included (Excellent!)
battery that will actually work for an hour or more (w00t!)

I turned it on while waiting in the checkout line and found that the display did work, but had the telltale red tint of a backlight tube that was long gone. I replaced it with one that I had had sitting around in a cracked display for two years. The display issue was fixed. I wished the panel had been a 15" so I could swap the dead-sexy S-IPS panel from my excess Dell laptop into it, but no such luck.

Looking at the Fujitsu laptops, I was able to decipher that the CPUs were 1.7GHz units. It was then that I had the bright idea to upgrade the CPU in the Tecra M2. It didn't work like I had expected it to. Turns out I had to run a configuration program to get the thing to recognize properly. And, when that was done, I realized that the CPU was a Banias Pentium M with half the L2 cache of the Dothan and higher power consumption at full load. After debating for a while whether I should give up cache and battery life in favor of a faster clock rate, I looked at the other Lifebook and saw that I had swapped the wrong CPU. One had a 1.7GHz Banias while the other had a 1.7GHz Dothan. I took that out and put it in the Tecra. It worked just fine. I replaced the nasty factory thermal compound with Arctic Silver Ceramique, put the system back together and did a full OS wipe to reinstall Windows XP Pro.

I couldn't get the Lifebooks to work. This was a shame since one was showing promise as a possible journal system due to the white keyboard with black lettering and the fact that, between the two systems, I had two battery packs, a DVD-RW drive and a drive bay secondary battery. It's just a shame that the S7010D model of Lifebooks is built like ass. Even after heatgun reflow of the motherboard I couldn't get the better of the two systems to play nice. I'm sure I'll have another shot at it soon. Oh well.

I sat the iMac on my desk at home and realized it wasn't a 17" model when I compared it to my 20" 4:3 aspect Dell display. It turned out to be a 20" model that was merely missing the memory, the internal drives and the carrier bracket they are mounted to. I was able to test the system, at least, by running my Powerbook G4 Ti in Firewire Target Disk mode to act as an optical drive and installing OSX Panther to a spare 160GB disk I had sitting free in the system with two receipts acting as insulation between the drive and the motherboard. It worked.

With an external CD drive connected (can't boot, but will work one in the OS), I attempted a World of Warcraft install. Didn't work. Oh well. Blender ran fine.

The KVM will be used for a later project involving a renderfarm I've been wanting to build. I have access to a lot of computers and, with an 8-port KVM, I won't be flying blind when a system needs special attention. I've already got an 8-port PDU that I can control from the network. I need a big network switch, a dedicated queue manager and a few cheap computers to have my renderfarm. Sounds like a fall project to me.

With two more 1800FP panels, I have a decent collection of matching S-IPS displays. I will have to get them working and see what kind of damage they have, if any. I have seen more than a few with dark spots from pressure points. The working one I have doesn't suffer from those. If I were really lucky, both of the new additions would be as pristine as the working one.