• Tag Archives Dell

  • Dell Precision T3610 Computer Demons

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    I’m going to start posting my random computer questions here in the hopes that someone might be able to answer them. Now I am a software engineer by trade and have been building my own PCs for 20+ years. I’m not exactly a novice so whenever I ask a question here it’s because I’ve reached the conclusion that it is computer demons at fault and am hoping that someone has a better answer because clearly that can’t be right…can it?

    This question involves a Dell Precision T3610 with an Intel Xeon 2697v2 (Ivy Bridge) 12-core CPU, 64 GB of DDR3-1600 ECC RAM and an nVidia Quadro K2000 video card.

    When I first got this machine, it had a recent version of Linux Mint installed. It seemed to work fine. I installed BOINC on it (which I do with every computer I get my hands on) and added my typical projects – einstein@home, rosetta@home, milkyway@home and World Community Grid. After it downloaded work units and started crunching them, the computer started responding VERY sluggishly. While BOINC works a computer hard, it runs at low priority so typically it is only using what would otherwise be idle cycles and normally a computer running BOINC would still be very responsive. In addition, I noticed that the work units were progressing much more slowly than they should be. However, everything looked like it should otherwise…CPU was running at about 3GHz, BOINC tasks were using most of the CPU cycles, etc. Nothing looked out of place to indicate why it would be operating more slowly than normal.

    Upon rebooting and paying closer attention, it looked like Linux was spitting out some error messages during boot that indicated corrected memory errors. I forget exactly what the errors were but when I looked it up it sounded like the problem MIGHT not be actual memory errors but a bad driver. Instead of trying to screw around with that I decided to install a fresh copy of Xubuntu (my normal linux of choice) to see what would happen. Perhaps unsurprisingly I got the same results.

    Then I installed Windows 10. Windows 10 behaved basically the same way. It got very sluggish when BOINC started up its tasks. I did notice that the System task was using quite a bit of CPU (at least one full core) and also hitting the disk pretty hard. But this is so often the case with Windows that it’s hard to say for sure if it is related. So CLEARLY this is a problem of bad memory, right? Well, maybe…but here is where it gets a little weird…

    I discovered this “fix” quite by accident. When you install Windows 10, it defaults to putting your computer to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity. Since I run BOINC I never want this to happen but I inevitably forget that setting until it happens the first time after a new install. So sure enough, I forgot to change that setting and the computer went to sleep after 30 minutes. I pressed the power button to wake it up and it woke up…but without the sluggishness it had before. Also, BOINC tasks seemed to be progressing at a more reasonable rate of speed. It seems whatever the problem was had been cured by a short nap. A fluke you say! But no…it’s repeatable. If I reboot the computer, it behaves sluggishly when BOINC is running and runs much slower than it seems it should. Put it to sleep and wake it up again, and it performs normally until rebooted again. And when I say rebooted, i don’t even mean power cycled…just rebooting brings the problem back.

    I also ran Windows Memory Diagnostic and it found no errors.

    This machine has the latest BIOS available and Windows does not show any missing drivers (and of course seemingly the same problem existed under Linux as well…not sure if a sleep and a wake-up would have fixed it there too or not). The memory is new but that doesn’t eliminate the possibility of a bad stick (it has 4 16GB modules in a quad channel configuration). It just seems odd that putting the computer to sleep and waking it up solves the problem and rebooting brings it back. What could possibly cause that? Since the problem exists across multiple operating systems, surely it is a hardware issue of some sort.

    Personally, I’m leaning toward a slightly more obscure solution than bad memory as I don’t see how sleeping and waking could possibly fix that. Maybe a flaky memory controller on the CPU? I would think if that were the case though that I would see all kinds of stability issues but there are none, either in its “sluggish” state or in its “fixed” state. It can run for hours on end either way with no crashes or other signs of instability, all the while using nearly 100% of the CPU and GPU for BOINC tasks.

    Poking around in Windows Event Viewer, I did find a whole crapload of WHEA-Logger errors that seemed to correspond to when the system was sluggish that say “A corrected hardware error has occurred. A record describing the condition is contained in the data section of this event.” But the “data” section might as well be random numbers for all the use it is.

    For one reason or another, I suspect that I am getting a constant stream of memory errors (that are ECC correctable so no crash) in the sluggish state and this is somehow resolved by sleeping and waking. Can correctable memory errors lead to a sluggish system? Why would sleeping and waking resolve this sort of problem?

    Like I said, it’s computer demons…

    I guess by process of elimination I could try swapping out the memory and then the CPU, I just don’t know if I have appropriate spares lying around at the moment. And it’s not like this is my primary computer…it’s just a toy to play with so as long as sleeping and waking it resolves the issue, then that’s what I’ll do. It just seems so weird.


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  • Digital Archaeology – Dell Latitude D600

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    The great thing about Dell computers is that you can usually go to Dell’s support site and type in the service tag which is typically on the computer somewhere and it will give you all kinds of information about it. In the case of this Dell Latitude D600, there wasn’t a whole lot. It seems that with some older computers, Dell has ‘lost’ certain information like the shipping configuration. However, other interesting stuff was still there including the shipping date, warranty expiration date, user manual and service manual.

    This particular artifact, er, laptop was included in an auction I won of various similar items. It can be hard to define what exactly is ‘vintage’ when it comes to computers. Is it any computer over a certain arbitrary age? Any computer that predates 64-bits? Something else? On one hand, this laptop has a 32-bit architecture and is rapidly closing in on 20 years old. On the other hand, it can still run at least one modern operating system (a 32-bit Debian distribution in this case). And on the first hand again, while it is running a modern OS the performance isn’t exactly spectacular and for all practical purposes unusable for modern web browsing. On the second hand again it CAN run a browser and you can slowly load some web pages as long as they aren’t too taxing and you aren’t using more than a tab or two. It’s also perfectly fine for basic office tasks like word processing, spreadsheets, etc. And if you stuck Windows XP on it (definitely the best version of Windows for this machine) then you could play some games of that era as well.

    The Latitude line is Dell’s business line of computers so there’s a good chance that this was once in an office somewhere. According to Dell’s support site, it was shipped on June 25th, 2004 and the warranty expired on June 26th 2007. So in a few months, this laptop will be a legal adult. If you were born 18 years ago or this laptop (or one like it) was the first computer you ever used as a kid then no doubt this PC will seem quite vintage. On the other hand, if your first computer was a Commodore 64, it will merely seem a bit old.

    To put the age of this computer in perspective, popular movies in June 2004 include Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkhaban, Spider-Man 2, and DodgeBall. Popular TV shows included CSI, CSI: Miami, American Idol, Everybody Loves Raymond, ER, Lost, CSI: NY, House, Boston Legal and The West Wing. George W. Bush was President.

    So what hardware did a laptop from 2004 include? In this case:

    • Pentium M @ 1.6 GHz CPU
    • 1 GB RAM – DDR 266 MHz
    • ATI Radeon 9000 (AGP)
    • Samsung CDRW/DVD drive
    • PCMCIA slot
    • 2 USB ports
    • 56K Modem
    • Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet Ethernet
    • Intel Pro/Wireless 2200BG WiFi adapter
    • 1024×768 display

    This model generally got positive reviews. Personally, I liked the build quality of the previous generation C600 series. The D600 has a metal (some kind of magnesium alloy I think) lid but the rest of it is plastic. The C600 was all plastic but it seemed to be a heavier duty plastic that what most of the D600 is made out of. Plus it was all black as opposed to the primarily gray color of the D600. The keyboard was also a little better. If there was one area where the D600 got some criticism it was the keyboard. However, there’s no doubt that the Pentium M and other hardware in the D600 was a step up from the Pentium III-M of the older generation. Unfortunately, this particular laptop only has a 1024×768 display which wasn’t really enough even when it was new in my opinion. Higher resolution displays were available for more money though.

    ZDNet’s take on the D600

    The Pentium M was a pretty major advancement in laptop CPUs. There was a mobile Pentium 4 and even desktop Pentium 4’s were used in some desktop replacement laptops. However, neither one was particularly energy efficient and performance was mediocre for the power consumption and price. The Pentium M actually resembles a Pentium III more than a Pentium 4 from an architectural point of view but is much more energy efficient and faster per clock than early Pentium 4s. The energy efficiency of the Pentium M is in large part what started Apple down the path to switching to Intel CPUs over the Power PC CPUs they had been using.

    As with every computer I power up, I currently run BOINC on this machine along with various projects. It’s still capable of running a few though no doubt I’m not going to break any records in terms of credits. Currently, this computer ranks 280,154 out of 349,636 according to boincstats. To be fair, I don’t actually have it turned on much though it happens to be on now because this is being typed on it.

    My first laptop was Pentium M based but It had a better display and more powerful graphics than this Dell Latitude D600. However, it does have some upgrade potential. I believe that the CPU can be upgraded from the existing 1.6 GHz model to as much as a 2.1 GHz model with double the cache (2MB vs. 1MB). In addition, I should be able to take the RAM from the existing 1GB up to 2GB. I’m not likely to bother in this case though. For more information on the hardware of the D600, check out the output of HardInfo here: https://www.megalextoria.com/DigitalArchaeology/da_Latitude-D600/hardinfo_report.html


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  • Digital Archaeology: Dell PowerEdge 2550

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    While out patrolling my neighborhood…really just taking a walk after dinner, I spotted something interesting by the curb. There were what appeared to be several rack mounted servers (well, they weren’t currently mounted…). Either our neighborhood was built on some ancient computer server burial ground and they were rising from the dead, or less likely, someone was throwing them out. Either way, I grabbed them…or at least hauled them off the ground with great force…these things were heavy…or they just didn’t want to let go…

    Double doors opened up to see inside this rather large 2U server.

    All in all there were 5 different machines. Here I’ll cover the first…what turned out to be a Dell PowerEdge 2550. This computer was made in the early 2000s. The PowerEdge 2550 was introduced on March 27th 2001 according to this article at a base price of $2499. While the article mentions CPUs ranging from 700 MHz to 1 GHz, I believe the lowest end PowerEdge models came with a 933 MHz CPU and they supported up to 1.4 GHz CPUs. ServerWorks Corp.’s HE-SL chipset also supported up to 4 GB of RAM (most desktops of the era only supported 512 MB to 2 GB if you were lucky), a dual channel raid with battery backup and 3 PCI buses (2 64-bit and 1 32-bit). This one seemed to have 2 CPUs in it. At least I could see two heatsinks and two voltage regulator modules (VRMs). The previous caretaker had wisely removed the hard drives. These would have been SCSI drives with particular hot swap caddies for this dell model (and maybe others) so it wasn’t something I just had lying around. Nevertheless, I hooked up a monitor, keyboard and mouse and turned it on to see what would happen…

    The VRMs and processor heatsinks can be seen at the bottom. The RAM is hidden by the metal cover next to one of the two power supplies. The SIMM next to the metal cover is for the RAID

    To my surprise, it posted and even though it had nothing to boot, I could enter the BIOS and see what was here. It reported 1 933 MHz Pentium III CPU and 1.5 GB of RAM. Why it cannot see the other CPU I have not figured out yet. There are no error beeps or messages displayed, it’s just as if that 2nd CPU which I can clearly see is not really there. I tried reseating the VRMs with no effect. The processor in the #1 spot must be the one working because otherwise the machine wouldn’t boot at all. At some point I’ll remove the CPU and heatsink of the 2nd CPU and maybe try reseating it.

    You can see the two power supplies at the top along with the CD-ROM drive at the bottom. The battery backup for the RAID can be seen attached to the door at the top right of the image.

    Unfortunately, this machine will not boot from USB. I guess there were a few options at this point. I could try to grab an appropriate drive off of eBay or elsewhere, stick in a SATA PCI card and drive (which I do happen to have around), or, since it did have a CD-ROM drive, burn a Linux live cd of some flavor. I chose the last option. Being an old machine with what is an apparently poorly supported graphics chip in Linux (it has a Rage XL chip on the motherboard) made this task more difficult than it should have been. Sadly, major Linux distributions seem to be ending 32-bit support which doesn’t help things either.

    A more angled view showing the riser card with 3 64-bit PCI slots.

    I first tried several relatively recent distributions either designed to work well with older machines or just to be lightweight in general. These included Amtix, Xubuntu, and various flavors of Puppy Linux. They all seemed to have more or less the same problem. The boot process would stop when it came to loading the GUI. In some cases the GUI would briefly appear before dropping to a black screen or text logon prompt. I believe the reason for this is the Rage XL graphics chip this thing uses. Finally, I tried an older version of Xubuntu I had lying around (12.04). To my surprise it loaded fine.

    A view inside the first two drive bays. You can see the SCSI connectors at the back.

    Given that I had no hard drive for this machine, I decided to see if I could get persistence working with the live CD and a USB drive. Unfortunately, I could never get that to work. Speed probably would not have been remotely acceptable anyway. That meant any applications I installed or data I created would be lost on shutdown or reboot. I decided to check out eBay to see if I could find a reasonably priced drive. I needed one or more Ultra 3/Ultra 160 or Ultra 320 SCSI drive. At first all I could find were overpriced drives. At least they were prices I wasn’t willing to pay. But in a day or two I found a buy it now auction for 4 drives for around $10 plus shipping and they even included the appropriate caddies for the PowerEdge 2550. That seemed like a pretty good bargain so I grabbed them. When the package showed up at my door, there was even an extra drive so I had a total of five Ultra 160 drives of ~36 GB each of various brands. Since I wasn’t planning to run a raid or anything I only really needed one but including shipping they averaged out to less than $5 each so I’m happy. Maybe I’ll see if I can find an inexpensive SCSI card or few and use these in some other old computers.

    Post screen showing CPU info and the connected SCSI devices.

    I plugged one of the drives in, booted from the Xubuntu 12.04 live CD and was able to install without any problems. The only real oddity is that the boot process seems to timeout. I wind up at an initramfs prompt or a blank screen. Typing ‘exit’ in either case results in the system continuing to boot normally. I’m not sure exactly what causes that and it doesn’t happen when booting from CD but it doesn’t seem to be a hardware problem as everything works as expected from that point on.

    A view of the front

    After the OS was installed, I did what I always do when reviving an old piece of hardware. I installed BOINC on it to see what projects I can get it to run. As with Linux, 32-bit support in BOINC (or at least in the projects that use BOINC) seems to be getting more uncertain. Many times projects will claim to have applications that support 32-bit but don’t work quite right at the end of the day. Work units will error out quickly (if you are lucky) or at the very end (if you are not). Seti@home was the best at supporting old hardware but it has entered “hibernation” and is no longer an option. Rosetta@home also used to do a pretty good job with old hardware and it even adjusts work unit sizes to complete in a certain time on whatever machine you have. However, ever since they added COVID-19 related work units, the memory requirements have gone way up and it doesn’t seem to work well on older systems. I’ve started to see work units arrive on older systems again recently though so all is not lost. I’ve had better luck with Einstein@home, NFS@home and yoyo@home. Not that you will get any great amount of credit using the likes of a Pentium III but if I’m going to have it on playing with it, it might as well be doing something useful.

    Hardware includes the following:

    CPU: 933 MHz Pentium III (two of them but one is non-functional for some reason)
    Memory: 1.5 GB (2 x 256 MB 133 MHz SDRAM and 2 x 512 MB 133 MHz SDRAM)
    Video: Rage XL
    Storeage:
    Hitachi Ultrastar DK32EJ-36NC 36.9 GB SCSI Ultra 160 hard drive
    Floppy: 3.5″ 1.44 MB
    Samsung SN-124 24x slimline CD-ROM drive
    Dell PowerVault 100T DD-4/ARCHIVE Python 06408-XXX tape drive

    As far as Pentium IIIs go, this is a pretty nice one as it must be the Coppermine T model which supports SMP and motherboards designed for Tualatin CPUs but it also supports motherboards designed for the older Coppermine CPUs. This CPU has the same 256K of cache as the Coppermine. Later Tualatin based CPUs eventually raised that to 512k.

    I thought about trying to use that tape drive to back up some stuff but with a capacity of 20 GB (40 GB compressed) and tapes that cost ~$25 each, it doesn’t really seem worth it.

    For more information on the hardware in this specific machine, see the output from lshw or HardInfo. Or you can check out how it is doing in regards to BOINC activity.

    At some point, I’ll take this thing apart for some more maintenance. I still want to try to figure out why the second CPU is invisible to the system. I will also contemplate upgrading the RAM to the max of 4 GB if I can find it cheap enough.

    Dell PowerEdge 2550 specifications: dell-poweredge-2550-spec

    Dell PowerEdge 2550 User’s Guide: poweredge-2550_user’s guide_en-us


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