Just In A Nick-of-Time: ThinkPad Reinforcements!

There is of course no pejorative attach to our native American brothers (I'm married to a "card-carrying" member of the Cherokee tribe), but this is how I've felt for about the last week or so...... surrounded by hostiles! If you aren't aware already, this next week, pretty much all the teachers in Texas go back to work. As if that wasn't bad enough, I'm the person responsible for getting my wife's little computer lab (BunnyNet) ready to go! What started out as a few out-of-date ThinkPads that had been given back to me by family members, has turned into a full-blown computer lab!

How many? At the moment, seven: the goal (my wife's) is to eventually have 12.... one for every 2 students. This kind of takes me back to my IT desktop support days. My first job at University of Illinois @ Chicago's Housing Department had about 70 computers of probably 12 different types from 7 different manufacturers. Then my next position with the Texas Tech University Libraries had about 700 computer of close to the same number of models and manufacturers as well! This was tech support chaos. In both cases, by the end of my tenure, I had gotten it down to 2 manufacturers (Dell for desktops and IBM ThinkPad for Laptops). The number of models of each in operation was about 8 or so, but that couldn't be helped since I didn't have the budget to replace them all at once. 

 

Anyway, the situation with my wife's classroom is similar. Although all the laptops are ThinkPads (with the lone exception of the Mac), they range in vintage from the 10+ year old P4 powered A31 series to the newest Core 2 Duo powered T60/Z61 series. In between, there are some Pentium "M" powered T4x machines as well. This not only gives me two operating systems to look after (XPP/SP3, Windows 7/SP1), but also 2 different voltage A/C adapters, 2 different types of RAM, and 2 different types of hard drives. The worse part of it is that the balance fell on the bad half of the equation: P4-M, Windows XP, 16 volt adapter, PATA hard drive, and DDR RAM!

Things were getting dicey when one of the A31s had a screen fail (along with it's video subsystem), and another steadfastly refused to take a BIOS hack to allow me to use a newer WiFi card (faster than 802.11b). Oh yeah; it also does this high-pitched whining noise when there was a battery in the machine! 

Then, while discussing random things with my brother via email, I got the bright idea to ask him if he had some unused old machines laying around. After a few back-and-forth emails, 5 (!!!) ThinkPads..... all of which were newer than all but one of my originals were on there way. 

 

Like a phantom, while I was mowing the back yard, a box arrived via UPS (who oddly put it in the garage instead of the front porch). Although, I unpacked them last night, I didn't look at them till this morning, knowing full-well that once I got started, I'd be doing what I'm doing right now...... adding RAM, finding A/C adapters, and loading the OS! Despite the fact that 3 of them are in need of batteries and 20 volt adapters (which I don't have spares), I sure feel like the proverbial settlers in the wagon train watching the arrival of the cavalry! 

Yes, there's work to be done on them, aside from the batteries and power adapters. One came with 1Gb of RAM spread into 2 modules, making them useless 512Mb sticks, but I had 2, 1Gb spares in my RAM box.That same T43p spit up it's hard drive when I tried to install the OS. It turns out that it was a drive that triggered the infamous "2010 error" anyway, meaning that the drive wasn't on the a approved "whitelist" in the BIOS. Even that turned out well since I found (in the hard drive box) a Fujitsu MHV2060AH HDD that had been taken out of a client machine when they upgraded to a large drive. Oh yeah, did I mention that, this particular drive is ON the "whitelist"!?! I'd better run out and buy a lottery ticket while I'm on a roll! So, now that machine has been loaded with Windows 7 and well on it's way to finishing it's updates and misc other software. Then, all I'll need to do is to clone it to the other T43p and they will replace the two bad A31s. 

This will get me up to 9 working machines of which one is the Mac running OS X Tiger, but the other 8 are ThinkPads. 4 of them will be Core Duo or better machines running Windows 7, and with any luck, I should be able to get the P-M, T42p to run W7 as well. So, when I find the necessary parts to get the other 3 up and running, I will have met the royal goal of 12 machines, but better yet, only 3 of them will be the old P4-Ms that still run Windows XP. That should give me close to 6 months to find replacements for them by next March when M$ ends XP support. That makes me one happy frog!