Land of Misfit ThinkPads

Sometimes I feel like the closet in my office is this; where the toys are various old ThinkPads and ThinkPad parts. The other computers...... Dells, HPs, Toshibas.......? Yeah, they get sold off, if they are of the slightest value, given away if anyone at all wants it or thrown out otherwise. In my world, ThinkPads only, are good enough to occupy the precious little crevices under, between and on top of the other stuff!

I also don't mean my small (and I mean that literally, consisting of 3) collection of classic ThinkPads, a 701c, a 765xd, and an X20. No, I mean relatively recent vintage machine.... although, I did dig out a couple of things that will go in the museum; the WorkPad C505/C500 and 1st gen, ThinkPad Android Tablet.

 

I mean more along the lines of these machines.

e.g. at least of the Core/Core 2 Duo generation. These are all usable in some way or have their parts harvested for use. My question becomes: what do I do with these things?

I've so far, been unable to convince the powers-that-be to let me and my machines go up in the International Space Station, although they appear to have enough of them already! 

 Lenovo thinks that something like this would be a good idea. My wife says otherwise.....

I lean towards these sorts of projects, but one can only have so many computer photo-frames and yellow T60s.....

If my imagination/skill-set was better, it might be things like this....

Last year, I did the "turn an A31 system with 2631 Dock in a server" thing using CentOS, but that concept has been proven and I failed to find a practical use for it...... at least in my world. So now what?

I can do that all over again using the now, rather long-in-the-tooth Z61m with the gorgeous titanium lid into a mobile server and since it has a dual core processor, I can even use the languishing MS Windows Home Server 2011 license that I have sitting around. 

I could use either that, or the also sitting under my desk gathering dust cousin, the R500. It's another member of the "Team-Too-Chunky-To-Travel-Well" category! However, the R500 is of the Penyrn generation, and thus newer and more usable for other pursuits.

Then there are the others (no, this isn't my pile.... at least, not yet) that a project isn't so imminent.... 

 

B.Y.O.D. and Me

Let me catch you up with the rather prosaic end of my technological life, and that's as the "support tech" of my wife's burgeoning classroom computer lab. 

If any of you have been in a college classroom lately, this is about what it looks like. And that's aside from the classes that students are taking online or coursework that they are doing in an electronic format. 

So yeah..... if you aren't either taking advantage of what's available, or better yet getting the students used to (and ready) to do work in this idiom, then you probably need to wake up, 'cus this is mostly how people work these days. 

Which is why "B.Y.O.D.", or bring your own device is the prevailing trend in schools today. What happened to school providing computers? Well; two things..... shrinking budgets, and web-delivery of content. Say what? Yeah, with the trend toward content being delivered via browsers through the Internet (the Cloud), content has become more and more platform agnostic. Meaning that the hardware and operating systems are largely irrelevant! These forces have combined to make institutions create an infrastructure for the student to get to the information, and allow the students themselves to get on there with whatever device that they happen to have.... kind of like the government building roads and letting you drive on there with whatever car you want to buy.

This is all fine and good at the high school (or even middle school) where I'm at. Parents can generally see the need for them to have a computer to take to school, but what about the little ones? Here in the Bermuda Triangle of education, just above the poverty line, rising expectations, and public pressure, we have a little problem. The schools in our demographic don't qualify for the mass of grants and government aid, or corporate PR programs that are out there. Parents are having a hard enough time to buy big brother or sis a tablet/laptop, much less one for 8-year-old. With the typical budget crunch, classrooms are looking more and more like my wife's which, as of yesterday has 23 kids assigned to it. In case you didn't know; that's A LOT for 3rd graders who need WAY more individual attention than my 14, 15, and 16 year olds! Meaning that she has a far greater use for a computer that she can put a student on to do independent practice while she's working with others, than I, who's students are far more likely to have them! This is the conundrum facing us in these last few days of summer as we get closer and closer to school starting.

Although, I've talked a little about it before, but I don't think I've completely discussed my brother's role in this little adventure. So here goes: as it got closer and closer to school starting and me facing the prospect of having "BunnyNet" (our name for her computer workgroup) looking more like last years poor little collection and any real improvements. Meanwhile my brother and I started having a back and forth about some old cameras. Any of you who read me regularly have probably figured out that he and I have the same hobbies. So briefly, since I don't want to go on at length about earlier posts, I asked him if he had any old ThinkPads that he needed to clean out (since he's cleaning out anyway). As the last post discussed, these machines arrived just in a nick-of-time to save the day. Pretty cool, although, he's probably less like a super-hero than Lucius Fox who invents all of Batman's cutting edge gear! Here is how it changed our situation.

Yup. This is it. It isn't the most exciting thing in the world, but it sure does make my life a lot nicer. You say; REALLY!?! .....Windows 7! Here's the deal: 

Twelve? That's the magic number! My wife has 23 students and 24 is pretty much the most that she could have period. So half of that is 12! She figures that she can divide her class in half after a concept has been taught, and work with 12 in "small group" while the other half can practice using laptops and any number of math programs, or the kids can pair up to use them as well. 

However, my number was 6! As the summer was winding down, I had about 6 machines, most of which were the old A31, mobile Pentium 4 ThinkPads that are pretty much limited to Windows XP. Nothing on XP, but it's really old and you can't run it now without Service Pack 3 if you expect to get updates, PLUS support ends next Spring! Some of you might being saying; why can't you run Linux on them? Great! I'll just have a bunch of low SE kids most of whom don't get on a computer regularly with a teacher who has never used Linux do THAT..... Yeah, that's what I thought.... which is why that group of machines from my brother became so important.

Although most people would turn up their nose at a 7 year old computer running a single core processor, these things are a life-saver to me! They'll run Windows 7! They use DDR2 ram (read much cheaper). They use SATA hard drives (read much cheaper). They're 6-7 years old (read much newer than 10 or 11)! Just to give you a run-down, before the reinforcements showed up, I had 3 A31s (one was partially working), 1 T30, 1 T42p, 1 Z61m, and 1 T60. The "Z61" series has essentially the same guts as the "T60" series. Now, BunnyNet has that plus 2 T43p (hardwarewise, basically between the T42 and T60), another T60 and another Z61. This gives her 10 laptops, plus the 2 school provided desktops allowing her to hit the magic "12", but more important to me, I'll have 6 of the 10 running on Windows 7 (once I get that T42p reloaded)! There are still a few machine here in "the shop" awaiting various parts, and those will allow me to replace the aged A31/T30 machines before XP support ends next Spring! The world is now as it should be..... at least, until the next techie emergency hits.

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!

 

E-Waste and the Frugal Propellerhead

I guess you could call me an E-Waste recycler, and really, I suppose I've been doing this for a long time going back to the mid-90s when I was buying up IBM PS/2 machines to learn server management. Of course, there was no noble intent back in those days (not sure whether there is in these days either), since I was just buying what I thought was interesting AND could afford. I will have to say that I've always been abhorrent of "waste" in general. And that goes for leaving the bottom few ounces of drink in a cup all the way to having to have the newest clothes (or game system) every few months. Not only is it not sustainable resource-wise; it's downright stupid. This is especially true in the technology field where actual performance changes happen so fast, but we humans only ever use a very small percentage of it. So, we buy new and literally throw out old (or 18 months old, according to Gordon Moore).... which leads to this:

....and that's the nice view! What it ends up looking like when it arrives in China, India, other random place is this:

No, this is not my garage, although the bottom picture does bear a bit of a resemblance. The unfortunate thing is that this is the better scenario, as compared to the folks who just throw this stuff out with their garbage and it ends up in a landfill where the chemicals from these devices are able to leach into the water-table. Probably the worse of the products are the old CRTs which have a LOT of dangerous products in them, but actually have the potential to kill you long after they've been unplugged:

 

This is what the problem looks like on a global scale:

So, back to me (because you know it's all about ME). I'm sure most of you are familiar with my rantings regarding the "Walmartization" of society, right? Where, we buy the cheapest possible, then just throw it out when it breaks? This of course, is probably all due to my Mom drilling into me to buy quality products that last. I'm certain the reality has as much to do with the Chinese cultural's need to be competitive show-offs, but that's beside the point. At any rate; the die is cast, so I'm just "hard-wired" this way now. What brings on this little soapbox oration today?

?????! This 11 year old computer came to live with us a few weeks ago. One of my long-time clients, bought a "new" ThinkPad from me, because she's going back to get her Master's degree, and the R52 that I did for her about 4 years ago is getting long in the tooth. So, she got an X300, the R52 was updated and reloaded for her daughter, and she brought me the daughter's T30 for retirement. I didn't remember that the machine was that "new" till it arrived, thinking that it was a PIII-class A2x machine. The T30s were the smaller, light-weight executive laptops of their day and were a match for the A31 workstations (hardware-wise). Actually, I had used one of these many moons ago before the T4x, and X300...... but I digress. Anyway, it ran "dog-slow" on the 512Mb of RAM and needed a reload in the worse way with all kinds of junk-software installed on it. This morning as I'm here babysitting the 109 updates after having gotten the OS up to SP3, AND installed 1.5GB of RAM and a wireless card, I realized that the vast majority of it's brethren have gone to live in the great briefcase in the sky. 

It really doesn't have to be, or should be this way. Right now, my dining room table looks about like this. There are 4 A31s, 1 T42p, 1 T60, 1 Z61m, ThinkPads and 1 HP LaserJet 4000n out there. Oh, there's also a first generation PowerBook G4, 12" as well. What the *#&# am I doing!?! Here's the thing. My wife moved to a new school district last year and although, we aren't talking about starving kids without textbooks, they aren't as well-endowed (technology-wise) as her former district (and 3rd graders are loooow on the techology-totem-pole), so there's one small computer lab in the building and two desktops in each classroom. As you can imagine, this wasn't a very workable solution for my, MBA trained, former Ernst & Young consultant wife, so she kept asking me what I was going to do with this or that "old" laptop. And when the answer would be that I didn't have any plans since it had been replaced by old-so-and-so, she'd get a gleam in her eye. About a year ago, things came together when various relatives whom I had set up with laptops, grew out of their 1st machines and brought them to me when they got replacements. This amounted to 2 T4x, and 3 A3x computers. Around that time, I had upgraded my wife from a Z61m to a T61, so there was a number of computers cluttering up my office. 

One day (I'm sure after, much cogitating), she wanted to know if maybe kids could get onto some learning games with those old laptops. My distracted answer was "of course", and there you have it: BunnyNet. By the last half of the spring semester, we had a little group of 3 A31s, the T42p, and her old Z61m working in her classroom. Over the course of this summer, I received some random donations, ranging from a T60, to the truly random PowerBook G4, and now the T30. They all needed work of one kind or another; some hard drives, others, wireless cards and almost all of them, RAM. This in combination with the prevailing educational trend of B.Y.O.D. (bring your own device), we'll be able to get them all on he school's network. 

Is this going to end E-Waste..... no. What's the point then? If we can prolong the use cycle, we can slow it down. Especially if there's a need out there for it. Why can't we divert some of those containers and retask some of this old technology? Yes, I get that there are practical considerations to make it work, but does anyone think that it's something a good "non-profit" can't tackle? Right now, I'm busy with my one classroom-worth, trying to turn E-Waste into something useful for a little while.



 

.....It Poured ThinkPads.....and It Was Good

Guess who was sick again yesterday? Other than the usual tap-dance of getting everything set up for a substitute teacher, it was great timing for me! The night before, the deluge of ThinkPads came. I've been looking to finish up my wife's little ThinkPad powered classroom network awaiting the arrival of two more of the beloved A31s that my fiend Andy was sending me. It happened that when I was asking about them, I caught him in a "clean out" mood (it sometimes strikes us ThinkPad hoarders at random times). So, he took the opportunity to dump his unloved ThinkPads and unwanted projects into a huge box appropriately marked "Toys" (from a recent move), then ship it to me. Actually I was expecting it today (or yesterday at best), but Tuesay, it came as I was getting a school bus ready to take our cheerleaders to a basketball game. So the big box came along for the ride. 

This is what I felt like when I opened it that night after I got home. There were 3 ThinkPads (2 A31s and 1 T61) and one R60 motherboard, along with 3 A/C adapters all crammed into that one box. So yeah, that picture is what I felt like trying to get everything out of there!

The A31s are of the NASA/International Space Station fame that I've talked about before, but currently, I'm in the process of changing over to the "x6x" line as the basis of my current general use computers around the house. Of this design series, I've already had a number of the "Zs" (Z60t- son, Z61m- wife & myself) as workstations, but lately, we've begun moving over to the T61 line, along with my daughter's X61.

These are "workhouse" computers, that have just come through the corporate 3 year cycle, so are plentiful and cheap to buy. You might remember me describing my wife's T61 with a 15.4" WSXGA screen, 240Gb SSD. Now, out of the magic "toy" box, came a virtually identical one (although w/o battery, and hard drive). In all probability it will become my son's new machine, retiring the last non-"Core" processor'd machine in our fleet. 

Of greater interest to me though, was the last thing out of the box....an R60 motherboard. A few months back, I was down at the monthly computer Flea Market and came across a much abused T60, after much haggling, I paid the guy $25 and went home with 2, 4Gb sticks of ECC spec'd, DDR2 RAM, and a wretched looking T60 that got power, but not much of anything else. It had a severely cracked screen where someone had stepped on it, and of course, a bowed lid, but to add insult to injury, somebody had painted it blue with enamel house paint. I don't mean "in an attempt to mod" spray paint: I mean in a attempt to destroy, slathered on with a brush, canned paint! Of course, me, being me, the fact that just the A/C adapter was probably worth what I paid just wasn't good enough. I decided that I need to revive this thing. So it sat under my desk for several months other than the occasional forays out for attempted cleanings.

The stubborn streak in me decided that I wanted to get it back up and running again despite the fact that it would probably be cheaper to just buy one! Anyway, I guess that's the geek Propellerhead side of my coming out! As luck would have it, my buddy Andy who had the A31s also had a motherboard from an R60, which (under the casing) is virtually identical to the T60. If you haven't seen the never ThinkPads with the "roll-cage" system, above is an image of the T60 version. All the grey stuff is the aforementioned "roll-cage", to which the motherboard (planar in ThinkPad speak) is attached along with the casing. So yesterday, I happily got to play ThinkPad "Lego" while the sick child slept and watched TV! As I make more progress on this thing, I'm sure I'll add more post this project.

ThinkPad Honey-Net

Everybody has “honey-dos”. Mostly we do take care of them as fast as we can and move on to something more interesting. So, why am I writing about it then? It’s a weird topic, I know, but just bear with me on this.

My wife is an elementary school teacher, a very good one who goes above and beyond slaving away at an often thankless, but societally important task. However, unlike the vast majority of these folks toiling away with our young ones, my wife hasn’t always worked in elementary education and is very comfortable with technology. She’s more than willing to try anything that might be effective with her charges. 

For her first eight years of teaching, she (and I) have worked in a school district which is pretty advanced in relation to the availability of technology. Although, we don’t issue notebook computers to students until the 5^th grade, a C.O.W. is often available for teachers to use in grades K-4. That’s “Computer On Wheels”, which is a specially adapted cart that holds a set of notebook computers and their power adapters as well as a printer. However, this last fall, she began working at a neighboring district that not only doesn’t have notebook computers for students , but doesn't have C.O.W.s available either. Each classroom has 2 desktop computers for student use and that’s it. With many resources being electronic and more every day, that’s simply not enough. As a matter of fact, one of my projects over the Christmas break was to take some old cassette tapes of stories and converting them to digital. There'll be more of this type of things to come....trust me.

I had recently upgraded her laptop computer from a ThinkPad Z61m to a T61. So, she asked me what I thought about her taking the old machine up to school I told her that I thought it'd be fine, but that she needed more than one machine; more like 4 or 5 (that's how many groups of desks she has). And furthermore, that the age and speed of the machine really didn't matter as much as long as they could all be made similar (or identical) so that the kids could operate them easily. 

Around that time, I had dealt with a rash of dead, dying, or returned due to replacement computers which ironically were largely the same or similar models. It became fairly obvious that they fell in two groups; T4x P-M computers, and older A3x P4-M computers. Although I would have loved to have done the T40/41/42s, there was only one of the 3 that wasn't dead! The only working one was an older personal T42p that had been passed on to my father-in-law. It's screen was the "last gasp" before dying red, but I had another screen in the garage. However, both of the A31s were running fine! So, I settled on one configuration, and made them identical through cloning the hard drives. Then I began checking with various acquaintances I've made through the ThinkPad Forum and I lucked out! One guy I know out in California had 2 more A31s that he was trying to get rid of and said I could have them for the cost of shipping!

To say that I'm ecstatic would be an understatement! Although, the T4x machines are newer, faster and just generally more advanced, IMHO, there's been no ThinkPad since the A31 went out of production that has replicated it's flexibilty and toughness. It's not an accident that they were chosen for Space Shuttle and International Space Station use. They really are tough: I don't know if they are 3rd-grader tough, but they are pretty robust. Plus they have big easy to see 15" screens and weigh enough so that the kids aren't tempted to try and move them around too much. 

This will give me 4 identical machines that uses the same cloned image and will be easy to support. In fact, although those machines haven't arrived yet, I have 3 drives already cloned ready to go! Two for the machines and one as a spare in case one of them fails at some point. Of course one of the things about the A31 series that I personally love is their modularity. You can pretty much configure the machine any way you like. It's one of the last laptop computers made that, aside from the hard drive, not only had a had two other drives, but they bays are modular. Over it's production run, pretty much anything that any one could conceive of was made for it. These devices ranged from the prosaic floppy disk drive, to a secondary battery or various optical drives, but they didn't stop there: IBM not only created some unusual devices which included hard drive adapters, but to cap it all off, a special adapter-frame that the user could fit either a number keypad or a Palm Pilot! 

What's not to love? It's almost like the James Bond's Little Nellie that arrived in two suitcases and "Q"!