VAIO 1

I think it was before Ziggy's plastic 478 heatsink/fan bracket broke when I put the old full-copper Thermaltake heatsink Ziggy used to use into the VAIO to make the cooling a bit better (least I think it's better). The mobo gave me trouble though because the fan was spinning under 1000 RPM and the mobo kept giving me the "Plug in CPU fan" error even though it was plugged in. What I did to solve that was to modify the fan from the stock heatsink (of the VAIO) to stand at an angle and use an extension cord to plug it into the CPU fan jack; the stock fan blows on the Radeon 9550 SE card (fanless, and used to be Ziggy's original card), so it works out. I connected the Thermaltake fan to the remaining fan controller (the Zalman 9700s are the only ones with them) so I could tweak the fan speed better so it's not as noisy, but also efficient at cooling.

I removed the DVD-RW (it's not compatible with +RW), DVD-ROM, and floppy drives as they were kinda useless (especially the DVD-ROM and floppy), and it sat for a long while.

When I wanted to test out 32-bit openSUSE 13.1, I decided to use the VAIO as a testbed, but for some reason, the installation hung on bootloader installation, forcing me to pull the plug. Ziggy turned out just fine, so I figured it's probably the crappy proc or something (it's a 3.2Ghz Pentium 4, but has a smaller cache and slower bus speed than Ziggy's P4, which is a bit funny because Ziggy's P4 is only 2.8Ghz).

A couple days ago, I decided to get the installation DVD image of 32-bit 13.1 to see if it would make any different (and to just possess), and finished downloading it yesterday.

When I tried installing this morning, the hardware probing hung on the Linux partition search, and when I tried using Gparted in Parted Magic, it also hung. I opened up a SMART utility and saw some unknown drive, which I thought to be the front-panel card reader, so I unplugged it and rebooted back into PMagic with the same results. At a closer look, I noticed the "fd0" designation and realized it was actually the floppy drive I took out, so I painstakingly put it back in (after checking that it was impossible to disable the floppy), then rebooted into PMagic again. This time, I was able to get into Gparted just fine, so I reboot into the installation DVD of 32-bit 13.1, and the probe didn't hang at all. When it was installing the bootloader, I was watching closely, since I was worried that it might hang again, but it didn't. After finishing the installation, 13.1 seemed to work just fine, so I shut it down and put the DVD+RW drive back into the Dell before cleaning up the VAIO to put away.

While I was thinking to use it in place of Sae-chan for writing, I'm thinking it would be a better idea to pair it with the Yamaha keyboard, as the keyboard has a floppy drive. The only thing is that the keyboard use is very seldom as well. Now that I think about it, I can also use it to pull things off of the floppies I was using for the ancient Performa 550, but we'll see what happens.