26-Sep-2004

Didn't do anything with Venus's problem with XP. Just keep it for now.

There is something wrong with Diana.
Months ago, 4 SIMMs of memory (64 Mb each) were inserted, and the proccessor was swapped for a faster one. All went well - until some weeks ago when severe machine-errors caused a reboot when something was started - either in batch, or interactively (loggging in even stopped thye machine working). I decided to take out the added memory and after that, the machine ran without a fuzz for weeks with 256Mb. This weekend I tried to figure out what SIMM was rotten but as it turned out all four of them seemed dead. Starting the machine revealed only 256Mb (just bank 0).
Luckily there were four more so these were all plugged in - and there were bank 1 and 2 showing up as well - a total of 512 bytes. Nevertheless - the system crashed severely, during startup.
First the processor was swapped but that did not solve the problem, so bank 2 was removed, but even that didn't help. The machine did start but after some time the same error showed up, stopping all processing. So memorybank 1 was also emptied - and now it's left with it's original 256 Mb in bank 0 - and no, there is not any problem anymore.
It seems a problem with memory control that causes a machine failure when memory over 256Mb (physical) is accessed. It will mean a swap of the motherboard - or adding another machine, whatever is preferable.
Cause: HEAT, presumably. The room temperature came well over 30 C....

All system patches that were released after the last update - May 2004 - have been applied so now Diana is fully up-to-date. Only, since the memory is jsut 256 Mb, the installation of development tools is not feasable - that requires 512Mb at least....

For the rest - everything back to normal, only have to re-insert the faster processor in Diana...