Lightning strikes twice

Some of my posts have gotten rather wordy lately, which I dislike so I’ll keep this one brief. Yesterday I went back to the same secondhand shop where I bought the 560e, and bought two things blindly that turned out to be winners. I know it’s bad form, since not everything is perfectly Linux-friendly, but I’ve been having good luck lately, and the trend continued.

The first was a memory chip found at the bottom of a bin of desktop parts. It has no more markings than “Nr64-16M,” but looked like the right size and dimension for PC66. It turned out to be a 16Mb chip that fits the 560e perfectly, although I really don’t have any more information than that. I should probably run a memory test on it, but thus far it seems to be working. With a total of 32Mb in that machine now, I can start using Debian (or Ubuntu) on it, and not have to worry about ducking the memory requirement.

The other find was a Buffalo LPC3-TX PCMCIA network card, which I intended as a replacement for the sketchy Corega FEther II PCC-TXD card I have been using off and on for two years. I picked it only because the box had no labeling on it newer than “Windows 2000,” and I figured that was a good stab at a 16-bit network card. (No CardBus support in my Pentiums.)

Debian says both cards are axnet-cs compatible, and even more surprising, they both lose network connections when traffic spikes. What I took for a hardware problem with the Corega card shows up in the Buffalo card too, which means the issue lies elsewhere. In any case, I dug the old one out of the trash and its boxing out of my paper recycling, and put it back in the closet.

Aside from that I spent a little time scoping out the used laptops, and have my eye on both an R60e and an X60, with neither machine costing more than US$600. I’m leaning towards Thinkpads these days, and those seemed like the most likely candidates.

See? Nice and short. 🙂