Well after a year away I decided to power on my gear and shake everything down.
Of course at first the battery iside my SS2K-PC hand controller passed away; that only took two emails to a chappie I know in Hawaii to point me to the right place in the USA go get its specific Lithium 3V wired AAA replacement. A bit of tricky mechanical work and soldering and the battery is in and it's all back to as good as ever. I note that the last battery must have lasted well over 8 years!
But next the astro lab PC refused to even post on power-up. It looks like the CPU itself died even though all current to it is via a large online UPS and all leads to and from it are isolated and locally earthed. I had to strip the PC down and remove just about everything to determine this diagnosis - including switching power supplies, memory, graphics card and even changing motherboards.
I really wanted to preserve as much gear as possible and have on-board Serial port(s) - so I stayed on the very end of life LGA775 Intel Conroe2 boards (yet to find a new processor).
So instead I decided the best recourse was to upgrade my eldest son's PC to a new GA-Z87-HD3 motherboard, paired with a Intel I5 4760 CPU and 16GB of 1600MHz RAM, then simply take his old Conroe2 1.8GHZ CPU and 8GB RAM and Gigabyte G41 variety motherboard and re-build his PC and the the astrolab PC.
After a day of Windows re-install his gear is now flying, then I tried the astro lab PC. It only took two re-boots for Windows to re-configure itself. Then I added a 4 port USB3 PCI Express extension card and driver and reconnected everything in the astrol lab. A few more reboots as all the very many USB driven devices all reconfigured and its good as new - which really surprised me.
The astro lab PC coming back to life meant I didn't have to re-install and configure maybe 20 astronomy related software applications - which I was dreading!
So it left me wondering.
- How do I minimise the pain of this happening again in a few years. A fried suggested virtualising everything (meaning I guess somehow capture the rebuilt PC exactly as a specific Virtual Machine (VM) - then if it ever dies again create any new VM on any PC and load the specific VM image I need on it).
- What is the most robust PC to build - should I go down the military gear build path or build a HP Proliant Microserver and run all applications on Windows Home Server 2011?
- Should the next hardware I get be a low end modern machine and ditch the Conroe2 platform, but if so how to I deliver a one or two serial COM port that works reliably? (Not all modern motherboards have COM ports and I hear USB <-> COM port devices are flaky so maybe that just leaves finding PCI gear that has 1-2 COM ports.
Love to here folks ideas in this space.
Thanks, Matt
