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I need a new/used lab computer
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My garage lab computer went kaput recently, and I need to get another one to control my instruments via GPIB and USB. I had a tower running Windows 7, although it was originally my wife’s computer running (ick!) Windows Vista. Sooooo slow! Anyway, I don’t need anything fancy, just a PCI slot for the GPIB card, Ethernet jack for Internet connection, and at least 4 USB jacks (kbd, mouse, USB microscope, GPSDO). Mini tower or thin client would be great. Anybody have a PC they don’t need? Thanks in advance.
Jim Ford Laguna Hills, California, USA |
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Jim,
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Do you have anyone in your environment with a not too old laptop? Get it for a box of cigars, install an SSD and Linux Mint. You're back in business! Best 73 de Harke On 6-3-2025 21:24, Jim Ford via groups.io wrote:
My garage lab computer went kaput recently, and I need to get another one to control my instruments via GPIB and USB. I had a tower running Windows 7, although it was originally my wife’s computer running (ick!) Windows Vista. Sooooo slow! Anyway, I don’t need anything fancy, just a PCI slot for the GPIB card, Ethernet jack for Internet connection, and at least 4 USB jacks (kbd, mouse, USB microscope, GPSDO). Mini tower or thin client would be great. Anybody have a PC they don’t need? Thanks in advance. |
开云体育Jim-let me check as I have a tower doing nothing...hss not been used for long time, will know when I get to the shop over the weekend. shop is? in no. SF bay area 搁别苍é别 On 3/6/25 12:24 PM, Jim Ford via
groups.io wrote:
My garage lab computer went kaput recently, and I need to get another one to control my instruments via GPIB and USB. I had a tower running Windows 7, although it was originally my wife’s computer running (ick!) Windows Vista. Sooooo slow! Anyway, I don’t need anything fancy, just a PCI slot for the GPIB card, Ethernet jack for Internet connection, and at least 4 USB jacks (kbd, mouse, USB microscope, GPSDO). Mini tower or thin client would be great. Anybody have a PC they don’t need? Thanks in advance. Jim Ford Laguna Hills, California, USA . |
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Looks like he needs a PCI slot for gpib card. Would have to go to USB to GPIB if he went w a laptop.
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On Mar 6, 2025, at 15:27, Harke Smits via groups.io <yrrah@...> wrote: |
开云体育That’s not absolutely true. One can use a thunderbolt equipped laptop with an external PCIe cage and a PCIe to PCI adapter or a PCIe 488 card.
It is even possible to use a virtual machine with an older OS than the hardware supports and use PCIe passthrough of the PCIe to PCI bridge to expose the card behind it to the virtual machine.
Due to lack of many necessary parts to support parallel ports, running things like E-cal that requires a GPIB port and a parallel port is likely not really feasible on modern hardware.
Another interesting problem is that it is possible to have hardware too new to run an older OS and you can find things like video drivers simply don’t exist, or USB ports not seen which can lead to no keyboard/mouse. Some can be worked around,
some not.
I’ve fallen down that rabbit hole and had some wins, some losses and some I could pull off but would be hard pressed to replicate or help someone through.
Ultimately, some things that are possible aren’t economically viable or cost so much more than alternatives.
The higher cost and more limited options for a TB capable laptop plus all of the necessary adapters and extra hardware can easily add a few hundred dollars.
From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of bownes via groups.io <bownes@...>
Sent: Thursday, March 6, 2025 5:16:05 PM To: [email protected] <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] <[email protected]>; [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [HP-Agilent-Keysight-equipment] I need a new/used lab computer ?
Looks like he needs a PCI slot for gpib card. Would have to go to USB to GPIB if he went w a laptop.
> On Mar 6, 2025, at 15:27, Harke Smits via <yrrah@...> wrote: > > ?Jim, > > > Do you have anyone in your environment with a not too old laptop? Get it for a box of cigars, install an SSD and Linux Mint. You're back in business! > > Best 73 de Harke > >> On 6-3-2025 21:24, Jim Ford via wrote: >> My garage lab computer went kaput recently, and I need to get another one to control my instruments via GPIB and USB.? I had a tower running Windows 7,? although it was originally my wife’s computer running (ick!) Windows Vista.? Sooooo slow!? Anyway, I don’t need anything fancy, just a PCI slot for the GPIB card, Ethernet jack for Internet connection, and at least 4 USB jacks (kbd, mouse, USB microscope, GPSDO).? Mini tower or thin client would be great.? Anybody have a PC they don’t need?? Thanks in advance. >> >> Jim Ford >> Laguna Hills, California, USA >> >> >> >> > > > > > |
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About PCI(e) passthrough - I tried to breathe some new life into an old PCI NI AWG card that supposedly only works with Windows XP. The card works flawlessly on a native XP install on the same machine (a PC from the 2010s). My thinking was that I could install XP in a VM and set up PCI passthrough to gain "direct" access to the card from within the VM (that would've made the entire setup enormously more useful for obvious reasons, practically meaning that I could use a single computer to manage all the devices on my bench). However, although the virtualized XP recognized the card, the NI software couldn't initialize it the same way - or use it altogether. I've verified that the hardware supports IOMMU and it's indeed active. Other users had similar experiences on the NI forums. I didn't have more time to investigate and I left it at that and accepted defeat for the time being. So, as you said, YMMV.? Gabor So I guess On Fri, Mar 7, 2025 at 1:15?AM Ed Marciniak via <ed=[email protected]> wrote:
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开云体育I haven’t tried to do anything useful yet, but I did succeed in getting a raspberry pi 5 to see an NI PCI-GPIB card hoping so a compact HPdrive system with the advantage of being able to ssh to it rather than being a microcontroller based solution.
From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of Gabor Szucs via groups.io <sniper.asys@...>
Sent: Thursday, March 6, 2025 6:45:22 PM To: [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [HP-Agilent-Keysight-equipment] I need a new/used lab computer ?
About PCI(e) passthrough - I tried to breathe some new life into an old PCI NI AWG card that supposedly only works with Windows XP. The card works flawlessly on a native XP install on the same machine (a PC from the 2010s). My thinking was that
I could install XP in a VM and set up PCI passthrough to gain "direct" access to the card from within the VM (that would've made the entire setup enormously more useful for obvious reasons, practically meaning that I could use a single computer to manage all
the devices on my bench). However, although the virtualized XP recognized the card, the NI software couldn't initialize it the same way - or use it altogether. I've verified that the hardware supports IOMMU and it's indeed active. Other users had similar experiences
on the NI forums. I didn't have more time to investigate and I left it at that and accepted defeat for the time being. So, as you said, YMMV.?
Gabor
So I guess
On Fri, Mar 7, 2025 at 1:15?AM Ed Marciniak via
<ed=[email protected]> wrote:
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开云体育Re:- Do you have anyone in your environment with a not too old laptop? Get it for a box of cigars, install an SSD and Linux Mint. You're back in business!
There is nothing wrong with using Linux for instrumentation.?
But... That is likely impossible with a laptop, if you have a PCI GPIB card, plus though it can work with Linux, the bridge to cross is narrow and wobbly.? (Steeeep learning curve!) ? Then, any existing software that ran on Win7 wont run natively, and even if it does in a VM, may not work with the PCI card known to the host. (From personal experience, with an XP VM on Linux, the NI GPIB-USB devices DO work with software and NI drivers running on XP in a VM, as you can make USB devices visible to the guest OS.)
Nothing wrong with Win 7, so long as you don't let MS muck it up.?? Anyone using it (or later MS OS's that are out of official support) for anything less than trivial, that can access the outside world, should perhaps consider:- or:-? if the above gets broken. ? ?? That goes to the above address. Not used it myself, yet, but is recommended by Mr Gibson of grc.com.?? If you know who he is, nothing more needs to be said. Regards to All. Dave 'KBV.
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Just as another data point, I do know for a fact that a PCIe to PCI bridge, NI PCI GPIB card, and Windows 10 64 bit will work.? I have yet to run any program that won't work with it, but I am sure something out there won't.??
I have not been brave enough to try Windows 11 on this machine, and probably will not until there's an easy path back to Windows 10 if it breaks the GPIB stuff. In all honesty, I probably should just build a second machine solely for the GPIB / electronics tasks, as this is the main machine I use for everything else in the hamshack as well.? It would be ideal to keep it separate and just network into the NAS I have downstairs.? Personally, laziness is the only reason I haven't gone this route, as I even have an old machine that would be perfect for that task. What I'm saying, is that unless you can't find an alternative, or don't have the room, the best bet if starting from scratch is a separate dedicated machine for the GPIB world you need to live within.? YMMV |
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Hey Jim,
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I'm a little late to the party here, but what about just fixing the original PC? You didn't mention the type of kaput-ness involved, which could be a number of things ranging from trivial to fatal. My dreaded worst case PC failures have always been HDDs losing boot sector or crapping out entirely, so having to redo the OS and all programs and trying to recover lost data. Power supplies and other drives and such are trivial, being mostly easy to replace commodities. If the OS HDD is still good, of course it's simplest to just park a fresh PC around it and tweak it to match the new HW details.
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I even fixed a huge Dell XPS400 motherboard a few years back. It suffered from the same sorts of things as other gear - bad electrolytic caps - and I could see it coming for over a year in advance as more and more paralleled caps gradually puffed up and blew their tops until there just wasn't enough C anymore. When it finally went down, I had to pull the board, and replaced several dozen caps throughout. It was tricky in many spots, where way undersized pads for caps had to be cooked out adjacent extremely skinny signal runs without wrecking anything on these multilayered boards - they are not laid out well at all for such service. It worked though, and continues to do so, with no signs of problems with the fresh caps. However, the usual problem happened again recently - the OS HDD crapped out entirely, with no spin-up or anything. I reloaded it with a new one and it's up and running, but not used much now. I keep a number of old PC types as spares mainly for legacy ports, programs, and devices, running on WinXPSP2. My "modern" PCs (one tower, two laptops) are on Win10/11.
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So anyway, maybe you can fix the original, depending on what's wrong - nothing to lose in trying. Good luck.
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Ed |
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I'm not a windows fan, but a while back got a tiny machine with windows 8 on it. It felt like using a phone as a computer. It updated to 10 (painfully, it didn't really have enough free space to do it properly) and is still horrible to use. I do have an alternate boot to win 7 on my linux laptop which I use occasionally for some proprietary config tool etc.?
But recently that was happening too often so I grabbed a cheap pc (second hand NUC 7i7 for ?70 ish) and it came with W11, no option.?
To be honest, I find it more usable than anything since W7. I think they might have walked back some of the worst errors of the last few years. It's still frustrating and naggy compared with debian but it's not quite so horrible.
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Now I might be missing some as-yet unencountered part of the W11 experience which will drive me to distraction, but at this point I'm thinking it's not as bad as painted. Especially compared with 10. Is what does it do badly ? So far I've avoided registering it as I don't see any point but it is slowly putting in uncustomisable and unpleasant behaviour so apparently it's built to annoy. Does the level of intrusive adverts eventually grow to the point where it's unusable ?
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Well, yes, I probably could try to fix the old machine, but the limiting factor is time.? If you're retired, and I'm not, that may make sense.? No rabbit holes here, thank you very much!? And there are of course many that one could jump down in this situation.? I just need something quick and dirty. Regarding OSs, I'm running Win 10 on this Dell all-in-one I'm writing this on, just got forcibly updated to Win 11 from Win 10 recently on my work laptop computer, and as I said originally, ran Win 7 installed in place of Vista on the now-defunct lab PC.? I've used Linux before, several years ago after a friend warned me about the danger of going online with a non-longer-supported OS like Win7 and turned me on to wubi.exe (dead simple Windows UBuntu Installer) so I was happily using Ubuntu Linux online and dual-booted to Win 7 for everything else, until one day Linux wouldn't boot.? Alas, I was unable to find wubi.exe online, and that was the end of my using Linux.? Someday I'll get back into it.? Yet another rabbit hole... The quickest, easiest way to get back to a computer hosting the GPIB card and connecting to my cheapo USB microscope and Leo Bodnar GPSDO and to the Internet will win the day. Thanks, everybody. Jim
On Friday, March 7, 2025 at 02:25:26 PM CST, Adrian Godwin via groups.io <artgodwin@...> wrote:
I'm not a windows fan, but a while back got a tiny machine with windows 8 on it. It felt like using a phone as a computer. It updated to 10 (painfully, it didn't really have enough free space to do it properly) and is still horrible to use. I do have an alternate boot to win 7 on my linux laptop which I use occasionally for some proprietary config tool etc.?
But recently that was happening too often so I grabbed a cheap pc (second hand NUC 7i7 for ?70 ish) and it came with W11, no option.?
To be honest, I find it more usable than anything since W7. I think they might have walked back some of the worst errors of the last few years. It's still frustrating and naggy compared with debian but it's not quite so horrible.
?
Now I might be missing some as-yet unencountered part of the W11 experience which will drive me to distraction, but at this point I'm thinking it's not as bad as painted. Especially compared with 10. Is what does it do badly ? So far I've avoided registering it as I don't see any point but it is slowly putting in uncustomisable and unpleasant behaviour so apparently it's built to annoy. Does the level of intrusive adverts eventually grow to the point where it's unusable ?
?
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On 2025-03-07 3:40 PM, Jim Ford via groups.io wrote:
The quickest, easiest way to get back to a computer hosting the GPIB card and connecting to my cheapo USB microscope and Leo Bodnar GPSDO and to the Internet will win the day.If your software can use USB/serial or Telnet to access the data, my KISS-488 offers a whole lot of OS-agnostic and platform-agnostic ways to access GPIB. www.hxengineering.com Steve Hendrix |
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This thread reminds me I have two old Dell mini-cabs running Win2k I got specifically to run MAME on for arcade cabinets.? And a few old laptops I have been holding onto for a lab machine that is more or less disposable in case of high voltage, metal flakes, etc kill it...? The problem will be remembering passwords to get data off of them when I get around to cleaning them up! On Fri, Mar 7, 2025 at 2:44?PM Steve Hendrix via <SteveHx=[email protected]> wrote: On 2025-03-07 3:40 PM, Jim Ford via wrote: |
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If you looking for the quickest way to get back running, it's going to be to change the caps in the power supply and motherboard. It shouldn't take more than a couple of hours of work to change them with a vacuum solder sucker tool, and a hot air gun. I always pre-heat the area with the hot air, then use the vacuum solder sucker to just give it the final bit of heat to melt the solder and vacuum out the holes. That's going to be heaps faster than getting a new machine, and re-installing all the software from scratch - especially windows - it takes forever to install and update and remember all the little tweaks you had to make along the way. If it was linux, that'd be a different story - usually installing takes about 5 minutes, updating to the latest packages online another 5 or 10, and you're pretty much ready to go. With windows, it's usually hours and hours, to days, depending on how you do it. On Fri, Mar 7, 2025 at 12:40?PM Jim Ford via <james.ford=[email protected]> wrote:
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I agree with the pain of commissioning a new computer. I have 30 years of past work, along with all the support applications (compilers, specialized IDEs, etc.), along with all the data, documentation, and such like. Hard drives (and now SSDs) have kept pace with my work, so I keep everything on line - about 3TB worth. Anything other than Windows is not possible - too many specialized and proprietary tools.
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So when I get a new laptop, every 5 years or so, the first thing I do is put in the largest SSD that will fit, then copy everything across (about 20 hours at present). Then I spend the next several days installing all the tools, configuring everything, setting up all my preferences and shortcuts, network shares, etc. I hate the process, which is why I don't do it very often. I keep thinking of automating parts of it, but in many cases I can't figure out a way to do so.
~~
Mark |
开云体育Hi again. Viable (PROVEN!) good backups are essential of course.? There are
any number of choices how to do that.? Local, or "in the cloud".?
Manually started, or done for you in the background. Heck, encrypted archives in a DropBox folder are easy to do.? (Do NOT rely, on the built in encryption in the popular zip archive tools.? Use Aescrypt to get it done correctly.)? Just do NOT loose the passwords you use!? There is no way to recover them if you do loose them. "Locknote" is a good encrypted notepad, that can be used to store
other passwords etc.? Windows only, though it runs under WINE if
needed.? ?
Again, do NOT loose that password!? You can keep it on a USB
stick, as it is self contained, no "Install" needed.?? But again,
keep a backup somewhere! It is possible create a similar largely secure (at rest) facility
under Linux, using aescrypt and a shell script.? What I've done
works well, but it's robustness under attack has not been tested. And again, do NOT loose the main password! The important stuff, is what "you" create and need, as well as
configuration and driver files etc.? The OS is less of a problem,
as you (should) still have the original install media, yes?? (You
did create such when you first commissioned the PC, didn't you??
Like it asked you to do.) Whole disk backup (imaging) is also possible, but not so much as
a daily basis, but at least the pain of what you have to
reinstall/recreate is minimal, compared to a total loss.?
(CloneZilla is good, it's a bootable USB or DVD, and you'll need
an external drive to put the image on.)?? Remember too, as talked about before, GRC.com's "Spinrite" software can keep a hard drive (and SSD) happy, and give you warnings of future impending failure. OK, not "Free", but what price insurance, and your time??
As Ed Breya says, also keep an eye on the main board, and PSU.? They suffer the usual component failures over time, much like other kit.?? But I can attest that replacing power rail decoupling caps on modern main boards is a right pain in the *** to do.? They are not designed at all for any sort of service/repair/rework.?? Of course, you'll do that in an ESD safe way too. Likewise any critical (to you) unique interface I/O boards. You do have backups of any needed driver install files, don't you? Lastly, upgrading to a newer OS.? (Win11 from say Win7.)?? You
may find some commercial third party software, will not install on
the new OS, NI's GPIB drivers etc is one such.?? The chances are,
the actual software to do the job will run, just that the
installer baulks at the new OS saying a newer version of the NI
software is needed.?? Then, you find that the newer version
doesn’t support the GPIB card you have!?? Don't ask how many times
I got hit by that in the past workplace. 73. Dave 'KBV.
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开云体育Jim-sorry this was in my drafts file I thought it was sent...dang anyway....I WILL be in the Bay area 15/16 March! I know one is a Win 7 machine, the other I think is an XP. I will send pictures if needed..... again my apologies for not getting this to you sooner 搁别苍é别 Jim - things changed due to water leak under the house......it will be following weekend...... 搁别苍é别 On 3/6/25 12:38 PM, Renee K6FSB wrote:
Jim- |
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