New workstations setup
It’s been some time before I could do anything else but setting up the working environments – apart from OpenVMS, of course, since Diana runs like a charm….
There has been a lot of work at home, and the datacenter had to be set aside for some time. Just letting it all run as before, except for the ususal access at times, and there has been little time to do whatever was needed to keep the PC’s happy.
At some point, however, I ran into a laptop with a 17-inch wide screen that has a separate keypad. This is a nic e feature to have when you’re planning to run Alpha Emulators with openVMS. And this one came cheap (relatively), with Windows 7 Pro 64-bit and office 2010 Pro, a 640Gb disk and can easily be extended to carry 8Gb memory.
This one became more needed since the usual desktop station Aphrodite, running XP PRO, Sp3, encountered severe problems: CTRL+ALT+DEL for instance caused no action…and other software had it’s troubles as well. So in the end, after havinf re-installed XP and all subsequent updates and other software a few times, I obtained this laptop, ordered the extra 4Gb of memory and started installing. Without trouble – it all went smoothly. Until I ran into software that does have some trouble in keeping connections alive. But it’s not a critical piece of software, so for the time I can live without it.
A last attempt of re-installing XP on the old box, and obtaing the patches, made it obvious I had to install Windows7 on that box as well. Just took the 32-bit version for that one because 3.5 Gb of mem is all it can take. 64-bit is of no use in there. But here I learned that the failing combination is not in the OS, but in the keyboard….Not a problem either. It took some time to get all drivers up and running but now I’ve got no more XP-boxes in the network, except for the older machines that work as ‘life-savers’ in the cluster.
This new system is named “Europa” after a nimph in Greek Mythology – running away from woman-hunter Zeus on bull-back, and landing on the continent named after her.
As for the usual maintenance tasks: this still has to be checked – so stay tuned for more information