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Trio Kenwood KD-1033 turntable main bearing service

  One of my first posts in this blog was regarding the servicing of the Pioneer PL12D turntable, and that has proven to be the most popular by a significant margin. The Pioneer PL12D had its competitors, and probably the most popular alternative was the Trio Kenwood KD-1033 turntable. I use both names (Trio and Kenwood) as the company operated under different names in different markets. In the UK they were Trio, possibly because the brand Kenwood was most famous here for food blenders. 95% of a KD-1033 is similar to  Pioneer PL12D, and servicing them is very much the same process. Both are belt drive , have an AC synchronous motor,  mechanical speed change , a main bearing, sprung top deck and rubber motor mounts. the KD-1033 uses a different type of anti skate mechanism, employing a thread and weight. The plinth is shallower with an internal cross brace. One aspect that is different is the design of the main bearing, and servicing it is a little harder than a PL12D. The ...
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The return of the Dell Dimension 2350

Back in 2008, I started this blog with a post about how my son and I attempted to tweak a humble Dell Dimension 2350 computer for PC gaming. See How to build a gaming PC from a Dell Dimension 2350. By 2012 the PC was running very slow and was retired to the attic, being replaced with a mac mini for my son to use for schoolwork. I lamented the demise of this lovable old PC, and back then signed off with :

Who knows, perhaps one day to return , in its current guise or perhaps running a flavour of Linux, which might be another way to give it a new lease of life


While recently reanimating  another retired PC as a dedicated Folding server  - see Building a Fold@Home dedicated PC server which is also a space heater, I spotted the old Dell and wondered if it too could be recycled doing something useful.

I fetched it down, and acquainted myself with this old friend. My thinking was initially , that I'd redeploy it as another Fold@home server , running linux. It would be slow, but might work.

I removed all the fans, HDD's and cleaned and reseated the P4 CPU heat sink with fresh thermal grease


A few challenges emerged though :
  • It is 32 bit and Fold@Home no longer support 32 bit Linux clients
  • It was IDE only
  • It wouldn't boot from USB. though the motherboard has USB support, not for booting. Any booting has to be from diskette, CD-drive, hard drive or LAN
  • The CD/DVD combo drive wouldn't read any CD's 
I looked around for Linux distributions that were lightweight, would boot from a LiveCD image (I had no DVD's to burn) and 32 bit. While there are a seemingly infinite number of Linux distros aimed at older /slower computers, actually very few meet the criteria above . Only Puppy Linux seemed to fit the bill, and I duly downloaded and burnt a CD.

I swapped the CD drive over from the other PC mentioned above, and was able to boot Puppy Linux. initially it does not recognise the integrated graphics of the Dell motherboard, but it did recognise the Sparkle 8500 PCI (YES!) Graphics card, a repeating problem all the way back to 2002.

It looked promising , but Puppy kernel panic'd repeatedly during the boot and I think it was struggling to run a live 32bit linux from CD with only 2Gb of memory on 20 year old hardware.

I decided that the best way forward was to get a new disk to install on, and luckily enough there are cheap IDE-to-SATA adapter cards for £6 on ebay which I ordered along with a 120Gb SSD for £9.

In hunting for a CD installable Linux, Debian 12 emerged as a good candidate, there is a 32 bit installer from CD which I downloaded and burnt on another computer while waiting for the parts to arrive.


From this point everything got a lot easier. The IDE-to-SATA adapter worked like a dream, recognised by the BIOS. The Debian install went very smoothly. I took pretty much all the defaults, the only changes being I elected for the Xfce window manager (the most lightweight) and I also selected the option to be an SSH server. My plan was to run this machine headless and ideally from the command line via ssh.

NOTE Sata adapter in the IDE slot on the board and SSD positioned with cable ties on the front grille. Also note new BIOS backup battery, the old one was 21 years old !

Debian install screen

The install went flawlessly, and the Dell rebooted, being reborn as a Debian Linux PC.
the desktop Gui worked fine albeit rather slowly, but after I checked everything was OK, I reconfigured it to run non-gui from boot ($ sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target) I installed the tightvncserver , in case I needed to remotely run any GUI tools from my mac mini desktop running  a VNC viewer.

I had installed using a monitor plugged into the PCI Graphics card, which was now unused, so I removed it and confirmed the machine was happy to boot (it was) and I could access the console via the integrated graphics RGB.

When I was working on my Fold@home server, I looked at other similar projects and came across Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing or BOINC, as it is abbreviated .It's a framework for distributed computing, where various Science and research organisations can setup projects that BOINC can distribute and allow remote processing on. projects encompass medical research, Climate forecasting and Astrophysics. There are many projects available. Importantly for me it also still supports 32 bit computing and the boinc-client is installable directly from the Debian repository. I installed and configured it, the boing manager is a gui tool , but is only needed for configuration. You can also configure via the command line, but it's easier. I have initially setup two projects, and you need to initially register with each project website  


worldcommunitygrid.org

einsteinathome.org

As with fold@home, BOINC uses the CPU, based on your configuration settings i.e how much and when. I'm happy for it to have maximum use of the CPU here. However on the other machines  I can monitor cpu temperature and fan speed, and tweak these to achieve optimal setting of usage vs fan noise. However  the Dell has no sensors on the motherboard or CPU to record temperature. The single case fan which doubles as a CPU fan has variable speed achieved using a thermistor  which  adjusts the voltage based on the exhaust air temperature and hence the fan RPM. Here the CPU will be running at 99% 24/7, so I needed to rethink the cooling a bit, while also hoping to make it quiet. Running BOINC the fan is quiet though audible, not bad for a 20+ year old device, but my next phase was to see how quiet I could make it ?

Next step : Cooling


I fitted some nice mesh-style PCI slot covers

with the front panel removed you can see the large empty space where HDD and CD drive were, no a storage are for unused power supply cabling

I also fitted mech blanking covers over the empty spaced in the front panel


Spare cabling is quite a ball, but there is plenty of free space through it


The front mesh inserts were cheap from ebay, and weren't a great fit, but some hot glue sorted that out

I replaced the fan with a standard 92mm case fan from Gelid. It fitted in the cowl perfectly. It doesn't have any speed control, its running full speed but its quieter than the old one

Here we see the Dell sporting its new look and appropriately de-stickered of it's Windows inside verbiage

Rear view of PCI mesh blankers

So far the machine has been running quietly , doing BOINC work

https://einsteinathome.org/host/13165453/tasks/0/0




July 2024

Well this old friend has now been running boinc tasks for 6 months without fail. It's still getting 32-bit linux tasks from world community grid and einstein@home. The only change has been  that back in Spring I reconfigured the server to only run during my cheap rate electricity period (00:00-05:00).

I experimented with using sleep and wake on LAN but this proved beyond me to get working. Then I realised that the BIOS had a boot option for a time of day. I configured it for midnight, and created a crontab entry to shutdown the machine at 05:00. Works like a dream





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