O2 troubles =========== As I have noticed earlier, I have got a second SGI O2 workstation. It's a low-end model with the R5000 processor. Not the lowest possible, though. It has the 200 MHz processor which is much faster than the basic 180 MHz one (the main difference is not the frequency but the size of it's caches). But I should compare the speed of my R5000-based SGI Indy (it's has a 150 MHz R500SC processor). Of course, the Indy should be much slower due to it's older menory and bus design. I finally got a disk sled for the O2. So I installed my spare 18 GB SCSI drive and started the box. But not everything is as good as it should be. The good -------- It works very well with my old 15" 1024x768 Compaq LCD (I got this LCD around 2006 because it has a good support for screen resolutions used by old Macintosh computers - it was the main screen for my Power Macintosh 6100). But first I had to set "setvar monitor l" in the PROM monitor. Otherwise it tried to start in the "high resolution" mode (1280x1024) which made my screen blank. After that, I got a working desktop with all expected features. The machine is surprisingly snappy. Shokingly enough, in can run smoothly the BZFlag in textured mode (my main O2 can do it, too - but not as well). It can be caused by smaller screen size (1024x768 vs 1600x1024) but it's possible that the R5000 procesor (which was designed in the O2 in mind) is better integrated in the system than the much more powerful hight-end R10000 processor. Even with 128 MB of RAM there are no speed problems caused by swapping (until something from the Mozilla family is started, of course...). Even the sound works (I wasn't sure about that because previous owner turned the startup tune off so the system was quiet on the boot). The bad ------- Well, I can connect my Indy Presenter flat panel to the system (I got an interface card in meantime - it cost me more than the O2 itself). The presenter is even correctly detected. But it is black (no image here). It looks like at least backlit is dead. It will be probably impossible to repair such rare device. The only fan in the computer is very noisy. It will be uneasy to get a new compatible one (I replaced the fan in my main O2 and it wasn't easy to get a working or a compatible one). The ugly -------- Well, I have expected that: the Toshiba CD drives broke after some years of use. And the main symptom is a random opening of the drive. This one openes all times. The problem is that I had to or unconnect it (and thus a had system without working CD-ROM) or a replace it by a compatible drive (the O2 uses a special front plate which is only compatible with certain Toshiba drives; also the audio-over-SCSI mode work only with Toshibas). It may be a minor issue for many but I still do use Audio CD disks - I have a good collection of them and I don't wont to connvert them to audio files. Also, on these old systems the MP3 playback consumes much more CPU cycles than use of the CD subsystem: playing CD is unnoticeable on the system performance and it's practically imunne to system's overloading but MP3 playbasck isn't. It's a much smaller problem for the O2 than for the older Indy system but is some cases every available CPU cycle can help. Conclusions ----------- I got a nice spare O2 systems. Unfortunately, the main goal: a construction of a portable workstation with a portable screen (the Presenter was designed for that) was not accomplished due to screen failure.