Another one bites the dust - dead T8pro

[dragonpoo]

Well, I went to log in to my T8pro and found it was off, and wouldn't power on anymore. I suspect it died during a power surge a couple months ago, but didn't notice anything since I've been too busy with work. (it's simply part of my test homelab). I have noticed, when it's plugged in, that I hear a feint high pitched sound coming from the power brick. I've also tried another one, done some other troubleshooting like unplug and hold the power button, etc.

I reached out to Barry for assistance, but since I've had it about two years, I'm not sure if anything can be done. Alas, poor T8pro, I knew him well!

[Gabe]

That's too bad. Maybe it will be like my old W8 Pro. One day it just stopped working. I tried a bunch of things, but nothing. I then put it back in the box and set it on a shelf in a closet, where it sat for a few years. Then a few months ago I decided I was going to try putting Linux on it, but not actually remembering if it even powered up or anything, and when I connected it and pressed the power button, it worked, as if nothing had ever been wrong with it. I reinstalled Windows 10 and set it up, as the W10 it had was WAY out of date, and everything was fine.

I then put it back on the shelf. It's got that Intel Atom x5-Z8350 CPU, 64GB of eMMC storage and 4GB RAM. It's sooooooooo slow. Maybe it'd be a bit faster with a lite Linux distro on it, but I think WiFi might be a problem, as even with Windows it has to have this weird, extra, non driver script installed for the WiFi's driver to even start. All of the Z8350 based units do, or at least the models from this company anyway.

[dragonpoo]

Heh, I think I remember your story about the W8 Pro. I have some old atom laptops (HP Streams) with 2GB RAM, 32GB storage, and they're terribly slow. Might be better with a lite Linux, as you described.

As I said, I reached out to Barry about it, but suspect it's past warranty so I don't expect much. It could be a power thing that just needs to sit. Meanwhile, I'm eyeing my other dual NIC systems to see which might be a suitable candidate for OPNsense. I like the S1's display too much to dedicate it to that. Hmm, maybe that AD03...

[Gabe]

I'll be honest, when I first got my AD03 I was a bit disappointed to discover that it didn't support NVMe. After thinking about it I realized that, in reality, there was practically no activity I could use an N95 based system for in which the speed advantage of NVMe could be utilized, save for frequently transferring large files back and forth to/from an external NVMe drive, which I don't do.

Since then, my AD03 has become my gaming machine. Not recent, graphics intensive games mind you, but older games, and through Steam. I had bought them all years ago and have the physical media, but those versions don't work on newer systems, so it was Steam to the rescue. And they all work great!