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Crusoe Update: Stability, at last(?) and Benchmarks

06 Sep 2021 - faintshadows

I couldn’t help myself.

I kept thinking, there HAD to be a reason why it was like this. There MUST be something I can do to fix this. How come it can run memtest86 for over 24 hours rock solid but I can barely get an OS to run for 3.

Enter, The Network Card

The only thing I haven’t changed or looked at really. And to my sheer and utter surprise, when I disable it in the BIOS and use a PCMCIA ethernet adapter?

No* Crashes!!!

*It crashed once but I was on Windows, so I could look at the BSOD code, NTFS_FILE_SYSTEM. Hard drive issue, and running HDAT2 on the IBM drive I have showed that there have been 4 instances of a reallocated sector, of course. So I’ll be replacing that drive and this time CHECKING THE REPLACEMENT DRIVE before I commit to using it :)

Good thing I checked my spare drives, all three of them have bad sectors! The S.M.A.R.T. fails on all of them, how sad! Looks like some unlucky laptop is going to get its drive yanked.

A Toshiba 15GB drive has been selected and tested to have no bad sectors or any errors in S.M.A.R.T. Not ideal, since I intend to dual boot Windows AND Linux… For now, I will just run WinXP, I can buy a SD to IDE adapter sometime and dual boot then.

Something about this laptop is just, odd. Installing XP was fine except it locked up two times, once during the drive format, and while the OOBE was running. I’ve never had it freeze during a format, but last time I installed XP it also froze up at the OOBE. After that though, it’s been fine.

I’ve run benchmarks, too! Passmark Performance Test and PCMark04 were run, though Passmark would never give me a solid result because the Crusoe does not have SSE instructions, just MMX. I also ran the CPU-Z Vintage Edition benchmarks. Also GeekBench 2 and PCMark2002

3DMark2001 failed to run, as even the lowest possible settings still caused me to run out of VRAM on the mobile Radeon chip, of which is only has 8MB. 3DMark2000 runs poorly but it at least runs, though it’s using 1024x768, and I think 800x600 would be more up to speed for a 1024x600 panel and this amount of video memory. Nevertheless I’ll be noting the score for 1024x768. 3DMark99 came next, but it claimed to require DirectX 6.1 or later, even though I had 9.0c installed, so all that I’m gonna get is 3DMark2000.

It’s… not good! At least that’s what I’m told, and I have reason to believe it too. Actually being able to use this thing and not constantly be worrying about it crashing on me, it’s quite slow!

I was going to install Linux again on here, but the writing of this post has dragged on long enough (it’s the 6th of September and I started writing the 22nd of August), I’m calling it here, I ran all the benchmarks I could think of. Whenever I install Linux again will get its own post.

  1. https://browser.geekbench.com/geekbench2/2726102 ↩