![occ] First hardware tests --- agk's diary 7 July 2025 @ 03:05 UTC --- HP 200LX (1994) with HP Memo editor (1993) in garage after dinner and bedtimes --- My fingers miss vi's navigation commands, but I decided to use the editor this palmtop shipped with instead of the calvin vi I installed. Today I tried to boot my flash drives with three computers. No troubleshooting or serious investigat- ion, just boot, let my kid play, shut down. It was a solid reminder. Real hardware is where romanticism about salvage and repurposability goes to die. Computers of yesteryear, like this year's computers, cut corners and bolted on extensions. Even without wifi, there's still sound and display to be weird. The Asus EeeBox EB1030 worked the best. It has a 1.86Ghz Atom D2550 CPU and 4GB RAM. I stuck in the usb-dos word processor flash drive, a HDMI monitor, and Model M keyboard, and pressed the power button. It booted, but no sound. Not from computer, HDMI monitor speakers, nor headphone jack. BabyType and Dynamo International Draughts worked fine in SvarDOS, just no sound. Same with FreeDOS- based FUZOMA. Daughter played Word Rescue, Vocabu- monkey, and (I think) Help The Frog with no sound. School Mom Plus threw an error I didn't catch and displayed a black screen. My kid asked what to do. Turning it off and back on with the power button got back to the familiar KIDSMENU. FuguIta also booted. The ZOTAC ZBOX CI320 Nano Mini PC expected to boot from the network. It wouldn't boot from USB til I changed BIOS settings. It sports a Celeron N2930 1.83 GHz CPU and 4GB RAM. Both DOS USBs booted. Sound played tinnily from the box, not the monitor's speakers. I didn't try the headphone jack. There was serious screen flicker. BabyType, Help the Frog, and SkyGlobe worked. Nothing we tried didn't work. FuguIta booted with the same screen flicker, but fixed the flicker during the boot sequence. The Annke DN41R DVR (digital video recorder) booted into the security camera viewing system in its storage chip. I couldn't get to a BIOS, or even get it to respond to a USB keyboard in any way. It's only 7 years old. It might not even be x86. I can't see the CPU through the massive heatsink or find any info online about its BIOS or UEFI, CPU, or RAM. Next I'll test more machines, and test/troubleshoot the EeeBox and ZBOX more thoroughly. Probably poke around on the VOGONS forum, too. If anyone has useful insight any of these machines, my email's agk@sdf.org (: