My work is keeping me in shape of late

I work for a hardware vendor testing the hardware mostly in Windows environments on a variety of machines,usually HP's, Dell's and Lenovo's but also clone machines mostly built from Asus, Gigabyte and Intel motherboards. I work in software quality assurance but what I do is closer to qualifying hardware.  

Since I test software on new hardware, I'd say for every product we've made, I've found 1-2 hardware bugs that had not been seen by those who qualified it before me. In general my team will probably find 4-5 hardware bugs that were missed by ASIC and hardware. Not because they are incompetent, or not thorough enough but because testing in real environments may bring up problems that don't appear in simulations. As well the products are tried out in far more systems and LCD's when they hit my department.

Lately I've been helping the hardware quality assurance team do compatibility instead of focusing on testing interfaces. I volunteered to do it.  I like the variety it provides, where I can spend less time on software and more time on hardware, It's helpful too because I can help my team with configuration issues. I liken it to trail-blazing. I tend to discover new hardware and then pass the knowledge to others.

So in the past 2 weeks I've probably tested close to  30 different OEM systems to ensure they worked properly with our product, and also to find what the 'sweet slots' for each individual machine are. They were all HP and Dells because currently the Lenovo BIOS does not work with our product and until they work with us to find a solution, my testing is limited to the other 2 large vendors. 

The systems I've tried out includes the following HP's: xw4400, xw4550, xw4600, xw6400, xw6600, xw8400, xw8600, xw9300, xw9400, z400, z600, z800, & ML110-G5. The dells include:  The Precision 490, 690, T1500, T3400, T3500, T5400, T5500, T7400, T7500, Optiplex 960, Optiplex 980 & the Dimension 9200c.  The sad part is, I now know how many PCIe slots each has, what they are both mechanically and electrically, and which slots work best with our products. Now I have to take all this data, and make a document that will be used in the future by our tech support and sales department

My testing of all those systems also includes lugging those beasts back to my workbench.  The biggest of them all, the T7400/7500/690 from Dell, weighing in at 55lbs, I stick to lifting, and putting on a cart. Pretty much all others which probably vary between 20lbs-45lbs I will carry around the department, from the shelf where they sit in HQA or from one of the people in my team with the system. 

Now I'm about 105lbs these days, so I've been spending half of my time telling the guys I work with that I can lift and carry these machines myself. It's sweet that they all want to help, but with my osteoporosis, I'm supposed to do weight bearing exercises, this works great. In one day I might move 4 systems, for about 5 minutes each. It's perfect for me.