Mailbag:

Chip Creep

SCSI. I picked up an Adaptec 2940UW on eBay over the weekend ("Buy it now!" is great if your timing's good and the price is fair--check completed auctions first to see what the item usually goes for), and it arrived yesterday. I decided that instead of trying to turn my 486 into an all-SCSI machine, it would make more sense to put my IDE stuff in it and make an all-SCSI machine out of my P120. But before doing that, I threw the card in another system and brought a mystery SCSI drive from work to test. I've got a stack of old, obsolescent SCSI drives there whose history I can't remember. Some were just salvaged, others were failing and pulled for that reason. I brought home one suspect from work to test here. It made a horrible sound when it powered up but DOS 6 formatted it, albeit slowly. Once I ran SpinRite on it, I understood why. Bad sectors out the wazzu! I know this drive came out of a Mac because it has an Apple logo on it. I don't know how good Mac OS is at dealing with bad sectors, but obviously something led me to scrap this drive. The drive sounded great while reading good sectors, but when it hit a bad spot, the awful noises came back.


Linkfest. If you do any Mac support, check out www.macgurus.com . They have diagrams of most Mac motherboards indicating the location of the CPU and memory, and what types of memory to use. Good resource.

Windows keyboard shortcuts. A coworker sent me this one. http://www.microsoft.com/TechNet/win98/Reskit/Part7/wrkappg.asp . Excellent.

Norton Commander replacement. Want a two-pane file manager without pirating the abandonware Norton Commander for Windows? Check out the free version of Mijenix Powerdesk, at http://www.mijenix.com/powerdesk/ . Very nice.

Chinese hacking in retaliation? I found this slightly disturbing, but the Chinese hacker in the interview didn't seem to know much about U.S. IT infrastructure. That softens the bad news. http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,42982,00.html

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Chip Creep