It’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times…

I hate arguing with women. When guys fight, they fight hard, and they don’t always fight fair, but when the fight’s over, it’s pretty much over. You settle it. Maybe you seethe for a little bit. But eventually, assuming you both still can walk, you can go to hockey games together almost like it never happened.
I’ve found myself in an argument. It’s not like an argument with a guy. Every time I think it’s over, it flares back up. It’s like fighting the hydra. (I don’t know if this is characteristic of arguments with women in general; I generally don’t seek out that experience.)

I found one solution though: Don’t open my inbox.

That worked for me once. After 8 months, she finally quit e-mailing me.

Found on a mailing list. I’m assuming this guy mistyped this:

“I need hell with my installation.”

Some smart aleck responded before I did. “Usually you get that with installation whether you want it or not. Now someone’s demanding it. Newbies, these days.”

I was going to say that if you ran Windows, you’d get that free of charge. (That’s the only thing Microsoft gives you for free!)

A cool phone call. My phone rings at work. Outside call. Don’t tell me she somehow got my number at work… I pick up. “This is Dave.”

“Dave, it’s Todd.”

Ah, my boss. Good thing I picked up, eh?

“You busy?”

When it’s your boss, there is absolutely no right answer to that question. One of my classmates in college told me something worth remembering, though: The truth’s always a lot easier to remember than a lie.

“We can’t come to the phone right now. Please leave a message at the beep.”

Nope. Too late for that.

“Not really,” I say, hoping I won’t regret it. Either he’s gathering data for my personal review, or he’s about to ask me to install Mac OS X on a Blue Dalmation iMac with 32 megs of RAM (speaking of wanting hell with installation…)

Actually he asks me for something pretty cool. He asks if I was up to learning some firewalling software. (No, I won’t tell you which one. And no, I won’t tell you who I work for. That’s like saying, “Hey, l337 h4xx0r5! You can’t get me!)

But I will tell you the IP address. It’s 127.0.0.1. If you can crack that address, you deserve whatever you can get. (No comments from the Peanut Gallery.)

So I hit the books. Thanks to this duty, I get another Linux box. I’ve got a Power Mac running Debian already, which runs scripts that are impossible on NT. It monitors the LAN and reformats some reports and e-mails them to my boss and co-workers at 6 every morning. But the management software runs under NT 4, Red Hat Linux, or Solaris. None of that’ll run on a PowerPC-based machine. So I lay claim to an old system that I happen to know has an Asus motherboard in it, along with 72 megs of RAM. I’ll have fun tweaking that system out. An Asus mobo, a Pentium-class CPU, and a Tulip network card. That’s not the makings of a rockin’ good weekend, but it’ll make for a reliable light-use workstation.

While the management software runs under Red Hat, some of the infrastructure is BSD-based. So I get to learn some BSD while I’m at it. As long as BSD is sane about /proc and /var/log, I’ll be in good shape. But I heard LSD was invented at Berkeley, so I may have a little learning to do… Maybe listening to some Beatles records while administering those systems would help.

I’m fried.

I spent the day trying to make an old PC get on the network, and I failed valiently. The machine connects to the network just fine in DOS. Load NT4 or 2000 though, and it shuts up fast. I didn’t try Linux, though I was threatening. I tried another 3Com 3c905. Nothing. I tried it in every possible PCI slot. Nothing. I swapped in an Intel EEPro/100. Nothing. I found an old ISA 3Com 3c509 card in a rehabbed Gateway2K box. Nope. All it did was sing to me. “I have no need for friendship, friendship causes pain. It’s laughter and loving I disdain. I am a rock. I am an island.”
Actually it didn’t even do that. It just stared back at me defiantly. Even when I told it I’d throw it in the pond. That just made me madder.

Stupid Intel motherboards. Too bad when you order a brand-name PC you can’t tell them you want an Asus or a Gigabyte. I swear by Asus. Lately I’ve been swearing at Intel. Wait, who am I kidding? I’ve always trusted Intel as much as I trust Microsoft. Which is about the same as I’d trust Slick Willie Clinton with my 17-year-old daughter, if I had a 17-year-old daughter.

And the system’s not even a month out of warranty either.

I’m frustrated because I’m the third guy to take a stab at this, and I’m the guy they turn to to take the impossible situation and manage to work it out. This one beat me, and I can’t stand losing.

Good thing I get a long weekend. I’m gonna go hang out with some of my Bible-thumpin’ buddies.

Katelyn update. Katelyn didn’t have surgery today. She’s in good enough shape to not need immediate surgery, but not in good enough shape to go home. They’re going to give her as much time as they can to build up strength, then it looks like they’ll go back in, unless something really changes quickly and she’s able to go home for a month.

Friday hodgepodge.

Now are we going to take viruses seriously? Top-secret Ukranian documents leaked out to the Ukranian press, courtesy of SirCam, including the president’s movements during the upcoming independence celebration. An assassin’s delight, to be sure.
Lessons learned:

1. Macro viruses can do damage without trashing your computer. Sometimes they can do more damage if they don’t trash your computer.
2. Don’t count on anti-virus software to save you. SirCam hides out in places McAfee Anti-Virus doesn’t look, and Norton Anti-Virus is reportedly not 100% effective against it either, especially if a document was already infected with another virus.

What can save you? Download your software from reputable sources only, and don’t open strange attachments. I used to say it’s much better to miss the joke than to wipe out your computer. Now we can amend that. It’s much better to miss the joke than to wipe out your computer or get the president of the Ukraine killed.

Motherboards. The Good Dr. Crider e-mailed me (among others) earlier this week asking for motherboard advice. He wanted respectable power for under $200. Interestingly, just the day before I went looking at mwave.com for motherboards for no particular reason. I spied the ultra-basic Gigabyte GA-7IXe4 motherboard (AMD 750-based) for 66 bucks. It won’t win any glamour contests, but it’s a fine meat-and-potato board at a fabulous price, and it’s not made in China so you’re not supporting an immoral government with your purchase either. You can pair that up with a $36 Duron-750 and a $10 fan and have a great start on a fantabulous bang-for-the-buck system. Of course, with a budget of $200, it’s possible to step up to a Duron-950 and still have a little left over.

Speaking of bang for the buck, here’s a review of the first commercially available SiS 735-based board. Put simply, right now it’s the fastest DDR motherboard you can buy. Pretty impressive, especially considering it’s coming from budget-minded ECS. I can’t wait to see what Asus or Abit will be able to do with it. But I know I’ll be waiting. ECS has manufacturing facilities in China.

Why the big deal about China? I’m not exactly in favor of slave labor–we freed our slaves about 135 years ago and we should be ashamed it took us that long. But slave labor exists in China today. I’m tired of China provoking the United States every chance it gets. I’m tired of China persecuting people who believe in Christianity and/or democracy. Need more reasons? OK. Fair warning: Some of the atrocities on this site will make you sick.

Completely boycotting China when buying computer products is tough. Really tough. For example, Intel’s Craig Barrett publicly advocates Chinese manufacturing. Does that mean Intel’s next fab will sit on Chinese soil? Fortunately, a Web search with a manufacturer’s name, plus the words “manufacturing” and “China” will almost always tell you conclusively if a company produces any of its stuff in China. If you want American-made stuff, good luck. Supermicro and AMI make motherboards in the States, but neither has a very diverse product line.

Need a dictionary? OK. Visit www.wordweb.co.uk.

Building a Win95 box

Building a Windows 95 box? Why? You nuts?
Why not? You’ve got old hardware, you’ve got a ton of licenses to run an obsolete operating system… It’s a good match. Remember, a Pentium-120 was a titan of a PC in 1995. You couldn’t get anything faster. Running Windows 95 on a Pentium-120 with 24 MB RAM, 1.2 GB HD, and 8X CD-ROM in 1995 seemed like running Windows 2000 on a decked-out 1.4 GHz Athlon today. Maybe it seemed even more extreme than that; I remember selling a good number of 486DX2/66s and DX4/100s in the summer of 1995. They were low-end, yes, but they were at that $1,000 sweet spot. You’d pick up a DX2/66 for $800 and a 14″ monitor for $200, and sometimes as a weekend special we’d bundle the two together with a printer for $1,099 or something.

We had a Pentium-120 to rebuild at work, and we had its Win95 license, so it made sense to just rebuild it with the stuff it had. I know Jerry Pournelle had a really hard time building a Win95 box a few months back. I didn’t have much trouble at all, so I might as well document the pitfalls.

First of all, I used vintage hardware. That helps. Win95 was designed for 1995-era hardware. This PC probably dates from 1996 or so; it has the strange pairing of an Intel 430HX chipset and a Pentium-120. The 120 was more frequently bundled with the earlier 430FX chipset; by the time of the HX, the 133 was considered low-end, the 200 high-end, and the 166 was mainstream. The video card was a plain old Cirrus Logic-based PCI card; no issues there. AGP sometimes threw Win95 for a loop. None of that here. While DMA drivers certainly improved the 430HX, they weren’t necessary for stable performance. In other words, a 430HX-based board with a Cirrus video card works acceptably straight out of the box, with no additional drivers.

Other hardware: A Mitsumi 8X CD-ROM. I don’t remember exactly when 8X came out, but for the most part an IDE CD-ROM is an IDE CD-ROM, from a driver standpoint. A Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16. That was a very common, very well-supported sound card. A DEC 450 network card. Those DEC cards can be a real pain to get working sometimes, but Win95 surprised me and detected it straight up.

But Setup wouldn’t run initially. It took some figuring, but I solved that problem. My colleague had booted with a Win98 boot disk I made over a year ago. He did an FDISK and format to wipe the drive, but he formatted the drive FAT32. The original Win95 didn’t know about FAT32, so Setup was throwing a hissy fit when it saw it. I did another FDISK and format, switched to plain old FAT16, and Setup installed very happily.

Once I got Setup to run, it installed, and quickly at that. And with absolutely no issues. Remember, Win95’s footprint was only about 35 megs. It doesn’t take long for an 8X drive to deliver 35 megs. And the system booted quickly. I didn’t sit down and time it, but I’m used to calling a minute a reasonably fast boot time, and this thing didn’t seem slow to me at all. A little optimization would help, of course. A little logo=0 in c:msdos.sys goes a long way.

Running Win95 on newer hardware is possible, but remember, it’s been nearly four years since it was the mainstream OS. And you can have a lot of headaches trying to do it. Windows 3.1 is in the same boat–it’s downright hard to find device drivers for modern video cards. Then again, I can think of circumstances under which I’d want to run Win95. I can’t think of any compelling reason whatsoever to run Win3.1 at this point in time. (And there wasn’t any compelling reason to run it in 1994 either.)

If I had to build up a Win95 box today and could have whatever components I wanted, I’d probably look for an Asus P55T2P4, easily the best Socket 7 motherboard ever manufactured. (In 1997 when I was in the market, I opted for an Abit IT5H instead and I’m still kicking myself.) That board is most naturally paired with a Pentium-MMX/233, but with unsupported–but widely-documented online–voltage settings, you can run more recent K6-2 CPUs on it. The P55T2P4 allows an FSB of up to 83 MHz, but for stability’s sake, I’d keep it at 66 MHz, or possibly 68 MHz if the board supports it (I don’t remember anymore). You can run a K6-2/400 with a 6x multiplier at either of those settings and be very close to its rated speed. Then I’d use an ATI Xpert 98 video card. Yes, it’s a bit old, but it’s probably the best all-around PCI card that’s still reasonably easy to find. Win95 won’t recognize it without manufacturer-supplied drivers, of course, but that’s not so bad. This combination would give you surprisingly good performance, stability, and minimal difficulty of installation.

Anyway, that adventure reminded me that a Pentium-120 can still be a viable computer. Vintage software like Win95 runs well on it. Office 95 has more features than most of us use, and it’s faster and more stable than the recent incarnations. It also has fewer strings attached. IE 5.01, although recent, would run decently on a P120, as long as you left out Active Desktop. Acrobat Reader 3.0 will still read the majority of PDF files on the Web, and it’s smaller and faster-loading than more recent versions. Do a Web search; you can still find it online.

Don’t get carried away with what you install, and a P120 can certainly surprise you.

SiS rises from the ashes, and tries to bring AMD and DDR with it

Well, I’m back from Bible study (I was teaching on one of those things that can change your life, so I put all kinds of pressure on myself, and I have no idea whether I delivered), but we won’t talk about that right now. No surprises on the Daynotes circuit today; the Weblogs circuit is mostly talking about Kaycee still. I think I’m done with that. I haven’t had time (or will) to go do the cable re-routing necessary to get my new Duron-700 working perfectly.
So, what to talk about…?

How about DDR chipsets?

VIA makes more DDR chipsets than anyone else, and they’ve surprised everyone during the past 18 months, producing chipsets that were much better than anyone expected while Intel produced chipset after chipset that was, for the most part, far worse than anyone’s come to expect of them. Current Intel chipsets work, but they’ve yet to deliver a truly worthy successor to the classic BX chipset. But so far, VIA’s DDR chipsets so far have been disappointing, which makes me wonder if inability to follow up is contagious.

AMD makes a pretty good DDR chipset–at least it gives better performance than PC133 SDRAM, unlike ALi’s DDR chipset and VIA’s DDR chipsets most of the time, and, to be fair, unlike Rambus chipsets–but finding a motherboard based on it can be difficult. AMD’s not very interested in producing the 760, and it shows.

So what’s the DDR chipset to get for AMD CPUs?

Right now, it’s the AMD 760. But very soon, it looks like it’ll be the SiS 735.

Yes, I know, it sounds like I’ve been smoking crack. SiS has a well-deserved reputation for making underachieving chipsets. Just ask Steve DeLassus what he thinks of his SiS 530 integrated video. He’ll throw an Okidata 180 printer at you (ouch) and then tell you it’s almost as bad as the service you get from GPS Computer Services, that’s what.

And the SiS 735 probably isn’t ready for release just yet, as the problems discussed in this review seem to indicate–though whether the problem is with the chipset, the prototype board, or the BIOS, who knows. But the benchmarks indicate the SiS 735 is about 5 percent faster than the AMD 760-based FIC AD11 while costing much less.

Yes, the AD11 isn’t the best-performing 760 board out there, but then again, prototypes aren’t known for stellar performance either. So this sounds promising. Based on these results, it would seem that an Asus or an Abit could produce a very nice-performing board with the SiS735. And as for SiS’s ability to produce a good chipset? Well, these are strange times. Two years ago, AMD bet the company on the Athlon. They had a new, expensive fab they couldn’t afford, dwindling market share and reputation, and a history of botching product releases. If they did everything right and Intel did everything wrong, they had a chance of surviving. Well, AMD executed while Intel fumbled and fumbled. And VIA executed. Intel got caught off guard, and while they’re still king of the hill, they’re embarrassed.

And there was a time, about five or six years ago, when SiS chipsets were actually very sought after. SiS was the first company to produce a chipset that truly brought out the best in Cyrix CPUs, and people who were concerned with raw applications performance sought them out, because the SiS/Cyrix combination outperformed anything Intel was making at the time.

Can SiS rise again? Maybe. It looks like we’re about to find out.

04/26/2001

Ugh. I’m dead tired. Why does it seem like I’m busier now than I was when I was dating or when I was writing a book? It doesn’t make any sense. I wanted to talk about something other than computers today, but I’m beat as I write this (10 pm Wednesday night), so I’m taking the lazy route.

Umm, I do have this. Most of the Daynoters have already mentioned it. I don’t know all the details of Kaycee’s story, but if I’ve got the details right, she’s come back from being clinically dead twice, and she beat cancer last year. Now her liver is failing and there’s nothing the doctors can do.

We said a prayer for her in church last night. I can’t claim to know God’s plan for her (I’m clueless about God’s plan for me, let alone for anyone else), but obviously He wanted to keep her around a while longer for some reason. If He’s through with her here, or nearly so, nothing can stop it. But if He’s not…

Don’t write off Kaycee just yet.

We’d all do well to follow her lead. Look what Kaycee’s doing now. She’s got at least a little time left. She’s making the very most of it. We’d all do well to appreciate and make the most of what we have.

Hmm. On to much less important stuff.

Asus reports they’re selling more P4 motherboards now. Don’t fall into that trap. Don’t buy one. Planned obsolescence. Intel’s changing the socket again later this year, so you’ll hit a dead-end on upgradability. Besides, the P4’s just a lousy performer. Give Intel a year to sort the thing out, and don’t fund them in the meantime. Intel needs to learn that they can’t just ship lousy product and people will buy it just because it says Intel on it.

Meanwhile, reader David Huff sent me this:  An AMD Duron-750 for 38 lousy bucks. Astounding. The retail box version with a fan and 3-year-warranty is $50. T he same place has an FIC AZ11 motherboard for $65, so you can be in a Duron-750 for $120 or so considering CPU fan and shipping costs. (I checked; shipping is $10.50.) Red Hill doesn’t like the AZ11’s BIOS, but at that price, whaddya want? Red Hill also doesn’t like the lack of ISA slots, but unless you have a nice ISA modem, that probably won’t bother you. (Put your ISA modem in another computer, get Freesco, network ’em together, and share your net connection.)

AMD will cut prices Monday or Tuesday, but I can’t imagine they’ll have anything in the $38 price range. I’m about 98% ready to bite on this one.

04/06/2001

Mailbag:

File Name;Resume; CS; Ad Blocking; 602 Suite; Scary; Plextor

Three days down… The server was down while administrators removed dead sites, in hopes of increasing performance. Performance does seem better, but time will tell… Let’s get on to some serious business.

More memory alphabet soup. JHR wrote in with a good question that I realized I haven’t answered: Can you use your existing plain, cheap old SDRAM on a new DDR-capable motherboard?

The answer, unfortunately, is usually no. DDR comes on 184-pin modules. SDRAM usually comes on 168-pin modules. A few companies, like Fujitsu and Apacer, have talked about putting SDRAM on 184-pin modules. It’s been mostly talk. The price difference between DDR and SDRAM isn’t enough to justify it.

There are a few boards, like the Asus A7A266 (reviewed at http://www.dansdata.com/a7a266.htm ), with both types of sockets for both types of memory. But the A7A266 isn’t the best performer out there, so you pay the price of convenience by buying speed instead. It’s a mediocre DDR performer and a terrible SDRAM performer.

It’s a shame to throw away memory, but this isn’t the first time. As recently as 1997, 72-pin EDO memory cost less than SDRAM. The 72-pin SIMM replaced the 30-pin SIMM as the type of memory to have in 1994, though 30-pin-capable boards remained available for upgraders through 1996. Before 30-pin SIMMs, there were all sorts of weird memory technologies, like 30-pin SIPPs, and different types of individual chips, which generally were a huge pain.

Usually when memory was replaced, adapters came out. There were SIMMs with sockets to plug old chips into. There were adapters to plug a SIPP into a SIMM socket. There were riser cards to allow you to plug 30-pin SIMMs into 72-pin slots. The problem was, they tended to hurt speed and stability, and in many cases they were nearly as expensive as new memory.

History’s repeating itself. There are adapters to let you plug DIMMs into RIMM sockets, and 168-to-184 sockets, though they’re expensive and hurt speed and stability, especially in the case of those RIMM adapters. There’s no point in using them.

I really should have been shouting louder that PC133’s time in the sun is over. The problem is, nobody knows for sure what will replace it. There’s DDR and Rambus, both of which perform really well in certain benchmarks, neither of which seem to make much difference in the real world yet. DDR’s pricing is very close to PC133, assuming you’re buying Crucial. Rambus is still priced way too high. I suspect DDR will win, but there’s no way to know.

It’s a shame to throw out memory, but there usually isn’t much we can do about it. If it makes you feel any better, PCs using SDRAM should be useful for a number of years. I’ve still got two systems with 72-pin SIMMs in them doing useful work for me. One’s a Compaq 486 I bought back in 1994 that just finished a tour of duty as a DSL router; its next incarnation will be as a file/print server if I can find an ISA SCSI card to put in it. I’ll probably also have it automate some parts of my network, courtesy of cron. The other one is a Pentium-120, which has done time as a file server and also as a testbed.

Anything new enough to have SDRAM is new enough to make a very useful Linux box, and it can also make a good Windows box, particularly if you scale it back to just do a handful of things very well. If I ever get around to retiring my K6-2/350, my sister would love to have it because it’d make a great word processing/web browsing/e-mail box–better than the Cyrix 233 she’s using right now, though she doesn’t complain much about that computer. That computer was built out of a bunch of stuff Tom Gatermann and I pulled out of our spare parts bins. And if I did make that switch for her, I know who’d get that Cyrix 233, and that person won’t be complaining either.

The key to responsible upgrading, I think, is to buy stuff that you’ll be able to recycle whenever possible. A good SCSI card and hard drive, though expensive, will be good enough to be worth recycling when you make your next motherboard upgrade. The same goes for a good monitor, and unless you’re a 3D gaming freak, the same goes for a good video card as well. My STB Velocity 128 video card, even though it has an ancient nVidia Riva128 chipset in it, is still fast for the games I play and frankly, it’s overkill for business use. I’ve had that card for three and a half years. I expect I’ll still be using it in three years. Heck, my Diamond Stealth 3D card is still useful. It won’t do justice for my 19-inch display, but it’s fast enough for routine work and it’ll drive a 17-inch monitor at 1024×768 at refresh rates and color depths that won’t embarrass you. And that card’s five years old. It cost me $119 at a time when low-end cards cost $59, and it’s still better for most things than the $40 cards of today. The $25 cards of today will give you higher color depth and sometimes better refresh rates, but they’re not as fast. So that card saved me money. My STB Velocity 128 and my Diamond Viper 770 haven’t been recycled yet, but I’ll get at least three more years’ use out of both of those, even if I turn into a flight simulator fiend. The 770 would be decent for flight sims, and both of them are outstanding for what I do now.

Everyone I know recycles good keyboards and mice, when they think to buy them.

You’ll generally replace motherboards and CPUs on every upgrade cycle. Depending on how often you upgrade, you can expect to replace memory every other cycle.

A lot of people are recommending you buy a motherboard capable of either type of memory, then buy cheap PC133 and upgrade later. But the performance difference isn’t great enough to justify that. If you think you’re going to want DDR, I recommend you just bite the bullet and get DDR. Crucial’s now selling 128 MB PC2100 DDR modules for under $65, so 256 MB of PC2100 costs slightly more than a mid-range video card.

Mailbag:

File Name;Resume; CS; Ad Blocking; 602 Suite; Scary; Plextor

03/30/2001

A big letdown. A lot of people (myself included) miss the days when you could build an SMP box on the cheap by getting an Abit BP6 motherboard and a pair of low-end Celerons. I read on Ace’s Hardware this week that Via’s C3 processor is SMP-capable. The C3 is a 733 MHz chip, derived from the Centaur WinChip 3 design, that plugs into Socket 370 and costs $54 in quantities of 1,000. Since a lot of places sell CPUs at or slightly below that cost and make their money on shipping, you can expect to buy it for under $60. The drawback with the C3 is weak floating point performance. For applications use that doesn’t make much difference, so for people like me who just want to multitask a bunch of productivity apps wicked fast, it would be nice.

But I was skeptical. Earlier Cyrix and Centaur CPUs (VIA now owns both design houses) didn’t support Intel’s APIC protocol for SMP due to patent problems. So Cyrix and AMD invented their own protocol, called OpenPIC, and prototype SMP chipsets existed but were never commercially released, probably due to lack of demand. AMD attempted to solve this problem by licensing the Alpha processor bus (and therefore its SMP architecture) for the Athlon/Duron and getting into the chipset business.

It was a Herculean labor for VIA to get the rights to use Intel’s P6 bus. I’d be shocked if they managed to wrestle SMP out of Intel as well. But if these rumors were true, it would have ushered in a whole new era of inexpensive SMP, albeit with a slightly limited audience due to the C3’s poor (but better than the AMD K6-2) gaming performance.

But VIA’s site made no mention of SMP. None of the reviews of the C3 or its predecessors mentioned SMP. Finally, I found confirmation of the truth on www.viahardware.com . The C3, in spite of photos of dual configurations originating at Cebit, doesn’t support APIC and therefore won’t do SMP. Bummer.

Want another letdown? OK. The C3 doesn’t do out-of-order execution like every other modern CPU (including even the Cyrix 6×86) does. That’s part of the reason why the C3 struggles to keep up with an equivalently-clocked Celeron, even if the Celeron is running on a 66 MHz FSB while the C3 runs on a 133 MHz FSB. For OOO, you’ll have to wait for the next revision of the processor, due later this year.

The lone drawing point, besides price, for the C3 is its cool operation and low power consumption. It can operate with just a heatsink, no fan. You could team it up with a fanless 135W power supply, a 4400 RPM hard drive (or a very quiet 5400 rpm drive), and an integrated motherboard to have a silent PC. You can’t do that with anything from AMD or Intel. So for quiet PCs, the C3 has an audience.

Hey, someone could take that chip, put it on a microATX board, and put it in a tiny squarish Lucite case with the CD-ROM drive up top, so you put the CDs in like toast in a toaster, and sell the computer on size, quietness, and looks alone. Oh, wait a minute. Someone already tried something like that.

You’ll also notice VIA is scrapping the Cyrix brand name, which is probably a good move. Cyrix chips weren’t bad; they weren’t ideal for 3D gaming but for everything else they were a fine chip. Cheap and fast. Unfortunately they were usually paired up with very cheap and very low-quality hardware (particularly cheap power supplies) and when the systems had problems, everyone blamed Cyrix. But my friends and I, pairing Cyrix CPUs up with Abit, Asus, and AOpen motherboards and Diamond video cards and Creative or Ensoniq sound cards, never had any problems whatsoever with the CPUs.

Discussion groups. I’ve often longed for the days of the old-style BBS. I never ran a BBS myself–in the golden age of BBSing, I was just a teenager, and a good BBS required a US Robotics dual standard modem, a 386, and a gigabyte hard drive, all of which could easily set you back $2,000.

The Internet has so many advantages to those BBSs. When you dialed in, it was very easy to spend an hour online. In the meantime, no one else could use the BBS. With 24 hours in a day, even with an average call length of 15 minutes, fewer than 100 people would get in, and that makes it hard to facilitate meaningful discussion. It happened, but unless the BBS was part of a network, the communities stayed small. The Internet doesn’t have those disadvantages. The line’s never busy (if you’ve got a decent ISP at least), so the community can be much larger.

The discussion groups facility on this site have always been very under-utilized. I think a grand total of four people have posted messages here. That’s largely my fault; I never configured the discussion area, nor did I ever get rid of that stupid skull and replace it with something intuitive (like, say, the word “Discuss…”). I started looking into configuring it, and lo and behold, it’s possible to create a nice discussion board with Manilla. The interface is a little different from UBBS, which seems to be what most of the popular discussion groups of today use, but it’s not bad.

Like most other online bulletin boards, you have to be a member to log in and post. There is no charge to be a member. Let me emphasize that. There is no charge to be a member! Understood? Excellent. There’s also no validation process, none of that other stuff. Manilla does maintain a database of members that I can look at. I’ve looked at it once. I just don’t have time to go snooping around there. I’m too busy to invade your privacy.

Non-members can read messages. Messages posted are indexed by this site’s search engine. It’s really nice.

To become a member, click Join Now to the left. It will ask for an e-mail address. That address is used for two things. If you forget your password, your password hint is mailed to that address. And optionally, you can get your daily (or more, if this board gets popular) dose of the Silicon Underground e-mailed to you. Probably most people will turn that option off. If you’re concerned about spam, or concerned about privacy, feed it a bogus e-mail address. Tell my site you’re billg@microsoft.com or something. I really don’t care. Honest. (A lot of Web robots seem to have problems navigating Manilla sites, so spam harvesters may find this site more trouble than it’s worth, but I can’t make any guarantees.) And if you want to use a handle, that’s fine too.

Discussion groups get their own calendar. When you click on March 29, 2001 in the calendar, you get that day’s messages, plus the rest from the previous week. If you just want to see just that day’s topics instead, click the link that says Chronological View, and it’ll switch. Sorry, I don’t know how to make that a preference that gets saved for you.

The advantages of a discussion group are many. First, this becomes more of a community and less something that’s all about me. When you want to have your say, you can just log in and respond and it’s instantly there. When you e-mail me, I won’t see it until I get home, and then I may or may not post it, depending on a number of factors. When you post, if someone else sees it first, they can respond. So if you’re having a problem and need a quick response, someone else may see it and respond before I get to it.

You’re still free to e-mail me of course, but I had this resource here and it’s really a shame I haven’t been using it. I’ll continue to respond to mail and have it posted, for those who prefer a more moderated discussion (a small few, if page reads are any indication).

You can get to the discussion groups at least two ways. You can click on the Discussion Groups link to the left. Or you can click the Discuss link at the bottom of a message.

Here’s hoping this will become a valuable resource.

03/19/2001

Another useful hidden utility. If you’ve never used Sysmon.exe, remember it. With Windows 98 and newer, you can use it to track CPU usage, memory usage, and disk throughput (usunted information, I always searched the Web. When I wanted useful information, I hit DejaNews. Sure, there was a lot of junk out there, but 50% of it was good stuff, and most of that never made it onto the Web. I never did find any useful information on the Asus SP97V motherboard on the Web, because the hardware sites weren’t into it. I found out what I wanted to know about it from DejaNews. When I wanted to know how to get Windows NT Workstation machines to authenticate against an OS/2 domain, I found out how on DejaNews. When I needed information about XTs and ATs for some insane reason, I hit DejaNews.

I spent a little time in the comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware hierarchy for old time’s sake yesterday. I’m sure I’ll get a ton of spam now because I probably didn’t spam-filter all of my e-mail addresses, but that’s OK. It was pretty fun. I’ll have to do it again someday soon. It’s the closest thing I can find to an old-style BBS that still exists and has a sizable community. The scary thing is, some of the old WWIVnet message boards had a bigger community than comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware seems to have. The questions I answered were hardly difficult ones, and some of them had been sitting for a couple of days, which never would have happened on WWIVnet. And I know WWIVnet wasn’t even the biggest of the BBS networks, it just happened to have a lock on the St. Louis market in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I wonder where all those wizards went?

I ought to install a text-based newsreader on my Linux box to give myself a more authentic atmosphere though. This stuff just doesn’t look right when it’s running in a GUI. Not to me at least–back when I was dialing up BBSs, nobody ever ran Windows. At the very least, it should be running in a terminal window. Hmm. Maybe next time…

Even if the community is smaller, Usenet does have one big advantage over the old-school BBS though: No busy signals.

03/17/2001

PC133 prices. I wrote last week that memory prices were about to jump, after reading a piece in The Register. Then I read something in The Register yesterday, after the prices of 128-megabit chips fell, quoting an NEC exec as saying NEC doesn’t expect memory prices to rebound until next year.

So… Nobody knows what memory prices are going to do. It’s truly like buying gasoline right now, isn’t it?

But the point will soon be moot for a lot of people anyway. Tom’s Hardware reviewed three AMD 760-based boards this week . A look at Pricewatch confirms these boards aren’t widely available yet (I found two listings on the Biostar board, two listings on the Gigabyte, none on the Asus, and a listing on an AOpen board), and Pricewatch hasn’t set aside an AMD 760 category yet, but by searching Pricewatch for AMD 760 you can find boards. The Biostar is currently the least expensive by far, but having used Biostar boards on occasion, I definitely prefer Asus, AOpen and Gigabyte.

Prices on an AMD 760-based board range from $129 to $189 before shipping, and these are bottom-feeder vendors so you know they’ll charge you $20 to ship it if they can find any excuse to do so.

If Intel’s your game, it’s easier to find a P3 DDR board based on the VIA Apollo Pro266 chipset. Pricing is very similar to the AMD 760 solutions, and availability is wider. As for performance, the only review I’ve seen of the Gigabyte GA-6RX was disappointing, but seeing as AnandTech doesn’t care about anything but overclocking CPUs and Gigabyte couldn’t care less about overclockers, that’s not too much of a surprise. But common sense must prevail here: If I just spent $450 on new DDR-capable kit, why would I immediately set out to overclock it and potentially burn it up?

Part of the problem might well be the Apollo Pro266 chipset. Tom’s Hardware has said the best-performing DDR chipset is the AMD 760, period. And of course Intel’s not about to give AMD a license to produce P3 chipsets, and AMD wouldn’t produce a P3 chipset even if Intel begged them to do so.

DDR memory. As for DDR memory, Crucial is still selling PC1600 DDR for the same price as CAS2 PC133 SDRAM. That’s considerably higher than you’ll pay for bottom-feeder PC133, but seeing as no one should be buying that stuff anyway, that’s a good price.

The outlook for upgrades. You may easily pay $180 or more for an AMD 760-based board right now. A 1 GHz Athlon with a 266 MHz FSB will run about $220, and 128 MB of PC1600 DDR will run $55. So you can be in a DDR-based system for right around $450 before shipping, which is considerably less than I paid to get into a Pentium-75 with EDO memory back when a Pentium with EDO was the thing to have. There’s no point in doing it if you’ve got a recent system because the performance increase isn’t spectacular, but if you’re upgrading an aging PC or building a new system outright, DDR is definitely worth a look. If you’re already looking to spend a fair bit to replace a motherboard, CPU, video card, and hard drive, the extra $100 you’ll spend to get into DDR looks like it’s worth it.