Author: Dave Farquhar

How eBay is ruining itself

Dave Farquhar net.culture , , , , , , , ,

A thread on one of the train forums I frequent mentioned today that the number of listings for Marx trains on eBay is down about 50% over what it was a year or so ago. Not only that, the listings are by and large the common, less interesting stuff.

Meanwhile, a debate rages on another forum I read sometimes, frequented by eBay sellers. On one side are the eBay apologists, saying they’ll just change as eBay changes. On the other side, people struggling to make a profit in the ever-changing environment are finding other venues to sell their wares and finding themselves a lot happier.The problem is that eBay is trying to create a sterile, retail experience. The big shareholders and the executives seem to think that’s what the consumer wants.

Another seller’s theory is that the people who sell brand new merchandise in huge quantities are less troublesome, causing fewer headaches for eBay and for the customers.

The eBay business books I’ve read talk a lot about people who drop-ship pool tables and other merchandise in large quantities, never touching any of it, and supposedly becoming millionaires by doing it.

But the people who put eBay on the map are the people like the ones I see every Saturday morning. They study classified ads the way a devout monk would study Scripture, looking for clues and carefully plotting out their routes. They get up before dawn and drive to their carefully chosen site. Their prey: The estate sale. They line up in the driveway hours before the sale opens, like bargain hunters the day after Thanksgiving. When the sale finally opens, shoppers come in, 10, 20, or 50 at a time, depending on the size of the house, while those who arrived later wait their turn. Any time someone leaves, those in the driveway gawk, trying to see what he or she purchased.

It doesn’t matter what item you can name, I know someone who goes out every Saturday looking for it. Some of these people are collectors, but some of them hawk their finds on eBay. They buy on Saturday and Sunday, then they spend hours the following week figuring out what exactly they have, carefully photographing and describing each item, then listing it, hoping to attract bidders.

The typical eBay addict doesn’t go there to buy a pool table, or the kind of things they sell at a suburban mall. Certainly there are people who buy those sorts of things on eBay. But those tend to be occasional shoppers. The biggest eBay addicts are the fanatics–the serious collectors who spend hours every day scouring new eBay listings, looking for items they don’t have in their collections.

And guess what? These collectors don’t buy from drop-shippers who duplicate the retail experience. The drop-shippers can’t get those kinds of collectibles. It’s the people who get up at 5 a.m. each Saturday to be first in line to prowl around in someone’s attic or basement who get that stuff.

The problem is that the people who do get that stuff have a difficult time becoming (and remaining) Powersellers. A Powerseller has to sell 100 items or $1,000 worth of inventory per month. If I wanted to sell vintage trains on eBay, there’s no way I could locate 1,200 items each year. Not in St. Louis. The $1,000 mark wouldn’t be much easier to hit.

So eBay is driving away that kind of seller. And as a result, eBay is going to lose that type of buyer as well.

I know for a fact there are plenty of collectors in Europe and elsewhere who are eager to take advantage of the low value of the dollar and buy a bunch of collectible American trains at bargain prices due to the exchange rate. Unfortunately the timing is horrible. The new eBay policies have driven away a lot of the people who sell the best items. So the foreigners with money to spend end up spending a lot less than they would like. Sure, they’ll buy the $10 items that are listed, but they’d really rather buy the $100 and $1,000 items that were listed last year but are conspicuously absent today.

Ten years ago, eBay was flying high. They weren’t the first online auction, but they were the most successful, precisely because they allowed ordinary people to sell ordinary (and extraordinary) things. I bought a number of things from online auctions in the mid 1990s, including the Lexmark 4039 laser printer I still use every day. I don’t remember now the name of the auction house where I bought it. I do know it went out of business shortly after eBay became widely known.

Lots of other companies wanted in on the action. Amazon, Yahoo, and others launched auction sites that looked and acted a lot like eBay. But they never went anywhere. The best sellers put their best stuff on eBay. The wannabes tended to just have second-rate stuff sold by second-rate sellers. Case point: I once tried to buy a lot of vintage train magazines from an Amazon auction. I won, paid my money, and waited. And waited. A week later I e-mailed the seller. No response. Finally after another week he responded, saying he’d been having computer trouble and asking if I still wanted the magazines. Well, since he offered me the refund, I took it. I spent the money on eBay instead.

Yahoo auctions are gone, closed about a year ago. If Amazon’s auctions are still open, they’re sure doing a good job of hiding them.

If another company wants to get a piece of eBay’s business, the time is right. There are lots of refugee eBay sellers looking for someplace a little cheaper, with a little more stable set of rules where they can sell. And if a large enough group of them take up shop somewhere, there are plenty of buyers more than willing to follow them there.

It may not happen this year. But I do think it’s only a matter of time.

More on Manhunt, plus revisiting Dr. Mudd

Dave Farquhar General ,

I’ve finished Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer. My impression is still favorable.

The short of it: It’s a well-told story in dramatic fashion, with good research to back it up.

For the long of it, you’ll have to read on.For one thing, the book explores a number of alternative possibilities. What if Booth had missed? Booth actually made a number of tactical mistakes, including the use of a Derringer, which meant he only had one shot. In contrast, one of his co-conspirators had six shots and still failed to kill Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State, the same night. But that’s another story.

I won’t ruin the story, but the book provides a compelling argument about how the outcome of that fateful night would have been very different if Booth’s shot had been off, or if the gun misfired, or if anything else had gone differently at Ford’s Theater.

The book also does a good job of telling what became of all the other players, major and minor, in the aftermath of Lincoln’s murder.

I wish the book had spent a little more time on the trials themselves, but since Booth is the principal character of the book and didn’t live to go on trial, I can see why only a couple of pages were devoted to it.

Having finished the book, I understand its treatment of Dr. Samuel Mudd a little bit better. I still maintain (and the book seems to agree) that although Mudd and Booth knew one another in passing, that there was no way Mudd was expecting that early morning visit from Booth, nor did Mudd know what Booth had just done. Furthermore, when Mudd did find out what Booth had done, he didn’t approve.

In that regard, Mudd was not guilty of conspiracy. He wasn’t in on this conspiracy. He was dragged in because Booth injured himself in the escape and needed medical attention. For that matter, Booth actually went several hours out of his way to see Mudd. Booth’s escape plan was to head south into Virginia just as quickly as possible, and from there, get into the Deep South, where he could find shelter in the small pockets of the Confederacy that had not yet surrendered. Booth’s ultimate goal was to throw the government of the north into disarray, giving what was left of the Confederacy a chance to reignite the war.

Booth had no use for Dr. Samuel Mudd in this plan. That is, not until he injured himself in his escape from Ford’s Theater, but that wasn’t part of Booth’s plan.

And furthermore, had Mudd been expecting Booth, wouldn’t he have had better implements on hand for making a splint? Mudd fashioned a crude splint from bits of a crate. He was hardly prepared to set a broken bone that morning when Booth came calling.

The position of the Mudd family all along has been that Booth showed up at his front door, and it was Dr. Mudd’s duty to treat this unexpected patient as best he could, the same way every doctor in earshot of Lincoln did his best to prolong Lincoln’s life, even once it was obvious to all that his wound would kill him.

But Swanson pointed out several things that make it more clear why Mudd served time in prison for helping Booth. Mudd would have been the hero of the story if he’d gone home after he found out what Booth had done, sent Booth on his way, then told the authorities that he had treated Booth’s broken leg and he was now heading south-southwest, destination Virginia. Had Mudd done that, he not only would have avoided jail time, he also would have received a reward.

But Mudd didn’t do that. He sent his cousin to give a vague secondhand account of what happened, and initially the authorities didn’t even follow up on the lead.

Once Booth’s path went cold and the authorities remembered Mudd, they questioned him, noticed he was visibly nervous and his story had inconsistencies, but worst of all, it contained false information that may have delayed Booth’s apprehension.

So Mudd did, in a sense, participate in the conspiracy. It’s just that he wasn’t involved at the beginning. Certainly Mudd committed no crime by treating Booth’s broken leg, and I think even a military tribunal would agree with me on that. His crime was giving misinformation that slowed down a criminal investigation.

Mudd escaped the death penalty by one vote. I wonder, if Booth had killed anyone else during his escape attempt, if Mudd would have been executed along with four others who had aided Booth in one way or another.

A book I\’ve been meaning to read for a very long time

Dave Farquhar General

I’ve been reading Manhunt: The 12-Day Search for Lincoln’s Killer, by James L. Swanson.

I’m not done but I like it.I’ve been fascinated with Lincoln for as long as I can remember (at least since kindergarten). You can’t be interested in Lincoln without having an interest in Booth, and I’ve been interested in Dr. Samuel Mudd since fifth grade. Dr. Mudd was implicated and imprisoned for conspiring with Booth in Lincoln’s murder.

I haven’t gotten to see all of the evidence against Mudd (presumably lots of it is in the book, since there’s lots of other stuff I’d never read before in it). Personally, I believe Mudd was innocent. Yes, he knew Booth, yes, he agreed to help Booth kidnap Lincoln, but no, he did not approve of the murder, and no, I’ve never seen any compelling evidence that on the morning of April 15, 1865, when Booth’s escort knocked on Mudd’s door and asked for medical treatment, that Mudd was expecting them or knew at that time what Booth had done.

Indeed, it was Mudd’s duty as a medical doctor to treat Booth’s injury. Mudd probably should have alerted the authorities sooner than he did, and he should have given them better information, but the authorities chose to ignore his lead anyway.

I’ll revisit some of the topics of this book when I finish reading it. But so far, I can say the book is well researched and tells the story in a very lively manner, changing back and forth between the major players’ points of view when appropriate.

Escape from Windows 98

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , ,

There’ve been a few times that I’ve met someone who was stuck in an old Windows 98 PC because it had all their software and data on it, it was set up the way they liked it, they may or may not have all the installation media, and it would take several days’ worth of labor to set up a new one like the old one.

So usually in that situation I just bubblegum and duct tape the system together as best I can.

No longer. Not now that I’ve discovered PC Mover.PC Mover is a Laplink product. It’s really pretty simple. Set up the old PC and new PC on the same network (ideally the new PC should be as pristine as possible), install and run PC Mover on the new PC and follow the prompts. Eventually it will tell you to install and run it on the old PC. Follow the prompts there, and it will do its very best to move all of the programs and data to the new PC.

I literally set up Mom’s old Windows 98 PC and her new(er) Compaq Evo D51C (running Windows XP), set the options, watched for 30 minutes, then went out and spent an hour mowing the lawn. About 15 minutes after I came back inside, it was finished. Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure her Windows 98 PC only has a 10-megabit NIC in it, so under what I would consider reasonable conditions, the migration would have been faster.

Now I wish I’d thought to change the NIC out.

But at any rate, at the end of the process, I rebooted the new computer and it came up looking just like her old PC. Her desktop looked the same, all her data was in the right place, and her old programs ran.

System-level stuff like antivirus and CD burning software won’t transfer, but that’s not PC Mover’s fault. Utility software is usually very OS-specific, and if I manually tried to install the Windows 98 version of Norton Antivirus in Windows XP, it would tell me to get lost. She can install her scanner, and XP will detect her printer and take care of setting that up for her.

When I ran PC Mover, I selected the advanced options and deliberately de-selected stuff I knew she wouldn’t need, in order to speed up the transfer and lessen the likelihood of something going wrong. But I’d be reasonably comfortable just letting it run on autopilot.

The resulting system does have some unneeded cruft on it, but I can live with that. Windows XP is worlds better than Windows 98 ever was, and this Compaq is newer and probably better than her old computer too. Maybe running CCleaner would help with the junk, but for now I’m just going to leave well enough alone.

PC Mover costs about 40 bucks, but I think it’s worth it. The last time I worked on someone else’s PC, I charged $50 an hour (which is probably too little, considering what a lawnmower mechanic or plumber charges). It would probably have taken me 4-6 hours to do what PC Mover did in two, and that’s assuming I would have been able to locate all of the old installation media.

Whether you need to move data and programs to a new PC running XP or Vista for yourself or for someone else, I think PC Mover can make the job a lot easier for you. It worked so well for Mom’s PCs, I’m thinking I ought to use it to migrate a couple of old PCs I’ve been keeping around to newer hardware.

How Generation X can take this country back

Dave Farquhar Society , , , , , , , , ,

I’ve done some reading in recent days. First I read that GenXers aren’t happy with Corporate America and the feeling is largely mutual. It appears I’m not the only one.

But I see an opportunity in this. We have a window to take this country back. And I have a plan.The way I see it, the unholy triumverate of big government, big corporations, and big labor has done its best to ruin this country. Big government’s mess needs no introduction. While big labor drove some necessary reforms, it lost its way, asked for too much, and today we see the result when we look at the sticker prices of GM, Ford, and Chrysler vehicles. And as for big business, I could get into specifics, but I see the problem like this: Large corporations think only quarter to quarter, chasing short-term profits and never considering the long term. They hand out raises to their workers that don’t keep pace with inflation, while their CEOs make six- and seven-figure salaries plus equally large bonuses, no matter how badly they do their jobs. Since the people who do the work feel undervalued, they tend to jump from job to job a lot, so institutional memory becomes a thing of the past.

Forget them. It’s time to escape and start over. Here’s the plan.

Minimize the risk.

You can’t very well escape corporate America’s stronghold while you’re saddled with debt. Most small businesses die within three years because at some point in that timeframe the owners find themselves unable to pay the bills. So as long as you have debt, you are corporate America’s slave.

But you can escape. It doesn’t really matter how much you make or how much money you owe–you can be debt free in seven years or less. The main reason this works is because creditors generally won’t loan you more money than you would be able to repay in seven years.

I don’t know how long this movement has existed. My mother and father in law did it in the 1980s. A classic entrepreneurial book by William Nickerson, published in the 1950s, mentions the phenomenon, so it must have existed then.

There are lots of subtle variants on the plan, but it boils down to this. Gather up all your debts–car payment, credit cards, mortgage, student loans, furniture, whatever. Figure out the minimum payment on them. Now take 10 percent of your monthly income. Pick one bill, and add that 10 percent of your monthly income to what you pay on it. (If you can afford more than 10 percent, pay that.) Make the minimum payment on all of your other bills.

After you pay off that first bill, take what you were paying on that bill and apply it to the next one. Let’s say you have two $300 car payments and a $1,000 mortgage. You could start paying an extra $300 a month on one car, for a total of $600, and pay $300 on the other car, and $1,000 on the mortgage. When the first car is paid off, the $600 moves to the other car, for $900 on the car and $1,000 on the mortgage. Once the other car is paid off, pay $1,900 per month on the mortgage.

The hardest part is initially coming up with that $300. The rest is fairly easy because you’re always paying the same amount every month, but the longer you go along, the faster you’re retiring your debt because you’re paying more principle and less interest.

How you pick the order is up to you. Mathematically speaking, you’re always best off applying your extra payment to the debt with the highest interest rate. But in every analysis that I’ve seen, the difference between paying them off in the best possible order and worst possible order is only a month’s worth of payments. Many people suggest paying off the debt on which you owe the least first, so you get the psychological boost of having eliminated one debt.

I started in November 2004. It took less than a year to pay off my car. Not long after that I got married, and it only took a few more months for us to pay off my wife’s car. Right now the only debt we have is the mortgage and my wife’s student loans. Barring unexpected emergencies this year, we should be able to pay off our remaining debt by the end of the year. (We may keep one of my wife’s student loans, since the interest rate is lower than the rate we get on one of our bank accounts.)

This is the most important thing: I fully expect to own my home outright at age 33. If I played by the rules most people play by, I’d make my last payment on it at age 58.

Here’s why I say to eliminate your debt. Take a look at what you spend every month. When my wife and I looked at our spending, we found we were spending more than $2,000 a month on car payments, the mortgage, and her student loans. Meanwhile, we were spending less than $1,000 on food, utilities, and everything else. So in theory, without debt, we could live on $12,000 a year.

Which leads to the second part of the plan.

Find a business you can start that will make you more than $12,000 a year

I’m not talking about multi-level marketing or any garbage like that. Start a real business that you control and makes money for you.

I won’t tell you what business to start, because I only know what works for my wife and me. But I’ll give you some questions that will get your mind rolling.

What can you do better than anyone else? There must be something that you know how to do really well and can leverage. Find it.

What do you know how to find or make less expensively than anyone else? This can replace the question above, or supplement it.

What do you enjoy doing? If you actually enjoy doing it, you’ll work harder and more productively. I would moonlight fixing Amiga computers if there were any money in it. Frankly I find modern computers uninteresting, so I don’t moonlight fixing other people’s computers at home, because I find it boring and stressful.

And finally, what problem do people have that you might be able to solve for them?

Mull those questions. It’s OK if you don’t immediately know the answer to any of those questions, or if you know the answer but they don’t bring a business plan to mind. Keep thinking about it, and keep looking around for opportunities.

I started looking for something in mid-2004 when I realized I didn’t make enough to support my wife and me if she was in school. I don’t remember now when I first had the idea that ultimately worked, but I followed through on it in June 2005. It took two weeks for anything to come of it, but it did finally work, and it’s still working today.

Once you get an idea, explore its feasibility. Look and see if anyone else is doing it. See if you can do it better or cheaper, or in a slightly different way than everyone else does it.

If the idea looks feasible, start doing it part-time. Don’t quit the job yet. The idea is to get established while you still have the safety net of a 9-to-5 job. If you’re thinking about a service, start advertising on Craigslist. If it’s a product, eBay and Craigslist are possible venues. The upside to Craigslist is that it doesn’t cost anything to advertise there. The real key is to look at your questions as an opportunity to get creative, rather than as blockades to your progress.

Here’s one strategy for dealing with those questions. Ask yourself those questions, especially around bedtime. Your subconscious will mull over the question even while you sleep. The answer will take some time to come, and will probably come at an unexpected time. But I’ve tried it and it works. Your subconscious mind may be the most powerful tool you have.

Notice I didn’t say to go borrow money. One of the reasons businesses die young is because they can’t pay their debts. Keep your overhead low, and you have a better chance of being successful. Operate on a shoestring.

Once you have an idea and something to do, give it a try on a small scale. At this stage, don’t put up any more money than you’re willing to lose, and don’t be afraid if your initial attempts don’t get anywhere or fail. You’re learning. If you’re starting while you still have a job and you’re in the process of paying down your debt, you can afford to fail a little. At the early stages, gaining information and wisdom and knowledge is more important than success. Get enough of those three things and you will find success, and if and when success wanes, you’ll find it again.

The problem with big government, big corporations and big labor is that they are successful, but by and large they are not well informed, they aren’t knowledgeable, and they certainly aren’t wise. That’s why we’ve seen so many spectacular failures in the last 10 years.

I see lots of small business owners who aren’t informed, knowledgeable, or wise either. When their success runs out, that’s probably the end of them. But there are also small businesses in St. Louis that stood the test of time and became institutions. Lots of Fortune 500 companies have come and gone in St. Louis since Ted Drewes Sr. opened a frozen custard stand on Natural Bridge Road in 1930. And lots more will come and go before the two Ted Drewes locations close up for good.

During this time that your small business is struggling and you’re gathering knowledge abd wisdom, you’re still working for someone else and you’re paying off your debts. But along with those struggles, you should have some encouraging successes. Follow those successes, and tweak things along the way.

Chances are, by the time you have your debt paid off, you’ll have a successful small business that’s capable of bringing in enough money to support you full-time. So you can step out of the corporate world and into business for yourself. From there, the sky’s the limit, because you’re no longer working hard to make money to support the pyramid of management above you–you only have to support yourself. And without the burden of personal debt and corporate overhead, you’ll be more free to be successful.

And how does this save America?

On May 11, 2006, Robert X. Cringely wrote, “I’m counting on Google and eBay to save America.” He didn’t elaborate, but here’s what I think he meant.

Just before the dawn of the 20th century, there weren’t a lot of large corporations in the United States, but there were plenty of bright entrepreneurs with ideas. Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and the Wright Brothers are examples.

The problem today is that large public companies don’t breed great people like Edison, Ford, and the Wrights. The shareholders won’t stand for it. Shareholders care only about the profits on the next quarterly report, and if the company doesn’t deliver, investors dump their shares, the stock price drops, and then (and only then) executives start losing their jobs. So companies tend to play it safe to protect their executives.

We’re seeing this problem with eBay right now, of all things. While eBay remains hugely profitable, its investors got spoiled with exponential growth. Now that the profits are steady but growth has leveled off, investors are whining, and eBay is trying all kinds of goofy things to try to recapture the magic. None of it’s really working, but they sure are alienating a lot of their best merchants.

Two years after Robert X. Cringely wrote those words, I no longer know if eBay is the right company for this recipe to save America, but it has the right business model. Someone else will pick it up if eBay decides it doesn’t want it anymore.

The small entrepreneur can’t afford to compete head to head with General Motors. But Google gives small businesses affordable, targeted advertising, while eBay and other online marketplaces provide small businesses with a low-overhead distribution channel. Google and eBay (or their replacements) won’t directly save America, but the small, bright, nimble businesses that they enable will. Small businesses can afford to think long-term, they can deliver a better product with better service (and do it faster) than the huge, lumbering behemoths, and they aren’t slaves to whiney shareholders who have lots of money but little idea how to run the companies they invested in and no vested interest in the company’s long-term health because in five years they’ll have their money somewhere else.

And since small businesses have more control over their own destinies, they’re in a better position to adapt.

If we believe the Businessweek article I linked above, corporations need us GenXers. But in my experience, as well as the experience of hundreds of people who commented on the article both at Businessweek and on Digg, by and large the corporations don’t want us. So the best thing for us to do is to compete with them. And in the long run, I think this country will be better off for it.

My poor-man’s SSD boots DOS really fast

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , ,

So, my no-name compact flash adapters arrived today. I ripped one open like a kid at Christmas, pulled a PC off the scrap heap, yanked my 128 MB compact flash card out of my PDA, and went to town.Unfortunately I couldn’t get Xubuntu to boot, let alone install a minimal configuration, because my CD was corrupt. I wasn’t sure if I could install anything in 128 MB, but my last Debian 3.0 install was smaller than that, so I held out hope.

So I grabbed a Windows 98 SE CD. Surely that would fit in 128 megs if I left out all of the optional components, right? And if not, there’s always Doublespace, right? Wrong. The installation bombed out, saying I needed 205 megs.

The original Win98 was smaller though, right? So I grabbed that CD. It wouldn’t play either. It repeated that same 205 meg line. I’ll bet it says that to all the guys.

So I grabbed my Win95B CD. I’m pretty sure I once crammed Win95B and Office 97 onto a 170 MB hard drive. It wasn’t pretty, but hey, it was an emergency. But no joy there either. The CD wouldn’t even read. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised since it’s a CD-R that I last touched sometime in 1999. I have no idea where the original CD is, but I know where the manual and COA are, not that that helps any.

I dug around for a Debian CD. I come across those fairly often when I’m looking for something else, but tonight I couldn’t find one.

I found my OS/2 3.0 sleeve, which got me thinking, but I couldn’t find the disc. I know I could make that fit in 128 megs and it would really scream–as in, it would complain loudly about the ATI video, and it would run really fast–but I never found the CD.

So for lack of anything else to put on it, I reinserted the Win98SE disc, rebooted, picked the Command Prompt with CD-ROM option, and dropped into DOS for perhaps the first time since the Clinton administration. I ran FDISK, blew away the partition table and repartitioned it, rebooted, found FORMAT.COM hidden in the WIN98 directory on the CD, formatted the drive, remembered I had to use the /S option, reformatted the drive, copied over himem.sys, oakcdrom.sys, mscdex.exe, and whatever else I could find, and built up config.sys and autoexec.bat files by hand using copy con, since I couldn’t find edit.com anywhere on the CD. I removed the CD, rebooted, and it booted fast–into an error message saying I’d neglected the /d parameter. Considering the last time I used the /d parameter was in 1999, that shouldn’t be surprising. What is surprising is that I remembered the syntax. So I deleted config.sys and autoexec.bat, built up new ones with copy con, and rebooted again.

The Win98 splash screen flashed, then I got a familiar DOS prompt, including indicators that the CD-ROM driver was working. It took about as long to boot as it did for the BIOS to do its thing–probably 1-2 seconds. Not bad for $7 worth of hardware ($5 for the adapter from Compgeeks, and $2 for the CF card from a garage sale).

Supposedly Windows 2000 can shrink down to 60MB if you get really aggressive with nLite. I’d really like to see that, but that means I’ll have to find my Windows 2000 CD. I’m sure it’s hiding somewhere in Argentina, playing cards with my OS/2 3.0 and Debian CDs.

I also ought to download Debian 3.0 again. I’m thinking 60-120 megs of Debian is probably more useful than 60 megs of Windows, but I really want to see how quickly Windows 2000 boots off flash.

Supposedly these cards support UDMA, so I probably ought to order some larger CF cards so I can do something really useful with them. Seeing DOS boot instantly is enough to convince me that these things can be useful. Who knows, I might be insane enough to try running my webserver off flash (the memory, not the obnoxious Macromedia/Adobe product).

One solution to the family IT man problem: Standardize

Dave Farquhar Hardware ,

This weekend was Mother’s Day, which meant a family get-together, which inevitably led to some computer questions. A few months ago I found a PC for my mom that’s for all intents and purposes identical to my main PC. Now that my sister and brother in law are due for a computer upgrade, I suggested they get the same model.Companies standardize because it makes support easier. Running the same operating system is supposed to minimize differences, but if I’ve learned anything since 1996 when I took my first part-time computer support gig, it’s that it doesn’t. Every system has its quirks, but if you’re used to them, are they really quirks?

The advantage is that when I inevitably get that phone call with a weird computer question, I can take a look at mine and probably find the answer. If a computer gets trashed too far, I can make an image on mine and mail out a CD to reload the system to a known-good configuration.

The cost isn’t outlandish. In our case, we’re standardizing on 2-ish GHz Compaq Evo PCs. They’re quiet, very well built and dependable, and they’re inexpensive. All the usual computer closeout places are selling secondhand Evos for $75-$125 depending on the configuration, but in the last two cases, I just searched the local Craigslist for an Evo. In both cases, I found people who buy and refurbish business PCs either for a living or as a side gig for some extra cash. They buy the machines, format the hard drive and reinstall Windows, and flip them for profit. In both cases, I avoided shipping charges and got PCs with more memory in them than mine originally had.

The downside to the Evo is that it doesn’t have a lot of drive bays or expansion slots. But in reality, none of us use a lot of drive bays or expansion slots anymore. Practically anything we’d want to plug into the system plugs into a USB socket. Back when a CD burner cost $400, of course I would install a regular CD-ROM drive for routine use so I didn’t wear out an expensive drive, but now a DVD burner costs $30, which isn’t significantly more than a read-only drive. So I really only need a single 5.25-inch bay anyway.

If you need more space than an Evo has to offer, buy something like a Dell Dimension that comes in a minitower case. The Dimensions I use at work have two external 5.25" and 3.5" bays, plus another internal 3.5" bay, and seven available expansion slots. Going the other way, if your family craves laptops, pick up identical Thinkpads. Thinkpads tend to be very reliable; Dell would probably be my second choice.

Another possible way to pick up inexpensive business PCs is to ask your workplace’s IT department. Most companies replace their PCs every 3-4 years by policy, and dispose of their PCs one way or another. You may be able to talk them into selling you a small quantity, provided you’re willing to sign a release saying you won’t receive or expect any support for the system from the company. The nice thing about this method is that you know what you’re getting because it might be just like the machine that was on your desk. It should go without saying that if it’s served you well, buy it, but if it’s a piece of junk, buy something else.

Over the years I’ve spent a significant amount of time fixing family computer problems. At one time I didn’t mind, but I don’t have a lot of time anymore. By the same token, I don’t want my family to be at the mercy of repair shops that will keep the machine longer than necessary, then overcharge for shoddy repair work. Standardizing on a quality, known-quantity machine seems like a good solution to the problem. It means any software problem is a 20-minute fix: Back up the data, re-image the machine, then restore the data. Hardware problems are minimal, since business PCs tend to be very reliable.

Basically, the same practices that made it possible for me to support hundreds of computers in a 40-hour workweek will scale down to 3 computers too.

The practice works fine for those who build PCs as well. Just buy the same motherboard and video card (or at least a video card that uses the same drivers) when you build PCs for family members. If you’re someone who changes PCs couple of years, keep that family PC around as your secondary PC until everyone else decides to upgrade. But for these purposes, I think buying secondhand business PCs saves a lot of time and money. I can build a PC in 30-60 minutes, but it takes at least that long to spec out and order all of the parts (and perhaps longer than that). It would have been difficult for me to build a better computer than those Evos for $100, and that wouldn’t have included the copy of Windows.

I think this is going to save us all a lot of grief over the years.

So if you find yourself doing a lot of tech support for family and friends, try getting all of them to buy the same system and get one yourself. (For that matter I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask them to chip in towards your system–split three or four ways, the cost would be $25-$35 per person.) The system will probably cost less than one trip to a repair shop would, and your lives will be a lot easier.

Better upgrade advice

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,

PC Magazine has a feature about inexpensive PC upgrades. There’s some good advice there, but some questionable advice too. Since I really did write the book on free and inexpensive upgrades, I’ll present my own advice (but I’ll skip the pretty pictures).Hard drives

The best upgrade they didn’t mention is replacing the hard drive. I’ve been squeezing extra life out of old systems for years by taking out the aging drives and replacing them with something newer and faster. The trick is figuring out whether the drive is the old-style parallel ATA (with a 40- or 80-conductor cable) or newer SATA. If you can afford it, it makes sense to upgrade to a SATA controller so you can use a more modern drive. Newer drives are almost always faster than older drives if only because the density of the data is always increasing. If a drive stores twice as much data in the same linear space as an old one, it (roughly) means it will retrieve the data twice as fast, assuming the disk spins at the same speed (and it may spin faster). You can go all the way up to the 10,000 RPM Western Digital Raptor drives if you want, but even putting a mid-range drive in an old PC will speed it up.

Some people will point out that a new drive may be able to deliver data at a faster rate than an old controller in an old PC can handle. I don’t see that as a problem. There’s no drive on the market that can keep a 133 MB/sec bus saturated 100% of the time, and the old drive certainly isn’t. Even if your older, slower bus is the limiting factor some of the time, you’re still getting the benefit of a newer drive’s faster seek times and faster average data transfers.

While replacing a hard drive can bust an entire $125 upgrade budget in and of itself, it’s still something I recommend doing. Unless your system is really short on memory or you’re heavily into gaming, the hard drive is the best bang for your upgrade buck.

Memory

The other point I disagree with most strongly is the memory. There’s very little reason anymore to run a system with less than 1 GB of RAM. As a system becomes more obsolete, memory prices go up instead of down, so it makes sense to just install a ton of memory when you’re upgrading it anyway. If you need it later, it will probably cost more.

The caveat here is that it makes very little sense to install 4 GB of RAM, since the Intel x86 processor architecture reserves most of the 4 GB block for system use. If you install 4 GB of RAM, you really get more like 3.2 or 3.5 GB of usable memory unless you’re running 64-bit Windows. I don’t recommend going 64-bit yet. When it works, it works well. Unfortunately there’s no way to know if you’ll have good drivers for everything in your system until you try it. I wouldn’t go 64-bit until some popular software that requires (or at least takes really good advantage of) 64 bit arrives. The next version of Photoshop will help, but I think the thing that will really drive 64-bit is when id software releases a game that needs it. Until then, hardware makers will treat 64-bit Windows as an afterthought.

I usually put 2 GB of RAM in a system if it’ll take that much. If you do a lot of graphics or video work, more is better of course. For routine use, 2 GB is more than adequate, yet affordable. If a system won’t take 2 GB, then it makes sense to install as much as it will take, whether that’s 1 GB or 512 MB. If a system won’t take 512 MB, then it’s old enough that it makes sense to start talking replacement.

Outright replacement

Speaking of that, outright replacement can be a very practical option, especially if a system is getting up in years. My primary system is a 5-year-old office PC. Take a 2-ish GHz P4 or equivalent (current market value: $75-$125), load it up with 2 GB of RAM and a moderately fast hard drive, and you’ll have a better-built system than any $399 budget PC on the market. It will probably run as fast or faster, and it will cost less.

I have two PCs at the office: a 3 GHz Pentium D, and a 2.6 GHz Core Duo. Both have 2 GB of RAM. They theoretically encode MP3s faster than my home PC and would make better gaming PCs than my home PC (ahem), but for the things I do–namely, web browsing, spreadsheets, word processing, e-mail, and the occasional non-3D game–I can’t tell much difference between them. The System Idle Process gets the overwhelming majority of the CPU time on all of them.

Other upgrades

The other things discussed in the article can be worthwhile, but faster network cards won’t help your Internet speed. If you routinely copy huge files between multiple PCs, they help a lot, but how many people really do that on a regular basis?

Fast DVD burners are nice and they’re inexpensive, but if you needed one, you’d know it. If you don’t know what you’d do with one, skip it. Or if you have an older one that you use occasionally, you probably won’t use a faster one any more often.

For $60 you can get a decently fast hard drive, and that will do a lot more for overall system performance than either a network card or DVD burner upgrade.

The video card is a sensible upgrade under two circumstances: If you’re using the integrated video on your motherboard, or if you play 3D games and they feel jerky. If neither of those describes you, skip the video card upgrade.

Free upgrades

The article describes CHKDSK as a “low level defrag.” That’s not what CHKDSK does–it checks your drive for errors and tries to fix them. If your drives are formatted NTFS (and they probably are), routinely running CHKDSK isn’t going to do much for you. If you run CHKDSK routinely and it actually says it’s done something when it finishes, you have bigger problems and what you really need is a new hard drive.

If you want to defragment optimally, download JK-Defrag. It’s free and open source, and not only does a better job than the utility that comes with Windows, but it does a better job than most of the for-pay utilities too.

The first time you run it, I recommend running it from the command line, exactly like this: JkDefrag.exe -a 7 -d 2 -q c:. After that, just run it without any options, about once a month or two. (Running more often than that doesn’t do much good–in fact, the people who defragment their drives once a day or once a week seem to have more problems.) Run it with the options about once a year. Depending on what condition your system is in, the difference in performance after running it ranges from noticeable to stunning.

My SSD experiment, coming soon

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,

SSDs are the first technology to excite me in a very long time. Next-generation drives with ultralow seek times and transfer rates around 100mb/s are finally available from Crucial and OCZ, but at a price of $600-$700 for a 32gb drive.

I’m going to wait for prices to come down and experiment with a cheaper alternative.Intel and Toshiba are promising 120mb/s rates later this year, and analysts are expecting prices to drop as manufacturing capacity increases. Competition can’t hurt either.

What I’m going to do in the meantime is use the old compact flash trick. The key is to get an adapter and a card that are both capable of UDMA. Addonics is the manufacturer of the best adapters. For cards, get something at least rated at 233X. A 300X card would be better. A 233X card will give transfer rates of 30-35mb/s, which is unspectacular but reasonable.

My goal is twofold. One, I want quiet. Two, it’ll reduce power consumption by about 20 watts. The you’ll-burn-the-drive-up-in-a-week myth is pretty well disproven now, so I’m not worried about that. Eliminating the possibility of a head crash means flash will be more reliable than a conventional drive, not less. For some of what I do, the low seek times will make a flash drive faster, rather than slower.

I have a couple of adapters on order. I haven’t ordered cards yet but that’s next. I need to decide what size I need first. With 233X 4gb cards selling for $25 at Newegg, I can get in the SSD game really cheaply, assuming I can live with 4 gigs (which is a possibility). Initially I’ll mess with this 128mb card I picked up at a yard sale for $2. I can’t do much with 128 megs anymore but I can build a Linux server in less than 100, just to prove the concept.

I think the CF trick is a good way to get in the game while waiting for prices to come down. And if you’re fixing up an old system for someone, a 4-8gb card may well give performance comparable to what was in the computer to begin with, and provides enough capacity for Windows 2000 or XP, office software, and a web browser, while eliminating the danger of a disk crash. In that situation, the compact flash is a viable permanent replacement.

Was California Republican Tony Krvaric Strider of Fairlight?

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , , , , , , , ,

A story today about the possibility that a prominent California Republican, Tony Krvaric, was once a co-founder of the Commodore 64 warez group Fairlight caused an uproar on Slashdot today. The claim said Krvaric went by the handle of Strider.

Reading it brought back some memories.

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