Author: Dave Farquhar

Windows and Outlook

Dave Farquhar General , ,

Outta here. I’m off to a Windows 2000 class in Kansas City later today. Class actually starts Monday, but I’m making an extended weekend out of it, leaving this afternoon, and coming back sometime on Tuesday.
No e-mail while I’m gone, but I’ll have Web access of course, so if you’ve got something to ask me, go ahead and use the comments here or the forum. I won’t be able to read mail until Wednesday.

Windows and Outlook. An old friend wrote in this week. She was implementing some of the advice in the first chapter of Optimizing Windows, and she got to the place where I said to uninstall anything you don’t use. So, logically, she said to herself, “I don’t use Outlook Express since I have Outlook,” so she uninstalled Outlook Express.

Then her contacts list stopped working.

If you use Outlook, you use Outlook Express because Outlook uses code from Outlook Express (and Internet Explorer) extensively. It makes no sense, and you’d think Windows would leave the DLLs from Outlook Express that Outlook needs when you uninstall Outlook Express, but evidently it’s not that smart. A shame, but typical.

More Like This: Optimizing Windows Windows Outlook

Short takes

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

AMD. According to the latest rumors on Ace’s Hardware and The Register, the Palomino core, when released, will be known as the Athlon 4. This is a marketing move; the Palomino is a less radical change to the core and the architecture than Thunderbird was. I think it’s a good marketing move, but it won’t do anything to make people less confused.
Tech support story of the day. A user one of my colleagues supports received an LS-120 superdisk in the mail. This user had no LS-120 drive, only a floppy drive. So my colleague went up to look at the disk and locate an LS-120 drive to read the disk. When he hunted down an LS-120 drive, he stuck in the disk, looked at it, and found a single file on it–a Word document. The file size? 32.5K!

But I guess it could have been worse. At least it wasn’t a 4K file…

Discussion groups. I’m not the least bit happy with how they look, and the performance isn’t so grand (an upgrade next week should help that), but I’ll go ahead and open up my forums. They’re at https://dfarq.homeip.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi. At the moment they’re totally open. I’ll bolt them down if spam, flame wars, or other things become a problem. I tend to be very open until that openness is abused, then I become a dictator.

I believe you can register without giving a true e-mail address, so you can use a spam filter if you’re afraid of that. Cookies are just used for automatic login and for timeouts–they’re good cookies.

The board is powered by YaBB, a free bulletin board written in Perl. Some things about it I like better than UBB, which is what most forums out there seem to use. I don’t like its color handling, but I’ll sacrifice that to gain other features.

Go ahead, take a look around, start posting stuff, and offer suggestions.

Why the forums when we’ve got comments? Well, I assume people want to talk about more than just what I talk about on a given day. This is preferable to e-mail because I have more options for reading it and it’s already online. Plus there’s always the chance someone else could pipe in with an answer.

More like this:AMD YaBB

Who was the most influential woman in your life?

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

My good friend Brad came to me with a question a couple of weeks ago: Who was the most influential woman in your life?
He wasn’t looking for my answer so much as he was looking for what I thought people’s answers would be. So I countered with a question: Married or single? He asked what difference that made. “Well, if you’re married, the right answer is your wife, whether it’s your mother or not,” I said. “And if you’re single, the right answer is your mother. Now the true answer could be something totally different.”

Brad laughed. I think he might have said I’ll be good at staying out of trouble with a wife someday, but I’m sure I’ll be very good at getting in trouble, or at least getting lots of dirty looks. Guys live for that.

Brad was looking to shoot another video together, with that as the theme. The pieces just didn’t come together this year so we had to shelve the project. But his question lingers on.

Who was the most influential woman in my life?

Certainly I learned more from my mom than anyone else. She taught me weird ways to remember how to spell tough words. Do you ever have trouble remembering how to spell “Wednesday?” It’s the day the Neses got married. wed-Nes-day. Got it? And how to remember the capital of Norway. Well, I knew Oslo was the capital of some Northern European country, but I couldn’t remember which. So she wrote “nOrway” on a slip of paper. I never lost the Oslo/Norway connection after that. (That’s probably not very impressive to my European readers, but Americans are notoriously bad at geography. I don’t know how many Americans know Norway is in Europe. Some Americans may not know what Europe is, for that matter.)

And yes, mom taught me how to tie my shoes and how to blow my nose and how to brush my teeth and lots of stuff like that. And when I didn’t understand girls (which was often… Who am I kidding? It is often) she was always there to listen.

But the question was who wasn’t that. It was: Who was the most influential woman in my life?

Well, there was this girl that I met right after college. I told her I loved her, she told me she loved me, she changed my life, and set me off in an unexpected and (mostly) better direction and…

AND she couldn’t hold a candle to my grandmother, my mom’s mom, so even though I was devastated at the time, in retrospect I’m really glad we broke up.

What can I say about Granny? She grew up in southern rural Missouri, in the Depression, one of about a dozen kids (my grandparents came from families of 12 and 13, and I can never keep straight which came from which, especially since both had siblings who didn’t live to adulthood). Now, she got in some trouble growing up, but I think that experience, along with having lived through the Depression, helped her learn how to do the right thing even when resources seemed limited. She moved to Kansas City during World War II and got a job at Pratt & Whitney, working on an assembly line making airplane engines. She married a Kansas Citian. On a truck driver’s salary, they managed to raise four kids.

I remember a lot of things about her. She always had time for her family. She never wanted anyone to make a big deal about anything she did. She really knew how to cook. She made the best quilts in the world. And before anyone starts complaining about her falling into female stereotypes, I’ll tell you this. She absolutely loved working in her yard, and one of the things that pained her the most was her deterriorating ability to take care of her yard as she got older. Besides, she built airplane engines! Have I ever done anything that manly? I’m doing well to change the spark plugs in my car.

But if I had to sum Granny’s life up in a sentence, I’d say this: When it came to doing more with less, she was one of the very best.

What am I known for? A book and a series of magazine articles about doing more with less.

So, who was the most influential woman in my life? I think it was Granny.

Granny died a little over six years ago. I miss her.

A lot.

I had a conversation with my mom a while back about my two grandmothers. Granny had nothing for most of her life. My other grandmother wasn’t like that. She was a successful doctor, a psychiatrist. She married a successful doctor. He was a general practitioner, and one of the best diagnosticians you’d ever see. I can say a lot about him, but I’ll say this and have my peace: His father spent a lot of time hanging out with tycoons, and must have learned a few things and passed them on to his son. The guy had money, but in a lot of ways he lived like my other grandmother, who had nothing. A good rule of thumb is that if you have money but live like you have none, you’ll end up with a lot more.

I’m talking a lot more about my dad’s father (he wasn’t a dad) than I am about his mother (she wasn’t a mom). Frankly I know more about him. I know she was brilliant. Yes, she was smarter than my mom’s mom. Granny didn’t always have all the answers. My other grandmother always had an answer. And it was usually right. It was also usually long. (I get that from somewhere.) I remember asking her once if Cooperstown, NY is close to New York City. It took her half an hour to answer that question.

But I never had much of a relationship with her. Neither did my dad. He’d talk about “my mother,” or “my father.” I heard him call his father “Dad” once. They were arguing. About me. As for her, well, I never heard him call her “Mom.”

I haven’t seen her or spoken with her since October 1990.

It’s hard for me to talk or write about this, because I don’t want to rag on my relatives. I always had a great deal of respect for them. I know what they were capable of, and I think that’s why I’m disappointed in them.

My dad grew up being told he’d be a failure all his life. He didn’t get good grades, and he was rebellious. I suspect a lot of that was because he had two absentee parents. But Dad was smart. It seems his biggest problem growing up was that he mostly used his great mind to figure out when he had to perform and when he could get by with slacking. He also couldn’t make up his mind what he wanted to do with his life. He had the same gifts his father had, but he wanted to be as different from his father as possible, and that posed a dilemma for him. He once told me his father didn’t know what to do with him. But that’s OK. Dad was only two years younger than I am now when he finally figured out what to do with himself.

The decision was made that my dad’s younger brother would carry my grandfather’s torch after he died. I don’t know what role she played in the decision, but she stood behind it. My dad watched as his brother made mistakes and both his brother and his mother paid for them. My dad tried to help. He didn’t want his help. She didn’t want his help. Finally my dad gave up. Dad had made himself a success; in his own mind, he’d proven them wrong. I don’t think he was interested in proving them wrong in their minds; he just didn’t want to see them struggle. Loyalty runs in the family.

I asked my mom which of my grandmothers really had more? Her mom thought she struggled all her life, but she was always able to provide for herself and others. Always. Had she been able to see that, I think she’d still be alive today.

When Granny died, she left enough for her four kids to fight over. But they didn’t fight over it. That wasn’t how she raised them.

I know one of my duties is to provide for my relatives, and in that regard, to be perfectly honest, I always let my dad’s mom down. But I guess I always assumed since she never wanted my dad’s help when he was alive, why would she want mine? To my knowledge, she never attempted to contact me after he died, so I had no way of knowing any different.

Dad’s mom died yesterday. All I have on her living conditions is hearsay, but I know poverty when I hear it described.

More Like This: Personal

Just the bang, and the clatter, as the server hits the wall

Dave Farquhar General

Looks like we’ve hit the wall. Some times during the day, this P-120 just isn’t keeping up well, and last night when I experimented with setting up forums, the speed was acceptable locally but really sluggish outside where latency is much higher. So it’s looking like I’ll have to move the system to a faster machine.
I dropped the number of days’ worth of posts on the front page to three days, instead of seven, to help a little. That’ll cut the amount of data sent when the homepage hits by 50 percent, but I see that as a temporary fix. Earlier in the day I added the site’s URL to the Google and AltaVista search engines, which means more traffic, particularly as more content moves in. So the situation won’t get any better over time.

I’ve got some options, and I’ll have more options when my new Duron-750 arrives because it’ll displace another system.

PCNation.com: Absolutely not recommended

Dave Farquhar Vendors

Don’t order from PCNation.com. That was the outfit I got my NEC 19″ monitor from. I won’t call them a PriceWatch bottom-feeder, since I’m not sure if they advertise on PriceWatch, and they did actually ship product. I made the mistake of waiting out my slightly-damaged NEC FE950+ monitor to see if its defect was indeed only cosmetic. PCNation offers a so-called 30-day return policy, so I figured I’d give it about three weeks. Big mistake. I should have made them eat the monitor.
I suspected the monitor’s settings were drifting on me. But after I reset everything to 50%, which should theoretically give you an acceptable display on any new monitor, I indeed got an acceptable display. Not as brilliant as it could be, but better than any cheapie, certainly, and with little or no drift. But the flaw didn’t get any less annoying with time. So I called the customer service number on the Web site. I have no idea who the foreign-accented guy was I talked to, but his business sure didn’t have anything to do with computers. So, out of options, I e-mailed their customer service. Six days later, rather than getting a response to my query, I got their true customer service policy (which has a few clauses I didn’t see on the Web site when I ordered, and it also has a different phone number than the one listed on the Web site). The most important bit: All returns must be completed within 30 days of the invoice date. Not the date of receipt. And by completed, they mean the returned box is in their hands, delivered.

Let’s do the math. The order is shipped. The clock starts ticking. Five days later you receive it. You have a problem. It takes customer service a week to respond with their policy. You re-describe the problem. A week later you get an RMA. You ship the product. It takes them five days to receive it. Their 30-day return policy ends up having closer to six days’ usable time. Better hope you find your problem fast. (I found it and I didn’t act on it right away–so much for good faith. No good deed goes unpunished…)

And on top of that, if you order something from them, count on it taking two weeks for you to receive it. It took them more than a week to process my order. Then when they shipped it, there was no confirmation e-mail and their Web page didn’t provide a tracking number. The only way I knew the thing had been shipped was my incessant checking of my order status. Finally the order showed up, with no warning.

Seems to me your best bet would be to immediately start the ball rolling on getting a return the day you place the order. That way you’ll have 20-25 days to make sure everything’s OK.

So, what do they have going for them? Slow order processing and shipment. No way of tracking the shipment. Misleading policies. Lousy customer service. Mediocre selection. The only thing these chumps have going for them is price. I will assume that they didn’t deliberately ship a bum monitor to me. Unlike the very worst of the worst, they did at least ship something, and unlike the worst of the worst, it was what I ordered.

Looks like you have to know how to deal with them. You know what? You’re better off ordering from someplace reputable that takes care of their customers. Mwave.com’s prices are almost as good, they don’t play bait and switch with their policies or their phone number, their customer service is pretty quick, and more importantly, the people are courteous and reasonable. I knew better, and I did the dumb thing anyway.

In retrospect, I should have called them first, before I ordered anything. Not getting the right number would have tipped me off straight up that something wasn’t kosher. Hearing the real return policy would have been another tip-off. When dealing with a strange, new vendor, you can’t know too much. Learn what you can before plunking down your credit card. Check Resellerratings.com (that I did–they turned out OK there). It also wouldn’t hurt to do a Web search on them, and a Usenet search (DejaNews is your friend, and it’s back and better than ever).

But hey, let’s look at the bright side. Now you know not to order from them, and why. And I’ve got a slightly imperfect NEC monitor, but seeing as I’d rather have an NEC monitor that’s been run over by a bus than any other brand, I can live with that.

I get ripped off so you don’t have to. This time.

Deja vu all over again

Dave Farquhar General

In case you haven’t heard about it elsewhere, there’s another VBS-based worm floating about, similar to the Anna worm earlier this year. This one includes a template called homepage.html.vbs. It e-mails itself to everyone in your address book, then opens one of four adult websites in your browser.
My usual advice about never opening any unexpected attachments applies here. Like I’ve said a million times, it’s much better to miss the joke than to infect your computer. If someone doesn’t tell me an attachment’s coming, I immediately reach for the delete key. Some attachments are harmless, but if you don’t know enough to know which ones are (and how to tell the difference between a GIF/JPEG/HTML attachment and a VBS attachment that’s trying to look like a GIF/JPEG/HTML attachment), you’re much better off just deleting it and protecting yourself and everyone else.

Don’t count on your anti-virus software protecting you. I’ve seen many a PC with anti-virus software on it that never updated itself, even though I configured it to do so. Plus, if you get the virus before your anti-virus vendor gets it and writes a fix and your program downloads the update, you’re totally unprotected.

I also suggest you add a line to the end of your e-mail signature that says something like, “This message should have no attachments. If there are any attachments, don’t open them because I didn’t put it there.” Just remember to delete that line if you do send attachments.

Consider yourself warned, today and every day.

–Dave
More Like This: Virus

Dual AMD processors, coming soon definitely maybe

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

The latest on AMD. I read yesterday that dual motherboards supporting Palominos (the next rev of the Athlon core) will be released June 4. These will be server-oriented boards, and thus very pricey. It’s an interesting strategy, because I would think Dual-AMD configurations would be more popular in the enthusiast market and the pointy-haired bosses are leery of putting anything but Intel CPUs in their server closets (better not tell ’em their Sun, SGI, and IBM RS/6000 servers ain’t Intel-powered, huh?). More on that in a second. The rumor I heard (and most of this should probably only be counted as rumor) said the boards will require 450W power supplies with a special supplemental connector, similar to the P4’s extra connector. No idea if it’s the same as the P4’s supplemental connector, but that would have made a lot of sense.
Obviously, if the boards will be out and use Palominos, that means the Palomino will have to be out on or before that date if there’s to be any hope of selling these boards.

The only part of this that I would bet my life on is the 450W power supply requirement. AMD probably could release it in that time frame, but they’re selling every CPU they can make, in spite of the slowdown in the PC market. So why the server play? Easy. AMD owns the enthusiast market and can pretty much count on owning that for a while yet. But AMD wants a piece of the server market, because that’s a slower-moving, higher-margin market. To get that, they have to have industrial-strength boards from top-tier makers and a solid chipset. AMD doesn’t have a lot of chipset experience, let alone SMP experience, so they want to make sure they get this right. That, I think, is the reason this has been so long in coming. They’d rather miss some target dates and deliver a solid product than come in right on time with something that’s still buggy.

More Like This: AMD

The return of Superbachelor

Dave Farquhar General

Superbachelor rides again. A certain someone called me up to heckle me this week. He was leading into a story, but he prefaced it by saying, “Now remember, you’re the one who keeps his phone in the fridge.”
Please allow me to clarify. A couple of years ago I lost my cordless phone. I checked my desk, my coffee table, my breakfast bar, my bed, my nightstand, the phone cradle… I even checked the bathroom. Nothing.

I hit the Find button on the cradle, but heard nothing. I figured I’d probably left it on and the battery had died. So I tore my apartment apart and still couldn’t find it. I had a dream about it that night. I dreamt that I went to work, talked about it, and for whatever reason a female coworker came over to help me find it. So we’re tearing my apartment apart, when suddenly I hear her calling me from the kitchen. I walked in, and she was holding the phone in her hand, shaking it mockingly. “You always keep your phone in the fridge?” she asked.

Now, keep in mind this was just a dream. But I woke up immediately afterward, and of course I went and checked, just in case. I had my hopes up. No phone. But I did realize there was plenty of extra room in there.

No, I’m not going to tell you how well O’Reilly books fit in the refrigerator, because I don’t know. But I did know a guy once who kept books in his fridge and in his cabinets. I guess I could ask him.

I found the phone a couple of days later, in a laundry basket, buried under a big pile of socks. So, bachelors, take note. Don’t bother with laundry baskets. Just pile your clothes on the floor or something. When a member of the gentler gender asks about it, tell her you don’t use laundry baskets because you’re afraid you’ll lose your phone in them. That’ll get you a dirty look for sure.

But this would be another really good Superbachelor story, except the guy who did this is married. But it does have the advantage of being true, and not just a dream. He got ambitious and decided to make roasted vegetable soup. So he cut up his carrots and celery and whatever garlic and onions he could scrounge up (obviously his wife wasn’t home), then he grabbed a bowl, tossed that in with a little olive oil, set the oven to 500 degrees, and threw it in. He baked it, then pulled it out and set it on a burner on the stove, because he figured, what better place for a 500-degree bowl, right? Well, first he regretted not using a bowl with a non-stick surface. But then he poured in some cold tap water, and he found out that glass and cold tap water don’t get along very well. (Obviously his wife wasn’t home. They seem to be born knowing this stuff. Or maybe that’s what they talk about when they go to the bathroom in pairs, if they run out of stories about guys like us, which is unlikely. But I digress.)

So then he got to do something manlier than cooking. He disassembled the oven and removed all the veggies, both new and old, that were living in there, along with all the shards of glass. Then he called to share his finding with me, which I appreciated, because I didn’t know that myself. But he forgot to tell me what power tools work best for disassembling an oven. He also didn’t tell me if it worked after he reassembled it, or how many pieces he had left over afterward.

Needless to say, he didn’t have roasted vegetable soup for dinner that night. He did what any self-respecting male would do when faced with such a dilemma: He ordered pizza, with all the meats and all the peppers. No extra charge for the heart attack.

More Like This: Personal Humor

One of my favorite bands makes a comeback

Dave Farquhar General

Hey, this is cool! After the last couple of weeks, I just felt like listening to Echo and the Bunnymen. I like them when I’m down, because their recent stuff is good to listen to when you want to feel less alone, but it’s not like listening to Joy Division or Sisters of Mercy, which can drag you down further. And Ian McCulloch isn’t afraid to turn to God in a song, sometimes for comfort but often to ask a really tough question. And of course I like that for some reason.
I knew they got dropped by their label last year, after releasing two albums that sold poorly and critics seemed to misunderstand–maybe you had to be like me to understand them, and nobody wants to admit to being what I am. I could listen to 1997’s Evergreen over and over, while the best moments of 1999’s What Are You Going to Do With Your Life? were better, I thought the predecessor was the better album overall.

Now, it’s 2001, they’ve signed with Spin Art in the States (the biggest name on their roster is ex-Pixie Frank Black) and with Cooking Vinyl in the UK (dunno anything about that label), and the new album comes out May 14. I haven’t heard any of it–RealAudio won’t cooperate with me… figures–but I read the lyrics and I’m excited. They’re a little gloomy. OK, sometimes they’re a lot gloomy. Ian McCulloch seems a little down on himself, and he’s asking questions of God, and he’s asking questions of his wife or maybe an old girlfriend.

And there’s the token love song in there–seems like that’s obligatory–but the words are sincere, not sappy. This one’s just pledge of loyalty and a thank-you for a compliment, worded simply and repeated a couple of times.

It’s gonna be a good year.

More Like This: Music

CD’s; Duron deal; Journal site; Cheap nic; DMA problem;

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , ,

MAILBAG:
From: Steve Delassus
Subject: Cheap CDs. Too cheap?

Hey, I found a spindle of 100 16X 80-minute CDs at Best Buy for $25 after rebate. Seemed like a good deal, so I grabbed it. They’re imation CDs, which I thought had at least a decent reputation. Have you heard anything to the contrary?

Steve
~~~~~
I’ll take that over private label who-knows-what. I like Kodaks best, but Imations are certainly better than, oh, Infodisc… But what were you doing at Best Bait-n-Switch?
~~~~~~~~~~
From: “David Huff”
Subject: good Duron deal

Dave,

Here’s another good deal for those wanting to build an inexpensive PC:

AMD Duron 750 OEM – $38.00 http://www.gpscomputersvcs.com/amdprocessors.html

Not too shabby 🙂

Regards,
Dave
~~~~~
Wow. Thanks much. A Duron for a song. A Backstreet Boys song.
~~~~~~~~~~
From:
Subject: A good journal site.

Dave,

I would like to suggest Blogger.com. I’ve used it since February and haven’t had a problem with it. You can setup your own templates or use one of theirs. You can use your existing FTP account or they can provide one at blogspot.com. I set my journal up and just copied their template information to use my existing page format. I have my journal online at http://mkelley.net/notes .

I also must say that we have the same tastes in music, with the Pixies and the Church and some of the others you’ve listed. I have a video that came out for the album after Starfish and it has all of the Church’s music videos from the early 80’s to their end in the 90’s. If I can find it’s name I’ll pass that along. It should be cheap at your local used video/music stop.

ever listen to the Smiths?

Thanks, Mike Kelley
~~~~~
I’ll look into Blogger, but I’d really prefer something Linux-based, preferably Open Source so I can make changes to it down the line if I need a feature, and something using a database backend so I can rapidly make changes. If I’m going to change, I want to make a change that’ll give me lots of versatility.

I’m familiar with The Smiths but never really got into them. As far as Manchester bands go, I pretty much stuck with Joy Division and to a lesser degree, New Order. I think it’s Morrissey I object to, because I really enjoyed Johnny Marr’s guitar work with Electronic and with The The. Morrissey’s veganism (or is he just a militant vegetarian?) and asexuality just weirds me out, I guess.
~~~~~~~~~~
From: “Jeff Hurchalla”
Subject: cheap nic

Hi Dave, Don’t know if you’ve already caught this, but I got a linksys 10/100 nic at Best Buy for $5 after rebate ($10 regular) on Thrusday 4/26. I can’t say how long it’ll last, but at that kind of price I thought you and your readers might like to hear about it. The card is suppoosed to support 95/98/me/2000, possibly NT and macOS, and also has unsupported drivers for linux. On another note, I’m having the most horrendous time setting up networking in win98 imaginable. I used to work in Tcp/ip programming so of course it feels like it shouldnt be anywhere near this hard to do.. but that wasn’t using anything microsoft. Well enough complaining, as fun as it is 🙂 Do you have any suggestions for a web page to look at that goes in depth? I want to connect win98 computer to another win98, I’m using a linksys card in one and an NDC card in the other. The one with the linksys also has a Dlink card connected to a cable modem. I’ve attempted to set up internet connection sharing on the computer with 2 cards(it is 98se), but right now I can’t get either computer to see the other one. They are in the same workgroup. The ICS computer appears to have assigned 192.168.0.1 to the linksys(home) tcp/ip adapter, and the other nic in that computer is connected to the cable modem and working fine. For the other computer, I’ve set windows to automatically assign an IP address. Well if you’ve got any quick suggestions or places for me to look, let me know – I wouldn’t want you to waste time on it – I can do that for both of us quite easily! Take care, Jeff
~~~~~
Easy solution. Don’t set it to obtain an IP address automatically. Give the other (non-ICS) PC an address in the 192.168.0.x range yourself, with subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 and gateway of 192.168.0.1, then open a command prompt and try to ping the other one. If that works, specify your DNS addresses, then try pinging yahoo.com. I’m betting both will work, as will file and printer sharing if you turn that on (but be sure to unbind the Microsoft client from your Dlink card).

Unless you’ve got a DHCP server somewhere on the network, Windows will assign it a goofy address (in the 64.x.x.x range if I remember right–it’s some range that makes absolutely no sense) and you won’t see anything.

As for the NIC, that’s a nice price but I really don’t like to use Linksys cards. The Netgear card selling at CompUSA for $10 this week is a better card. I can confirm that Linux readily recognizes the Linksys, but the failure rate is higher than I like to see. Thanks for the tip though.
~~~~~~~~~~
From: “Al Hedstrom”
Subject: The Move

Dave –

I also want to move my stuff, but I’ll move it to a host and probably use something like Coffee Cup. One question: How are you moving all your archives? Page by page?

Al Hedstrom
~~~~~
Yep, I think that’s the way I’m going to have to do it. I’m looking into alternatives but right now I don’t see any. I’m going to set up a test server and play around with it. I haven’t downloaded my Manila site yet; it may be possible to extract the stuff. That’d be nice. If I can extract the text I can probably wrap the template around it and fake out Greymatter, but I haven’t really looked into it the way I should. Maybe next weekend.
~~~~~~~~~~
From: Mike Barkman
Subject: DMA problem

Hi Dave —

A small problem: I’m hurriedly converting my spare box for my son-in-law, as his second office machine has carked.

It has a Gigabyte GA5AA m/b with the ALi chipset and 100 MHz bus. The processor is AMD K6-II-350 and 64 MB of SDram. I’ve transferred his two drives over — Seagate medallists, one 6 GB and the other 8 GB. I cleaned off the c: partition and reinstalled Win98SE and his working software.

Problem: I enabled DMA for each drive and the CDRom; but it won’t stick — reboot and the checkmark has vanished.

Any ideas? I was transferring files over my network, and the speed was dead slow — that’s what tipped me off.

Cheers /Mike
~~~~~
Sounds like you don’t have the proper drivers for your ALi chipset. Download those from your Gigabyte’s site and install them, and chances are that’ll clear up the DMA issue.