No reason for brand wars

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , , , , , ,

On one of the train forums I frequent, a legitimate question quickly degenerated into brand wars. And brand wars are one thing, but when people hold their preferred company to a different standard than the other company–in other words, one company is evil because it does something, but their preferred company does the same thing, it isn’t productive.

Actually, I see very little reason for brand loyalty as it is. I drive a Honda and I use a Compaq computer. Do either of those companies have any loyalty to me? No. To them, I’m just a source of income from yesterday.I don’t like the categorization of companies as "good" and "evil." Companies don’t exist to be good or evil. Companies exist for one reason: Make money. And one thing to remember is that companies will always do exactly what they think they can get away with.

In the case of the toy train wars, the two antagonists are Lionel and MTH. MTH is a scrappy underdog that got its start building trains as a subcontractor for Lionel. A business deal went bad–in short, Lionel left MTH high and dry on a multimillion dollar project, so MTH decided to go on its own and sell the product Lionel decided it didn’t want, but Lionel didn’t like the idea of one of its subcontractors competing with it while also making product for them, and understandably so.

MTH and Lionel have been mortal enemies ever since.

A few years ago, MTH accused Lionel of stealing trade secrets. The specifics are difficult to sort out, but someone with intimate knowledge of some of MTH’s products started designing equivalent products for Lionel. MTH sued and won, to the tune of $40 million. The case is now in appeal.

There’s no question that Lionel benefited from this contractor’s knowledge of the competing product. The question is who knew this was going on, who authorized it, and what an appropriate punishment would be. The only people who are questioning guilt have blinders on. There is no innocence here–just possible degrees of guilt. The other question is appropriateness. Lionel doesn’t have $40 million in the bank. Arguably the company isn’t worth a lot more than $40 million. So that $40 million judgment is essentially the corporate death penalty.

MTH is anything but perfect and holy, however. The thing that bothers me most about MTH is its attempt to patent elements of DCC (Digital Command Control), a method for automating train layouts. It’s an open industry standard, widely used by HO and N scale hobbyists. So MTH was seeking to collect royalties on something that’s supposed to be free for everyone to use. That’s a particular pet peeve of mine, and it’s the reason I haven’t bought any MTH products since 2003.

I came close to relenting this weekend though, when I saw some people bashing MTH while holding Lionel up as some kind of perfect, holy standard. It made me want to go buy a bunch of MTH gear, photograph myself with it, and post it on some forums so I could watch these guys have a stroke about it. Fortunately for them, I have better things to do with $200 right now. I also looked on my layout, and I don’t know where I could put the things I would have considered buying.

I’m more familiar with the computer industry than I am with anything else, and if you mention any computer company, I can probably think of something they did that would fit most people’s definition of evil. HP? Print cartridges that lie about being empty. Lexmark? Same thing, plus using the DMCA to keep you from refilling them. Dell? Nonstandard pinouts on power supplies that look standard, but blow up your motherboard if you try to use non-Dell equipment. IBM? Microchannel. Microsoft? Don’t get me started. Apple? Lying in ads.

As far as I’m concerned though, the most evil company of all is Disney. Disney, of all people? Yes. Disney is the main reason for the many complicated rewrites of copyright law that we’ve had in recent decades. Whenever something Disney values might fall into the public domain, Disney buys enough congressmen to get the laws changed. Never mind that early in its history, Disney exploited the public domain for its gain as much as anyone (which was its legal right), even to the point of waiting for The Jungle Book to fall into the public domain before making the movie, in order to avoid paying royalties to Rudyard Kipling. The problem is that now that Disney is the biggest kid on the block, it’s changing the rules it used to get there, so that nobody else can do it.

Unfortunately I’ve even seen not-for-profit corporations, companies that exist mostly to give away money, do dishonest things and essentially steal. If a charity can and will do these things, you can be certain that a for-profit corporation will.

So I don’t see any reason for brand loyalty, aside from liking a product. If you buy a company’s products and you like them, fine. Keep buying them. But that doesn’t make the people who prefer a competitor’s product evil. They didn’t sign off on the decisions, and your favorite company has done its own share of underhanded things too, whether you know it or not.

And there’s certainly no reason to go to war for your company of choice. It wouldn’t do the same for you.

Fighting Web rage

Dave Farquhar net.culture , , , , ,

There’s something about the Internet that turns people into jerks. Or maybe there’s something about jerks that turns them on to the Internet. — Tim Barker, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

I loved that lead, and the rest of the story is good too. I first started using the Internet in 1993, and I first went online sometime in 1986 or 87.
I think people who started going online in the 1980s and early 1990s tend to be more polite because in those days, “going online” usually meant dialing into a computer that a hobbyist set up in a spare bedroom for the purpose of attracting like-minded people who wanted to talk about shared interests. It was an expensive hobby–generally the computer had to be dedicated to the purpose, and the operator had to pay for an extra phone line, and the software to run the operatiion cost money too.

Whenever someone would start acting rude, it didn’t take long for someone to step in and remind the person that he (in those days, it usually was a he) was essentially a guest in someone’s house, and he had to play by the owner’s rules or get thrown out.

There were still disagreements, of course, and if there were too many people I didn’t like on a particular bulletin board, I’d quit calling. At first I took it personally, but considering that in 1990 there were literally hundreds of bulletin boards running in St. Louis, it was always easy to find a new hangout.

One of my friends from those days ended up being the best man at my wedding. I ran into someone else I knew from that timeframe back in December at a train show. He and I probably talked for more than an hour, catching up.

The big problem today is that people think they own the Internet because they pay $20 a month for Internet access, so they have the right to go anywhere they want and say and do anything they want. And they also think they can do this without anyone knowing who they are or where they live. The combination of unlimited entitlement and zero presence of fear tends to bring out the worst in bitter, unpleasant people.

The thing is, you don’t own the Internet. That monthly fee just gives you the right to use it. If you hop in your car, drive someplace, and pay the cover charge, you don’t own the place. If you start threatening people or otherwise making things unpleasant, the guy who pays the rent can throw you out.

The anonymyty is a bit of a myth too. Ask anyone who’s been sued for downloading MP3s. Tracking someone down online is sometimes difficult, but it’s never impossible. There’s a guy on a train forum I frequent who uses the cryptic name of LS51Heli. Hiding behind a cryptic username, a throwaway Gmail address, and a bunch of false information in his user profile, he relishes in taunting and harassing anyone who disagrees with him–and some people who don’t.

But the security LS51Heli thinks he lives under doesn’t exist. Ask Lori Drew, the woman whose online bullying drove Megan Meier to suicide in 2006. Knowing nothing more than the name of a neighbor, hundreds of people tracked her down. A friend and I spent a couple of hours one Sunday night and Monday morning tracking her down, before her identity became widely known. Most of the tools we used were a bit more complicated than a Google search, but everything we used is free and open on the Internet, ready for anyone to use–provided they know where to look.

I can’t speak for anyone else’s motivation, but we unmasked her so that we could keep her away from his kids. Once a bully, always a bully. We never did anything else with the information.

I’ve never felt the need to go unmask LS51Heli. But it could be done.

Usually the troublemakers on train forums will eventually get banned, and then they’ll slink off to another forum and complain about how their rights to freedom of speech got stepped on. One forum in particular tends to be a real magnet for these people, and they refer to the more mainstream forums as “North Korea,” “Iran,” and “Iraq” while they talk about goings-on at the places that banned them and poke fun at the forums’ owners and anyone they don’t like.

They forget that the person who pays to run the web site has rights too–including the right to throw out unruly guests.

The Internet would be a much more pleasant place if we all remembered that we’re just guests in someone else’s house. I pay my monthly fee, but the site operator’s bill is a lot higher than my $20 a month. It’s no different from visiting my sister. It costs me $20 to drive there, but she pays the mortgage, so she owns the place and she makes the rules.

Ve hev vays to uninstall Symantec Antivirus

Dave Farquhar Software ,

We use Symantec Antivirus where we work, and somehow I got put in charge of it. It’s not my favorite product, but I’m not sure what would be better. So we live with it.

Recently I had two systems that decided they didn’t want to be managed anymore, and my usual fix, copying the server’s certificate file and grc.dat back into place, didn’t work. The official solution? Uninstall and reinstall.

So what if it refuses to uninstall and reinstall?I didn’t like the answer I got (rebuild the server), so I did some digging. I noticed that one of the services hung in the stopping state, which gave me a clue. I found manual instructions for uninstalling, but one of the prerequisites is that you stop all the services.

Unable to stop the services, I set everything with “Symantec” in its name to Disabled and rebooted. When the server came back, SAV wasn’t running.

At that point, the manual uninstallation would have worked, but that process takes 30-60 minutes, depending on how much junk you have to wade through in the registry (the more applications you have installed, the longer it takes). While I was snowed in this weekend, I built a machine and installed SAV on it so I could step through the process. With nothing else installed, it took me about 30 minutes to complete all the steps.

I decided to be lazy and see if I could pull it out with Add/Remove Programs. It would take 5-10 minutes to find out, and if it worked, it would be a good investment of time.

In my case, it worked, so I got to trade 60-120 minutes of active work for 20 minutes of mostly passive work. That’s a good trade, especially when the active work involves registry editing.

If the official method, via Add/Remove Programs, had failed, I can think of one option besides the manual uninstall. If your local bureaucracy will allow you to install a tool without jumping through a zillion hoops, you could install Revo Uninstaller and see if it can clean up the mess. Odds are it would leave fewer traces of SAV strewn about on your computer, so you’d get a cleaner uninstall, and, perhaps, less chance of whatever caused your problem in the first place lingering and rearing its ugly head again.

That wasn’t an option for me, so I was glad that I was able to get Add/Remove Programs to work.

Making trees from wire, plaster and lichen

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , ,

I like this tutorial because it uses common materials and works for almost any kind of train: Making detailed oaks and maples.

It doesn’t hurt that the results look good too.I don’t think there would be anything wrong with using these trees on a tinplate prewar O gauge, Standard Gauge, or 2-inch Gauge (Carlisle & Finch and the like) layout. I don’t know if hobbyists were using these techniques 100 years ago, but the materials were all available then.

Lichen is available at craft and floral supply stores. You could also buy floral wire there to use in the project in place of electrical wire. Plaster is available at craft and hardware stores. And you can paint it with craft acrylics, available at craft stores and even some discount stores.

A lot of projects require a good hobby shop close by, and not everyone has one of those anymore. Living where I do, there are three good shops within 15 minutes of home (one is only about three miles away) but some projects require specialty items those stores don’t have. About a year ago I went to the estate sale of a model railroader who was extremely good at building and superdetailing kits. Virtually everything he had came from a hobby shop much further away.

The first thing I thought when I saw this project was that I could probably go out and buy everything I needed to make some of these even if I was visiting my in-laws in southeastern Missouri. And I might not even have to drive 30 miles to the nearest Hobby Lobby to get what I need.

It might be the first project I’ve ever seen where this is true.

A big time test for Nlite

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , ,

I saw an XP Myths page this weekend, and although I don’t agree with its assessment of XP’s security, most of it seemed credible. It said XP can do fine on as little as a 233 MHz Pentium with 128 MB of RAM.

I whipped out a P2-266 with 192 MB of RAM to see.The specs are humble, to say the least: P2-266, 192 MB RAM (upgraded from 96 because XP kicks into some kind of "reduced functionality" mode with less than 128), and a very old Seagate 1.2 GB hard drive.

I installed XP with lots of pieces, like Media Player and the Internet Connection Wizard, removed, although I did leave in Internet Explorer.

Initially I formatted the drive FAT, since FAT does perform about 20% better than NTFS on limited hardware. The problem was the cluster size got me. Formatted FAT, I had about 100 MB free when the installation was complete, which is dangerously low. Converting to NTFS brought that up to 170 MB, and gives the option to compress some items to get some more space.

Performance wise, it’s not as bad as it sounds. Windows boots in 1 minute, 15 seconds after defragmenting the drive. Considering this 1.2 GB drive probably dates to 1996 at the latest, that’s awfully good. Memory usage was 96 MB, so you’d be able to run an application or two on it, although a modern web browser would feel claustrophobic after a while.

If I were actually going to try to use this computer, I’d put a decent hard drive in it–the newer the better, of course.

I would also want to upgrade the memory to 384 MB, which is the maximum this one supports. A cut-down XP seems to do just fine in 192 MB of RAM, but it wouldn’t do so fine with antivirus software loaded.

I still think a cut-down Windows 2000 is a better choice for this type of machine, but it’s certainly possible to run XP on it. With either OS, though, I would use Nlite to remove as much of the fluff as possible, to give yourself some space for whatever it is you really want to do with the machine. I think it would make a good PC to run educational software for kids, for example. And it’s nice to have a choice of something other than Windows 98 for that.

The Nlite-d Compaq revisited

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , ,

I installed antivirus software on the Compaq today. As expected, it weighed things down–boot time doubled, to 40 seconds, and memory usage approximately doubled, to 212 MB.

I can’t do much about the memory usage. But half the system memory is still available for apps, which should be fine. Upgrading the memory is always an option for the future. The boot time was fixable.I ran Jk-Defrag, which is probably my favorite utility now. Full optimization didn’t take long on a system with so little on it. I used the option -a7 to sort by filename, which works surprisingly well.

To help the memory usage a little, I yanked the Microsoft Office stub out of the startup group. All that does is preload some of Office at boot time, so Office apps load faster. But modern hardware negates it. With that running, Word loads in about two seconds. Without it, Word loads in about two seconds. Windows XP’s prefetching gives the same benefit for free, so there’s no point in wasting memory on the Office startup piece.

The two changes dropped the boot time to 30 seconds, which is pretty good, especially on a conventional drive. A minute is typical for a stock Windows XP system, even on new hardware. Solid-state drive manufacturers brag about how their products can boot XP in 30 seconds.

I wonder how fast they’d boot if they’d been installed off my Windows CD?

Memory usage and boot time will jump some more when it comes time to actually use the system–scanner drivers and digital camera software need memory and take time to load. But that’s OK. My goal was just to reduce the overhead somewhat, since antivirus software is an absolute requirement these days, and its overhead is only going to go up. I ran across a year-old stash of virus definition files recently, and today’s files are more than 50% larger. The number of viruses out there is growing, and they are becoming more complex.

Confessions of a \"child man\"

Dave Farquhar Personal

I read an editorial about the “child man” phenomenon and it made me mad.

I fit those stereotypes, spending most of my 20s living in an apartment surrounded by toys, in somewhat social isolation, when I was supposed to be “growing up,” taking responsibility, (whatever those two things mean), getting married, and pumping out kids. I even had people telling me this back in that era.

Believe me, I wasn’t living this way by choice. And it wasn’t for lack of trying that I was stuck there.I did date some girls after college. Notice I call them girls–it was appropriate. The first relationship started just a few months after I graduated. For worse and for better, she became one of the most influential people in my life, and sometimes that influence still lingers even though it’s been nearly a decade since the last time we spoke to one another.

Marriage material? No way, although you couldn’t convince me of that when I was 23. If you asked me then, she had it all: reasonably good looks, sky-high intelligence, and she and I could talk for hours about any number of different things. Ask me now, and there were problems, most of which had to do with maturity: She knew everything (just ask her); she had a very difficult time accepting me for who I was, flaws and virtues; her self-righteousness got on my nerves; and perhaps most importantly, she was still in school while I’d started my career, and she couldn’t relate to the demands my employer was putting on me, or to the difficulty I was having adjusting to those demands.

She also said I had a drinking problem. Yes, at the time I was drinking more heavily than I ever had before or since, but I was having two or three drinks a week, never more than one per day, and I never drank alone. Since alcoholism runs in my family, it wasn’t the smartest thing for me to be doing, but the quantities were small enough that I wasn’t hurting anything either. I know because nothing weird happened when I stopped.

Actually, there was one other problem. At church a few months after she and I had broken up, I asked three middle-aged men what I needed to be looking for, because I didn’t know. Dwight, perhaps the wisest of the three, spoke up first. He said to look for sexual attractiveness because you’re going to look for that anyway, and for someone your family approves of because they’re going to have to interact for a very long time, and for someone you would trust to raise your children correctly if something were to happen to you.

Dwight’s advice was so concise and brilliant that neither of the other two said much of anything except that they agreed with Dwight.

Everyone else had always given me a much longer list, and what was messing me up was that this girl was tailor-made for those longer lists. But she only went one for three on Dwight’s list. My family resented the way she controlled me and didn’t let me be myself, and I totally wouldn’t trust her to raise my kids because she would homeschool them and they wouldn’t know how to deal with people–just like her.

And as for the attractiveness, let’s just say she wasn’t worth being shallow for, and leave it at that.

So Dwight set me on the right path at 23. I knew what to look for. The trouble was finding it. As far as girls my own age, there was only one who went to my church. She and I had gone to high school together. We got along fine, but it never seemed like we had much in common. There were plenty of girls in high school, but whenever 23-year-olds had tried to date my younger sister, I always looked down on them. And when I tried dating someone still in college, we had trouble relating. Wouldn’t it be worse with someone who was still in high school?

So I got a new job in St. Louis and moved there. I needed that break anyway. By that time the ex had graduated, met someone else and was all but engaged (she was in a hurry), and had left town, but Columbia still felt like it was half hers. I needed to go either to Kansas City or St. Louis, because either of those would be mine. I had more connections in St. Louis and that helped me get a job, so I landed there.

And? Well, there weren’t a lot of 23-year-old girls at my new church either. There were plenty where I worked, but they were almost all engaged or married. Those who weren’t had a lot of baggage and nothing ever happened.

So to fill up the empty apartment, I spent most of age 24 writing and publishing a book. I’d say that took a little bit of responsibility, and a lot of other things.

So I wasn’t meeting girls at church or at work. I needed to get out, right? Check out the bar scene or something! Well, wrong, because I know what kind of person you’ll probably get if you do that: someone a lot like the girl I dated when I was 28.

At 22, she was a lot younger than me. How’d she rate against Dwight’s rules? Reasonably attractive, although a slight downgrade from her predecessor. She seemed to get along fine with my family. Raising kids was the unknown. Two months in, I saw a potential problem–she was entirely too much into drinking and party living and had no interest in outgrowing it. (By then, I was down to a couple of drinks a year.) I held on for five more months, hoping that would change, and even trying to force a change. That didn’t work out so well. My friends told me I really needed to break up with her. They were right but I didn’t want to believe it just yet. It didn’t matter though, because she broke up with me first.

So there I was. Back on the market at 29.

The nice thing about 29, as opposed to 23, is that your range broadens. At that age, it’s perfectly OK to date someone 8, 9, even 10 years younger than you. And, like 23, you can date someone older than you too. Being alone again still stank, but at least at 29 I had more options than the last time around.

And this time I actually shopped around a bit. I read a book that tried to help you know in five dates or less if someone was worth pursuing and I guess it helped, but all I really needed was Dwight’s rules.

In this case, I knew about two weeks in how she’d do on #3. I got sick and missed some work. She took care of me. And all I could think was that if this was how she treated a guy she’d just met, what would she be like with her own flesh and blood? She met my family soon afterward and did fine. Mom really liked her. So that was it for rule #2. And #1 was a given, since there wouldn’t have been a second date if #1 hadn’t been OK.

So I got married at 31. I’ll be 33 when our first son is born. I guess we’ve had some ups and downs but my coworkers all complain about their wives more than I do.

If I’d done what these “man-boy” critics wanted me to do, I would have gotten married 10 years ago, wrecked my life, wrecked that girl’s life, and we would have made a really unpleasant environment for our kids. And then we would have been left with two unpleasant choices: Stay together for the kids and wreck their lives some more, or a really messy divorce and perhaps wreck her relationship with her family, who believe there’s basically no justifiable reason to divorce, ever.

I think I did the right thing by waiting. Not that I had much choice in the matter, but on some level at least I always knew what I was looking for. I suppose I could have made a mistake at 23 but even then I knew something wasn’t right, and I don’t think I would have actually gone through with it. The relationship at 28 was more of a long shot to end up becoming a bad marriage because of the alcohol. There was no point in all my hard work to avoid becoming an alcoholic if I turned around and married one.

I did the right thing for me, my wife, my son, and society. Those “man-boy” critics need to go do the right thing for society too, and just shut up.

A Readyboost alternative for XP

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , ,

I found a reference today to Eboostr, a product that adds Readyboost-like capability to XP. Essentially it uses a USB 2.0 flash drive to speed up your system, although it’s unclear whether it’s using it for virtual memory, a disk cache, or both.

I found a review.I don’t have a machine that’s an ideal candidate for this. The product, from everyone else’s comments on the blog, works best on machines that have less than 1 GB of RAM. If you’ve maxxed out the memory on an aging laptop, this product will extend its usefulness.

My ancient Micron Transport laptop would be a good candidate, since it maxes out at 320MB of RAM and none of the 256 MB sticks I’ve tried in it work, so I’m stuck at 192 MB. But there are two problems: It’s running Windows 2000, and it doesn’t have USB 2.0 slots. Any machine that came with USB 2.0 slots and Windows XP probably can be upgraded pretty cheaply to 1 GB of RAM or more.

I could put XP on the laptop, get a PCMCIA USB 2.0 card for it, and a $20 USB stick so I can use a $29 product to give me Readyboost. But by the time I bought all that, I’d be more than halfway down the road to a newer laptop.

I think a better solution for me would be to replace the hard drive with a solid-state drive. It would cost less than $200, boost the reliability (the latest I’ve heard is that solid state IDE drives will last about 10 years, which is about double the expectancy of a conventional drive), and then everything is on a device with a fast seek time. Plus the drive in that machine is getting old anyway and probably ought to be replaced. I could probably get a solid state drive for about the cost of a conventional hard drive, a USB stick, and this software.

I’m not going to dismiss the software entirely, since it clearly is helping some of the people using it. If you run lots of heavy applications side by side and you’re running up against your memory limits, it can probably help you. And if you can get a good deal on a flash drive (either you have one, or grab one on sale for $20), then there’s little harm in downloading the demo and trying it out for 4 hours. Make sure you stress the system before and after installing to see if you can notice a difference.

If you don’t see much difference, you’re not out much. USB flash drives are incredibly useful anyway. Use it as a cheap and fast backup device. If you do see a difference, then you’ve extended the useful life of your machine.

The mixed results don’t surprise me, frankly. Vista’s Readyboost gives mixed results too. It really helps some people. It has no effect on others. And in rare cases it may actually make things worse.

If you want to try to get some of the benefit for free, you might experiment with redirecting your browser cache, Photoshop scratch disk, and temp files to a USB flash drive. It almost certainly won’t hurt, and could help a lot.

Nlite and Windows XP

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , , ,

Well, I had my first major experience with Nlite and Windows XP tonight. I installed a new 160 GB Seagate hard drive into Mom’s Compaq Evo 510 and I used Nlite to slipstream SP2 into Windows XP, since SP2 is necessary to properly use a drive that big.

The resulting image was far too big to fit on a CD, so I started pulling stuff out.Mainly I pulled out stuff like Outlook Express, MSN Explorer, and Media Player. I thought about removing Internet Explorer, but since Mom is going to use MS Office, I thought twice about that. Office uses IE for some things. If I’d been building the system for me, I’d pull that too.

I also removed most of the international support. I saw no need for anything other than US English and maybe Spanish, so I pulled the rest.

Installation went fast. Really fast. I laid down Windows XP, Office 2000, and Firefox in less than an hour. I used the Nlite CD to install the OS, and I installed Office and Firefox from a USB flash drive. All I need now is antivirus software and the system would be usable.

It boots lightning fast–we’re talking 20 seconds from POST to a desktop with no hourglass. Installing antivirus software will slow that down, but it’s impressive. Part of that is due to the new hard drive, but it’s a Seagate 7200.10. It’s newer and faster than the five-year-old Western Digital drive the system came with, but the 7200.10 isn’t exactly new technology anymore.

Memory usage isn’t bad either–100 megs at boot. That’ll double or triple once I install antivirus software, but at least I’m starting lower than usual.

I didn’t check disk usage, but I’m sure it’s much lower than the typical 1.5 GB.

I’m a believer. The results make me wonder just how old and slow of a computer I could get away with XP on.

When to call it quits and get a new(er) computer

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , ,

Mom’s computer is fading fast. I built it in 2002 or so, but I used stuff from her old computer, including the operating system, which dated to more like 1998.

I’m tired of fixing it. There was a time that I might have enjoyed it, but she needs something reliable, and I don’t have that kind of time anymore. Windows 98 was anything but rock solid when it was new, and this is a 10-year-old build. And do I know for certain that all the hardware is perfect?

It’s cheaper and easier to just start over.I didn’t find any earth-shattering deals at Compgeeks.com, although I did find some stuff that would have been usable. I wandered over to Craigslist and found the usual myriad of people selling their old home PCs. I decided to just do a search for something I knew would work. My wife and I have had a Compaq Evo 510 for about two months now and everything about it impresses me. So I went looking for another one.

I found one. It’s a 2 GHz P4 with 256 MB RAM (I quickly upgraded it to 512) and a CD burner. It even had a fresh install of Windows XP Pro on it, and a certificate of authenticity so it’s legal. I paid less for it than I charged the last time I had to fix someone’s computer. Actually, I paid less for it than a copy of XP Pro sells for. So it really was like getting the hardware for free.

XP isn’t perfect but it’s a lot more stable and reliable than Windows 98 ever was or will be. While this hardware isn’t new, it’s newer than what Mom has, and it’s built with quality components. It’s a business-class machine, and in my experience, business-grade hardware isn’t flashy but it’s very reliable. As long as you feed clean electricity into it, the only thing that’s likely to go wrong is a hard drive crash, and those can happen no matter what you buy.

There is a ton of former office equipment on the market now that’s perfectly usable, replaced only because corporate policy mandates that computers get replaced every three or four years. As long as the hard drive gets replaced, or at the very least reformatted and Windows is freshly reinstalled, these PCs will make very good home computers for a very long time.

They make terrible gaming rigs, although with a better video card you can do some light gaming with them (my Evo 510 runs Railroad Tycoon 3 and Baseball Mogul 2008 just fine).
For word processing, e-mail, and web browsing, they’re all you need.

I put a better video card in it anyway, to free up the memory that the onboard video was using. I put in a $10 Nvidia TNT2 card in it that came out of an old IBM. I got it off Craigslist too.

If anything, I’m more comfortable with Mom having something like this than I would be with her buying a new Compaq Presario or HP Pavilion because it’s made with better components.

If you have an aging Windows 98 computer, this is a good time to upgrade to something a little bit newer. You should be able to get a former business computer with a 2 GHz Pentium 4 running Windows XP for less than $200. It will be money well spent, in any case.

Mom will be happier because she’ll have a much faster and more reliable computer. I’ll be happier because if I play my cards right, I’ll never see Windows 98 again.