This changes everything

Dave Farquhar Personal

I won’t post specifics in order to protect him, but I became a father this week. This is my first, a son.

Don’t expect any coherence in any of this. These are just some thoughts in the order they come to me.I’d never changed a diaper before in my life. The day he was born, I think I changed four. By the time I did the last one, I was even able to change one without him screaming bloody murder.

As I changed those diapers, it was so clear how vulnerable he is. He’s pretty much defenseless in every single way. Maybe that’s the idea, so parents will protect and nurture them.

They had to monitor his blood sugar really closely at first, and he screamed bloody murder whenever they took those samples. I tried to figure out how I could convince them to let me take the sample. Of course any sample I took would be from me, not from him.

Balancing your son’s long-term safety against comfort for the moment is a bit difficult. In the long term, all of those shots and other things will make him healthier. But there’s no way to explain any of that to him. All he knows is that strange people are hurting him and he can’t hear mom’s and dad’s voices anymore.

So far it looks like he has my ears, my eyes, my hair, and my wife’s nose and bone structure. The combination quickly made him popular with the female nurses. I hope his vision ends up being comparable to mine and my dad’s, but I sure hope he doesn’t end up being as prone to ear infections as I was. It also might be nice if he doesn’t get his first gray hair in the sixth grade like I did.

I’ve always been afraid to hold other people’s babies because I was afraid I might drop them. I haven’t had any trouble with him. It’s easier for some reason when it’s your own.

Trying to bribe a newborn with promises of a puppy, trains, and Tonka trucks doesn’t work. I didn’t think it would, but I thought it was worth a shot.

It’s also impossible to explain to the dog where my wife is and that she’s bringing a baby home. My dog loves kids, and any time kids come to visit, she’ll walk around the house looking for them even a couple of hours after they’ve left. I don’t know how she’ll react to a newborn, but once he’s big enough to crawl, she’ll have a playmate for the rest of her life.

I used to joke, derisively, that some people want to baptize their babies before, or right after, the umbilical cord is cut. I actually understand that attitude now. I still don’t agree with it (except in case of dire emergency of course), but now I see the perspective. I wasn’t there in the room holding a glass of water. But did the thought cross my mind? Yes.

The argument for paying your mortgage off early

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , ,

I’ve had a number of people tell me I’m making a mistake paying my mortgage off early. If all goes well, my wife and I will be rid of that debt sometime this year.

I can understand the logic behind keeping that "good debt." But that’s idealistic. I have lots of reasons for getting rid of that as soon as possible.First, there’s my personal experience. Right out of college, I invested everything I could, and for a time I looked like a genius because the market was doing gangbusters in 1998 and 1999. Then the double whammy of the dotcom bust and 9/11 happened, and I literally lost half of it. Now that those investments have mostly recovered, the market is in the toilet again. How much will I lose this time?

Of course, when the losses are piling up it’s a great time to buy at low prices and hold. If that were the only factor, I might do it.

But in the meantime, I know exactly what the return will be if I pay off the mortgage early. And it doesn’t really matter what the rest of the economy does.

The second factor is job security. Let’s look at my recent history. In 2005 I lost my job. About six weeks later I found another one. It wasn’t ideal, because the company was having financial problems and I knew going in that it might not last. I took it because I was on the hook for pair of $400 car payments and an $1,100 mortgage. By my math, the money I had in the bank would last about four more months. I took the job because I didn’t like my odds of finding anything better.

The job lasted four months.

When that ended, I interviewed with another company for a temporary job. It was anything but ideal: About an hour away, and it was only for two months. But it was late October, not a good time for job-hunting, and this would get me through the holidays. The interview was a home run.

I didn’t get the job though. Later that very day, the company did a round of massive layoffs, and the job I interviewed for ceased to exist. I lost the job before I even had it.

For two months I looked and didn’t find anything. I couldn’t even find a desktop support job.

Finally at the end of December I got another job. It wasn’t ideal either. The biggest problem was that it was 45 minutes from home. For seven years I’d worked 10-20 minutes from home. Did I want the job? No. Did I have a choice? Given my recent history, not really. My car was paid off but my wife’s wasn’t yet, so we were still on the hook for $1,500 every month. This job was secure for at least a couple of years, which was a lot better than the last two opportunities. So I took it.

I’ve looked for something closer since then. The problem is that there are so many other people who want any job that comes up. I’ve had a few phone calls, but never an interview.

My job is reasonably secure until September or October. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess. If the house is paid off before then, it doesn’t matter nearly as much.

In decades past, if you got a job with a good company, there was a reasonable expectation on both sides that you would work for that company until you retired. That world doesn’t really exist anymore. A lot of companies want turnover, because it keeps wages down. It almost seems like some companies try to make sure you won’t be around more than five years so they don’t have to give you a third week of vacation.

Other companies run themselves into the ground before you can stick around five years.

In that kind of environment, being on the hook for $2,000 a month for 30 years just doesn’t look very appealing. There will be periods of time in your career that you won’t have that money coming in. The only question is when it will be, and for how long.

Changing careers becomes much easier without a mountain of debt. A lot of us end up in jobs that don’t really suit us, for whatever reason. We go to college and study four or five years, hoping to figure out what we want to do with our lives. It’s really not enough time, and most of us don’t actually find ourselves until we’re somewhere north of age 30. By then it may be too late. We’ve built up our debts and our lifestyles to the point that we can’t afford to change careers and start over at the bottom of the pay scale again. And if you have to go back to school on top of that? Ouch.

What if you want to chase the American Dream the classic way and go into business for yourself? The problem with that is that most businesses can’t make enough to support the owner until they’re two or three years old. This is why most businesses don’t survive more than 18-24 months.

If you’re not on the hook for $2,000 a month, you can much better afford to weather a few lean months or even a couple of years until you can either climb the pay scale in a new career, or your business matures to the point where it can support you. Getting rid of debt puts you back in control of your own destiny.

Finally, I’ve seen what it’s like to not have debt. Some friends of my mother in law and father in law convinced them that it would be a good idea to pay off all of their debt, and they gave them a plan to do it in seven years. They did it. And even though the two of them had modest salaries–she was a schoolteacher and he was a disabled veteran with no college education, which limited him to jobs that didn’t pay a lot–without that debt, they were able to live very comfortably and retire while they were in their 50s.

Imagine what it would be like to have the freedom to change to a career that suits you, reach the point where you’re able to retire in your 50s, but not really want to retire yet because you enjoy what you’re doing.

Not having an anchor of debt hanging around your neck opens a lot of possibilities, doesn’t it? I think it’s worth sacrificing a couple of years of investing to get to that point.

Identifying what processes are talking on your Windows box

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , , ,

If you’re curious whether a particular piece of software might be spyware, or you have some other reason to believe your computer might have been compromised and might be talking to something it shouldn’t be, there’s a quick and easy way to find out besides using the standard netstat -an command.

Windows XP and 2003 (and, presumably, Vista) have the netstat -o command, which tells you what IP addresses your computer is talking to and on what ports, plus it adds the process IDs that have those ports open. There’s a hotfix to add that functionality to Windows 2000, but it appears you have to demonstrate a need for it in order for Microsoft to provide it.

Regardless, I like the Sysinternals tool TCPview better. The most important thing it does is give you the names of the application, instead of the process ID, using each port. That saves you from having to run task manager and figure it out yourself. It puts everything in a GUI window, making it a little bit easier to scroll around, and it also tries to resolve the IP addresses, which can be nice. So if all you have open is a web browser pointing at Google and you see processes talking to web addresses you’ve never heard of, you have reason to be suspicious.

The next time someone complains to me that a computer is running slow, once I think I’ve cleaned off the spyware I think I’ll run this utility just to see if there might be anything left.

What’s wrong with Kirkwood?

Dave Farquhar St. Louis ,

Tonight at 7 PM, a Kirkwood area contractor named Charles Lee "Cookie" Thornton walked in to a city council meeting. On his way in he shot two police officers, then opened fire and shot five others, including the mayor, his intended target. He fired on the city attorney and missed; the attorney fought back by throwing chairs at Thornton until more police officers ran in and shot Thornton dead.

Five of Thornton’s victims are dead.Kirkwood is the place where Kevin Johnson hunted down, shot and killed police officer William McEntee after the Kirkwood Police were unable to save his half brother in 2005.

A little over a year ago, kidnapping victims Shawn Hornbeck and Ben Ownby were found in a Kirkwood apartment.

Thornton and Johnson lived about three blocks apart, in Kirkwood’s Meacham Park neighborhood.

What’s wrong with Kirkwood?

Well, mostly Meacham Park, which is what was wrong with Kirkwood 20 years ago.

Kirkwood is largely an upper middle-class suburb today, although there are working-class pockets. At one time it was a railroad town, and it shows in some of the neighborhoods. But by and large, it’s the kind of place a doctor, lawyer, or executive wouldn’t be ashamed to call home, and a potential client wouldn’t think any less of a professional who hailed from there.

I know the area well and like it. In high school, I worked in a restaurant in Kirkwood. I worked in Kirkwood off and on from 1998 to 2005. I don’t live there mostly because I can’t afford to.

When I was a teenager, Meacham Park was mostly a nuisance. People from Meacham Park would come into the restaurant and cause trouble, making a mess or stealing things, whether it would be food off the salad bar or stupid stuff like napkins or straws. When a shift supervisor disappeared mysteriously one night and left the safe empty except for a single $5 bill and some singles, he hid out in Meacham Park. Another coworker who lived in Meacham Park found him–alive.

When parts of Meacham Park were leveled to make way for an enormous strip mall, I didn’t shed any tears for it.

How you fix the Meacham Park problem is pretty clear–provide opportunities. Thornton, by the accounts I’m hearing, did some things right. He had a bachelor’s degree and ran a small business. Unfortunately he racked up more than $18,500 worth of fines, which has been cited as a motive in the shootings. Thornton used to show up at city council meetings and cause trouble. I guess he couldn’t come up with a more constructive way to protest the fines.

It would have been better if he just would have gotten the permits he was supposed to get in order to conduct his business legally.

Thornton claimed discrimination, and others have said he would get ticketed for minor violations. I knew plenty of Kirkwood police officers from my time working in the restaurant. This goes back several years of course, but the Kirkwood police weren’t prejudiced against people because of the color of their skin. They were prejudiced against people who caused problems.

Many of my coworkers were African-American, and the only one who had problems with the Kirkwood police was involved in criminal activity, so it was justifiable.

So I believe they may have targeted Thornton, but I believe the motivation was the past violations.

I don’t know many details of what’s happening, but if you’re a praying person, please pray for the city of Kirkwood and the families of the six deceased and two wounded.

Everybody is creative

Dave Farquhar General , ,

When a 15-year-old came around asking how to continue his hobbies during a time in his life when finances and time are a bit short, I had a simple suggestion for him: Work on developing his creativity.

Creativity has another bonus: It’s also one of 10 traits that can make you rich, if that’s important to you.I remember in an annual review I received several years ago, a manager said I come up with creative solutions to problems. I’m still not sure if that was meant as a compliment or not, but I took it as one. That ability to find odd, not-so-obvious solutions to problems saved my first employer a lot of money in a time that it really needed it. We needed to replace a project that had cost about $100,000 to create, and we had $25,000 to do it.

I did it. It required us to do things as a department that we’d never done before. We had some hiccups along the way, and we finished with just one day to spare. It was stressful. But we did it.

Up until I was about 20, I never really thought of myself as creative. I could always write, but I never was all that good at drawing and painting or playing musical instruments, which are the things we normally associate with creativity. As a junior at the University of Missouri, I took a class titled The Graphics of Journalism, taught by Dr. Birgit Wassmuth, who is now chairwoman of the Department of communications at Kennesaw State University. Dr. Wassmuth argued that everyone has creative ability, but not everyone has tapped it to its potential.

I think I got a B+ in the class (yes, MU has a plus/minus system) and I really had to work for it. It was one of the three hardest classes I took, and I don’t think many of the people who took that class would disagree.

It was a basic class that almost everyone had to take. If you were going to be a graphic designer it was a necessity, but for everyone else, it was basically intended to teach you enough skills that in an emergency, if you had to grab a camera or fire up a desktop publishing or a graphics program, you’d be able to do a decent enough job to not make your employer look like a fool.

There’ve been times when I’ve had to do all of those things during writing projects. But the biggest value in that class came in life itself.

Often there are times you have to do something and you don’t have the ideal materials on hand. It always helps to look at something and consider alternative possibilities. In my professional field, there are always 20 ways to do something. I’ve worked in the past with people who always do things “by the book,” but that can be a problem, depending on who wrote the book. Was it written by someone who’s been working with that particular subject matter for 20 years, or was it written by someone who’s only seen the product in a lab environment, not in the real world? A lot of Windows books are written by the latter type, and I’ve seen by-the-book types make decisions that box them in based on that.

But even better is the ability to look at a pile of stuff and think of answers to a simple question: What can I do with this?

The younger you are when you start doing this, the better. I guess I started early; It was nothing to me to look at a box of my friends’ toys, pull out a couple of broken toys, and make something else out of the broken pieces.

When I was in between jobs a few years ago, I looked around the house for ideas for ways to make some money until I found a permanent job. At first my phone kept ringing, so it didn’t look like I’d have much trouble finding something. But then the phone stopped, so I had to think of alternatives. My first couple of ideas didn’t pan out. The third one was a home run, and besides keeping the light on, it gave my wife an alternative to teaching, which was important because she was unhappy. Now she has a lot more flexibility and she doesn’t have to deal with parents and administration wanting her to be a pass-everyone babysitter when she wanted to be a serious teacher.

What she’s doing today isn’t for everyone, but she’s much happier now, and even in the early stages it provided enough income for us to keep the lights on until I could find a permanent job with benefits.

I guess I had the tendencies even when I was in grade school, but it wasn’t until college that someone really taught me how to cultivate it. So even though I’m not working at a magazine now, which definitely was where I would have wanted to be in 2008 if you’d asked me while I was in college, that class probably changed my life more than any other class I took in college. Knowing how to harness creativity got me out of some bad spots in life.

So I think it’s a good idea for everyone to take a class or otherwise learn how to make something, whether it’s art classes, woodworking classes, cooking, or something else.

Knowing what to use when you’re in the middle of making something and you realized you’re out of butter is a useful skill. And I don’t think it’s always a good idea to take the easy way out and borrow some from your next door neighbor.

Sometimes workarounds aren’t quite that easy, and sometimes there’s more at stake than a batch of bread.

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.