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.

Confessions of a mediocre modeler

Dave Farquhar Toy trains

Spookshow is an N scaler’s autobiography of his hobby experience.

I agree with him that he isn’t a master modeler, but if he’s mediocre, he’s upper-tier mediocre. The biggest difference I see between his layouts and the layouts in magazines is the photography–their photographers take clearer, “poppier” shots, and they don’t take photos of the layout’s weak points. (What you don’t show is as important as what you show.)He talks about everything that went into building his layouts, including his thought process, and his philosophy on the hobby. It’s interesting to watch another hobbyist think, and it’s kind of refreshing to see it from the point of view of someone who isn’t full of himself. A lot of hobby sites tend to pat the author on the back a lot (mine may have too much of that attitude too, for that matter), so I find this guy refreshing.

This site is worth spending some time reading, certainly. I don’t do N scale and I don’t go after the realistic look (I may try it someday, but not now) but his insights are very useful.

I don’t know if this attitude is a general thing, or if it’s just one particularly vocal modeler and it seems like a lot because he just talks too stinking much, but I get really irritated with a tunnel-vision approach to the hobby. I can still learn a lot from people who take a different approach from me. I think I can learn more from them than I can from the people who think just like me. After all, we’re probably all stuck in the same rut. I even look at what the tabletop wargamers are doing. They build scenery too…

What high school did you go to?

Dave Farquhar St. Louis ,

Crestwood Plaza is a mall in the southwestern suburbs of St. Louis. It was originally built in 1957, and was one of the largest, if not the largest, malls in the area. I remember the radio commercials from the 1980s where the pitch line was “The ultra mall has it all.”

Today it’s at least 30% vacant and struggling. It’s been for sale for a while. They finally found a buyer.It merited mention in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. A group led by two brothers is buying the mall to redevelop it.

The article doesn’t say what the two brothers plan to do with the mall, except that it will be a “mixed-use” redevelopment. That tells me about as much as saying there will be concrete and steel involved.

But the article goes out of its way to mention what high school the two brothers attended.

Yet another example of the St. Louis attitude. Nothing’s as important as what high school you went to.

I’m surprised the headline didn’t read “Two Ladue H.S. Alumni Buy Crestwood Plaza.”

I guess there just wasn’t enough room.

My new toy train website

Dave Farquhar Toy trains

For the first time since about 1997, I’ve created a hobby web page. Since my ISP provides web space and I pay for it whether I use it or not, I thought this would be a good use for it. I have some photographs there, and some general information on toy trains, particularly tinplate trains.

The address is pages.sbcglobal.net/dave_farquhar/.Since the old Prodigy servers (theoretically) have more bandwidth than my puny 128K upstream DSL connection, I thought that would be a more appropriate place to put it, rather than on my own server. The pictures aren’t huge, but they’ll download a lot faster from an ISP than from me.

Hopefully someone will find it and enjoy it. I have no idea how often I’ll update the page, but now it’s out there.

Fifteen minutes a day

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , ,

I’ve been spending entirely too much time on train forums lately. So have a lot of other people. Places that used to be good for learning things have turned into cliques, or worse yet, hateful arguments over stupid things like whether Lionel O gauge is more popular than HO scale (something that hasn’t been true since about 1957, and I’m shocked anyone has believed otherwise since about 1960).

A few months ago, someone actually posted something helpful: a suggestion that you spend 15 minutes a day working on your hobby instead of talking about it.

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Trailing edge computing

Dave Farquhar Hardware ,

I found a blog entry today suggesting that you buy 3-year-old computer hardware and software.

I’ve been doing this for years, although I never put that much thought into it.The idea goes like this: Instead of buying cutting-edge computers, which depreciate faster than cars do, buy a machine that’s a few years old, and then run older software on it. He says games, but the trick works fine for other software too. Just make sure the software you run is still getting updates. Microsoft generally continues releasing updates for 10 years, for example.

He suggests scouring the bargain bins at game stores for old software, but you can get used copies of pretty much anything you want online too, such as at Amazon. If the game is rare the price can be high, but the titles you’re likely to want are also likely to be common and cheap.

I haven’t built a new PC since 2002, which might surprise some people since there was a time when I would either build a new PC or do a major upgrade once a year or so.

But it’s telling that when I built that machine I didn’t use cutting edge parts either. I used a surplus Compaq motherboard and the cheapest ATI video card I could find. Is it useful? You bet. My wife uses it every day.

The PC I use most often now is a 2 GHz Compaq, most likely an off-lease business PC. I put a discrete video card in it and filled its memory slots. It probably dates to 2002 or 2003 also, but it’s almost as peppy as the 3 GHz PC I use at work.

Needless to say, I like the idea a lot.

As far as whether you should build a PC from old (or mostly old) parts or buy an entire PC, it really depends. I bought the Compaq because there was no way I could build anything comparable for the price, even if I reused components (and I have a lot of parts I could reuse). I can assemble a PC in less than an hour, so time wasn’t a huge consideration for me, but it would be for some people. A PC built entirely with off-the-shelf components is more upgradable, but this Compaq is tiny, and I really liked that.

If I could have bought a bunch of cheap parts, I might have gone a different direction.