How to get my job

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,

I’ve had a couple of people ask me in the past couple of weeks how to break into the computer field. It was a tough question. I literally got into fixing these things because I couldn’t find a repair shop in St. Louis that I felt I could trust. So I started trying to fix them myself. I might break it beyond repair, but one time we had a repair done that cost more than replacing the unit outright would have cost. So what did I have to lose, right?
I took my Commodore 128 apart a few times. Usually it was for an upgrade, but once it was to clean the keyboard because keys weren’t working anymore. It was an adventure, and I had to learn how to solder first. My dad’s friend Norb taught me how. He was a building inspector. No wonder I still solder like a plumber, even to this day. So I de-soldered the 6 connections I had to in order to get into the keyboard, removed the dozens of tiny screws, cleaned up the printed circuit board, put it back together, re-soldered those connections, reassembled the computer, and held my breath. It worked. Cool. It didn’t impress the girls, but it saved me at least 50 bucks.

It was my uncle’s approach. I remember riding with him to an auto parts store once, then watching him work on his truck. “I don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to cars,” I said.

“I don’t let that stop me,” he said. “I just have to do it.”

His truck cost more than any computer I’ve ever owned.

Later on, I got an upgrade ROM for my Amiga 2000. So my dad came home one day to find me hovering above my Amiga, which was sprawled across his OMT table. The cover was off, the power supply was out, and the drive cage was out, and there I was, slowly prying out a chip with a screwdriver. Dad gave me a nervous look. “You gonna be able to get that thing back together?” he asked me. “Sure,” I said. I didn’t tell him how many times I’d had it apart before. So he stood there and watched me as I finished extracting the chip, popped the new one into place, and re-installed the power supply and drive cage.

Eventually I got smart and realized I shouldn’t be experimenting on computers that I cared about. XT clones cost about 20 bucks when people wouldn’t just give them to you, so I got a couple. I ripped them apart, figured out how a computer was really put together, and reassembled them. And yes, I even took parts from one and put them in the other to see what would happen. I was pretty sure it would work. It did. Eventually I did something stupid (I don’t remember what anymore) and I killed at least one of those XT clones, but it wasn’t important. I’d learned a lot from them, and I was only out 20 bucks. That’s assuming I wasn’t given the thing outright–I don’t remember that detail anymore either.

I needed that skill the next year. I was living in a fraternity house, and the power supply died in the house computer. I knew enough by then to diagnose it, and I headed off to the local computer shop for parts. They didn’t have any power supplies that would fit, and the motherboard was nonstandard. But they had a lineup of barebones systems sprawled across the floor. A bare 386 cost about $200. I knew the rest of the system worked. So I talked it over with the treasurer, then came back with a house check and bought a 25 MHz 386DX. I took it home, popped the case on the house computer, pulled out the video card and all the I/O cards, installed them in the 386, and found the computer wouldn’t recognize the hard drive. We eventually worked through that one (it turned out we had one of the very few 8-bit IDE drives ever made, and that 8-bit controller did not get along with our 386 one bit) and we got a working system up and going.

By the time I graduated there were at least half a dozen guys in that house capable of doing that job. Times changed (swapping a motherboard was much more of an endeavor in 1993 than it was in 1997, because by then so many components that had once been discrete and configured by jumpers were integrated and configurable through the BIOS Setup), and I’d like to think most of them learned at least a little something from me.

That summer, I got a job selling computers. An opportunity arose when the store technician developed a difficulty showing up for work. They never fired the guy, but since he was only there half the time, I got to be the tech the other half. When he was there, I learned a lot from him.

The next school year, I got wind of a job opportunity on campus. The journalism department had a batch of 300 new IBM PC 330s and 350s. Every last one of them needed to be unboxed and upgraded with extra memory and a NIC, then plugged into the network, where one of the more experienced techs could do a push install of OS/2. I got the job, and I learned a ton from those guys. These are guys who had seen prototypes of the IBM PS/2 Model 80, and who occasionally had to whip out a soldering gun and make a change to the motherboard with an engineer from IBM on the phone. You bet they had a lot to teach me.

That part-time job eventually grew into a full-time job when those guys recognized that I was willing to work hard and willing and able to learn.

That approach worked really well for me. But I had the advantage of being young and being able to wait for opportunities and take them as they came. I also had the advantage of growing up with the things (the schools I went to had computers and taught computer classes, all the way back to when I was in the second grade) and messing with them for the majority of my life.

Realistically, I don’t think that approach would work for an adult with minimal computer skills and a family to support. Or at least it wouldn’t work on a quick timeframe. I’ve tried to teach 24-year-olds starting from ground zero how to do this. It didn’t work very well.

It’s a lot easier to teach someone how to write.

I’m here to tell you how busy I am

Dave Farquhar General

This looks like a good time for a 6,000-word diatribe about how busy I am, but I’m too busy to write about how busy I am, so I won’t.
I’m making what was supposed to be a quickie one-off documentary with minimal footage. Well, the problem is I’ve got about an hour’s worth of good footage. I figured it would take me an hour to figure out what story to tell with that footage. Bzzzt! Guess again, Farq.

I’ve found about 20 minutes’ worth of the best footage. Based on the story I want to tell, I can cut half of it. Then I can take what’s left of that and edit it in half pretty easily, giving me a manageable five-minute biography/documentary.

I always underestimate my video projects.

You’ll hear back from me when it’s done. But for the next couple of days until then, I don’t know how much I’ll be here. Fair warning.

And once it’s done? Well, I think I might know how to do streaming Qui*kTime-compatible video with a Linux server. Wouldn’t that be a cool project?

If you find yourself missing me, go have a read about a missing spyplane and how someone, after making 20 trips, spending more than $6,500, involving 9 different people, and finding three other wrecks, finally found the elusive plane.

You’ll also learn that the SR-71 wasn’t the most advanced U.S. spyplane of the 1960s. (That image on the front page of the link looks an awful lot like an SR-71, but it isn’t!)

It’s a long story. It’ll easily occupy you for a few days while I’m gone.

Planes, trains, and computers

Dave Farquhar General , ,

Planes. I’m not as big of an airplane fanatic as my dad was, but no one is. It’s too bad he didn’t live to see the Web come of age, because I found some sites that would have made him want to use a computer. Aviationarchaeology documents military crash sites in the United States. It’s not complete (I know of an F-86 Sabre crash site in a remote site in the Southwest that it doesn’t document) but cool. I found another similar page.
And then there’s Urban’s military aviation weblog, which is a links collection that just has to be seen to believe.

Trains. Gatermann sent this link to a streetcar, built in 1910, for sale on eBay. I asked him if he thought Metrolink would mind if we used it on their tracks. He said he didn’t think so.

Having a restored streetcar would be almost as cool as having a private Tu-144… And a whole lot safer.

Automobiles Computers. The P2 shell I ordered last week arrived yesterday. It was surprisingly well constructed. The motherboard and floppy drive were installed, and all cables were present, making it really easy to construct a complete system from it. I plugged in a 128-meg stick, attached a CPU fan to a Celeron-366 in a slotket and plugged it in, then I raided an old 486 for a video card, NIC, hard drive, and CD-ROM drive. The HD in the 486 had Debian 2.2 installed, so no further work was necessary. I plugged it in, turned it on, Debian booted, and it was fast.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen a P2-class machine with ISA video and network cards, but this thing’s going to be a low-volume Intranet server. Why waste a decent video card on it when the only thing it’s ever going to display is a logon prompt? Back before Microsoft brainwashed the world into putting GUIs on their servers, it was common practice to put ISA video cards in servers to conserve PCI slots for important things, like network cards and SCSI cards.

A Pentium-75 would do this job nicely, but I had a slotket, a CPU, and a 128-meg stick, and the barebones system cost $40 delivered. I’d have needed 32 megs of 72-pin memory to bring up a Pentium-75 to do this job, and it would have cost more than that.

At any rate, if you want to build your own dirt-cheap P2, you can get the case/ps/mobo/floppy combo for $20 and a P2-233 for $17 at Compgeeks.com. As for hard drives, a 2.5-gig job will run you $26 and it goes on up from there. They don’t have any dirt-cheap video cards there, unfortunately. You can go to Computer Surplus Outlet for that. I wouldn’t trust either place’s memory, so go to Crucial for that. If you have some parts laying around from upgrades past, you can have a complete system cheap. If you don’t have parts, you’re better off just buying a complete P2. You can get a Dell P2-233/32MB for $79, including CD-ROM and NIC.

I’m really curious how a lab full of P2-233s running Linux as one big OpenMosix cluster would perform…

And baseball. Can’t leave that out. I just read that Cookie Rojas is coaching for the Toronto Blue Jays. So when are the Royals going to get rid of Tony Loser and put Cookie at the helm?

As for Stinky the Frenchman’s comments the other day comparing rooting for the Royals to rooting for the cars at a monster truck rally, does anyone else find it ironic that a supposed French nobleman would talk with an air of superiority about “American Cricket,” then go compare my favorite team to a monster truck rally? How does he know about monster truck rallies?

Vintage PCs and bubblegum and Unix and Windows server crashes

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , ,

Mail. Svenson wrote in, a little bit disturbed at the “vintage” label I hung on Pentium IIs this week. Here’s what he said:

What you call a Vintage PC is about what I got as a "new" box at work!

OK, it's a P2/400 but the 128Meg is not EEC and the drive is a standard 10GB 5400rpm thing. No SCSI anywhere. That is the kind of hardware being installed here.

Oh, and, BTW, it has to run Win2000.

To which I replied my “vintage” label was at least slightly tongue-in-cheek. I’ve got a Celeron-400 here that’s still in heavy use. My P2/266 laptop doesn’t get much use anymore because my employer provided me with a P3-800 laptop late last year. There are people who call even that P3-800 passe. They’re idiots, and I have zero respect for them, but they’re out there, and unfortunately people listen to them. Today I’m hearing P2s mentioned with the same disdain that 286s were in 1993 and 386s in 1996. They’re still fine computers. As my workplace is well aware–our workhorse machine is still a P2-350 or 400 with a 5400 RPM IDE drive, and that looks to remain true for another couple of years.

It’s a buyer’s market. If you know someone who needs a computer, buy one of these. They’re built much better than a $399 eMachine, and the models with SCSI drives in them will outperform the eMachine for household tasks.

Absolutely nuts. If you’re in the market for Luis Gonzalez’s bubblegum (Gonzalez is the Arizona Diamondbacks’ slugging left fielder), it’s for sale. I got a bit far out there on my baseball collectibles, but never that far.

Absolutely funny. I’m so glad that the people at Microsoft and Unisys are incompetent. They set their sights on Unix with their “We Have the Way Out” campaign. Then someone noticed the Web site was running on, uh, well, FreeBSD. I see. Unix is good enough for them, but not for the rest of us. Word got out in a hurry, and they hastily moved the site over to Windows 2000. Within hours, the site was down. And down it stayed, for two days.

See what happens when you abandon Unix in your datacenter for Windows 2000? I gotta get me some of that. I’ll charge into my boss’ boss’ office today and tell him we need to migrate our VMS and Digital Unix and Linux systems to Windows 2000. He’ll ask why, and I’ll tell him the truth:

The systems we have now work too well and I need job security.

Wehavethewayout.com is working now, but Gatermann visited it yesterday and noted its form didn’t work right in Mozilla. So I guess you can only get information on Microsoft’s way out if you’re running Internet Explorer.

Maybe these guys are smart, but they have about as much common sense as the chair I’m sitting in.

That’s just as well. If their experience is any indication (trust me, it is), they can keep their information. I’ve seen more useful information written in bathroom stalls.

Technobabble

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , ,

Grisoft AVG works as advertised. If you don’t want to pay for virus protection, do yourself and your friends a favor and head over to Grisoft and download the free edition of AVG. I used it Monday night to disinfect a friend’s PC that had become infected by the infamous KAK virus.
Free-for-personal-use anti-virus tools have a nasty habit of becoming un-free within a year or two of their release, but look at it this way: AVG at least saves you a year or two of paying for virus update subscriptions.

It’s not as whiz-bang as the tools from Norton or McAfee but it works. You can’t get as fine-grained about scheduling stuff but that doesn’t matter so much. You can schedule things like scans and updates, and it does find and isolate the viruses, and you can’t beat the price. Go get it.

Linux on vintage P2s. I helped Gatermann get Debian up and running on his vintage HP Kayak workstation last night. This is an early P2-266 workstation. Gatermann marveled at how it was put together, and with the calibre of components in it. It had a high-end (for its time) Matrox AGP card in it, plus onboard Adaptec Wide SCSI, 128 MB of ECC SDRAM, and a 10,000-RPM IBM Wide SCSI hard drive. It arrived stripped of its original network card; Gatermann installed an Intel EtherExpress Pro.

In its day, this was the best Intel-based workstation money could buy, and you needed a lot of it. Of course, back in that day I was working on the copydesk of a weekly magazine in Columbia, Mo. and chasing a girl named Rachel (who I would catch, then lose, about a year later). And I probably hadn’t turned 22 yet either. Needless to say, that was a while ago. It seems like 100 years ago now.

Today, the most impressive thing about the system is its original price tag, but it remains a solidly built system that’s very useful and very upgradable. He can add another CPU, and depending on what variation his particular model is, he can possibly upgrade to as much as a P2-450. A pair of 450s is nothing to turn your nose up at. And of course he can add a variety of SCSI hard drives to it.

Debian runs fine on the system; its inability to boot doesn’t bother me too much. I occasionally run across systems that just won’t boot a Linux CD, but once I manage to get them running (either by putting the drive in another PC for the installation process or by using a pair of boot floppies to get started) they run fine.

The system didn’t want to boot Debian on CD, or any other Linux for that matter. So we made a set of boot floppies, then all was well.

The batch that this computer came from is long gone, but I expect more to continue to appear on the used market as they trickle out of the firms that bought them. They are, after all, long since obsolete for their original purpose. But they’re a bargain. These systems will remain useful for several years, and are built well enough that they probably will be totally obsolete before they break.

Baseball season is here, and so’s Baseball Mogul 2003

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

The Kansas City Royals wised up on Friday and gave Mike Sweeney what he wanted. Well, at least enough of what he wanted that he signed. So Mike Sweeney is now $55 million richer, and the Royals have him locked in for five years, as long as they manage to reach .500 in either 2003 or 2004.
Personally, I wish they’d signed him to a longer deal, but it could be that the second-greatest Kansas City Royal of all time didn’t want more than five years.

To celebrate, I headed over to Sports Mogul to see if there was a new patch to fix some bugs in Baseball Mogul 2002. And I found that Baseball Mogul 2003 is out. I downloaded the demo and played around with it. The free-agency model seems to be more realistic now, and the players aren’t as rigid in their contract negotiations, which may or may not be realistic. The computer GMs offered trades, some stupid, others inspired.

The game crashed as the July 31 trading deadline approached. My Royals were in second place, thanks to a couple of shrewd acquisitions. Predictably, with one more really big stick in the lineup, Mike Sweeney and Mark Quinn hit a whole lot better. It crashed as I was wheeling and dealing, looking for a catcher with a little bit of pop in his bat and maybe a veteran starting pitcher. I’d signed Bret Saberhagen and David Cone as free agents for old times’ sake, but they had nothing left.

At any rate, for 20 bucks, why not get the full version, I figued, especially since I could plunk down the credit card, they’d ship me the retail box in mid-April, and in the meantime I could download and install a 75-meg package?

I like the new version better than the old one. And of course the old one was good enough that I once deemed it a necessity of life. The new one adds a few features, like letting you set prices for concessions (so I guess I can do a 10-cent beer night like Bill Veeck did one year in Chicago), and it adds play-by-play, which is tedious during the regular season, but great for watching games like the All-Star Game and the World Series.

What can I say? For a baseball strategy nut like me, Baseball Mogul is really hard to beat. It would be nice if it would do some more statistics, so you could do lefty/righty platoons. These days, there are managers who decide who’s playing based on whether there’s a right- or left-handed pitcher on the mound, whether it’s a day or night game, home or road game, and whether the game’s being played on turf or grass. You think I’m kidding.

The other feature I wish it had was hirable managers. The only game I’ve ever seen that had that feature was Earl Weaver Baseball, which was popular more than 10 years ago.

But even with those shortcomings, it’s still an incredibly addictive game. I haven’t found a better baseball sim yet. And despite its bad first impression, it’s less buggy than its predecessor.

Some video editing tips from the school of hard knocks

Dave Farquhar Video , , , , ,

Hi. My name is Dave. I attended the best journalism school there is for broadcasting.
I paid almost zero attention in the television units, because, well, I hate TV. So I learned nothing that would be of use to me at this stage of life. Aside from how to go get a story and ask questions and gather footage, which is pretty much the same no matter what your medium is, whether it’s a newspaper, a magazine, a video documentary, a Web page, or a research paper. We all have a sense for what’s interesting and relevant. Develop that, and you can tell a story in any medium.

OK, that’s all I know about video editing theory. That was easy, wasn’t it? Aren’t you glad you didn’t pay $200 per credit hour for it?

Now let’s get practical. This is going to be most practical if you have equipment similar to mine. If you don’t, hopefully it’ll tell you something useful.

Here’s what I use to make magic happen on the boob tube:

IBM-compatible PC

  • AMD Duron 700 MHz CPU

  • 384 MB PC133 memory

  • Adaptec 19160 Ultra160 SCSI card

  • Maxtor Atlas III 10,000 RPM 18GB Ultra160 SCSI hard drive

  • Quantum Fireball 15 GB UDMA66 hard drive

  • Plextor UltraPlex 40max SCSI CD-ROM for audio capture

    • Pinnacle DV500 Plus editing/capture card
    JVC GR-DVL100 miniDV camcorder

    You can capture video with Adobe Premiere, but there’s a lot of overhead involved. It’s better to use the bundled Pinnacle DVTools app. I was in the habit of capturing with DVTools, then using the freeware VirtualDub (do a Google search) to convert those files to Indeo 5.1 format to save space. I saved a lot of disk space, but I wasted a lot of time. A PC equipped with a DV500 can do most things to DV-formatted files in realtime, whereas my setup has to render other file formats. You’re looking at 2-4 frames per second to do the initial conversion, and then Premiere renders them at a similar rate. Get monster hard drives so you can hold those larger DV files, and you’ll save lots of render time. You’ll also completely eliminate generation loss, which is the whole point of digital video in the first place, although the generation loss from rendering DV to Indeo back to DV isn’t something anyone’s likely to notice. Realistically, you’ll lose more as the signal is being transmitted from the camera to your screen than you will from three generations of conversion.

    I find playback off my UDMA drive less than adequate. It doesn’t drop frames but the video has too many artifacts. It’s fine as a holding bin for clips I might use, or for editing, but before I do my final output to tape, I move the files over to my high-speed SCSI drive.

    On some platforms, you really want to have your OS and apps on one drive, your video on another, and your audio on yet another. I find the Atlas III is more than fast enough to hold all three and get away with it. If I had to do it all again though, I’d probably still get the Atlas, and I’d get another very large but slower SCSI drive.

    When you’re editing with Premiere, you may find your hard drives fill up at an alarming rate. Before starting a project, search for directories called Adobe Premiere Preview Files and clear their contents. I found a missing 4 gigs that way. Also defragment your drives before starting on a project. You want big, contiguous blocks to hold your huge video files.

    You can’t just plug a camcorder into your firewire port and go to File, Export Timeline, Print to Tape and expect it to work. You have to put your camcorder into VTR mode first, an operation that isn’t always obvious from looking at the camera. Check your manual. On my DVL100, turning the mode knob to Play does the trick.

    Also, you can’t plug a camcorder in hot. At least not any of the JVC cameras I’ve tried. The computer will see them, but it won’t be able to control them. Shut down the computer and turn off the camera, plug in, then power both up, and they’re happy.

    Although Pinnacle’s DVTools can export DV to tape, it’s faster to do it from Premiere. It takes Premiere forever to export a video to disk in DV format, and then of course the export to tape happens in real-time. Doing it from Premiere in the first place cuts the time required by 3/4.

    And here’s a principle I learned at a seminar earlier this year at Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church in Dayton, OH: There’s no such thing as junk video. Ginghamsburg’s video director actually advocates leaving your camera on at all times, even when you’re moving the camera, because a lot of times you’ll shoot good video unintentionally. I don’t have the battery life to be able to leave it on all the time, but I leave it on more than I normally would. I found in my last project, where I was filming fire, that the smoke and heat waves coming off the fire confused my camera’s autofocus, so the camera was trying to find what it was supposed to focus on, which futher accentuated the heat waves and produced a really haunting effect. People asked me how I did it, what it was, where I shot it. It was pretty anticlimatic, I’m sure, to hear it was just a tree off in the distance. And I got the shot strictly because I wasn’t paying attention. The fire had died down and I hadn’t noticed.

    All cameras have particular nuances. That scene probably would have looked different with another camera. I discovered later how to confuse my autofocus when I was trying to set the camera up for playback. The only way you’ll learn your camera’s nuances is to play with it. And be sure to try things with it you wouldn’t normally try. I discovered the autofocus thing when the camera was pointed at my desk at extremely close range. Believe me, there’s absolutely nothing compelling about that desk. It’s 18-year-old particle board.

    And a principle I learned myself: There are a couple of ways I find my best footage. One way is just to fast-forward through it and watch. If it’s compelling at 20x normal speed with fuzzy detail, it’s likely to be compelling when played the way it was shot. The other thing I’ll do is play the footage in my monitor, and watch out of my peripheral vision while I do something else. If it’s good enough to grab my attention, chances are it’s worth using. It’s a brutal way to edit, but if you have to condense several hours’ worth of footage into three minutes, it’s the fastest way I’ve found.

    Cult of Linux, and cheap cheap hardware

    Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

    Potpourri. I just have two little things to write about today, so that’s what I’ll do.
    The Cult of Linux, and cults of computing past. In yesterday’s comments, Dave Thorarinsson brought up an interesting phenomenon. He observed, when talking about his new Linux box and losing track of time learning it, “It pretty much feels like the time I had my Amiga.”

    I remember reading in the mail section of Amiga magazines, more than a decade ago, “I haven’t had this much fun since I got my C-64!” And the old Commodore magazines noted that their C-64s had a special place in their devotees’ hearts and asked, “Have you ever heard of anyone getting attached to a PC clone?”

    The inferred answer is no. And that doesn’t seem to have changed. Today, the biggest PC enthusiasts replace their machines frequently, relegating their old, unbeloved machines to grunt roles, or scrapping them for parts.

    The C-64, by contrast, was a simple machine. Although it only had one slot for expansion, the motherboard itself was simple enough that just about anyone with a little bit of patience could trace it out and understand it. There was some unused address space in it that you could add chips to. Common projects included speech synthesizers and an extra sound chip, so you could have six-voice, stereo sound. And it seemed like most C-64 owners had tried their hand writing at least simple programs.

    The Amiga was similar. It was harder to program, and a little harder to hack, but I had a subdirectory on my Amiga’s hard drive that was called “PD Hardware,” containing makeshift schematics for stuff I could build. I wired in a PAL/NTSC switch so I could change video standards and run European software correctly. I even designed an add-on board for it myself, once, to give myself an extra ROM socket. And of course I replaced much of the operating system with replacement utilities written by hobbyists that were smaller and faster, had more features, or both.

    You want to know why the Amiga and C-64 fanatics were so loyal? They knew their machines inside and out, and to a degree that just wasn’t possible with a PC clone.

    With Linux, the hardware doesn’t matter anymore, but you can customize the software to whatever extent you want. The hardest-core Linux people are doing just that. At a level below that, people compile the OS from source, from scratch. At a level below that, they just replace utilities with smaller and faster or more functional ones, like I was doing with my Amiga.

    The long and the short of it is tweakers have a lot more liberties with Linux than they’ll ever get out of Redmond.

    People who liked my book can certainly find a lot to like with Linux. People who fancy themselves experts but don’t really want to know how their computers work and who think books like mine are a waste of time will never be tied to Linux like the fanatics are.

    Cheap hardware. It’s a buyer’s market. I’m building an intranet server for my church, and they have lots of bits and pieces but not quite enough for a complete system, so I did some looking around at my favorite bottom-fishing holes. You can get an awful lot of computer for next to nothing these days.

    I’ve bought things at least once from each of these vendors, and they got stuff to me reasonably fast (within a week, ground shipping) so I feel reasonably comfortable recommending them.

    Slot-1 barebones systems — case, power supply, slot 1 mobo (66 MHz FSB, so you’re stuck with P2s up to 333 MHz or Celerons, and according to the manufacturer, Celerons will work), and a floppy drive. $24.50. $19.95 if you don’t mind some wear. Very nice.

    At the same place, scroll down and you can pick up Tier-1 business-class P2s for under $200. If you’re lucky you can sometimes even find a dual-capable machine. They go fast, but the getting’s good. Lots of businesses are dumping these due to their 3- or 4-year upgrade cycles. For someone who just wants to do word processing and e-mail, these systems are overkill. If you want to upgrade in pieces over the course of the next couple of years, the P2s with a 100 MHz FSB are workhorses and you can add lots of cheap memory, nice video cards, and fast, cheap hard drives. Gatermann just picked up an HP Vectra P2-266, dual capable, with SCSI, for $117. It will serve him well. He plans to run Debian on it, but I don’t know if he’s thinking of it as a server or a workstation. It’d make a fabulous server.

    72-pin SIMMs — if you’ve still got a system that takes them, nice deals on 4-16MB sticks, and good deals on bigger sticks.

    Low-end Pentium I desktops — P75-120, 16 meg of RAM, 1 MB video, who knows what else. $29.99. Nice for a low-end Linux box, or for a Win95 system that’s going to see limited use. Put a fast hard drive in it and it’ll surprise you. After you get yours, check and see what CPUs the system will take; a P200 can be had for as little as $16 and makes a nice upgrade. It’s a pretty big step up from 75 MHz to 200 MHz.

    Seagate 9-gig 5.25″ full-height SCSI HD — $12.95. If you’ve got two 5.25″ bays open and no spacer between them, here’s a cheap way to fill it with 9 gigs of storage. I know a couple of people who have these drives. They’re surprisingly quick (they hold their own next to 7200-rpm 3.5″ disks). Back up your data and buy some spares if the shipping doesn’t kill you. One of the guys I know has several of these, and he’s had one or two die on him.

    FIC AZ-11 ATX mobo — $34.95. It’ll take Durons and Athlon Thunderbirds. The fastest chip I’ve put in one is a 1 GHz Duron. No ISA slots and just 5 PCI slots, but it’s a capable board. I use one in my video editing workstation, and I paid more than 35 bucks for it. Totally obsolete, but when you can get a 1 GHz Duron and fan on this board for $89, who cares? It’ll still be a good computer in three years. Trust me.

    I keep seeing this board on the closeout places, so I expect even after the current supply dries up, there’ll be more.

    Speaking of closeout motherboards, there’s a variety of them over at Just Deals. You can get a Soyo Socket 370 board for $28 and various Socket A boards in the $35-$40 range. If it’s Slot 1 or even Slot A you’re looking for (maybe you’ve got a CPU laying around), you can find stuff there too.

    And if you need a cheap copy of Word 97, you can get the Works 99 suite for 30 bucks.

    Need an operating system for that new old computer? Prices range from $25 for Win95 to $180 for WinXP Pro.

    Dave installs Windows XP

    Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , ,

    We needed an XP box at work for testing. Duty to do the dirty deed fell to me. So after ghosting the Windows 2000 station several of us share, I pulled out an XP CD. It installed surprisingly quickly–less than half an hour. The system is a P3-667 with 128 MB RAM and an IBM hard drive (I don’t know the model).
    It found the network and had drivers for all the hardware in the box. That doesn’t happen very often with Microsoft OSs, so it was nice.

    I booted into XP, to be greeted by a hillside that was just begging to be overrun by tanks, but instead of tanks, there was this humongo start menu. I right-clicked on the Start button, hit Properties, and picked Classic view. There. I had a Win95-like Start menu. While I was at it, I went back and picked small icons. I don’t like humongous Start menus.

    I also don’t like training wheels and big, bubbly title bars. The system was dog slow, so I right-clicked on the desktop to see what I could find to turn off. I replaced the Windows XP theme with the Classic theme. Then I turned off that annoying fade effect.

    Still, the system dragged. I went into Control Panel, System, Performance. Bingo. I could pick settings for best appearance (whose choices are certainly debatable–I guess they look good if you like bright colors and have a huge monitor) or best performance. Guess which I picked? Much better.

    Next, I went into Networking. I saw some QoS thing. I did a search. It’s intended to improve the quality of your network, at the price of 20% of your bandwidth. Forget that. I killed it.

    After I did all that stuff, XP was reasonably peppy. It logs on and off quickly. I installed Office 2000 and it worked fine. The apps loaded quickly–just a couple of seconds. That’s how it should be. If I went in and edited the shortcuts in the Start menu to turn off the splash screens, they’d load instantly.

    WinXP brings up a bunch of popups that I don’t like. If I wanted unexpected popup windows, I’d run a Web browser. I couldn’t quickly figure out how to disable those.

    I couldn’t run Windows Update. It froze every time I tried.

    I found a Windows XP tuning guide at ExtremeTech. I suspect turning off the eye candy will help more than most of the suggestions in that article. I suspect if I dug around I’d find other things. We’ll see if I get some time.

    XP isn’t as bad as I expected, I guess. But I’m still not going to buy it.

    This, on the other hand, is worth a second look. And a third. You can now run MS Office on Linux. No need to wait for Lindows, no need to abandon your current fave distro (at least if your fave distro is Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, or Caldera).

    It’s 55 bucks. It’s available today. It brings Office 97/2000 and Lotus Notes r5 to your Linux desktop. Other Windows apps work, but their functionality isn’t guaranteed.

    You can get some screenshots at CodeWeavers. It even makes the apps look like native Linux apps.

    Spontaneous system reboots

    Dave Farquhar Troubleshooting , , , , ,

    Steve DeLassus asked me the other day what I would do to fix a PC that was rebooting itself periodically. It’s not him who’s having the problem, he says, it’s someone he knows. He must be trying to show up someone at work or on the Web or something.
    So I gave him a few things I’d check, in order of likelihood.

    Static electricity. A big static shock can send a system down faster than anything else I’ve seen. Keep a humidifier in the computer room to reduce static electricity. If you’re really paranoid, put a metal strip on your desk and connect it to ground (on your electrical outlet, not on your PC) and touch it before touching your PC. Some people metalize and ground part of their mouse pad. That’s a bit extreme but it works.

    Power supply. This is the big one. A failing power supply can take out other components. And even if you have an expensive, big-brand box like a PCP&C or Enermax, they can fail. So I always keep a spare ATX power supply around for testing. It doesn’t have to be an expensive one–you just want something that can run the machine for a day or two to see if the problem goes away.
    Overheating. Check all your fans to make sure they’re working. An overheated system can produce all sorts of weird behavior, including reboots. The computer we produced our school newspaper on back in 1996 tended to overheat and reboot about 8 hours into our marathon QuarkXPress sessions.

    Memory. It’s extremely rare, but even Crucial produces the occasional defective module. And while bad memory is more likely to produce blue screens than reboots, it’s a possibility worth checking into. Download Memtest86 to exercise your memory.

    CPU. If you’re overclocking and experiencing spontaneous reboots, cut it out and see what happens. Unfortunately, by the time these reboots become common, it may be too late. That turned out to be the case with that QuarkXPress-running PC I mentioned earlier. Had we replaced the fans with more powerful units right away, we might have been fine, but we ended up having to replace the CPU. (We weren’t overclocking, but this was an early Cyrix 6×86 CPU, a chip that was notorious for running hot.) Less likely today, but still possible.

    Hard drive. I’m really reaching here. If you’re using a lot of virtual memory and you have bad sectors on your hard drive and the swapfile is using one or more of those bad sectors, a lot of unpredictable things can happen. A spontaneous reboot is probably the least of those. But theoretically it could happen.

    Operating system. This is truly the last resort. People frequently try to run an OS that’s either too new or too old to be ideal on a PC of a particular vintage. If the system is failing but all the hardware seems to be OK, try loading the OS that was contemporary when the system was new. That means if it’s a Pentium-133, try Win95 on it. If it’s a P4, try Windows 2000 or Windows XP on it. When you try to run a five-year-old OS on a new system, or vice-versa, you can run into problems with poorly tested device drivers or a system strapped for resources.

    Another good OS-related troubleshooting trick for failing hardware is to try to load Linux. Linux will often cause suspect hardware to fail, even if the hardware can run Windows successfully, because Linux pushes the hardware more than Microsoft systems do. So if the system fails to load Linux, start swapping components and try again. Once the system is capable of loading Linux successfully, it’s likely to work right in Windows too.

    Troubleshooting advice: When you suspect a bad component, particularly a power supply, always swap in a known-good component, rather than trying out the suspect component in another system to see if the problem follows it. The risks of damaging the system are too great, particularly when you try a bad power supply in another system.

    And, as always, you minimize the risks of these problems by buying high-quality components, but you never completely eliminate the risk. Even the best occasionally make a defective part.