04/13/2001

Dave Farquhar General ,

Dave’s utility. I spent some time yesterday writing a short utility to assist in creating multiboot systems. It’s not ready yet, but I’ll let the world know when it is. The source code is about 6K in length so it won’t be a monster, but I expect the executable to bloat up to 50-60K. It’s written in QuickBasic, since the Microsoft Basics of old were my best language for a long time, and still the language I remember best. But I seem to be missing some pieces of QuickBasic, so I may have to rewrite it.

It’s simple enough that I probably could even write the thing in assembler, but I’m not that much of a glutton for self punishment. 🙂

I used to really enjoy writing short, useful utilities. These days I’m in that mood maybe once a year.

Daynotes.com. I don’t know what’s going on there, if it’s technical difficulties or something else. I am going to assume it’s either technical difficulties or an oversight. What I do know is that the Apache welcome page that shows up when you go there isn’t what most people are expecting. Bob Walder has set up a portal at www.bobwalder.com/daynotes that you can use in the interim.

Outta here. Today’s Good Friday, so I have the day off. I need to work on an article for Computer Shopper UK.

Partition table recovery. I thought I’d posted this stuff here before, but I can’t find it. So here goes. If you blitz your partition table, here’s what you want to get it back.

MBRWORK: http://www.webdev.net/orca/mbrwork.htm (easier to use)

TestDisk: http://www.esiea.fr/public_html/Christophe.GRENIER/ (more complete)

04/12/2001

Dave Farquhar General ,

Mailbag:

Chip Creep

SCSI. I picked up an Adaptec 2940UW on eBay over the weekend (“Buy it now!” is great if your timing’s good and the price is fair–check completed auctions first to see what the item usually goes for), and it arrived yesterday. I decided that instead of trying to turn my 486 into an all-SCSI machine, it would make more sense to put my IDE stuff in it and make an all-SCSI machine out of my P120. But before doing that, I threw the card in another system and brought a mystery SCSI drive from work to test. I’ve got a stack of old, obsolescent SCSI drives there whose history I can’t remember. Some were just salvaged, others were failing and pulled for that reason. I brought home one suspect from work to test here. It made a horrible sound when it powered up but DOS 6 formatted it, albeit slowly. Once I ran SpinRite on it, I understood why. Bad sectors out the wazzu! I know this drive came out of a Mac because it has an Apple logo on it. I don’t know how good Mac OS is at dealing with bad sectors, but obviously something led me to scrap this drive. The drive sounded great while reading good sectors, but when it hit a bad spot, the awful noises came back.
Linkfest. If you do any Mac support, check out www.macgurus.com . They have diagrams of most Mac motherboards indicating the location of the CPU and memory, and what types of memory to use. Good resource.

Windows keyboard shortcuts. A coworker sent me this one. http://www.microsoft.com/TechNet/win98/Reskit/Part7/wrkappg.asp . Excellent.

Norton Commander replacement. Want a two-pane file manager without pirating the abandonware Norton Commander for Windows? Check out the free version of Mijenix Powerdesk, at http://www.mijenix.com/powerdesk/ . Very nice.

Chinese hacking in retaliation? I found this slightly disturbing, but the Chinese hacker in the interview didn’t seem to know much about U.S. IT infrastructure. That softens the bad news. http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,42982,00.html

Mailbag:

Chip Creep

04/11/2001

Dave Farquhar General

Mailbag:

DNS; Prices

I’d forgotten this utility. DisplayMate, like SpinRite, is a classic utility, independently made, and invaluable. Check it out at www.displaymate.com . Basically what it does is flash up a bunch of screens designed to bring out the worst in your monitor, then guide you through using the monitor’s controls to adjust them. The result is sharper text and brighter colors. Ideally a monitor should work optimally with all the controls except contrast set to 50%. Contrast should probably be at about 75%. But no monitor stays optimal at those settings for long.

Anyway… It’s about 70 bucks, and definitely worth it if you have more than one monitor. You can download a feature-limited demo and check it out. Even running the demo makes a difference.

Chip creep. I was flipping through some of my boss’ old PC repair books and I found a reference to “chip creep.” I immediately thought of Andy Grove–a creep who sells tons of chips. It turns out it was referring to the phenomenon where a chip works its way out of its socket due to expansion and contraction from heating and cooling resulting from powering the system off and on. Since components these days are soldered, you don’t see that anymore. But I remember in college, a neighbor’s 386 quit working one day. I popped the hood and found his BIOS chip literally sitting on top of its socket (one or two sets of pins were still making some sort of electrical contact). Cute. I pressed the chip back into place and the system worked again. Modern designs, where all chips are soldered into place, eliminate chip creep, though plug-in cards can still exhibit the problem to a degree.

Mailbag:

DNS; Prices

Troubleshooting a Mac SCSI drive

Dave Farquhar Macintosh ,

Mailbag:

Filtering; Monitor

Sometimes SCSI just doesn’t want to work. I tried to configure an Initio Miles 9100UW card and a 20-gig Seagate Barracuda drive in a Power Macintosh 8600 yesterday. I’d have much preferred an Adaptec card, because I haven’t had much luck with Initios in the past and Adaptec’s Web site has great tech support, but the user bought the stuff without asking me, partly because the Initio cards are really cheap. The 9100 spun up the drive and allowed us to format it, no problem. Then we installed an OS and tried to boot from it… Bus error. Or, if we were lucky, Error Type 96. (I’ve never seen that one before. I think we got a Type 97 once too.) We installed the factory SCSI drive, which we knew worked, alone on the Initio. Same result. I tried different cables just to eliminate that possibility. Nope. So I pulled the 9100 and the Barracuda and put them in a Power Macintosh 7300 we use for support. It worked the first time, and every subsequent time.

I found absolutely no reference to bootup problems with this card, or incompatibility problems, anywhere on the Web or in Usenet. The card had the latest firmware, so I went ahead and downloaded all available firmware versions and tested the card with them, one at a time. It seemed to get a little further in the boot process with the older versions, but I’d still get a bus error.

We ended up just putting the OS on his factory drive, kept it connected to the motherboard’s built-in SCSI, and we moved virtual memory and applications to the new drive. That way, he still gets most of the new drive’s speed benefit. Once the OS is loaded into memory, it won’t touch the old drive for much. Putting more time into it just didn’t seem to be worth the slight benefit we’d get.

Converting movies between different types. If you want to convert QuickTime movies to MP4 format (so you don’t have to keep QuickTime installed, or to make the movies take up less space on disk), you can find instructions for doing it here. It’s easy to use the Bink Converter to do other things as well, such as changing an AVI file to use a less obscure codec, or remove an audio track…

Conversion takes some time though. Don’t try this on your Pentium-133, unless you like waiting.

Mailbag:

Filtering; Monitor

04/09/2001

Dave Farquhar General

Web content filtering. Sometimes you just have to filter Web content. I’m not in favor of requiring it by law, but I won’t go to the extremes that some personal liberty advocates go, who say there should be no filtering. If a company or organization is providing equipment and an Internet connection, I believe they have some right to say what that connection will be used for. It’s a question of whose rights trump whose.

At any rate, I’m doing some work with a church/school that needs some content filtering, because, well, they don’t want to become the place for people who don’t have computers of their own to come and get porn. And they’ve got jack to spend. Getting them some low-end hardware shouldn’t be a problem. But what about content filtering software?

There’s some stuff out there.

http://dansguardian.org/?page=introduction — Filtering based on PICS and keywords, requires Linux and Squid.
http://www.squidguard.org — Filtering based on URLs. Uses Squid. Blocklist updated three times a week. Automatic updating? That’s what cron is for!
http://www.squid-cache.org — Caching Web proxy.

Squid saves you bandwidth, then the other two hop on board and take advantage of its expansion capabilities and add filtering. Both are written in C or C++, which makes them much faster than solutions written in Perl.

Controversy. Chris Miller sent me a link to this commentary .

I sincerely hope the US View/European view at the end is satire.  We know Cuba isn’t bent on world domination and wouldn’t get it anyway. Castro annoys the heck out of conservatives, though some in Hollywood profess to be very fond of the man. Most conservatives see him as a totalitarian with a really big mouth that’s usually open. We don’t put guns on kids’ lunchtrays. Most conservatives believe that when you walk into a school building, you lose all constitutional rights. I don’t agree with that, but if I’m going to give a constitutional right to schoolchildren, the first amendment is much more useful to them than the second.

Most of us are very disgusted with lawyers and lawsuits and opportunists and huge, unfair settlements. And as for foot-and-mouth, we don’t want it, hence our restrictions on importing European livestock. Europe should have sealed off its borders to prevent its rampant spread. It’s called a quarantine.

I wholeheartedly agree with the author’s friend, who said: “The trouble with Europe is that every time you get into trouble you yell across the Atlantic for help. But, when things are good you expect us to listen to your horses— lectures about the way we run things in the US.”

This doesn’t totally excuse the United States’ lack of interest in affairs abroad, but until they’ve been here, Europeans don’t grasp the size of this place. The United States is not the size of France. We have individual states that are larger than European countries, in land mass and/or population. We have divisions. To a New Yorker, New Mexico is difficult to understand. Keeping up just with what’s going on in the United States is like keeping up with all of Europe. Maybe worse. That said, if we’d learn the lessons of Europe we’d be much better off.

Not much needs to be said about this piece, except it illustrates how little the United States and how little Europe have changed over the past three centuries. The Founding Fathers were the liberals of their day, while Europe was conservative. Now, the United States is seen as conservative and Europe as more liberal. But we haven’t changed. The Founding Fathers mistrusted government, and modern conservatives and libertarians still do. Therefore, in the United States, we are apt to look for a solution outside government, and only go to the government to solve a problem as a last resort. We’ve always had that tendency and probably always will. In Europe, where people tend to trust the institution of government much more, that’s a strange idea.

And, to the inevitable question of environmentalism… We have precious little data. We know very little. We have tons and tons of satelite data from the past few years. But even assuming we have 40 years’ useful data, think about it. How old is the earth? The most extreme Judeo-Christian view dates the earth at about 6,000 years old. Many scientists say it’s several million years old. I’m no statistician, but as a journalist I had to take a statistics class so I’d at least remember to ask that sort of question. Seven years ago I would have had a prayer of telling you how many years’ sample size we did need. Forty years is not a significant sample size against the larger set, which is the figure the majority of environmentalists would accept. We know that temperatures and atmospheric content fluctuate over time, but we don’t know how much. Taking drastic measures at this point is little different from deciding public opinion on a given issue based on asking four people.

I’ll open this up for discussion, but talk about it in the forums. E-mail about this will probably just sit here or get a short private response; I need to focus on the things I do well. I can’t solve this problem, so I’ll focus on people’s PC questions and problems, which I frequently can solve.

04/08/2001

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

How far we’ve come… While I was hunting down tax paperwork yesterday (found it!), I ran across a stash of ancient computer magazines. For grins, I pulled out the May 1992 issue of Compute, which celebrated the release of Windows 3.1. I would have received this magazine nine years ago this month.

Some tidbits I liked:

“Windows 3.0… entered a hostile world. OS/2 loomed on the horizon like a dragon ready to devour us, and MS-DOS, stuck in version 4.0, had lost its momentum. It looked as if Digital Research…was the only company trying to make DOS better.” –Clifton Karnes, pg 4

That’s what happens when there’s no strong competition. I don’t get the OS/2 and dragon metaphor though. What, people didn’t want a computer that worked right? I didn’t get it at the time. I had an Amiga, which at the time offered OS/2 features and a good software library.

“Some people even started talking about Unix.” Ibid.

Some things never change.

“The masses are happy, and nobody talks about Unix much anymore.” Ibid.

That certainly changed.

“You can now buy a 200 MB drive for just $500.” –Mark Minasi, pg 58

That now-laughable line was from a Mark Minasi column that talked about strategies for getting drives larger than 512 MB working. Strangely, that problem still rears its ugly head more often than it should, and its descendant problem, getting a drive bigger than 8 gigs working, is even more common.

“A 286-based notebook is a very capable machine; with a decent-size hard disk and a portable mouse, you could even run Windows applications on one (except for those requiring enhanced mode performance such as Excel).” –Peter Scisco, pg 72

Don’t let any of the end users I support read that line. That’s funny. Later in the same article, Scisco discusses the problem of battery life, a struggle we still live with.

“The last dozen modems I’ve installed here at Compute have been compact models. It’s almost like the manufacturers are trying to get better mileage by leaving out parts and making the cards smaller. These modems don’t reject line noise very well.” –Richard Leinecker, pg. 106

Now there’s a problem that only got worse with time.

An ad from Computer Direct on page 53 offered a 16 MHz 386SX with a meg of RAM and dual floppy drives (no hard drive) for $399. Your $399 gets you a lot more these days, but that price got a second look for sure. A complete system with a 14-inch VGA monitor and 40-meg HD ran $939. The same vendor offered an external CD-ROM drive (everything was a 1X in these days) for $399.

An ad on page 63 proclaimed the availability of the epic game Civilization, for “IBM-PC/Tandy/Compatibles.” Yes, these were the days when you could still buy a PC at Radio Shack and expect to be taken seriously.

04/07/2001

Dave Farquhar General , ,

Caveat emptor. Dan Bowman wrote in asking about a barebones Duron system he found. $399, just add an HD. He was nervous about it but wanted confirmation. It sounded OK until I found the word “Amptron.” You should translate the word “Amptron” as “No,” or, “Don’t buy it.”

Amptron is part of the PC Chips group, and the running joke about PC Chips was that PC Chips made parts so bad that even Packard Bell wouldn’t touch them. Typically a PC Chips board will sell for $65 or less and have integrated everything, so you can build a really cheap system in it. Mom-and-Pop stores will use systems built around a PC Chips board to undercut the consumer electronics chains, because, let’s face it, an integrated motherboard selling in the mid two figures will allow you to undercut even the entry-level $399 eMachine.

My personal experience with PC Chips boards has been horrendous. Defects abounded. I had one system that worked fine until you tried to access the floppy drive. Then the PC would bluescreen. Every single time. I had two other PC Chips boards that didn’t work at all. That was when I swore the company off for good. Some of my coworkers have bought cheap PCs at Mom-and-Pop shops, had problems, and brought them in to work for me to look at. Wouldn’t you know it? PC Chips. In both cases the problem turned out to be really, really dumb statements in config.sys and autoexec.bat so the motherboards weren’t at fault, that time. Honestly, I was surprised.

So… Friends don’t let friends buy Amptron, or any of the other members of the PC Chips group. Eurone and Bondwell are the only others I can think of off the top of my head.

I’m not sure why anyone buys these boards anyway, seeing as you can always get an FIC board for $10 more, and FIC generally makes good stuff. But anyway…

If you’re looking for a cheap Duron upgrade, look for a Gigabyte GA-7IXE4. It sells for about $85, and it’s a bare board. No video, no audio, no nothing. If you’ve got an existing PC, it’s perfect. Pair it up with a Duron-750 at $60, and salvage all your other components from the old machine, and you’ve just hot-rodded your aging PC for $145.

Soyo’s not my favorite motherboard company, but they’re miles ahead of PC Chips, and if you need an integrated solution they’ve got one for a good price. The K7VLM-B uses a VIA KL133 chipset and includes audio and video. Its 2D performance isn’t great, but its gaming performance is outstanding for an integrated chipset. The K7VLM-B sells for about $95, so you can build a low-end Duron gaming rig very inexpensively.

The other problem with barebones systems is the difficulty of knowing what you get. No one cares about anything but the motherboard maker. But what about the case? Will you sever a finger trying to open it? What about the power supply? Will it struggle to light the IDE activity LED? It’s impossible to know. Yeah, it’s a little hassle to spec out a case and power supply, and it’s a little hassle to mount the board instead of having it all done for you, but in the long run it’s more than worth it.

This particular barebones PC also included 256 MB of RAM. That really scared me, especially considering everything else. No one puts an Amptron board in a system and then puts Kingston memory on it. People buy PC Chips boards because they’re cheapest, so they’ll buy whatever commodity RAM is cheapest. A cheap motherboard plus cheap RAM is a recipe for disaster.

You can at least take comfort that they aren’t charging you any extra for the problems. They’re included, free.

04/06/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , ,

Mailbag:

File Name;Resume; CS; Ad Blocking; 602 Suite; Scary; Plextor

Three days down… The server was down while administrators removed dead sites, in hopes of increasing performance. Performance does seem better, but time will tell… Let’s get on to some serious business.

More memory alphabet soup. JHR wrote in with a good question that I realized I haven’t answered: Can you use your existing plain, cheap old SDRAM on a new DDR-capable motherboard?

The answer, unfortunately, is usually no. DDR comes on 184-pin modules. SDRAM usually comes on 168-pin modules. A few companies, like Fujitsu and Apacer, have talked about putting SDRAM on 184-pin modules. It’s been mostly talk. The price difference between DDR and SDRAM isn’t enough to justify it.

There are a few boards, like the Asus A7A266 (reviewed at http://www.dansdata.com/a7a266.htm ), with both types of sockets for both types of memory. But the A7A266 isn’t the best performer out there, so you pay the price of convenience by buying speed instead. It’s a mediocre DDR performer and a terrible SDRAM performer.

It’s a shame to throw away memory, but this isn’t the first time. As recently as 1997, 72-pin EDO memory cost less than SDRAM. The 72-pin SIMM replaced the 30-pin SIMM as the type of memory to have in 1994, though 30-pin-capable boards remained available for upgraders through 1996. Before 30-pin SIMMs, there were all sorts of weird memory technologies, like 30-pin SIPPs, and different types of individual chips, which generally were a huge pain.

Usually when memory was replaced, adapters came out. There were SIMMs with sockets to plug old chips into. There were adapters to plug a SIPP into a SIMM socket. There were riser cards to allow you to plug 30-pin SIMMs into 72-pin slots. The problem was, they tended to hurt speed and stability, and in many cases they were nearly as expensive as new memory.

History’s repeating itself. There are adapters to let you plug DIMMs into RIMM sockets, and 168-to-184 sockets, though they’re expensive and hurt speed and stability, especially in the case of those RIMM adapters. There’s no point in using them.

I really should have been shouting louder that PC133’s time in the sun is over. The problem is, nobody knows for sure what will replace it. There’s DDR and Rambus, both of which perform really well in certain benchmarks, neither of which seem to make much difference in the real world yet. DDR’s pricing is very close to PC133, assuming you’re buying Crucial. Rambus is still priced way too high. I suspect DDR will win, but there’s no way to know.

It’s a shame to throw out memory, but there usually isn’t much we can do about it. If it makes you feel any better, PCs using SDRAM should be useful for a number of years. I’ve still got two systems with 72-pin SIMMs in them doing useful work for me. One’s a Compaq 486 I bought back in 1994 that just finished a tour of duty as a DSL router; its next incarnation will be as a file/print server if I can find an ISA SCSI card to put in it. I’ll probably also have it automate some parts of my network, courtesy of cron. The other one is a Pentium-120, which has done time as a file server and also as a testbed.

Anything new enough to have SDRAM is new enough to make a very useful Linux box, and it can also make a good Windows box, particularly if you scale it back to just do a handful of things very well. If I ever get around to retiring my K6-2/350, my sister would love to have it because it’d make a great word processing/web browsing/e-mail box–better than the Cyrix 233 she’s using right now, though she doesn’t complain much about that computer. That computer was built out of a bunch of stuff Tom Gatermann and I pulled out of our spare parts bins. And if I did make that switch for her, I know who’d get that Cyrix 233, and that person won’t be complaining either.

The key to responsible upgrading, I think, is to buy stuff that you’ll be able to recycle whenever possible. A good SCSI card and hard drive, though expensive, will be good enough to be worth recycling when you make your next motherboard upgrade. The same goes for a good monitor, and unless you’re a 3D gaming freak, the same goes for a good video card as well. My STB Velocity 128 video card, even though it has an ancient nVidia Riva128 chipset in it, is still fast for the games I play and frankly, it’s overkill for business use. I’ve had that card for three and a half years. I expect I’ll still be using it in three years. Heck, my Diamond Stealth 3D card is still useful. It won’t do justice for my 19-inch display, but it’s fast enough for routine work and it’ll drive a 17-inch monitor at 1024×768 at refresh rates and color depths that won’t embarrass you. And that card’s five years old. It cost me $119 at a time when low-end cards cost $59, and it’s still better for most things than the $40 cards of today. The $25 cards of today will give you higher color depth and sometimes better refresh rates, but they’re not as fast. So that card saved me money. My STB Velocity 128 and my Diamond Viper 770 haven’t been recycled yet, but I’ll get at least three more years’ use out of both of those, even if I turn into a flight simulator fiend. The 770 would be decent for flight sims, and both of them are outstanding for what I do now.

Everyone I know recycles good keyboards and mice, when they think to buy them.

You’ll generally replace motherboards and CPUs on every upgrade cycle. Depending on how often you upgrade, you can expect to replace memory every other cycle.

A lot of people are recommending you buy a motherboard capable of either type of memory, then buy cheap PC133 and upgrade later. But the performance difference isn’t great enough to justify that. If you think you’re going to want DDR, I recommend you just bite the bullet and get DDR. Crucial’s now selling 128 MB PC2100 DDR modules for under $65, so 256 MB of PC2100 costs slightly more than a mid-range video card.

Mailbag:

File Name;Resume; CS; Ad Blocking; 602 Suite; Scary; Plextor

04/04/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

A great hardware site. I found this yesterday when I was searching in hopes of remembering a long-departed name of a hard drive manufacturer. The name I couldn’t put my finger on was Miniscribe. The great site, http://www.redhill.net.au, is a hardware guide, written by an experienced Australian clone shop, that’s unusually straight-shooting. It’s the only mention I’ve seen on a hardware site of the Gigabyte 7IXE4, a low-end Duron/Athlon board that sells for about 80 bucks.

Especially interesting to me is the history. They discuss drives in detail, and though it’s hardly a complete memoir of every drive that was ever on the market, it hits the common ones. Want to know where Western Digital got its sterling (and not very deserved) reputation? Read on. I’m not so sure of their statement that Maxtor was bought out by Hyundai (Maxtor certainly never mentions that), but their history seems about as complete and accurate as any other I’ve seen, and it’s interesting to read the reviews of ancient hard drives. At least to me.

Motherboards and CPUs get a similar treatment. Good stuff.

Monitors. My NEC FE950 finally came in yesterday. It’s gorgeous, and takes up the same amount of desk space that early 17-inchers took. Mine looks like it got pretty banged up either in manufacturing or shipping though, so I’ll have to arrange an RMA. I hate to be picky, but after spending $400 on a monitor, I don’t want something with a beat-up case. It could be a cosmetic flaw, or it could be an indication that this monitor had an incident with a forklift. I’m not taking that chance.

The vendor will advance me a replacement, which is good. I’ll probably opt for that. I hope I don’t get nailed for shipping, but I suspect I probably will. Lesson learned: Order from Staples.

As for the monitor, I can’t tell much difference between it and a Trinitron. I’m not sure if it’s using a Mitsubishi DiamondTron tube or something of NEC’s design (NEC and Mitsubishi merged their monitor operations last year), but whatever it is, I like it. Fabulous monitor, and great value for the money. As far as I can tell, it’s indistinguishable from the FP series other than the FP’s higher maximum resolution, which isn’t comfortable for the monitor’s size anyway. The only fault I can find with this FE is what appears to be an incident with a forklift or some other heavy machinery.

Once again I should emphasize this point: never ever scrimp on a monitor. It might be tempting to get a no-name monitor so you can afford more memory or a faster CPU, but memory and CPU prices drop much faster than monitor prices, and they always have. Plus, their useful life is much shorter. A good monitor can outlive two or three computers, so in the long run, you save money with a premium monitor.

Why was I stumbling over the name Miniscribe? I was recalling my first-ever building of a PC. I was salvaging parts from a 286 with a blown power supply. I couldn’t get a replacement power supply because it was a Samsung PC, largely proprietary. The power supply had cooked itself because a poorly placed IDE cable totally blocked its vents, so it never had proper cooling. This was 1993, my first year of college. The PC was owned by my fraternity. We went and bought a barebones 386DX-25–just a motherboard in a case–and went to work. The video card and floppy drives and I/O cards moved without a hitch. But the Miniscribe 40-meg IDE drive gave us problems. I couldn’t get it to work, and I doubted I had much future building PCs. I took it into the shop, and they couldn’t make any sense of it either. Their most experienced tech remembered that Miniscribe had been bought out by Maxtor, so he called a contact at Maxtor. The drive turned out to be an 8-bit IDE drive that worked on some 286s but would never work in a 386 or better. They took the drive in trade for a used 40-meg IDE drive using the more conventional 16-bit interface and transferred the data for us. We got a couple of years out of that PC, though it was never a speed demon. But it was functional and cheap.

Of course I recovered from those early stumbles. Within a couple months I was selling PCs, and a couple of months after that I was working as a tech myself.

The wages of spam. And finally, I saw yesterday that Nasdaq suspended trading of PSInet and the company is considering bankruptcy. Excellent. During its not-troubled-enough life, PSInet was frequently accused of operating a safe harbor for spammers, and back in the days when I bothered to try tracking down spammers, I traced large percentages of it to PSInet.

I do not like green eggs and spam. I do not like them, Sam I am.

Hopefully this is the start of a trend. I’ve seen estimates that the traffic generated by spammers increases the costs you and I pay for Internet service by a full $2 per month. That’s just the infrastructure costs our ISPs have to bear and pass on to us. And of course it’s a huge waste of time.

04/03/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

Interesting day at work yesterday. Some genius decided it’d be great to send a 281-K attachment to everyone in their address book (only 5,000 people). That meant no e-mail came in or out that afternoon while our poor VMS-based mail server tried valiantly to plow through 140 gigs’ worth of data. (I’ll be building that person a new PC. I knew I was keeping that 10 MHz 286 motherboard for a reason…)

But in the meantime, I pulled off the turnaround of the month. One of the users I support has an old NEC Versa laptop. It was a dog the day they got it, and it’s still yapping away today. Actually I probably shouldn’t insult the canine species by comparing them to this thing. It’s a Pentium-133 with MMX (the slowest MMX CPU Intel ever made), with a woefully underpowered 16 MB of RAM and a hard drive that’s been going soft for as long as I can remember.

At any rate, even after I tweaked it out, the thing still took the better part of two minutes to boot, and it took a good 30-45 seconds to launch Word 97. Memory usage was obnoxiously high–nearly 40 megs without any applications running. In short, the thing was unusable.

So I took the entire contents of the hard drive and shoved them into a directory called OLD, just in case I needed them. I copied the Win95 directory of the OSR2.1 CD into C:WindowsOptionsCabs. I hacked out MSN, IE, the Exchange client, and the other online services as described in my book (the freebie sample chapter describes the process), then I installed it, leaving out networking and basically leaving out everything but the bare essentials like Calc, WordPad (questionable, but I kept it anyway), Defrag, and Notepad. No networking. No Internet. When all was said and done, the system booted in 19 seconds. No kidding. I couldn’t believe it myself. And memory usage was right about 16 megs.

I did the Vcache trick and got memory usage down to 10. Excellent. I downloaded the laptop’s video drivers with another PC and installed them, which got me into 800x600x256. Then I installed Word. Word loaded in about 10 seconds. Astounding. I rebooted, and surprisingly enough, the machine still booted in 21 seconds, even after installing slow, fat, instrusive Word 97.

I installed Norton AntiVirus, assuming that’d kill performance once and for all, but we can’t have corporate PCs running around without it. NAV more than doubled boot time and memory usage (ugh), but it was still booting in under a minute, and Word was still loading in under 15 seconds. Can’t complain about that.

I did a few more filesystem tweaks and I defragged, which cut a little off the boot time and Word’s load time. This woefully underpowered laptop is about ready to turn some heads. The trick is to know exactly what you want, and ask it for exactly what you want. It’ll reward you.

And Windows, once liberated from the Evil Internet Exploiter Empire and the rest of Microsoft’s plans for world domination, can do things no one would have imagined.

And a big thank-you to my readers. Occasionally, editthispage/userland.com has a glitch that tabulates its Top 100 sites incorrectly. Well, yesterday such a glitch occurred, a bunch of other candidates’ votes were lost entirely, and I cracked the Top 100, at position #99, with 52,259 hits. (The usual holder of that spot has around 68,000 hits.) That’s since Oct. 21, which isn’t bad at all.

With 400-500 reads per day on average, I should be a legitimate Top 100 site within about six weeks.

That’s the first cumulative statistic I’ve seen in a number of months, since the last big glitch put me in the Top 100 when I wasn’t. And at the time I wasn’t tracking so I didn’t have a good count. (I track now.)

Argh. Yesterday Roger Clemens broke Walter Johnson’s 74-year-old record for the most career strikeouts by an American League pitcher. He did it against my Royals, which bothers me some, but what really bothers me is seeing a record held by one of the classiest guys to ever play the game by a jerk like Clemens.