12/22/2000

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , ,

AMD, part II. Intel will have its work cut out for it when Micron releases its Mamba chipset for the Athlon and Duron. Micron noticed a great waste of space in its Samurai chipset, so they decided to turn the wasted silicon into 8 MB of high-speed, low-latency L3 cache. Intel wouldn’t license the P6 bus to Micron, so Micron went to AMD, who of course welcomed them with open arms.

The Mamba is expected to perform 15% faster than the AMD 760. Unfortunately, I know nothing about expected release dates.

And what of AMD’s great hope for the Duron, the VIA KM133? Horrendous 2D performance holds it back. While it has the memory bandwidth of the earlier KT133 and KX133 and offers decent 3D performance, its 2D performance seriously lags behind the SiS 730–and SiS video isn’t exactly renowned for performance. In other words, the reason the Savage series flopped as a standalone card remains. Intel’s integrated chipsets put up better numbers overall, so if AMD’s going to beat Intel in this space, it’s going to have to be on price.

The new Musicmatch Jukebox. I normally don’t pay any attention to this app, but I caught a review of it and it includes a compelling new feature. It’s optional, and most privacy activists will hate it, but that’s why you can turn it off. For me, it’s the draw.

Tell it your favorite artist, and it streams stuff that other people who like the same thing like. I punch in Aimee Mann (who else?) and it responds by playing a set of Aimee Mann, Moby, Abra Moore, and Lou Reed. Nice. The next set was David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Blur. And none of the tracks was the artist’s best-known song.

For me, the whole point of radio is to discover new stuff. I love my music (I’ve got a modest-sized collection of nearly 200 CDs), but radio has become so repetitive and it’s really hard for a quality artist like Aimee Mann to get any radio play. And when she does get play, it’s “Voices Carry” (her smash 1985 hit with her band, ‘Til Tuesday), or if a station is especially progressive, her Oscar-nominated “Save Me.” About once a year, you might hear one of her minor hits like “I Should Have Known” or “That’s Just What You Are” or “Red Vines.” The problem is, she doesn’t have the promotional engine behind her to give radio stations much of anything in return for playing her stuff (short of the occasional concert ticket, but she doesn’t tour much). So we get the same ‘N Sync and The Backstreet Boys and Celine Dion and Elton John songs over and over and over. Nothing new about that.

Sometimes a good station does come around, but when you hear a new song, good luck finding out anything about it because the DJ usually doesn’t say (except for the songs everyone already knows). When a song is playing, MusicMatch optionally brings up a browser window with album info, a review, a listing of the most popular tracks off the album. And in some cases, you can download a free track off the album. And–unlike radio–if you don’t like a track, you can skip it!

You can also choose from a list of 18 preset stations, and you can tell it to mix selections from the stations. So if you yearn for the days when AOR stations mixed in a dash of alternative music, you can approximate it by mixing Classic Rock, Hard Rock, and Adult Alternative (since that’s what they now call most of the stuff that was considered alternative in 1992).

The other nice thing is it’ll favor the artists whose MP3s you rip using the program in the 18 preset stations. So presumably if I rip a lot of Badfinger and Cars (I still have trouble calling The Cars classic rock) tunes, if I click on the Classic Rock station I’ll hear something other than a constant barrage of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Rush (which, as far as I can tell, is all that anyone listened to in the ’70s). Sounds good to me.

This, I think, is a killer application for the Internet. Musicmatch is at www.musicmatch.com.

Spam. If it sounds too good to be true, it is. At least the phrase “boost the reliability of ordinary Windows 3.x…to nearly the level of Windows NT or 2000” gave me a chuckle.

Ignore these chumps.

Dear Windows User,

Now you can boost the reliability of ordinary Windows 3.x, 95 and 98 to nearly the level of Windows NT or 2000, Microsoft’s professional and industrial version of Windows.

The new WinFix 4.3 is a very effective way to improve the reliability of Windows, because it makes Windows fault-tolerant and self-repairing. And WinFix is very safe, because it operates completely independent of Windows.

http://www.backtoday.com/comph to find out more about WinFix, the safest, most effective way to keep you working, by keeping your PC working non-stop.

Arlen Dixon, CEO
Westwood Software Marketing

This announcement is being sent to PC users who asked to be kept informed about new developments in Windows(tm) technology. To be removed from our mailing list, go to the Email-us page. OR To be removed mailto:remove@backtoday.com?Subject=REMOVE

12/21/2000

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

Athlon and Duron info. Should I buy an Athlon or a Duron? Tough question. Here’s the first good analysis I’ve seen. And Anand has a review of the SiS 730 integrated Athlon/Duron chipset. This won’t be the chipset you choose for your PC, but it might end up in your Aunt Millie’s.

As for motherboards, I’ve read of some people having problems with the Asus A7V; that it’s a decent board once you get it set up, but that it’s very cranky. The number of search engine hits I get with the phrase “Asus A7V” and words like “conflict” and “configuration” lends some circumstantial evidence to this. This troubles me; Asus boards are normally as solid as they come. Yet like I’ve said before, every time I’ve bought something other than Asus I’ve regretted it.

If you’re here looking for help on your Asus A7V, one of Storage Review’s moderators pointed me to the defunct A7V Troubleshooting Board  — I looked there and found no shortage of advice.

I guess if I were going to buy something now — and I admit I’m half-tempted to pick up a Duron and board as a cheap upgrade for my aging K6-2/350 — I’d probably go with a Gigabyte GA-7ZX or GA-7ZX1. The former includes a single ISA slot and built-in Creative audio; the latter includes neither of those. It costs about $35 less than the Asus A7V, and benchmarks nearly as fast. And, for the price difference you can afford to more than make up the performance difference through brute force by buying a faster CPU.

Gigabyte and AMD have a great working relationship lately (AMD often uses Gigabyte boards in their testbed and demo systems), so I have few qualms about going with them.

If anyone out there has some first-hand experience with different current Athlon/Duron boards, I’d love to hear about it — and I’m sure my readers would too. The mail link’s to the left.

We’ll revisit the topic of AMD tomorrow. There’s a lot more to this.

Cloning Mac Hard Drives. I may have covered this before but it bears repeating. From the Finder, drag and drop the old drive icon onto the new drive. It’ll copy all files, including hidden files, to a folder inside the new drive. Open that folder, drag the files out, and you’ve got a perfect clone. I do this very frequently with the Macs I fix at work.
You can also use Apple’s Disk Copy to copy one drive to another, but I find it easier to just use the Finder.

Disk Copy is also capable of saving hard disk images to files, a la Drive Image or Ghost for the PC. So cloning of Macs is possible, though you don’t get the cool multicast facilities of Drive Image or Ghost. But for one-off cloning, Disk Copy works great. You don’t get an exact binary copy of the disk, however, so you’ll still want to rebuild the directory with DiskWarrior and then defragment afterward for absolute best performance.

Presidential questions. Here we go again. I hinted during my previous arguments that I didn’t think Gore necessarily had won the popular vote. Absentee ballots weren’t in, and many of the states that had declared an electoral winner still hadn’t reported 100% of their precincts. It seemed a longshot, but so did a lot of things about this election.

Here’s a story about the wide and varied vote counts (all still putting Gore ahead nationally, but by a margin of as little as 330,000 votes). A coworker sent me the text to another story on the same site that had claimed Bush won by 2 million votes by one total. Unfortunately that story seems to have disappeared.

12/20/2000

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

~Mail follows today’s post~

A failed review of McAfee Utilities 2000. I was going to write about the successor to Nuts & Bolts, the utilities suite that could have been so good, except parts of it were so bad. It was never second-best of the three I looked at in Optimizing Windows. It was sometimes the best in a particular category, and often the worst. I was hoping the new version would fix some of the shortcomings–add the launch acceleration features of Speed Disk, Fix-It, and Windows Defrag to DiskMinder and it would be the best of the bunch when configured properly.

It’s bloated. While Fix-It is clean and simple and NU is getting there, McAfee still insists on throwing in the kitchen sink and a hair dryer. Never mind that’s a particularly  dangerous combination. You can’t de-select some of the kitchen sink or hair dryer features either. Worse yet, the installer missed installing at least one critical DLL, so it doesn’t run. At first I figured it was incompatible with Windows Me, so I tried installing it on a 98SE system. It had the same problems there too–and this was a fresh install, with no special trickery. So I can’t tell you how good the good parts are because I don’t know.

I should probably look into getting a retail copy of it, because it’s presumably more polished (I sure hope so–imagine not even being able to install something, but not being able to return it!) but I’m less than hopeful. The reasons are obvious, I hope.

You can download an evaluation copy at www.mcafee.com , but I really can’t recommend you do. Check out Norton Utilities 2001 instead. You can get an evaluation copy of it at www.symantec.com .

Time for a new system. A friend and I are spec’ing out a system for another friend. We’re having fun spending someone else’s money. So far, we’ve managed to run up a $10,092 tab, but my friend was slacking. For one, he forgot the second 21″ NEC flat-panel display and TNT2-based PCI video card. We want him to be able to watch IrfanView slide shows on his second monitor while he plays Quake full-screen. (IrfanView doesn’t require the greatest of available cards, but we want like manufacturers since that works better for multi-head displays. And never mind that Tim doesn’t play Quake.) And he went with a TNT2 card for the main display. What’s up with that? Why would they make $400 64 MB GeForce 2 Ultra cards otherwise, except for Tim to buy them? But I approved a PCI-based TNT2 for the secondary display because I didn’t want to look too extravagent.

So we’re not done yet.

He’s been sending me specs and I’ve been telling him what’s wrong with them. I’d be great in upper-level management.

I’ve even got a Plan B. If what we come up with is too much, I’ll admit to Tim that The Gator’s being too extravagent. “Yeah, he insisted on putting a second floppy drive in there, in case you needed to copy disks. ‘Who copies disks?’ I asked him, but he insisted. So I humored him. You and me, we both know you can copy disks with a single floppy drive. So we’ll nix that drive, cut the bill by 15 bucks and everything’s perfect. There. Now THAT is a practical system.”

~~~~~~~~~~

From: Dan Bowman
Subject: RE: Whaddayadoin?
Yeah, there are some issues here. …and you are one of the voices of your generation, like it or not. Speaking of that, when you can, please take a look at the story I linked from the ETP site on Sunday, the one about smoking and the ads. Is her take on the ads valid? Are you qualified to answer? http://www.thegardencafe.com/2000_12_10_arc.shtml#1615885
 
Thanks; just looking out for my kids’ futures. I may have to take them by a morgue.
 
dan
~~~~~

Sorry for that aside.
 
Am I qualified to answer? Who knows. Does it sound accurate to me? You bet. I haven’t seen that ad, but it’d strike me as morbid, maybe funny. It sure doesn’t sound effective to me. Wouldn’t stop me from smoking. The stat that 1 cigarette cuts your life expectancy by 7 minutes helped, but that’s just me. I’ve smoked three cigars in my life. Cigars are worse for you, I know. But fear is a terrible motivator, when someone else is trying to scare you. Internal fear is a great motivator, but nobody thinks smoking will make them a failure.
 
Maybe the financial aspect could be effective. What will a year’s worth of cigarettes buy? I don’t know the answer to that question. But if smoking versus not smoking is the difference between driving a Ford Escort and something with some prestige to it, that’ll get some people’s attention. Not everyone’s. I see my peers thinking more about money than they used to. That may just be a coming-of-age thing.
 
I think honesty is just the best way, regardless of the other approaches used. Respect and honesty. Not that I’m an expert, but when my dad sat me down and talked to me like someone he respected and said, “This is what’s bad about marijuana,” and on down the line through each drug, I listened to him. (Tobacco may or may not have been included. Alcohol was not. I learned what was bad about alcohol from watching him. Some people can pick things up that way. Others won’t.)

~~~~~~~~~~

From: “Jan Swijsen” <qjsw@nospam.oce.nl>
Subject: Re: strings

Hey, I won’t out-do you every time. Just every time I can.

In Computer Shopper, the subtitles and section headings are worth a laugh too. Their editors add a personal touch without giving the impression of doing self promotion. In fact Computer Shopper and PC Plus (also a good one) are the only mags that I buy these days.
~~~~~

I’ve noticed that. I know Chris Ward-Johnson recommends PC Plus; when Shopper approached me about doing the “Optimise Your PC” series I noticed
they were published by the same outfit so I asked him his opinion of both magazines.

When I showed a copy of the article to a marketing guru I work with, he asked me where “those guys” were when I wrote Optimizing Windows. (“Why
didn’t you have those guys design your cover, and that ‘Try David Farquhar’s tips for pepping up your PC’ phrase should have been on it! Right on the front!”) That’s not the O’Reilly way, but I bet it sure would sell…

~~~~~~~~~~

From: Dan Bowman
Subject: Whaddayadoin?

Trying to take the heat off Pournelle or something?????
 
I didn’t see a slavish devotion to The One True Penguin Path in that post<g>.
 
dan

~~~~~

There is no One True Penguin Path. If someone tries to create one, then they’ve just totally destroyed the entire purpose. Not that they haven’t already. That “slavish devotion” you mention says a lot. Linux is supposed to be about freedom, not slavery. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with paying for intellectual property. The people who think otherwise have traded one form of slavery for a much more vicious form. I see absolutely no difference between total, blind devotion to Linux and total, blind devotion to Microsoft. None. Not at all. If you reach that point, you desperately need to go find religion.
 
And if people disagree with that, good. I would love to hear a reasoned argument why total, blind devotion to Linux is a good thing and people should do it, because I sure can’t figure out why on my own.
~~~~~~~~~~

From: “Håkan Waara” <hwaara@nospam.chello.se>
Subject: editthispage

Hey, great site!

How did you change the <body> attributes on your Manila site? I can’t see any way to do that from the “advanced” preferences..

Thanks.
~~~~~

Thanks!

I don’t think I changed the body attributes; I specify the font for the
daily posts (you’ll notice occasionally I miss), so I get a mixture of Times
and Verdana.

You can define a body tag in your cascading style sheet to accomplish that,
I think. I know standard HTML pretty well but I never bothered to get
comfortable with either XML or CSS. But maybe one of my other readers will pipe in.

12/19/2000

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , ,

Quick thoughts on Norton Utilities 2001 (aka Norton Utilities 5). Not a full review, just the most important points. It now runs on all 32-bit Windows flavors. Excellent. I prefer Speed Disk over Diskeeper, since it also reorders files based on usage, which Diskeeper doesn’t do. Executive Software argues this is unimportant, but my impressions suggest otherwise. File reorder does make those key apps load faster. However, Speed Disk does go against Microsoft’s recommendations for how defraggers should run in NT/2000, which may matter to you. On servers I’d stick to Diskeeper. On workstations, I’d go Speed Disk.

They’ve cut some of the superflous junk out, which is good. There’s still plenty of stuff in there to make your system worse though, so my advice from Optimizing Windows of just installing Disk Doctor, Optimization Wizard, Basefiles, WinDoctor, and Speed Disk holds, and if you’re running 95/98/Me, so does my advice on how to use them most effectively. (You’ll have to buy the book for that bit of advice–sorry. I can’t give it all away.) Under NT and 2000, you get far fewer options, but the defaults are sensible, which is more than I can say for the defaults under 95/98/Me.

How do they do? Well, after I used my top-secret NU settings, Windows Me booted about 10% faster, and it was already anything but a slouch.

The biggest improvement for NU 2001 is that it now works on all Windows platforms. Competition with Ontrack’s Fix-It and The McAfee Utilities (formerly Nuts & Bolts) suites at least gives us that. Unfortunately, there still is no best utilities suite–each one has some feature I wish the others had. NU is the best overall, but that’s only by being second-best at just about everything.

If you’ve got an earlier version, don’t bother with the upgrade unless you’ve switched to Windows Me or Windows 2000. If you’re looking to buy a utilities suite for the first time, this is the one to get. A utilities suite is absolutely essential when you’re optimizing Windows Me, Windows 98, or Windows 95, and with the right settings, this one’s the best.

An FDISK Primer. A question of how to use FDISK came up on Storage Review’s forum (I’ve been stirring up trouble over there), so here’s my response. I figured I might as well put it here too, in case someone needs an FDISK tutorial.

Make your boot disk. Run FDISK. When it asks if you want to enable large disk support, say yes unless you want FAT16 partitions. (You probably want FAT32.) Hit 1 (Create Partition), then hit 2 (Primary DOS partition). It’ll ask if you want to create the maximum-sized partition and set it active. I’m guessing the answer is yes. (Active means it’ll be holding a bootable OS. Why they can’t just say that, I don’t know.) FDISK will do its thing. When it says you need to reboot, reboot. When the system comes back, format the drive with FORMAT x: (substitute your drive letter). I always do a DIR x: before formatting to make sure I’ve got the right drive. If you get an invalid media type error, it’s the right drive. Proceed.

12/18/2000

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

Fixing a troublesome hard drive. Some time ago, one of my church’s staffers handed me a 10-gig Western Digital hard drive he couldn’t get working. “When you have time,” he said. I took it home, set it on my desk and promptly forgot about it, until yesterday, when I was helping someone out with setting jumpers a WD drive and I remembered I had a recent WD drive…

So I threw it in my Dual Celeron-366, which has sort of become my testbed system, to see what I could get from it. The system detected it fine. Good. Try booting… I find that EZ-Drive utility that everyone installs, even though with a plug-in UDMA card (and I know they use those) there’s no need for it. With a recent BIOS there shouldn’t be any need for it, unless you’ve got flaky BIOSes like me. But we won’t go there. But it doesn’t boot. Boot off a floppy, run FDISK, and I find a 9.7 GB non-DOS partition.

I call to verify whether the drive has any valuable data on it. None? Low-level format time.  I download Western Digital’s utility suite and run its quick test. It passes with flying colors. WD doesn’t offer a true low-level format, but the utilities can zero out the drive. Close enough. That’ll get rid of EZ-Drive.

And now, an editorial statement, if I may. Western Digital makes the most overrated hard drives in existance. I’ll daresay Western Digital hard drives are the most overrated piece of computer hardware, period. In my experience, I’ve found Quantums and Maxtors and IBMs to be faster, and I’ve had less trouble with them.

And speaking of EZ-Drive, do the manuals that come with new retail-packaged hard drives tell you you have to install it? I confess, I usually buy bare OEM drives since they’re cheaper, and the last couple of times I’ve bought retail kits for work, I did the stereotypical male thing and didn’t read the instructions. Seeing as I could have written the instructions, I didn’t see the need. Come to think of it, I almost never read the instructions unless I’m just totally out of my league (like when I was learning Linux). I learn more that way.

As I was writing this, the zeroing finished, no bad sectors, and I partitioned the drive and SYSed it. Good deal.

Optimizing Windows. Curtis Horn writes in that Amazon’s selling it (to him at least) for $7.50. No one’s making any money at that price, but hey. It might be Amazon experimenting with supply and demand again, who knows. But if you’ve been putting it off, now’s a good time to get it (assuming the price is still good and shipping doesn’t end up being 20 bucks). The link’s to the left, as always.

Computer Shopper UK. Chris Miller warns me that features don’t stay up there forever, so if you want the first installment of the “Optimise Your PC” series, I suggest you get over there quickly and print yourself a copy.

12/17/2000

Dave Farquhar General , ,

Radio Free Linux? I found these instructions for broadcasting audio with Linux very interesting, though of questionable legality. When you broadcast music, you’re supposed to pay the artist, or the artist’s representative, a cut. That’s how Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney made their money–they bought up rights to songs besides their own. Their record royalties are a pittance in comparison.

I’m guessing we’ll be seeing plenty of Linux-based pirate Radio stations, since the required software’s all free and the system requirements minimal.

Search engine hits. I’ll take these recent search engine queries as questions. Editthispage keeps track of the links people follow to get here. I’m sure some of the privacy people out there are throwing a fit about this, but that’s pretty standard behavior for Webservers. The better you know your audience, the better you can serve them, as I’m going to attempt to demonstrate. (Might as well reward these people if they come back, eh?)

As usual, the difference between good and evil or right and wrong comes down to the answer to one question: What’s your motive?

The built-in memory test. I assume this person was looking for information on the standard POST (Power-On Self Test) built into every PC. What about it? It’s worthless. If the memory module is in really bad shape, it might fail that test. But many of these tests simply count the memory, since fast memory tests give the impression of being a faster board. For a good memory tester, see RAM Stress Test (expensive, unfortunately). For troubleshooting, maybe a local computer store has a memory tester. For preventative maintenance, it’s less expensive to buy quality name-brand memory.

Windows Me DNS cache. Ah, someone’s thinking. A DNS cache is an outstanding way to speed up or optimize Internet access. The only true DNS cache that I know of that runs under Windows is Naviscope , which also does ad blocking but doesn’t do as good of a job as AdSubtract or Proxomitron. Since Naviscope can use a proxy server itself, you could point it at Proxomitron, assuming you have buckets of memory for running Internet utilities.

If you happen to be running a Linux box to route packets to a broadband connection, you can take this advice.

Underground ADSL. No idea what the user meant but I know exactly why it hit. I’ve talked about ADSL, and the site’s name will produce a search hit. Since DSL uses existing underground cable, sites talking about DSL installation will get hits, as will a lot of sites of questionable character (hacking and phreaking sites).

12/16/2000

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

Troubleshooting Windows NT and Outlook. This one had me totally stumped. We have a PC that’s always been a little flaky, but very recently Outlook just stopped working reliably. Access violations every 5-20 minutes, always at the same address, became the norm. In addition, it would claim to run out of memory every time you tried to read anything other than a plain-text message.

I traced the latter problem to a corrupt normal.dot file; he was using Word as his e-mail editor and as his format for fancy messages.

Finally, I coaxed another error message out of it while logged in with an administrative account: Unable to find or register vbscript.dll. Fine. Time to uninstall, run Eraser 97 to get rid of the last of those bits, then reinstall both Office 97 and Outlook 98.

Vbscript.dll still didn’t register, so I grabbed a copy off a working PC, dropped it in WinntSystem32, and issued the command regsvr32 vbscript.dll to register it. It took.I launched Outlook 98, Word 97, and Internet Explorer 5, since that combination seems best able to coax whatever errors out of Outlook I’m going to get. I configured Outlook to go read my mail account via IMAP and waited. Access violation once again.

So I loaded a program we have from Seagate Software, called Modules.exe I believe. It tells you exactly what’s loaded in memory and at what address. Being able to count in hexadecimal doesn’t get you any dates, but it sometimes helps you troubleshoot a problem. Plus it lets you make jokes about how much more fun it makes you at parties. So I sort by memory address, look at the ranges, and find the culprit. I forget the name of the DLL offhand, but the description Modules gave was “Outlook Network Folders.” Net Folders. Net Folders: one of the best but most poorly implemented ideas Microsoft ever foisted upon the unsuspecting masses.

So I copied that DLL over from the properly-working machine, then used the command-line utility fc.exe to compare them–if they’re different, I’ve found my culprit. I compare them, and find they’re identical.

That leaves two possibilities: Either the OS is corrupt beyond repair and just needs a clean re-install from scratch, or we’ve got a hardware problem. I find it suspicious that the problem always occurs at the same address, so I take the address, translate it into decimal using Windows’ calculator, then divide it by 1024 and then by 1024 again to get the address in megabytes rather than in bytes, and I get… 1221-something. Ouch. In a machine with 64 MB of RAM? So I went and found a programmer to confirm whether I was running through the right mathematical process. Indeed I was. He asked what kind of memory translation Intel PCs and Windows NT do (he’s a VMS programmer).   Then I remembered NT uses a 4-gigabyte address space, regardless of how much physical memory is there. So much for getting a number between 0 and 64 that I could use to determine which DIMM in the system was bad.

So instead, I just swapped the DIMMs. The problem went away. A smoking gun! Problem is, which of the two was bad? I can’t just leave it that way, because eventually something else will break.

Popping out RAM Stress Test , from the unfortunately-named Ultra-X, Inc., is the best way I’ve found to conclusively find a bad module. So I ran it for a couple of hours. Nothing. So I left it to run over the weekend. Hopefully that will turn up the problem by the time I return to the office on Monday.

And of course the PC in question is the one on the desk of one of our most important executives. Figures.

A minor change. Seeing as I have a growing number of British readers, still cursed with dialup connections, and since I tend to write really long, I switched to a three-day view rather than the seven-day view I’ve been using. Older pieces are of course accessible through the calendar and through the Best of this Page link, both to the left.

12/15/2000

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

This can’t wait. The two graphics giants have wed, sort of. nVidia has purchased 3dfx’s core assets.  That’s the end of the line for 3dfx.

This leaves nVidia as the undisputed leader in 3D graphics, and in graphics, we’re now down to a Big Three of nVidia, ATi and Matrox, with ATi and Matrox making boards and nVidia supplying other board manufacturers such as Guillemot and Creative.

So, what went wrong? A lot of things. They were late delivering new products. They lost focus, buying out struggling boardmaker STB and entering the graphics card business. In doing so, they entered foreign territory and they alienated their former allies. Rather than strengthening their brand, it weakened it–suddenly there was one company promoting their stuff, rather than six or seven. Then the combined company had to sell their product for such a low price, it killed profitability and harmed them more than it harmed the competition. Dumping only works when you’re much bigger than your competitiors.

They made a good product, and really, they deserve a lot of credit for reinvigorating the PC game market. But history is littered with the carcasses of companies that made great contributions but weren’t able to remain competitive for one reason or another.

Corel pulling out of the Linux market? It’s no great surprise, but there are reports that Corel’s selling its Linux business.

The original P4 design. If you thought the Pentium 4 seemed underly ambitious, there’s a reason for it. Read about what it almost was at The Register.

Makes me wonder if once they get down to .13 micron, if they might not dust off more elements of the original design and give it a shot. AMD may force their hand, if their 32/64-bit Sledgehammer CPU is as good as they’re saying it will be. (Question is, is that the engineering department or the marketing department talking?)

By the way, there are Linux distributions incompatible with the P4. They don’t recognize the CPU so they refuse to run. The various companies are releasing patches to fix the problem.

12/14/2000

Dave Farquhar General , ,

Jumbo HD woes. My 15-gig Quantum drive mysteriously started working right from the regular UMDA-33 controller on my Abit BP6 yesterday. Totally out of the blue. That’s what makes this problem so maddening; it’s intermittent. I’m going to stick with keeping the drive connected to the UDMA-66 controller though, since this is a UDMA-66 drive.

And my March article for Shopper is almost complete. I need to come up with a good lead and a good closer, figure out whether I can fit one more trick into the 200 or so words I have left, and then fire it off to London. I could have done another book rehash but I decided to write this one from scratch, and I think it’s pretty good.

A useful modems link. Modems are mostly a thing of the past for me, but I know a lot of my readers (especially those in the UK) aren’t so fortunate. There’s a large and authoritative guide to modems at http://modems.rosenet.net/ .

Snow. There’s a family from Michigan who recently joined our church. I remember one of them saying recently, “I keep telling the kids it doesn’t snow in Missouri.”

Well, not quite like it does in Michigan. But the seven inches or so of the white stuff sitting on the ground outside right now testifies that it can snow in Missouri. This isn’t Florida. So I’m guessing this was a bit of a rude surprise to them–not that they can’t handle driving in it.

Rick Sutcliffe may return to the Cubs. As a television analyst , not as a pitcher.

The Chicago Cubs are looking for a replacement for longtime analyst Steve Stone, who retired this year. Rick, who’s worked for the last two seasons as a part-time analyst for ESPN and for the San Diego Padres, is one of the candidates to replace him.

Rick and I are cousins, which explains the strong feelings I have about the Cubs, the team where he had the most longevity.

12/13/2000

Dave Farquhar General , ,

Windows and dot-matrix printers. Why do I remember this old, next-to-useless information? I was talking today with someone at work about traits inherited from our parents. We both thought we got our parents’ worst stuff, but I must have gotten my dad’s memory.

But I digress, as usual. Over on Shopper UK’s message boards there was a question about using an old Star Micronics LX-10 dot-matrix printer with Windows 2.5. A Star Micronics rep (I had no idea the company was still in business!) was stumped–the printer’s old enough that it’s not in Star’s database, I guess. The model number seems vaguely familiar to me, but I don’t know anything specific about it other than it must be a pre-1987 printer because by then Star was making the NX-1000 and not much else (I know because I had one). But the trick to running a dot matrix printer with any piece of software if you can’t find an exact driver is to first try an Epson LQ series driver, then try an Epson FX series, then try an Epson MX series. In that order.

Virtually all dot-matrix printers (Okidata, Star, Citizen, Panasonic) were Epson-compatible; the major differences between various printers were number of pins (24, 9, or 7), speed, and number of built-in fonts. An Epson driver won’t get you all your printer’s unique features, but it will at least get it working.

I don’t know how many people need this kind of information anymore, but I might as well put it online as it comes up. Since search engines have this site indexed, people will find it.

Speaking of Shopper UK, Chris Miller tells me my first “Optimise Your PC” article is now up on their site, at www.computershopper.co.uk . Registration is required (sorry), but it’s there if you want to read it. The second article in the series will appear in the February issue, and the third (which I’m writing now) in March. Presumably that means they’ll be online in approximately a month and two months, respectively.

I’ve come up with a method to dual-boot Windows 98 and Windows Me (or any other two systems that don’t get along) using Partition Magic and Boot Magic. It’s so easy it ought to be considered cheating. Now to accomplish the same thing with XOSL… And I thought I had more to say but I’m out of time. If you mailed me the last couple of days, I’ll get back to you shortly.