Spinrite, Mac troubleshooting, and elections

Dave Farquhar Macintosh

SpinRite is your friend. Gatermann was telling me about instability with one of his Win98 boxes; he re-installed about 6 times with no better results when he ran SpinRite on his drive. It found tons of bad sectors that Scandisk wasn’t finding. He swapped out the drive and Win98 went back to its normal rate of instability.

Unfortunately, SpinRite doesn’t yet support NTFS, making it less useful for those who run NT or W2K.

More Mac troubleshooting. If your Mac crashes while printing, there’s a decent chance it’ll crash at bootup immediately afterward. I was troubleshooting a startup problem on a G4 and spent a good two hours before I noticed a document in one of the printer icons on the desktop. I rebooted without extensions, opened each printer and deleted any and all documents in them, and rebooted again. Then the G4 went back to its normal rate of instability.

Election “troubleshooting.” If you’re wondering why recounts can be different each time, here’s a perspective you’re not finding in the mainstream media from WorldNetDaily. You probably suspect, like I do, that this is less about recounts than it is about looking for Gore votes. It may actually be manufacturing Gore votes.

These guys are definitely right-leaning, which bothers me about as much as left-leaning, but at least they’re honest and not trying to push leftist coverage off as objective.

I continue to contend that objective coverage is very difficult, if not impossible, but that doesn’t matter because no one even wants to practice objective news coverage anymore. That’s why I left the news business.

Impressions of Netscape 6

Dave Farquhar net.culture , , , , , ,

I’ll be back in a bit. With preliminary impressions of Netscape 6. My notes on it are at work, but I’ll give you the overall. I’m thinking C+. It worked OK for me and it was fast. There were things about it that annoyed me though. I very badly want to use a non-Microsoft product, because I detest Microsoft, but IE has a couple of features that save me a lot of keystrokes and I have to think of that.

Assuming it manages to install, chances are there’ll be things about it you like. The things that bother me most are features that Netscape used to have but now don’t. But for basic browsing it’s much better than its predecessors.

I’ll get the rest of the details up here within a few hours.

My notes on Netscape 6. This is pretty rough, but I don’t have time to pretty it up.

Speed: Good. Very comparable to IE in most regards and sometimes faster, though still not as fast when rendering nested tables. On a P2/350 it’s hard to tell a difference. Program loads very slowly however (20+ seconds on that P2/350).

Stability: So-so if you can manage to get it installed. Installation problems galore; seemed stable under NT4 once I got it running. Under heavy use it didn’t crash on me once. However, numerous attempts to get Java plug-in working failed. I never did get it to install on a Mac G3 running OS 8.6.

Features: Stop animations feature is gone and sorely missed. Makes me mouse more than IE does. IE-like backspace is there; ctrl-enter is not and autocomplete is Netscape 4-like rather than IE like, forcing more keystrokes. I wish they’d focus more on usability, speed and stability and less on eye candy. Text enlargement doesn’t trigger window scrollbar or margin resizing when needed, so if you enlarge the text, you’ll lose the edge of the screen.

The ctrl-l-accessible Open Location box doesn’t use any autocomplete at all.

What’s Related moves from the navigation bar to the sidebar, where it’s tempting to turn off to save screen space.

Built-in search tool turns the sidebar back on if you turned it off. Annoying–don’t throw out your bookmarks to Google and Altavista yet.

No longer any fast, easy way to toggle images on/off

No longer forces you to install everything under the sun, which is very nice. Good to be able to get just a browser if you want.

Memory usage: disappointing. Used anywhere from 18-28 megs during initial testing. It’d be so nice to nuke the #$%& eye candy and get that memory usage down.

The verdict: I’m pretty happy with how the Gecko rendering engine turned out. But as soon as K-Meleon comes of age, chances are I’ll switch to that because it’s so much leaner and meaner. (Mozilla’s plagued by the same eye candy garbage, and until we all have 2-GHz processors and a gig of RAM and 15K RPM hard drives on our desktops, I’m mostly interested in having something that works fast. That means giving up some inessential whiz-bang stuff.)

And if you missed it… I posted an update late yesterday. It was too important to wait until this morning.

~~~~~~~~~~

From: “bill cavanaugh” <billcav@nospam.yahoo.com>
I just followed the Daynotes link to your site. I couldn’t help but notice:

“Farquhar’s Law. I should have some t-shirts made with this on it. Repeat after me. Cable connections are the last thing most people check. Make them the first thing you check.”

This has been one of (actually, I think the first) Pournelle’s Laws for a couple of decades.

Bill

~~~~~
Aw man, I thought I stole that fair and square from PC/Computing way back when it was still a magazine kind of worth reading.

Well, hopefully there’s some other stuff on the site useful to you that isn’t stolen from someone who stole it from Jerry Pournelle.

~~~~~~~~~~

From: “Curtis Horn” <curtishorn@nospam.home.com>
Subject: Fwd: FIC VA-503+ and K6-III+

I read what Peter said, and you are right, I got the K6-III because my other option is a k6-2, and we all know that on chip cache is better than on board, even at 100Mhz.  And it wasn’t that much more expensive than getting a k6-2.

I haven’t had the chance to upgrade the bios, but I did find it.  The other issue is that the bios chip is soldered on so I have to do it right and back up the old bios.  I’ll have some time this weekend, when I’m going to put the hard drive in.

This may sound weird but ever since I got a job that has me work on computer sometimes I feel less enthusiastic about doing it at home.  Right now I have 3 computers that I have to put NT Images on, and one has to have a second network card (for a bnc connector).  Thanks allot for the help.

Curtis

~~~~~
By all means take all proper precautions. It’s always a shame to ruin a motherboard because of something as simple as a BIOS upgrade. (I’ve got a dead Abit IT5H under my desk. Great board. I have no idea what I did that killed it, and that’s a shame because I could drop a Cyrix MII in it along with all the 72-pin SIMMs I could scrounge up and a 7200 rpm hard drive and it’d still be a fantastic workaday machine.)

What you say about not wanting to work on PCs after you get home actually makes a lot of sense. I resemble that remark! My main station’s Antec 300W power supply blew over the summer. The PC sat there in pieces for a couple of months because I just didn’t feel like working on it after doing that kind of stuff all day at work. I finally got around to swapping in another power supply a couple of weeks ago. I messed up my Linux firewall around the same time that power supply blew. I didn’t get around to fixing it until this weekend. Writing is relaxing to me because I don’t do it all day. Back when I was paying for college by selling my soul working as a salesman in a consumer electronics store, I found working on PCs relaxing.

I’m glad I could help.

 

A retraction, and a t-shirt saying

Dave Farquhar General ,

A profuse apology. Some months ago I posted an incorrect recollection that self-help pioneer Jess Lair, author of I Ain’t Much Baby, But I’m All I’ve Got, among other books, had committed suicide. I, regrettably, speculated as to why. Unable to find any confirmation one way or the other, I posted both the rumor and the speculation (I know better than to do that but I didn’t). Dan Seto, master researcher, quickly refuted it.

Then, today, Dr. Lair’s granddaughter e-mailed me to give some specifics. She confirmed that no, Dr. Lair did not commit suicide in the 1970s or anything else of the sort. To an extreme contrary, Dr. Lair was the ultimate survivor. He got his first pacemaker 38 years ago. He went through a total of three of them in his life. He survived six heart attacks. (Many of us don’t survive our first.)

When he died, she said he struggled for each breath for half an hour before finally walking to the light.

It’s unfortunate that those details aren’t widely known. This sounds to me like a man who said what he believed and believed what he said, pubished it, and lived it. That kind of genuineness is rare.

Do yourself a favor and give Dr. Lair’s I Ain’t Much Baby, But I’m All I’ve Got a look if you’ve never heard of it before.

Once again, I am terribly sorry. (And when I get a chance later tonight, I really need to go find that page and change it, leaving only the retraction, to prevent that rumor from perpetuating.)

Thanks to Dan Bowman for finding the link for me. But the FTP server is now refusing connections. I hate my other frickin’ ISP… Don’t they understand, this is important!?

Farquhar’s Law. I should have some t-shirts made with this on it. Repeat after me. Cable connections are the last thing most people check. Make them the first thing you check.

Got it? Good. I bring this up because I had a CD-RW fail yesterday. The culprit was a poorly seated firewire cable.

That’s it for computer stuff for the day. But fasten your seatbelts for a long post anyway. I rode a roller coaster yesterday, and now I’m taking you with me. (Hey, you agreed.)

Time to preach again. I’ll keep it short. I know some of you love it when I do this. Some of you absolutely hate it. What writer could possibly resist a subject that stirs such strong reactions?

I was talking after church last night with a relative newcomer. She’s been a Christian for about six months, she says. She was talking about her upbringing, and in trying to understand it, I used the word “hollow,” and she agreed. She talked about how the past six months have turned her life around, telling story after story, and I just couldn’t help but get excited. I was nodding and saying, “yeah!” a lot. The last person I talked to who was struggling so much and yet so happy was the man in… my… mirror. A few years ago.

And then she did a funny thing. She apologized for taking so much of my time. For one, I like being useful (that’s part of the reason for this site, after all–if people stop telling me it’s useful, it’s history). The other reason should be obvious. God is a relationship. So think about other relationships. How many sappy love songs talk about love when it’s new? Relationships just seem more exciting when they’re new, for some reason. So here’s someone telling stories that sound just like my experiences when my relationship with God was newer than it is now. You think I’m gonna get tired of listening to that? Not on your life.

If you’re living Psalm 51:12 (“Restore to me the joy of my salvation…”), try talking to someone who’s still experiencing the newness of theirs. It’s contagious. You’ll be singing a different tune real quick.

I got my Missouri Constitution Article X Distribution yesterday. That’s also known as the annual Mel Carnahan illegal taxation refund. Mel Carnahan, in case you don’t know, is the former two-term governor of Missouri, killed in a plane crash last month and elected posthumously to the U.S. Senate. He has attained something resembling sainthood here in Myzurah.

I try not to spout off about politics too much anymore, but this just makes me too mad. So, rant mode equals one, here we go.

I remember Carnahan for taxing Missouri citizens at levels deemed illegal by the Missouri constitution (forcing the use of state funds to return that illegal money, money that could be used for something else) and for demanding that Missouri representatives and senators fire their interns if they crossed him the wrong way. (I personally interviewed a fired intern who fell victim to Carnahan’s rage for a story back in 1993.) Carnahan was Missouri’s king of overtaxation and political dirty tricks.

Let’s say my refund was for $50. (It wasn’t, but that number works for this exercise.) That means the Missouri government willfully tried to steal 50 bucks from me over the course of the past year. Now, the kicker. I messed up my 1998 state taxes and got hit for a penalty. So for 1999 I had an accountant do them. He got my Federal return right, but my Missouri return was off by about 20 bucks. So Missouri nailed me for underpayment and charged a penalty. Then I got a check at the end of the year for considerably more than the amount I underpaid!

So, Tax Man Carnahan’s thugs did steal the amount of that interest and penalty (whatever that was) from me. Who knows how many other people this happened to? The amount was fairly small, so there’s no point in fighting it or whining about it any more than I already have, but I wonder how many people who aren’t so well-off (whom Carnahan’s cronies supposedly want to help) bounced checks or had to go without something because the government had stolen money from them and held it hostage for seven months? How many of them slightly “underpaid” (Carnahanspeak for paying something closer to the legal amount), then got slapped with interest and penalties that weren’t refunded? What if some of them actually need that money? Do these limousine and SUV liberals know what it’s like to be literally a couple of bucks short of being able to pay their bills? I understand that situation because I’ve been there. I work hard and live cheap and save to try to ensure I never will be in that situation again. I’d rather teach government to work hard like I do at being fiscally responsible, so as to not lay an overly heavy yoke of a tax burden on the poor (who, if they’re making less than 15 Gs a year, shouldn’t be paying any taxes anyway) or on anyone else.

Liberalism, particularly Carnahan Liberalism, isn’t about compassion. It’s about money and power–specifically, grabbing as much of it as possible, whatever the price. Even if it means breaking the law.

I’m sorry he’s dead. I don’t wish sudden death on anyone (or their families). But I’m not sorry he’s not going to Washington. I am sorry the citizens of Missouri are too stupid to elect lawmakers with enough regard for the law to follow it themselves.

Windows keyboard tricks

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , ,

Those promised keyboard tricks. To get a Windows key, download the Kernel Toys. The keyboard applet, which works under 95 and 98, allows you to remap the caps lock, control, or alt keys to a Windows key. You can also remap the caps lock key to control or alt if you want. 

To assign My Computer to a hotkey, create a new shortcut with the following command line:
explorer.exe /n,/e,::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}

Next, click on the shortcut key and hit a key (I suggest “m” or “c”) and that’ll give you instant two-pane access to My Computer any time you hit ctrl-alt and that key.

If you want single-pane access (I don’t think it’s as useful, but hey), use this command line instead:
explorer.exe /n,::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}

I finally fixed my firewall. I souped up the firewall a while back, then it never worked again. (I guess that’s the ultimate in security, eh? No one can hack in if you’re offline.) I forgot which ethernet card was outgoing and which was pointing inward, to my LAN. Finally, I tried stopping and restarting PMFirewall, which printed my network configuration. When both NICs were assigned to the address 192.168.0.1, I knew I was in trouble. With that tip-off, fixing it took just a matter of minutes.

Speaking of Linux, a speed tip. If you’re running Red Hat Linux as a NAT/IP masquerade gateway to share an Internet connection, do yourself a favor and install the BIND and caching-nameserver RPMs, then set your first DNS entry on your other PCs to your gateway’s IP address. This will make your proxy server look up DNS addresses for you and store them, reducing network traffic slightly but noticeably. The overhead is minimal; I’ve got Steve DeLassus running IP masquerade and caching nameserver on a 486SX/20 and it’s more than up to the task. For a small home network, a 386SX/16 has enough horsepower as long as it meets your distribution’s minimum memory requirements. I’d be more comfortable with a 50 MHz or faster 486 for a small office, but that’s as much due to expected age and reliability as it is to CPU requirements.

If you’re running a close derivative of Red Hat (Mandrake is certainly close enough, and I believe even Caldera and TurboLinux are as well), go ahead and download Red Hat’s caching nameserver RPM. It’s just a couple of short text files, but it’s easier to download and install an RPM than it is to key them in.

Mouse cursor troubleshooting

Dave Farquhar Windows , , ,

Sorry, keyboard secrets will have to wait. No time. But here’s something else.

Case of the disappearing cursor. Maybe you’re lucky and you’ve never seen this, but sometimes the cursor will disappear inside text boxes in Windows NT (and presumably 9x). The solution is to reinstall your video driver — preferably a newer version.

I’ll be back in a bit. I’ve got some cool hotkey tricks. You don’t have to buy a new Microsoft keyboard to have keyboard access to things like the My Computer icon. For that matter you don’t have to buy a new keyboard to get a Windows key either, if you’re an old-timer like me still using an old 101-key PS/2 keyboard (the keyboards of today just aren’t nearly as good as the ones IBM and Lexmark made 12 or 13 years ago–of course, they also cost 10% of what those keyboards cost new).

I’ll spill the beans later this morning.

Christmas presents you want, and don’t want

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , ,

Evening update. I came home to a non-working phone and CD player. The phone’s working again. I’m thinking Southwestern Bell really doesn’t want me to like them. As for the CD player, I unplugged it for 10 seconds and plugged it in–first thing I do with any piece of electronics. That brought it back from the dead, but as I was listening to U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind, I noticed some crackling in the audio. I’ve been listening mostly to really synthy New Wave music lately and the crackling can blend in with the synths, but on the more organic-sounding tracks in the middle of ATYCLB, there’s no place for the crackling to hide.

I ought to open it up and see if the problem isn’t just an overly dirty lens. That’s nothing a foam swab dipped in a little isopropyl alcohol can’t fix. Otherwise, I may have to start shopping. That’s what www.audioreview.com is for. The JVC XL-MC334-BK looks good for the money.

I’ll also have to resist the temptation to get a second pair of speakers. The KLH 970A speakers are dirt cheap ($20-$30) and reportedly sound really good for the price. There are better speaker brands than KLH, but these would be secondary speakers and if I don’t like them on the stereo, if paired up with an inexpensive receiver they’d make a very nice computer sound system.

An early Christmas present you don’t want. Another e-mail worm is making the rounds, this one called Navidad.exe. Navidad.exe es muy mal para su computadora. Sorry. Couldn’t resist.

What it appears to do is reply to all messages in your inbox containing a single attachment, attaching itself in the process. The really nasty part is that the worm contains poorly written code, causing your system to be unstable.

I’ll continue with my standard advice. Don’t open unexpected executable (.exe) attachments. If you can’t tell the difference, don’t open unexpected attachments at all. It’s better to miss the joke than to have to reinstall Windows yet another time. Keep in mind that the people who are most likely to fall victim to such things are also the least likely to have any backups.

You can get details and a repair tool from Symantec.

A friend got a hysterical phone call at midnight last Thursday from another friend whose system was exhibiting behavior similar to this. He eventually calmed her down enough to walk her through reinstalling Windows, which restored her system to a bootable state.

If a system will no longer boot, it should be possible to bubblegum it back together with Windows 98’s scanreg tool. Boot to a command prompt by holding down the control key, then type scanreg at the C:> prompt. Restore a recent backup (preferably the most recent or second-most recent). Once you boot successfully, immediately update your virus signatures and run your anti-virus program, or download a repair tool to do a full repair.

This trick fixes many, but not all, recent viruses.

486s and Amigas and emulators, oh my

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , ,

Recovering data from an old large hard drive out of a 486. Someone asked how. No problem.
What do is put both drives in a new(er) system, each on its own IDE channel as master, then autodetect the old drive with the BIOS’ autodetect drives feature. But, to be on the safe side, I don’t boot Windows. I don’t want anything to try to write to the old drive, because it may not work right the first time. Instead, hold down the control key while booting (if you have Win98; if you have Win95, start tapping the F8 key immediately after the BIOS boot screen comes up–if you get a keyboard error, hit F1 when it says, then resume your attack on the F8 key). Select Safe Mode Command Prompt Only from the menu. That will put you at a C prompt.

Your old(er) drive will be drive D. If you had other partitions on the drive, they’ll be lower in the alphabet as Dan said. We can tell you exactly how your drives will be mapped if you remember your partitions (or maybe you’re familiar with how drive letters get mapped already).

Now, I execute a DIR /S D: to see if it produced an error. If it doesn’t, try this to get your data (don’t type the comments in italics):

MD C:RECOVER create a destination for your data
SMARTDRV D- turn on disk caching to speed up –may not work but does no harm
XCOPY /S /E /V D:*.* C:RECOVER copy drive D in its entirety to the destination

With any luck, that’ll safely spirit all your data away to the new drive. This is more convoluted than using Windows Explorer, but it’s safer. (See why I disagree with the people who say command lines are evil and obsolete and we shouldn’t have them anymore?)

If that succeeds, power down, disconnect the old drive, boot Windows, and check to make sure your data is intact and not corrupt. If it fails, reboot, go into the BIOS, and change the translation scheme for the old drive (you have a choice between Normal, Large, and LBA–LBA is usually the default). Lather, rinse, and repeat.

The good news is, I’ve used this method numerous times to move data from old 486s to newer machines, so chances of success, though not guaranteed, are pretty high.

Maybe I don’t want that Amiga 1200 after all… I went ahead and downloaded UAE 0.8.8 Release 8, then downloaded Amiga In A Box, which gives me a nice, souped-up Amiga setup without me having to remember all the nuances of the OS and tweak them myself (including some nice PD and shareware stuff already installed, configured and running). I fed it my Kickstart ROM image and my Workbench disk, it copied the files it needed, and voila, I had a working AGA-compatible Amiga!

The package even includes TCP/IP support. While Web browsing on a 33 MHz machine is a bit slow, I found performance to be almost as good as Netscape 4.x on a 90 MHz Power Macintosh 7200.

I benchmarked it, and on my Celeron-400 with a pathetic Cirrus Logic video card (I really need to get a cheap TNT2) I still compared favorably to a 33 MHz Amiga 4000/030. (My old beloved Amiga 2000 had a 25 MHz 68030 in it.) Since the Amiga’s biggest bottlenecks were with the disk subsystem and the video–they were comparable in speed to the PCs of 1990 and 1991–even a slow-sounding 33 MHz machine runs pretty nicely. I could probably crank out a little extra speed with some tweaking, which of course I’ll do at some point.

Then again, maybe I’ve finally found a use for a 1.2-GHz Athlon… (Besides voice recognition.)

If you have an old Amiga laying around and want some nostalgia, go get this. There’s a ton of legal Amiga software at www.back2roots.org to experiment with. If you don’t have an Amiga but want to see what all the fuss is about, you can get Cloanto’s Amiga Forever package, which contains legal, licensed ROM and OS images. You’ve probably never heard of Cloanto, but they’re one of the largest remaining Amiga software publishers. They’re reputable.

Now I just need to get TransWrite, the great no-nonsense word processor that I bought when I first got my A2000, running under UAE.

The joy of teaching

Dave Farquhar Personal , , , , , , ,

The joy of teaching. Remember that Pentium-75 that was limping along under Windows NT’s heavy yoke? She didn’t complain to me about it (probably because she knew I did a lot to try to make it usable), but she did complain to some other people. One of the other IT guys did some lobbying. And when I said that a Mac would be an improvement over that thing, it got some people’s attention. (I’m not exactly known as a Mac zealot at work. Some call me exactly the opposite.) So she got another machine.
Well, as it turns out, she’s taking a class titled Management of Information Systems. She called me up yesterday to ask me a few questions relating to the class. Sure, says I. She asked about a mainframe’s place in a Webcentric world, which really made me think. I’m not of the mainframe generation, and I left the computer science program at the University of Missouri because the only thing they were interested in cranking out at the time were IBM System 370 administrators who knew VM/CMS and JCL. Gag me. I’d rather use and fix Macs. But retrofitting certainly makes more sense than outright replacement in many cases.

Then she asked about NCs. I laughed, because my now-defunct Linux book was to have a chapter about NCs in it (and how to roll your own). “Why didn’t they catch on?” she asked. Two reasons, I said. Poor marketing, for one. Larry Ellison assumes that everyone hates Microsoft as much as he does, so he releases this overpriced box and says little about it other than “Not Microsoft.” The second reason, of course, is versatility. People like the versatility of their PCs. NCs have none.

Then she asked a sharp question. “Isn’t this the same thing we do with Reflection?” (Reflection is a very high-priced VTxx terminal emulator from WRQ, Inc. that we use to connect to a cluster of VMS boxes.) Ah, she gets it! Yes, only NCs pull Windows and Windows applications (or another GUI and GUI applications) instead of text-based programs.

“This stuff doesn’t even seem real,” she said at one point. “And here you are, talking right off the top of your head about it.” But at the end of the conversation, she seemed to get it.

And that’s what’s cool about writing books or maintaining a Web site. Lighting up the darkness. Making the unfamiliar make sense. Or at least a little more sense.

My phone was ringing off the hook today. I made a comment about my popularity rising. One of my office-mates suggested I run for president. Well, I said, I couldn’t do any worse of a job of carrying Florida… But I won’t be of legal age until 2012.

I guess that’s the last thing I have to look forward to. At 16 you can drive. At 17 you can get into R-rated movies. At 18 you can vote. At 21 you can drink. At 25, your insurance rates go down. And at 35, you can run for president.

~~~~~~~~~~
Dave,

I remembered seeing an article a while back concerning this person’s issue:

http://www.aceshardware.com/Spades/read.php?article_id=15000166

It is an optimization guide for the K6-2+ (also K6-III+, but not
explicitly stated) processors, and it includes a board compatibility guide.

According to the guide, the FIC VA-503+ will only support the new
processors with a beta bios (doesn’t mention specific versions) and revision 1.2 of the board.

I’m CC’ing a copy of this to Curtis.

Sincerely,

Dustin D. Cook, A+
 
~~~~~

Thanks!
 
I didn’t get this message, except when Curtis replied to me. I’ll have to investigate.
 
Thanks much for the tip.
~~~~~~~~~~
 

Doesn’t anybody else feel impelled to mention that a 50MHz (for in this case >12.5%) speed gain is completely valueless? As you surely know, Dave, in ordinary use people don’t usually notice any speed change that’s much finer than 2x. I’d take a 12%-faster CPU and pop it into my system if 1) somebody gave it to me for nothing, and 2) it was a no-brainer plop-in install. Otherwise, there are better uses for $60. Ya think?

Peter A. Moore
ITS Engineer
Precision IT, a division of Precision Design Systems

in reference to:
http://thesiliconunderground.editthispage.com/2000/11/05
~~~~~
My understanding was he wanted to get that CPU because he was using his 400 MHz CPU in another system.

Yes, you are entirely right, a 50 MHz gain generally isn’t worth it. You could make an argument for when it’s a 50 MHz gain accompanied by something else, say, an upgrade from a K6-2/400 to a K6-III/450, in which case you’d get a larger gain, maybe 25-35 percent, due to on-chip cache. But with CPU speed being a fairly small factor in overall system performance, that 35% increase definitely won’t work miracles.

When upgrading a system, I generally attack system RAM and the hard drive first. It’s amazing what a difference dropping in a 7200-rpm hard drive makes. I recently made a P200 boot Win95 in 15 seconds by replacing the drive, dropping in another 64 megs of RAM, then doing a fresh Windows installation and tweaking msdos.sys. Very nice.

Good observation. Thanks.

An Optimizing Windows followup?

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , ,

Optimizing Windows NT for Games, Graphics and Multimedia or Whatever… I occasionally get a question whether there’ll ever be such a beast. O’Reilly and I discussed it in the past, with little interest. (In fact when we were negotiating Optimizing Windows, I wanted it to be an NT book, and they asked if I knew Win9x well enough to write about that instead.)

There’s the possibility that another publisher who’s strong in Windows NT/Windows 2000, such as Sybex, might be interested. I haven’t talked to anyone there about it yet. But believe me, I’ve thought about the possibility of such a book.

I tried to write Optimizing Windows in such a way that someone who knew Windows 9x and another OS would then be able to apply the principles to both OSes, even though the specifics would only apply to 9x.

In the meantime, the best suggestion I can come up with is to take yesterday’s post , print it, then paste it to an otherwise underutilized page (such as the last page of the preface, which is totally blank). While it doesn’t go into great detail, that message could well form the basis of a chapter in an NT/2000 follow-on. I’d say at least half of chapter 2 in Optimizing Windows (particularly the user interface stuff) applies to NT and 2000 as well.

Laptop troubleshooting. I had a laptop the other day that seemed to launch programs and move the mouse pointer around at will. I’d never seen anything like it before. We were perplexed about it for a couple of hours (it was a deployed user in California, so it wasn’t like I could just tool over to his desk and start trying stuff). On a hunch, he unplugged everything and powered up the bare laptop. It worked fine. He started adding components one at a time, and when he got to the mouse, the problem reappeared.

Constant travel and frequent plugging and unplugging certainly could be hard on the mouse cable, so I can see where this might be a common problem for road warriors (I’d say 90 percent of my support experience is desktop PCs). So, if you’re getting unexplainable behavior from a PC, especially a laptop, try a different mouse — and a different external keyboard too, while you’re at it — and see if that makes the problem go away.