macintosh

Getting in touch with my feminine side

Dave Farquhar Personal , ,

Soon after I moved back to St. Louis, Gatermann and I came up with a weird ritual for Friday and/or Saturday nights. Come Feb. 1999, I started writing my first book, which was a full-time job on top of the full-time job I already had, so my brain was usually totally fried after a week of troubleshooting Macintoshes for 40 hours and spelunking in Windows configuration files and writing about my findings for another 35-50 hours.
Sometimes our buddy Tim Coleman was involved too; it just depended on whether he had to work on a given night.

First, we’d go rent a movie, almost always an old Peter Sellers movie. Tom can keep the Pink Panther series straight; being oh-so dark and cynical, my faves are, of course, Dr. Strangelove, the classic comedy on nuclear war, and Being There, which is a very cynical take on what it takes to succeed in Washington. If you haven’t seen it, I’ve already given away too much.

Once we had a movie or two, we’d stop off at the local QT for some lovely beverages. You can get a 64-ouncer of whatever soft drink you want for about a buck, which is what we usually do. Note: A full 64 ounces of root beer does really bad things to you. You feel it in the morning. I know you’re going to go try it now, and you’ll be cursing me afterward. You’re welcome.

The first night we did this, Tim complained about women always using the facilities. I’d never paid any attention. But that triggered another part of the ritual. Being five-nine and about 140 pounds, I don’t have a whole lot of room to put 64 ounces of anything, especially when those 64 ounces are consumed within about a two-and-a-half-hour time frame. So, when I stood up about 45 minutes into the first movie to go recycle, Tom yelled, “Dave’s a woman.” When I came back, Tim got up. Tom yelled, “Tim’s a woman.” Without looking back, Tim made a one-finger gesture at Tom over his shoulder and kept walking. Tom enjoys inciting those.

We’ve seen every Peter Sellers movie available on VHS and we’ve tried every flavor at QT, so we don’t do this all that much anymore.

I bring this up because earlier this week, I received a flyer from Skillpath Seminars. The title of the seminar: Conflict Management and Resolution for Women. The guy who delivers the mail personally walked over to my cube and handed it to me with a smirk. Since I get about four brochures a day for various seminars, I normally put them in my round file without even looking at them, but I glanced at this.

“Dwayne got one too. We had a good time sorting the mail this morning,” he said.

Yep. Either someone told Skillpath about our little ritual, or some procedure was performed this past week that I’m going to be very unhappy about when I find out about it.

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

Troubleshooting Mac extensions

Dave Farquhar Macintosh , , , , , ,

Troubleshooting Macintosh extensions. An extensions conflict is where you lose your innocence with fixing a Mac. Not all extensions and control panels get along, and certain combinations can have disastrous results.

Here’s my method. Create a folder on the desktop. Drag exactly half the extensions out of System Folder:Extensions and drop them in the folder. Select all the extensions in that new folder and give them a label, so they stand out (it makes them a different color). Now reboot and see if the problem goes away. If it doesn’t, create another folder, move the remaining extensions into it and give them a label. Move the first batch back into the extensions folder and reboot.

Now, add half your extensions back from the folder on the desktop to the extensions folder. If the problem comes back, move that half back into the second folder on the desktop and move the now-known good half into the extensions folder. After each test, remove the labels from the extensions in the extensions folder. Just keep swapping halves until you narrow it down to one bad extension, using labels to keep yourself from getting lost.

I don’t recommend Conflict Catcher because all it does is move the extensions around for you–it’s no easier than this method, and this method doesn’t cost $50.

This is how we build ’em in St. Louis. Neither Gatermann nor I are really in the habit of naming our PCs unless a name is just painfully obvious. In the case of his Linux gateway, the name was painfully obvious. One name and one name only fits: Mir.

This is how we build computers in St. Louis. This is Tom Gatermann’s Linux gateway: a Micronics P75 board with a Cirrus Logic PCI SVGA card, a Kingston PCI NE2000 clone connecting to the Internet, and a Bay Netgear 310TX PCI 10/100 (DEC Tulip chipset) connecting to the local LAN. Yes, that AT case was as cheap as it looks. Maybe cheaper.

Inside the case, there’s an IMES 8X IDE CD-ROM, an ancient 1.44 MB floppy drive of unknown origin, and a 1.2 GB Quantum Bigfoot HD, of which about 1.5 MB is used (booting’s much faster off the HD than off the floppy).

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Mir is made from, well, a pile of junk. A Micronics P75 board. A Cirrus Logic PCI SVGA card. Whatever 72-pin SIMMs we had laying around. A Quantum Bigfoot 1.2-gig HD. A really trashed 3.5″ floppy drive. The cheapest-looking AT case ever. But we did skip the Linksys NICs. The NICs are a Kingston PCI NE2000 clone and a Bay Netgear 10/100 based on the DEC Tulip chipset.

We assembled it outside the case because we had so much trouble getting it going correctly–it’s much easier to swap components when they’re accessible. Once we got it going, we never bothered to put everything back inside the case. Maybe we’re trend-setters and this is the next fad in computing. After all, what’s the logical next step after translucency?

Open source and innovation

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , , , , , ,

Innovation. And of course I can’t let this slip by. Microsoft is trying to say that open source stifles innovation. Steve DeLassus and I have been talking about this (he was the one who originally pointed it out to me), and I think he and I are in agreement that open source by nature isn’t inherently innovative. It may improve on another idea or add features, but most open source projects (and certainly the most successful ones) are clones of proprietary software. Then again, so was a lot of Microsoft software, starting out. Pot, meet Kettle. Kettle, meet Pot.

But although the programs themselves aren’t always innovative, I think the open source atmosphere can stimulate innovation. Huh? Bear with me. Open source gets you in closer contact with computer internals than a Microsoft or Apple OS generally will. That gets you thinking more about what’s possible and what’s not–the idea of what’s possible starts to have more to do with the hardware than it does with what people have tried before. That stimulates creativity, which in turn stimulates innovation.

Need an example? A calculator company called Busicom accidentally invented the personal computer. I’ve heard several versions of the story, but the gist of it was, Busicom wanted to create a programmable calculator. In the process of creating this device, they commissioned the Intel 4004 CPU, the first chip of its kind. There are conflicting accounts as to whether the resulting product even used the Intel 4004, but that’s immaterial–this calculator’s other innovation was its inclusion of a tape drive.

Intel bought back the rights and marketed the 4004 on its own and became a success story, of course. Meanwhile, people started using their Busicom calculators as inexpensive computers–the built-in tape drive worked as well for data storage as it did for program storage. This was in 1970-1971, several years before the Altair and other kit computers.

Four years later, Busicom was out of business but the revolution was under way, all because some people–both engineers at Intel and end-users who bought the calculators–looked beyond the device’s intended use and saw something more.

Open source software frequently forces you to do the same thing, or it at least encourages it. This fuels innovation, and thus should be encouraged, if anything.

Last week’s flood. No, I haven’t answered all the mail about it. I’m going to give it another day before I deal with it, because dealing with a ton of mail is frankly harder than just writing content from scratch. I don’t mind occasionally, but I’d rather wait until a discussion reaches critical mass, you know?

One reader wrote in asking why foreigners care about U.S. gun laws. I don’t really have an answer to that question. I find it very interesting that no American has yet voiced any strong objections to anything I said–I even had a lifelong liberal Democrat write in, and while she stayed to my left, she advocated enforcement of the laws we already have on the books, rather than an outright ban. She’d force more safety classes, but I don’t have any real objections to that notion.

An interesting upgrade approach. The Register reported about a new upgrade board, about to be released by Hypertec, that plugs into any PC with an available ISA slot and upgrades the CPU, video, and sound subsystems. I’m assuming it also replaces the memory subsystem, since pulling system memory through the ISA bus would be pitifully slow.

The solution will be more expensive than a motherboard swap, but for a corporation that has a wide variety of obsolescent PCs, it might be a good solution. First, it’s cheaper than outright replacement. Second, it creates common ground where there was none: two upgraded systems would presumably be able to use the same Ghost/DriveImage/Linux DD image, lowering administrative costs and, consequently, TCO. Third, corporations are frequently more willing to upgrade, rather than replace, existing systems even when it doesn’t make economic sense to do so (that’s corporate management for you).

Depending on the chipset it uses and the expected timeframe, I may be inclined to recommend these for the company I work for. We’ve got anywhere from 30-100 systems that aren’t capable of running Office 2000 for whatever reason. Some of them are just old Micron Client Pros, others are Micron Millenias who were configured by idiots (a local clone shop that we used to contract with way back when–I’ve never seen anyone configure NT in a more nonsensical manner), others are clones built by idiots, and others are well-built clones that just happen to be far too old to upgrade economically.

Many of these machines can be upgraded–the Microns are all ATX, so an Intel motherboard and a low-end CPU would be acceptable. Most of the others are ATs and Socket 7-based. An upgrade CPU would likely work, but will be pricey and compatibility is always a dicey issue, and most businesses are still stuck in the Intel-only mindset. (Better not tell them Macintoshes don’t use Intel CPUs–wait… Someone PLEASE tell them Macs don’t use Intel CPUs! Yeah, I’ll be an Intel lackey in exchange for never having to troubleshoot an extension conflict on a Mac again. But that’s another story.) They all need memory upgrades, and buying SIMMs in this day and age is a sucker bet. Average price of the upgrades would be $550, but we’d have a hodgepodge of systems. If we can get common ground and two years of useful life for $700 from Hypertec, upper management would probably approve it.

How to slow down Windows

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , ,

I sure didn’t see much that I liked yesterday. What kind of stuff did I used to write here? Oh yeah. Stuff like this.

How to slow down Windows. Yes, sometimes you want to do this, like when an old game runs too fast. You can do this with a simple free utility called Turbo . You tell it you want to run your computer at, say, 50% speed, so it works by creating a single high-priority process that uses half your CPU time. Tell it you want quarter-speed, and it chews up 75 percent of your CPU time. It works a little better on NT than on 9x, because NT’s timing is more precise, but it definitely slows the system down.

There are programs that just slow down one particular process, but most of those are shareware programs costing $25 or more. Turbo slows down the entire system, but its brute-force approach mostly works and you can’t beat the price.

An invaluable network utility for laptops. If you have a laptop and you connect to multiple networks (say a LAN at home and at the office, or if you’re like me and have more than one office), you need Netswitcher ( www.netswitcher.com ). It’s an $8 shareware utility. Definitely worth the money. And the author stands behind it. I had a problem getting the program to run under one particular circumstance, so I e-mailed tech support. The author responded and asked if he could call me. So we talked on the phone for a few minutes while we determined the problem, then he compiled a special build to work around our problem. Amazing, especially in this day and age when most companies won’t even pick up the phone. You might not get quite that level of support, but you probably won’t need it either because the program’s solid.

Check this one out. You’ll be glad you did.

And that’s more than I can say for most of what I read yesterday. Let’s get to that.

SCSI vs. IDE (THG) http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/01q1/010129/index.html

I had high hopes for this one, as SCSI-vs.-IDE is an even more incendiary issue than Windows-vs.-Linux or Macintosh-vs.-the-world, and unlike those, this debate should be fairly easy to settle. Unfortunately the review relied solely on benchmarks, and from raw benchmarks, you’ll come to the conclusion that there’s never any reason to buy SCSI drives when in reality the older IBM SCSI drive in the roundup will outperform the IDE drive for many everyday tasks even though it benchmarks poorly.

I’ve never met anyone who used a modern SCSI drive in a multitasking environment and then went back to IDE. Never ever. There’s more to this issue than sheer benchmarks.

Upgrading a Mac CPU (Byte) http://www.byte.com/feature/BYT20010124S0001

How the mighty have fallen. This piece would have never seen the light of day in the old print magazine.

First of all, Newer Technology has been in serious trouble for months. Newer dissolved before Christmas, and all of its engineering staff was hired by competitor Sonnet earlier this month. This is evidently news to the author, who says Newer “seems to have” ceased operations in December but their online store is still operational. No it isn’t. And Newer’s demise caused a huge splash in the Mac community when it happened.

Second of all, replacing a Mac CPU doesn’t always make sense. Upgrading a G3 probably does, but you’ve still got an old memory bus, old memory, and an old hard drive tied to a new CPU. You pay a fraction of the cost of a new computer, but you get a fraction of the performance too.

Plus, upgrading CPUs in some Macs is an absolute nightmare. I spent one of the worst weeks of my life trying to get a Sonnet G3 upgrade working in a Power Mac 7500. The only thing consistent about it was its lack of stability. Sometimes it booted and ran at the old speed. Sometimes it ran at G3 speed. Sometimes it was somewhere in between (presumably the L2 cache wasn’t getting enabled). It never ran very long. Sonnet technical support verified with me after checking a few things that the upgrade would never work right in that particular model. The local Mac dealer gave us a refund and vowed after our experience that he would never sell another CPU upgrade again. The author mentions it’s hard to buy these things at locally owned dealers, but never says why.

Some wisdom in choosing your upgrade would have been nice. You’d better at least double your CPU power, or you won’t notice much difference. Some wisdom about what to upgrade would be nice too. How many people just blindly throw money at CPU upgrades when they’d be better served by a faster disk or more memory?

At least the advice on working inside the Mac once he popped the hood was solid.

Abit KT7 review (Ars Technica) http://arstechnica.com/reviews/01q1/abitkt7r/abitkt7r-1.html

This review seems a bit late, as the KT7 has been on the market a long time and the hot chipset of today is the KT133A, not the KT133 featured on the Abit KT7. The reviewer caught a number of caveats with the board, which someone building a system around this board will be very happy to know. Benchmarking is incomplete, due to their inability to run Content Creation on it. So benchmarks are limited to Sandra and Quake 3, which are of limited use.

Benchmarking against the Asus CUSL2 board isn’t very useful; it would be nice to see scores against a one or two competing Socket A boards for comparison.

But the graphs start properly at 0 and the reviewer discloses his testbed, which is good. You can’t take those things for granted. He also discussed stability, which is a rare thing.

Really, this review wasn’t enraging, unlike most of the stuff I read yesterday (some of which was so bad it’s not worth even talking about). It just left me wondering what the point was, since the product’s remaining shelf life can probably be measured in weeks.

Name-brand memory vs. generic

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , ,

The difference between brand-name RAM and commodity RAM. I’ve been seeing a lot of questions along the lines of, “Do I really have to buy name-brand memory when I can find memory for half the price on PriceWatch?” on message boards lately. I talked about memory some in Memory-buying secrets, but I didn’t really go into the difference between generic/commodity/broker memory and the expensive stuff.

There are three factors that go into the quality of a memory module: the quality of the chips, the quality of the printed circuit board (PCB), and manufacturing.

When memory chips are made, they are tested. A memory chip that runs at or below spec gets classified as an A-grade chip. Chips with minor defects are classified as C-grade chips and shouldn’t be used in PCs.

Memory manufacturers will also charge varying amounts based on how much testing they do for the chips. Top-tier chips are guaranteed to have a failure rate of .1% or less–we’re talking one in a thousand chips failing here.

The least expensive chips aren’t tested at all.

The only way to ensure you’re getting these best-of-the-best chips is to buy name-brand memory. The best way to ensure you’re getting C-grade or untested chips is to buy the cheapest module you can find.

Inexpensive PCBs use a four-layer design, with signal layers on the outside, and power and ground sandwiched inside. This is inexpensive to produce and easy to repair. Unfortunately, this design leaves you open to signal noise, which can corrupt the data stored in the chip, and lead to unpleasant things like BSODs.

A better approach is to put the signal layers inside, and put power and ground on the outside, protecting them. Better still is a six-layer design, which adds two more ground layers for even better isolation. The higher the memory speed, the more important this extra isolation becomes.

You can sometimes tell the difference between a 4-layer and a 6-layer board by looking at it under a strong light. By turning it slowly, you can isolate discrete layers with the naked eye. However, it’s impossible to tell the difference between power, ground, and signal layers with the naked eye.

Name-brand vendors use high-quality PCBs. Some even proudly proclaim it when they use 6-layer boards. Again, the best way to get a poorly designed 4-layer board is to buy the cheapest memory you can find.

The third factor is assembly. When soldering chips to PCBs, things can go wrong. Trust me. I’m very good at demonstrating. While no one puts together memory modules by hand (I hope), my plumber-like soldering skills make me appreciate good equipment. Quality solder joints are bright and shiny, and they’re applied very quickly. Intermittent solder joints cause problems, and they’re maddening.

Kingston puts every module through rigorous testing. Other name-brand manufacturers test as well. When you don’t even know who made your module, it’s impossible to know whether it’s had the proper testing. Putting it in a PC and watching the BIOS check is not proper testing. Memory has to be very far gone to fail that test.

Miscellaneous computer memory.
The module on the right has Samsung chips on it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it was made by Samsung. I’d be fine with putting the HP module directly below it in a PC, though. The same goes for the Kingston module at the top of the image.

Frequently vendors will advertise Micron memory or NEC memory. A Micron or NEC stamp on the chips doesn’t necessarily mean they manufactured the module! Be sure to find out who assembled the module–they usually stamp the PCB, or they put a sticker on the module itself. If you find a so-called Micron module on Pricewatch for half the price that Crucial is asking (Crucial is a division of Micron), chances are it’s a no-name module that just happens to have Micron chips on it.

So, does it really make a difference?

As an IT professional by day, I work on a large network–roughly 700 PCs. I’ll conservatively estimate that farm of PCs has 1,000 memory modules collectively. We buy name-brand memory (Crucial, Kingston, Viking or Simple) exclusively. We buy PCs from Micron, so they have Crucial modules in them. Macintoshes generally come with Crucial or IBM modules.

A typical memory module has 8 chips on it, and it only takes one bad chip to make the whole module bad. I’ve seen two bad memory modules cross my desk–so we’re talking two bad chips out of a batch of 8,000. So if you’re buying a single module for a home PC, your chances of getting a lemon are pretty slim if you get a good name brand.

For my own use, I buy name-brand memory modules. Usually this means Crucial; I got a great deal over the summer on some PNY memory so I bought a couple of sticks. I use high-quality memory, I don’t overclock, and I generally don’t run experimental software. I almost never get a BSOD or an illegal operation error, even when running Windows 95 or 98. I reboot my Windows 9x boxes about once a month on average, and half the time that’s because I installed or uninstalled something and it requires me to reboot. To give you an idea how I use PCs, at the moment I have seven applications running, with 11 windows open between them, and two TSRs running. That’s my idea of moderate use.

I’d rather have 64 megs of Crucial memory than a gig of the cheap stuff. Hopefully now you see why.

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.

Apple. you call this tech support?

Dave Farquhar Macintosh , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

This is why I don’t like Apple. Yesterday I worked on a new dual-processor G4. It was intermittent. Didn’t want to drive the monitor half the time. After re-seating the video card and monitor cable a number of times and installing the hardware the computer needed, it started giving an error message at boot:

The built-in memory test has detected a problem with cache memory. Please contact a service technician for assistance.

So I called Apple. You get 90 days’ free support, period. (You also only get a one-year warranty unless you buy the AppleCare extended warranty, which I’m loathe to do. But I we’d probably better do it for this machine since it all but screams “lemon” every time we boot it.) So, hey, we can’t get anywhere with this, so let’s start burning up the support period.

The hold time was about 15 seconds. I mention this because that’s the only part of the call that impressed me and my mother taught me to say whatever nice things I could. I read the message to the tech, who then put me on hold, then came back in about a minute.

“That message is caused by a defective memory module. Replace the third-party memory module to solve the problem,” she said.

“But the computer is saying the problem is with cache, not with the memory,” I told her. (The cache for the G4 resides on a small board along with the CPU core, sort of like the first Pentium IIs, only it plugs into a socket.) She repeated the message to me. I was very impressed that she didn’t ask whether we’d added any memory to the system (of course we had–Apple factory memory would never go bad, I’m sure).

I seem to remember at least one of my English teachers telling me to write exactly what I mean. Obviously the Mac OS 9 programmers didn’t have any of my English teachers.

I took the memory out and cleaned it with a dollar bill, then put it back in. The system was fine for the rest of the afternoon after this, but I have my doubts about this system. If the problem returns, I’ll replace the memory. When that turns out not to be the problem, I don’t know what I’ll do.

We’ve been having some problems lately with Micron tech support as well, but there’s a big difference there. With Apple, if you don’t prove they caused the problem, well, it’s your problem, and they won’t lift a finger to help you resolve it. Compare this to Micron. My boss complained to Micron about the length of time it was taking to resolve a problem with one particular system. You know what the Micron tech said? “If this replacement CPU doesn’t work, I’ll replace the system.” We’re talking a two-year-old system here.

Now I know why Micron has more business customers than Apple does. When you pay a higher price for a computer (whether that’s buying a Micron Client Pro instead of a less-expensive, consumer-oriented Micron Millenia, or an Apple G4 instead of virtually any PC), you expect quick resolution to your computer problems because, well, your business doesn’t slow down just because your computer doesn’t work right. Micron seems to get this. Apple doesn’t.

And that probably has something to do with why our business now has 25 Micron PCs for every Mac. There was a time when that situation was reversed.

The joke was obvious, but… I still laughed really hard when I read today’s User Friendly. I guess I’m showing my age here by virtue of getting this.

Then again, three or four years back, a friend walked up to me on campus. “Hey, I finally got a 64!” I gave him a funny look. “Commodore 64s aren’t hard to find,” I told him. Then he laughed. “No, a Nintendo 64.”

It’s funny how nicknames recycle themselves.

For old times’ sake. I see that Amiga, Inc. must be trying to blow out the remaining inventory of Amiga 1200s, because they’re selling this machine at unprecedented low prices. I checked out www.softhut.com just out of curiosity, and I can get a bare A1200 for $170. A model with a 260MB hard drive is $200.  On an Amiga, a drive of that size is cavernous, though I’d probably eventually rip out the 260-megger and put in a more modern drive.

The A1200 was seriously underpowered when it came out, but at that price it’s awfully tempting. It’s less than used A1200s typically fetch on eBay, when they show up. I can add an accelerator card later after the PowerPC migration plan firms up a bit more. And Amigas tend to hold their value really well. And I always wanted one.

I’m so out of the loop on the Amiga it’s not even funny, but I found it funny that as I started reading so much started coming back. The main commands are stored in a directory called c, and it gets referred to as c: (many crucial Amiga directories are referenced this way, e.g. prefs: and devs: ). Hard drives used to be DH0:, DF1:, etc., though I understand they changed that later to HD0:, HD1:, etc.

So what was the Amiga like? I get that question a lot. Commodore released one model that did run System V Unix (the Amiga 3000UX), but for the most part it ran its own OS, known originally as AmigaDOS and later shortened to AmigaOS. Since the OS being developed internally at Amiga, Inc., and later at Commodore after they bought Amiga, wasn’t going to be ready on time for a late 1984/early 1985 release, Commodore contracted with British software developer Metacomco to develop an operating system. Metacomco delivered a Tripos-derived OS, written in MC68000 assembly language and BCPL, that offered fully pre-emptive multitasking, multithreading, and dynamic memory allocation (two things even Mac OS 9 doesn’t do yet–OS 9 does have multithreading but its multitasking is cooperative and its memory allocation static).

Commodore spent the better part of the next decade refining and improving the OS, gradually replacing most of the old BCPL code with C code, stomping bugs, adding features and improving its looks. The GUI never quite reached the level of sophistication that Mac OS had, though it certainly was usable and had a much lower memory footprint. The command line resembled Unix in some ways (using the / for subdirectories rather than ) and DOS in others (you used devicename:filename to address files). Some command names resembled DOS, others resembled Unix, and others neither (presumably they were Tripos-inspired, but I know next to nothing about Tripos).

Two modern features that AmigaOS never got were virtual memory and a disk cache. As rare as hard drives were for much of the Amiga’s existance this wasn’t missed too terribly, though Commodore announced in 1989 that AmigaDOS 1.4 (never released) would contain these features. AmigaDOS 1.4 gained improved looks, became AmigaOS 2.0, and was released without the cache or virtual memory (though both were available as third-party add-ons).

As for the hardware, the Amiga used the same MC68000 series of CPUs that the pre-PowerPC Macintoshes used. The Amiga also had a custom chipset that provided graphics and sound coprocessing, years before this became a standard feature on PCs. This was an advantage for years, but became a liability in the early 1990s. While Apple and the cloners were buying off-the-shelf chipsets, Commodore continued having to develop their own for the sake of backward compatibility. They revved the chipset once in 1991, but it was too little, too late. While the first iteration stayed state of the art for about five years, it only took a year or two for the second iteration to fall behind the times, and Motorola was having trouble keeping up with Intel in the MHz wars (funny how history repeats itself), so the Amigas of 1992 and 1993 looked underpowered. Bled to death by clueless marketing and clueless management (it’s arguable who was worse), Commodore bled engineers for years and fell further and further behind before finally running out of cash in 1993.

Though the Amiga is a noncontender today, its influence remains. It was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature color displays of more than 16 colors (it could display up to 4,096 at a time), stereo sound, and pre-emptive multitasking–all features most of us take for granted today. And even though it was widely dismissed as a gaming machine in its heyday, the best-selling titles for the computer that ultimately won the battle are, you guessed it, games.

Praying about depression, and a common Mac no-no

Dave Farquhar Christianity , , , , , ,

Sorry, not thinking much about computers tonight. Short version of the story: I was at church Wednesday night, and I sat near the front. I never do that–that’s the last remnant of “Good Lutheran” in me. (I’m a very, very bad Lutheran, partly because I believe a guitar’s proper place is near the altar.) I was staring off into space before the service when I happened to turn around, and there was a lady my age sitting behind me. I’d seen her at Wednesday services a couple of times before but we’d never been introduced.
I’m usually one of two twentysomething males present. The other plays keys for the praise team and isn’t very accessible because he’s always busy. She seemed to want to talk to a twentysomething male. More on that in a second.

We ended up in the same prayer team. We break into groups of about seven to talk about what’s going on in our lives and pray as a group for those individual needs, for pastor, and for the church. Her big concern: Her brother. He’s depressed. OK, what twentysomething male isn’t sometimes? He’s not very receptive to God. Again, what twentysomething male isn’t? So after we prayed, I asked her a little more about her brother. From what she told me and others, I got a bit of a picture. Twenty-one, depressed, doesn’t have a girlfriend and thinks that means there’s something horribly wrong with him.

I know a certain someone who was in that very same boat, right down to the age. He was deathly afraid to tell anyone about it. So he wrote a column about it and published it in the student newspaper at the University of Missouri-Columbia where potentially 20,000 people could read all about it. He’s a good friend of mine. His name’s Dave.

I didn’t get to talk to her a whole lot more about it because I had to go put together a slideshow after the service, but that’s just as well because I think it’s good that I’ve thought about it some. I need to think the situation over a little bit more.

Some things are more important than computers, after all.

Yes, some things are more important. Let’s fast-forward to when I was 23. Maybe as you read this, you think, “Dave just found himself a target.” Well, you know, when I was 23 and not very different from how I was at 21, some people saw me as a target, and they did just that. They messed me up even more. But there were a couple of guys who were different: an ex-Marine named Cannon, and a guitar player named Mark, and an artist/guitarist/anthropologist named Charlie. They saw a guy who needed a friend. Cool guys. All Christian, but they weren’t fake. Their approach worked pretty well.

So of course I have to change it. What I needed most at that time was to know that someone had been there before. All the rest could come later. In Mark and Cannon, I saw two guys, one of them a couple of years older than me, who’d kinda sorta been there before.

So. This could be my chance to give something back.

———-

From: Dan Bowman

Subject: FWIW (Macintosh maintenance)

Mac Buyer’s Tip: On our new dual-processor G4, the cruddy DHTML animation at Happy Cog runs as smoothly as a Flash movie. And our crisp, new, widescreen Cinema display reveals the terrible imperfections of the artwork we’ve foisted on the public for years. One freelance gig can pay for this system. We recommend it highly. But don’t buy the latest versions of Norton Utilities and Tech Tool Pro yet. They won’t boot the dual-processor G4. And Norton has actually caused hard drive problems we were only able to repair with Apple’s built-in Disk First Aid app. Installing these two power-user must-have programs was the cause of most of our installation woes.

via Zeldman: http://www.zeldman.com/coming.html October 17 post.

dan

———-

Amen, brother!

Rule #1: Never, ever, ever, EVER install Norton Utilities and Tech Tool Pro. Not even if Steve Jobs holds a gun to your head. Boot off them in emergencies in order to fix or defrag your hard drive. You have to boot off the CD to do that anyway (the OS won’t let you fix or defrag the drive you booted from), and those tools cause more problems than they solve when they’re installed. Installing serves no useful purpose. Buy them and store them away except for that one day a month when you do disk maintenance.

Rule #2: Don’t rely only on NU and TTP. Also get DiskWarrior, from Alsoft. When something goes wrong, run DiskWarrior. Then run TTP. Then run NU. Then run Apple’s Disk First Aid. Why? All of them fix a lot of disk problems. None of them fix all of them. DW and TTP catch things NU won’t. NU catches minor things they don’t. And Disk First Aid fixes what NU breaks.

To get around the dual G4 boot problem, partition the drive and install just a minimal Mac OS 9 to it. When maintenance calls, boot off that partition, then run your disk tools off their respective CDs (or copy the CDs’ contents to that partition if you have the space).

This problem occurs every time Apple changes their architecture.

Tongue-tied

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , ,

Anything to say? My sister (yes, she has a name–it’s Di) mailed me and asked me if I had anything to say today. Not really. I finally won a major victory at work that will result in the departure of two Macintoshes that have become the bane of my existence. The battle came at a high personal price–I’m exhausted and have little to say. Other than an observation that AppleShare IP 6.3 appears to be about as rude as its predecessors. It seems to like MacOS 9, but it also seems very willing to crash MacOS 8.6 and earlier clients. Seeing as these are 100, 120, and 132 MHz machines, upgrading to 9 isn’t exactly practical or worthwhile or cost-effective. So they’re getting brand spanking new Micron PCs with Pentium III 600 chips or whatever it is we’re buying these days. I will be very joyfully installing them in the morning.

———- From: al wynn
Does McAfee still sell Nuts&Bolts?

Exactly how do you use Nuts&Bolts to “sort directory entries by the file’s physical placement on the hard drive” (ie. under which menu item can I find it ?)

Also, what are some good web links (or other resources) that will show me how to optimize Norton Utilities configuration ?

———-
It’s in Disk Tune. Click Advanced–>Directory Sort–>Sort Criteria. There you can select Cluster number as your directory sort criteria. Under Win95, this makes N&B’s Disk Tune the best defragmenter/optimizer, but under Win98, NU’s Speed Disk and Fix-It’s Defrag Plus have features that will make them outperform Disk Tune in spite of this feature (they actually do some strategic fragmentation to increase speed). I suppose you could optimize the disk with one of the others, then try to get Disk Tune to skip the defragmentation part and just optimize the directories, but I think I tried to figure out how to do that and gave up. Alternatively you could optimize with Disk Tune first, then defragment with one of the others and not do anything with the directory entries–assuming you want to save absolutely every microsecond possible. (Be aware that Disk Tune is a very slow program, so we’re talking diminishing returns here to run it, then run one of the others.)

I haven’t seen a better resource for the utilities suites than chapters 3 and 5 of Optimizing Windows; those chapters were the result of about seven years’ experience messing around with disk utilities (starting under DOS, of course). I’ve never seen a Web site on the subject (good or bad); nor much other information outside of the manuals that came with some of the older versions. That was part of the reason why I wrote my own. I tried to explain what to do with whatever suite you happened to have, as well as the reasoning behind it.