Steve's Current Notes

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Sunday, December 26, 1999

I think we made it.

The Tucker household is quite slow and sleepy this morning after a very full Christmas day.  One of the gifts I received was Titanic on DVD so we spend then evening watching the movie.  We have a surround sound home theater system, including a powered sub-woofer.  I have my DVD player running to a aux input on the VCR.  I was out of inputs on the surround sound amp.  Anyway, Titanic is a great movie for checking out your sub-woofer.  I thought there were a few times when the pictures were going to rattle off the wall and plates off the table.  The voices were muted in contrast to the low-end sounds and I found my self throttling the sound up for the voices and quickly cutting it  back for the rushes of water, etc.   Not trying to become a movie critic here, but it was a great movie, albeit a little intense at times.  I hadn't seen it before.

MY SCSI PROBLEMS CONTINUE.  I have the scanner working just fine.  Haven't screwed up anything there, but I thought I would bring the Kodak printer back on line.  Haven't had any luck there.  Win NT reports there was a device or service failure during system startup.  Upon further investigation, the event log reports that I was having a problem with my SCSI bus.   It logged an Event 11.  Microsoft reports Event 11 as:

...and from the Microsoft KnowledgeBase:

In almost all cases, these messages are begin posted due to hardware problems with either the controller or, more likely, a device that is attached to the controller in question.  The hardware problems can be associated with poor cabling, incorrect termination or transfer rate settings, lazy or slow device responses to relinquish the SCSI bus, a faulty device or, in very rare cases, a poorly written device driver.

My problem could be cabling.  I am using the cable I've had attached to this machine for some some time.  It could also be the device.  I think my next move is going to be to connect this printer to BamBam where it worked before and if it works there I will start backwards.  When I look at |Control Panel| SCSI Adapters NT is only reporting the scanner as being connected.  However, the SCSI bios does find the printer at boot.  I will bet it's one of the stupid settings in the SCSI bios.  More trial and error I suppose.  However, next I am going to connect this printer to the Win 9x machine were it used to live very happily.

UPDATE 01/01/00 11:13:45 AM:

I published earlier this morning, but guess I have not gotten accustomed to the changing the redirector page.  I forgot that one, so here's the update.   You should be redirected to the correct page now.

I will bet there are a lot of families who got new computers for Christmas and they are burning up the internet all night these days.  I can remember when I first began to surf I would look at may watch and it was suddenly two in the morning.   I have since become more disciplined. 

The internet is a powerful search (some call it research) toll and has some very powerful search engines.  If you're looking for a search engine I have complied a list of engines on the web. I also have some engines that are especially geared towards kids.

WHEN ANDREW FIRST GOT his Sony Playstation I thought I would smart and make a backup copy of the CDs.  Compact Discs are supposed to be indestructible, but then in a kid's hand anything is possible.  We have some games CDs with some major scratches and some that will only work intermittently.  Some with huge fingerprint smudges that still work perfectly, go figure.  At about $50 (US) when they first hit the market I didn't want to be replacing the game CDs.  My plan to make a backup copy did not work.  My first tip should have been when the back of the CD was jet black. 

Since that time I have run across a link on ZDTV's site that gives some hints on accomplishing this backup.  It appears the PlayStation itself may need to be modified in some way to make the backups work and to date I have been unwilling to mess with one of the major attractions of our basement playroom.  Don't want to screw up his Playstation like I have done to some of mine in the past.  If you've read any of my past notes you probably know what I am talking about. :-).

I RECEIVED AN email from Jonathan Hassell just down the road in Charlotte, NC [jon@hassell.com] who wants to build himself a machines that matches my IBM IntelliStation in many ways.

I just wanted to say first that I enjoy reading your notes page immensely. I just discovered it last night and I have been reading back into August this morning. I came across your page from a link from Robert Bruce Thompson from another link of Jerry Pournelle’s. Nice work.

I am interested in building a new system of my own similar to your new IBM IntelliStation. I was wondering if you could give me your opinion on this rundown. I have searched prices non-stop for a week now and my shop in Charlotte (MicroSource Inc.) seems to be pretty close to mail-order prices, with the added bonus that I can pick the parcels up and not pay shipping.

Here is the list:

Supermicro P6DGS
Supports Dual Pentium II, III processors, Intel 440GX chipset, integrated Adaptec Ultra Wide SCSI multichannel interface, 4 168-pin DIMM sockets, 1AGP/5 PCI/2 ISA slots, ATX form factor.  404.95 - MicroSource

Intel Pentium III 500MHz MMX SSE Dual processors
2 @ 247.95 = 495.90 - MicroSource

128MB PC100 DIMM
2 @ 155.95 = 311.90 - MicroSource

Supermicro SC730-A ATX MidTower
7 bays (3 5.25", 4 3.5"), 235W power supply, ATX. 68.95 - MicroSource

IBM Ultrastar 9ES DDRS-39130 9.1GB
9.1GB formatted capacity, Ultra2 Wide SCSI-3 (68-pin) interface, 7.5ms avg seek time, 80 MB/s transfer rate, 7200RPM rotational speed, 512KB buffer. 233.95 - MicroSource

Toshiba 40x SCSI CD-ROM Drive
Model XM-6401B - SCSI-2 interface, Up to 6,000KB/s Sustained Transfer Rate,80ms Average Random Access, 256KB Buffer.  75.95 - MicroSource

Mitsumi 1.44MB 3.5-inch FDD
(Oem)Floppy disk drive - beige. 19.50 - MicroSource

TOTAL PRICE = $1607.50

I have an extra video card I can use until I can afford a better video card, and I also have an Ethernet card to hook up to my cable modem and, in the future, our Ethernet network. :-) I also have an SBLive in this machine right now that I plan to turn into an NT Server. I am new to SCSI so I would appreciate any opinions on my proposal - and feel free to post this to your notes page to take up space. ;-)

Thanks for your help.

I have learned more than once there are positives to buying computers parts locally and MicroSource seems to very competitive at my first glance.  Just last week I reaffirmed this when the barbones case, etc. I grabbed from Computer and Software Outlet didn't work out for what I was trying to do.   They gladly accepted a return and I bought the equipment I needed to build the system from them.

It looks like you are planning to build yourself a heck of a system, but I wonder why you have chosen the SCSI route?  I didn't see a CD-R?  If you are not planning to make your own CDs, then I would question why you would want to go to the extra expense of SCSI?  You can get larger IDE drives that are almost as fast as SCSI, but less expensive.  Maybe you are planning to use this machine for full-motion video and need to speed of SCSI or just wanting to stick your toes in the SCSI waters or maybe you are going to be bringing up a web server.  The positives to SCSI are it is faster and you can daisy chain more devices than IDE.   The drawbacks include price and sometimes the difficulty of making everything work.   I have personally found that IDE is more plug and play.

My IntelliStation is a very powerful SCSI machine.   And here's the kick in the pants.  When IBM built this machine they went SCSI all the way, except when it came to the CD-ROM, which is the only IDE device.

I have two IDE HP CD-Writers in machines on my network and only once in a while have problems with buffer underruns when making a CD.   I have learned it is important not to be doing anything else with the machine when burning a CD.  This includes screen savers, so I try to remember to turn any screen savers off when starting the CD burn.  I rarely remember to do this!

As you might recall from reading my notes I bought my machine from an uBid auction.  Don't know how you feel about participating in these, but I found it hassle free.  As a ressult I also found IBM's support desk to very helpful.

An advantage to buying a machine "off the shelf" is it usually comes with an operating system and some software.  In your case you would have to purchase these items separately.

Good luck with your new system.  Please be sure to let me know which way you decide to go.

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Monday, December 27, 1999

Bob Thompson has been telling me that I should post a photo of myself.   I didn't have a digital photo of myself and I guess I was too lazy to scan one, so Bob emailed me one he had taken this past summer when he first got his new digital camera.   He's compensated for the fluorescent light and I have cropped the original version.   Here's the photo, taken while I lazily leaning back in my chair in the computer room/office at Wakeolda.  The mystery is now solved.  Think I should include this photo on my weekly notes page?

Jon Hassell [jon@hassell.com] and I continued our conversation on his plans to build a new computer:

Thanks for your quick reply. I made the SCSI choice because I want this system to be as powerful as possible. While I know the installation difficulties can be frustrating, I am intrigued by SCSI (which I know very little about) and its higher data transfer rates. I plan on adding a CD-RW drive and a DVD-ROM drive to the system at a later date, but I’d like to see the RW media become a more stable platform and I want to investigate DVD more. More than anything I can’t afford everything in the system now, but this Pentium-133 I use as my main machine now is getting so slow it is frustrating to work with.

I actually didn’t realize how slow my machine now was until I started my job. I work at a local ISP’s technical support desk. The machine at my desk was a Pentium II-300 with 96MB of RAM. I was impressed by the zippiness of that machine under Win98. Since then this machine has been bumped up to 64MB of RAM and a faster display adapter, but alas I cannot help but become irritable when I have to wait 25-30 seconds for Word to load. Office 2000 runs on this machine, but not well at all; in fact, I took it off and reverted to Office 97 because of speed. I hope to eliminate this frustration and ward off obsolescence with the new dual-processor machine.

The new machine will be used as a server (most likely Win2000 Server) and will be connected via ethernet to this machine, which I will turn into an NT Server and use Microsoft Proxy Server. I have investigated Linux for this machine and there is some hardware that it doesn’t like. I want to run it further and will probably use VMware on the new machine until I can find my way around. I also will purchase a new monitor, although I have 3 unused ones around here. Operating system software will not be a problem, as I am a beta tester for Microsoft and I have a lot of licenses on several products to spare, whcih were given to me as gifts for my time.

I considered purchasing an off-the-shelf system from Dell or Quantex, but by assembling everything myself I can have part of the system running now instead of waiting for everything. I am technical support, so hopefully there won’t be much needed. :-) I have a lot of resources through my job that I can call on if need be. I am excited about the project and considering starting a daynotes section on a website. What do you think?

My best suggestion in SCSI would be to get good cables. This controller you are talking about has two channels (at least mine does) and is a integrated Adaptec 78xx. I would go ahead and get an internal cable with four or five connectors. This would allow for any expansion you might be planning or even haven’t thought of at this point.

You mentioned a cable modem. That must mean you’re on the Time Warner system. They have been promising cable access here and in fact rolled it out in December. I was primed and ready to go and then got the bad news that the new cable modem access came to within one mile of my house. Seems like I am on a different node and my node is out in the rural area, so no telling when I will get fast access to the web. In the meantime I guess I will call on your for tech support :-)

As for slow machines, I had put an old 486 up in my daughter’s room and given her access to the home network. She doesn’t turn it on very often. I was up there this afternoon and upgraded her to IE 5. Now that was a painful process. The download was nearly an hour and when it finally downloaded and started updating her machine I thought I should be using an hourglass to time the progress. I would have thought it was hung had I not see the hard drive light fluttering.

As you might have I seen, the first thing I did with my IntelliStation was to trash the Win NT installation and go for a Windows 2000 beta. It worked great with the one exception of video. I was running in a whopping 16 colors and couldn’t find any Win 2000 video drivers, not from IBM and not from Intergraph, who sent me a nastygram that I should be looking to IBM for drivers and not them. Finally I got in touch with someone at IBM tech support that led to me some drivers that would work, but I decided to go back to Win NT Server so I could use this machine as a backup domain controller. I’ll wait on Win 2000 to at least the second service pack if I can hold out that long.

I want to bring up a Linux box myself, but I plan to use some older hardware. There are lots of hardware issues with Linux, rather, you really need to know all of the fine points about your hardware vs. Windows, where you can pop it in your machine and everything pretty much works. You may have to insert a driver disk every once in a while. For the most part, Windows ships with a array of the most common drivers.

There is also some satisfaction in building your own system. Usually if I get a new box the first thing I do is Fdisk the drive and install what I want.

I am so far behind the times that I don’t even have a DVD in any of my computers. We have one connected to the TV, but I haven’t added one to a computer yet.

The one thing that I have found out about computers is nothing I ever attempt to do takes the small amount of time I think it should. I have also reluctantly found that using quality parts will prevent some of the problems I have suffered of late. I know better, but sometimes I still wander to the other side of the fence.

Good luck on building your new screamer.

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Tuesday, December 28, 1999 

I spent some more time yesterday attempting to solve my SCSI  dilemma on Rubble.  Win NT is reporting an error 11 at startup "The driver detected a controller error on Device\ScsiPort2" and I have learned from searching the Microsoft site this error message means there is a problem with the card or the cable.

I started to go out a get a new cable, but then a brainstorm hit.  I moved all of this SCSI equipment back to BamBam where it worked before.  Guess what, it fired up without a hitch and both the scanner and the Kodak printer were available and worked right away.

So here's my current thought process.  To make channel B on on the AIC 7895 card in Rubble talk to the scanner I had to turn wide SCSI negotiation off and slow the transfer rate down to 10 MBps.  I did this for both devices -- the scanner and the printer.  The frustrating thing is the SCSI Bios sees both devices at boot time, but when Win NT loads and you look at SCSI Adapters in Control Panel only the scanner is showing.  It would seem that if the bios sees both devices then they should be passed to Win NT.  Silly me.

I have resolved my thinking to this.  Maybe by turning the wide negotiation off  I have changed the SCSI bus to a SCSI-2 bus and there is a cable limitation.  The new cable I purchased from Computer and Software Outlet has a HPDB68 to CN50 (High Density 68-pin male to a 50-pin centroniscs male) and is about 6 feet long.   I made a mental note of the cable length when I purchased it, but it was my only option.  The cable that daisy chains the printer to the scanner is a DB25 to HPDB50 and is about 3 feet in length. It looks like a short printer cable with the exception of the funny looking SCSI connector on the other end.  The reason I made a mental note of the new cable length was that both of my old cables were short, each about three feet in length.

Since I am such a SCSI novice I even attempted a call to Adaptec technical support, but they are closed for the holidays.  I also remembered there was some short cable limitation to SCSI-2 and found a site on the that sells about any kind of SCSI cable you might want.  Ram Electronics also has some guides about SCSI cable lengths and I noticed that the maximum length for 10 MHz (SCSI-2 FAST, Fast / Wide SCSI) is 3 meters.  This made me wonder if by changing the speed and turning wide negotiation off if I have actually changed my SCSI bus type and my cables are just a tad too long.

I suppose I now have several alternatives.  I can try to find a short (three feet HPDB68 to CN50 SCSI cable, I could buy one from RAM), wait for Adaptec Tech support to reopen after the holidays, post this question to a Usenet newsgroup or maybe someone who happens by these pages may be more proficient in the SCSI than I an could answer my question and confirm that I am on the right track.  If you have any thoughts on this issue, please feel free to drop me a note.

I HAVE BEEN NOTICING in my stats logs recently that I get a high amount of hits from mar33.marriott.com, which leads to believe it is a search site indexing my pages.  Most search robots have some reference to search in their domain name.  As an example, yesterday my site got the highest number of requests from admin.searchplace.com, obviously a search robot.  Maybe I should ask some of my webmaster friends, the DayNoters in particular,  if they are seeing the same thing.   I guess because I stay at a fair amount of Marriott hotels, the name just jumped out at me.  Maybe I can get some points from Marriott through this search engine, or maybe it's someone working the night shift and doing some intensive reading at Wakeolda <g>.

IF YOU HAVE ONE OF THE PALM computers and have been envious of the Palm VII owners who can access the web directly from their Palm Pilot there is a site that will take you part of the way there.  AvantGO puts web site content you sign up for on your Palm Pilot or Windows CE device when you sync it in the cradle.  You can get headlines, business news, sports, entertainment, etc. by signing up for channels from  their webiste.  On their Explore AvantGO page, I noticed there were 70-some business channels available from their website, offering contents from such high powered sites like The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and TheStreet.Com.  The news channels included The New York Times, USA Today, Fox and the Excite portal. You can download the free software and signup with AvantGo here.  I think I might give it a try when I return to the office, where I synch my PalmV.

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Wednesday, December 29, 1999 

It must be a Y2K thing.  I actually backed my network up yesterday.   It was pretty much an all day affair.  In stead of putting all 6 machines in one backup set, I split the network in two for backup purposes.  In the morning backup session I chose Wilma (the machine I use to update my website), BamBam and Betty.   In the evening session Fred (my main NT server), Rubble, Barney and Pebbles got their shot.  I am still using the HP surestore, which uses TR-4 tapes.

I WENT UPSTAIRS FROM THE computer room exclusion and noticed Suzy was making Rice Crispy squares, which was a sure sign that her brother was getting ready to head back down to Florida.  So I asked and sure enough, he headed out late in the evening, well late in the day, but early in the evening.  Before he left I made him a CD with the latest Microsoft Service Packs, including Office 2b and Win NT Service Pack 6a.  I also put the same NT Service Pack 5 on this disk and since there was room I also gave him SP-4 and SP-3, just for the heck of it.

Sam also purchased an IBM IntelliStation from uBid, in fact he's the one who gave me the heads-up.  He has been watching this week with great curiosity as I have struggled with my SCSI dilemma.  He knows he's going to be tackling SCSI when he returns home.  He has a HP scanner he want s to connect to his IntelliStation and has recently bought a SyQuest drive for the SCSI chain.  Good luck is my best advice.

THE KIDS HAVE ASKED about the possibility of going ice skating.  I am sure this doesn't sound like a big deal to our friends from the North, but around here we never get cold enough to have the ponds freeze over or for there to be a need for outdoor ice skating rinks.  Our kids get to share ice time with the local hockey team.  Ice skating is a departure from the old-hat action of the roller blades I suppose.  I think they're getting bored and ready to go back to school.  It'll be a trip to Grandma's over the weekend.  Their excited about the trip.  Nothing like a change in venue.

I had a quick response yesterday about from Pete Moore [pmoore@entrecs.com].   It seems AvantGO has breathed some new life into his Palm III.  Makes me want to give it a try even more when I return to office.

I’ve been vastly entertained and frequently educated by you and the other Daynoters. Thanks for the work you put into it. This is what I want to Web to do—let knowledgeable folks who otherwise would probably never interact do so in an open venue, where the synergy of overlapping expertise and the personal flavor of the varying personalities transforms the whole mix into a delicious techno-human stew.

I just wanted to comment on AvantGo, which I’ve used on my ancient (less than a year <sniff>) Palm III for a few months now. The only thing that would improve this cool tool would be if you Daynoters (in your copious free time) ;) offered your journals in Palm-friendly format. AvantGo has breathed new life into my Palm III, which was in danger of becoming a mere phone list.

Keep up the good work!

Thanks for your very kind words, but I must admit you are piquing my curiosity with your reccomendation of AvantGo.

And my sister Maryanna, [MNana8199@aol.com] doesn't think the photo I added to my notes yesterday is the  best picture she's seen of me.  Must be some family prejudice there.

I think i have seen much better pictures of you that you may include.

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Thursday,  December 30, 1999

I was by the office to check on a few things yesterday afternoon.  I had the kids with me and after using up a couple reams of paper, a few ink pens and more than their share of post-it notes we headed out.  On the way out I asked the kids if they wanted to stop by our technical services group to say hello to some friends.  Of course, they were all in for the adventure.

I was surprised at what I saw.  The tech boys are taking these Y2K threats very seriously.  They're ready to bunker in for a couple of days and plan to start manning their "war room" as the clocks start to roll forward in the Far East.  They're even going to have their meals catered in.  There seems to be some concern over viruses that may arrive in emails at the stroke of the new Millenium or ones that are already here, but wake-up when Dick Clark gives the signal to drop the ball in New York's Times Square.  They plan to start checking our computer systems in earnest when it becomes 2000 here in Winston-Salem.

Before my drop by I wasn't too concerned about Y2K, but seeing these preparations made me wonder if I have maybe been too callous about the whole Millenium bug thing.

Even my mother got in on the act.  When I called her today to let her know that we would be arriving with kids in tow on Friday she mentioned that one of my sisters had opined that she couldn't believe I was going to be leaving my computers for the dawning of the new Millenium.  If I hear new Millenium one more time I think I am going to puke.

I CAME ACROSS AN interesting search site last night.   WebOpedia seems to built for the geeks.  I was looking for an explanation for the file extension .mpd and found everything but that at this site.  WebOpedia's quick reference page included links for microprocessor comparison charts, data formats and their relating file extensions, country codes and their domain extensions ( think I may already have more in my stats than listed here), something you don't use everyday -- an ASCII chart (remember the good old days when we manually inserted these in WordPerfect),  internet error messages and a brief timeline of the internet. I checked and Al Gore's name was not mentioned.

ANOTHER STOP ON MY journey with the kids yesterday afternoon was at the coliseum where the two of them suckered me out of $14 for ice skating.  Not that I mind the ice skating fee, but it also included lunch at one our favorite little places, and they might have skated for a grand total of 45 minutes before announcing they were tired of skating and were cold. It's ice.  Cold.  Uh.   I should have figured.  What the heck, it's the holidays.  Oh, I didn't mention the stop at the frozen yogurt shop on the way home from the office.  Kids.   Ya gotta love 'em.

REBECCA LYNN EISENBERY, THE NOUVEAUGEEK at CBS Marketwatch.com says the dawning of the new century may also mark the dawning of the post-PC era. She predicts the information age is in for a makeover and she's not talking about digital or broadband access.  She thinks the PC as we know it today may become the dinosaur of tomorrow.  She thinks the hot items in the next few years will include communicating via a handheld device like your Palm Pilot or Windows CE device, listening to music on your RIO MP3 player, playing an interactive role with your TV and WebTV, including buying products while you are watching commercials.  Wonder what that will do to a channel surfer like myself?   And don't forget TIVO, which will watch our television viewing habits and begin to record the programs we like automatically for us.   Now, I should be able to give that thing a run for the money.

STILL AGONIZING WITH SCSI.  I am continuing to play around with SCSI on Rubble and in fact I have tried so many Adaptec drivers and the like that I've got the SCSI devices so screwed up that they have stopped working.  So I am at a crossroads and made the following decision.  I formatted the drive and am going to load Windows 2000 Professional RC2.  I don't have anything to lose.  If my SCSI chain works better with 2000 then I'm ahead.  If it doesn't, then I haven't lost anything but some time.  If I get the same results or worse I will bang out another low level format and reinstall Win NT 4.0 and restore my backup that I did the other day. I knew I was doing a backup for a good reason.  This way my curiosity over Windows 2000 will have been answered before I get too much software installed on Rubble.  I need to give 2000 more of a serious test than I previously did anyway.

MORE ON Y2K IN WINSTON-SALEM.  Our neighbor is involved in administration at the Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center and was over last night.  Naturally the conversation turned to Y2K.  She said that she will have to go to work at 10PM on New Year's Eve and be there until at least 2 AM.  In fact, almost  everyone in administration will be there.  Her normal job is a patient care coordinator at the Brenner Children's Hospital, which is a hospital within the giant medical center.  She helps parents cut through the hospital's red tape when their child is hospitalized.

The hospital is planning to have a patient-to-care-giver ration of 1:1 during this calendar rollover time.  I suggested that maybe this wasn't a bad time to be sick, when she quickly reminded me that many of these 1:1'ers were from administration.   Hey, it sounded good anyway.

The hospital has this huge generator sitting there on standby that will power all of the life support equipment.  Hopefully it will not be needed.

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Friday, December 31, 1999 

It's almost here!

Here's one from the egg on Microsoft's face dept.  It appears the Microsoft forgot to pay the  measley $35 to Network Solutions to keep one of the domains going for their Hotmail service.  Their system crashed big-time over the Christmas Holiday, leaving millions e-mail challenged.  Word on the street is they hey forgot to re-register the passport domain that handles passwords for Hotmail.   And then a user from the Linux community needed his email, so he offered to donate the $35 so Hotmail could get going again.  Ha Ha He He.  There's quite a thread on this slip-up at slashdot. And more here and here.   Microsoft has graciously offered to repay Michael Chaney his $35.  Chaney says he will frame the check...unless it's a big one.  Maybe he should request a personal check from Bill Gates.  Wonder if Gates uses HotMail.  Was he without mail on Christmas?

There may not be much here over the weekend and we plan to head north into Virginia by three hours to clebrate the dawning of Y2K and a long weekend with my mother.   I will probably take a laptop with me to check messages, but may not try to make any posts to the site.

DON'T ASK ME HOW, but I think I may have finally conquered the SCSI printer thing.  I just hope I am not bragging too early.   It's come back twice, so hopefully it's going to work.

How did I finally get here after spending a good portion of my week messing around with this thing.  I will take you back to Wednesday night.  I had tried so many drivers that I had my system totally screwed up.  In fact it was so bad that it would not boot, so I figured no problem, I'll take her down to bare metal on Thursday and reinstall Win NT server and we'll be back running.  Wrong, as always.

After a good night's sleep,  I thought, what the heck, this would be a good time to give Windows 2000 Professional another try.  That I did. The installation of W2K went smooth enough and upon rebooting W2K found two unknown devices.   One was my scanner and the second was the Kodak printer.  Hey, now we're cooking.  But naturally, there are no W2K drivers for these things, so I was stuck.   I checked both the UMAX website and the Kodak site.  I even exchanged emails with Kodak tech support  who sent me back a terse response that went something like this:  "As Windows 2000 has not been "officially" released yet, we do not have a driver available, nor do we currently support communications with the 2000 OS. When the OS is officially released sometime next month, we will have drivers available. Until then, there is really nothing we can do to support connectivity."  Good thing my system didn't have return sound.  But I was pleased that at least I had learned my problem was a driver problem.  I was pleased to assume it was not hardware related.

I thought I would leave W2K on Rubble now and play with it some.  The first order of business was to enhance the screen from the default 16 colors.  I thought I was installing the InterGraph video driver that IBM had earlier told me would work with this system, but I guess not.  I had now locked this system up on the blue screen of death.  I mean the big one, where it does a memory dump, etc.

Now I am at a crossroads.  So I decided I will go backwards.  I format the drive again and proceed to install Win NT 4.0 server again, but I have problems with that.  When NT is searching the SCSI bus it locks up tight.

I'm going to shorten this some at this point.

I format again and decided to give Win NT 4.0 Workstation a try.   Same results.  Rubble locks up at the blue OS loader screen.  I even restore a back up and can at least get the system going, but it was a Win NT 4.0 server backup and I installed it over a Win NT Workstation installation.  I knew this wouldn't work, so I went back to the SCSI controller for yet another low level format.

This time I took my time and manually put in all of the devices like the SCSI controller from disk and selecting the IDE atapi controller manually.

I think during my previous installs I may have had the external SCSI chain powered up.  So I made sure they were turned off in this install.  The install went fine and I got Server up with no problem.  The next thing I did was to bring the video back.  We're still cooking. 

My next step was to run NT service pack 5.  In the previous install I think I may have not allowed the service pack to replace the aic78xx.sys driver, so this time my thought went something like this.  Maybe the service pack is later than my installation disk, so what do I have to lose.  I allowed SP5 to replace the SCSI driver.

Moving right along I reinstalled the scanner software and PhotoShop and then the Kodak export utility into PhotoShop for the printer.

Now it's time throw some juice to the SCSI chain and presto, magic, etc. Windows NT boots.  I hold my breath while I looked at the SCSI adapter folder in control panel and click on the B channel and what is there?  Both the scanner and the printer.  I could hardly believe my eyes.

So I load PhotoShop and ruin a test print and we are working.

After the printer was finally alive I used Adaptec EZ-SCSI to look at the device and found what may be culprit on my fast system.  The printer is SCSI-0 and the scanner is SCSI-2.  Don't know if that means anything or not, but more than likely it does.What am I talking about.  Of course I know it means something.

What have I learned from all of this.  Heck, I tried so many things this week that I could fill a three volume change log, so I won't even try to recount the steps.  But maybe the important thing is something I already knew, but did not practice.  Run the service pack after you do anything....and allow the service pack to use its files to update drivers in question.  Maybe if I had followed theses rules I would have enjoyed a less frustrating week, he says while kicking himself in the #$%.

Jon Hassell  [jon@hassell.com]checks back in and it looks like he's been successful in building his new screaming dual Pentium system:

I finally built my machine from scratch yesterday, and I'm glad I did.  After an all-afternoon ordeal with many problems, including a defective SCSI HD, I finally had everything done about 5:30. (6 hours later than when I started.)  I wouldn't take the world for the experience, though, and this baby is one fast machine.  I'm at work now using VNC to run a terminal session to it and it is not even remotely slow, even across a terminal connection.  I'm very impressed with it, and I had no SCSI configuration troubles.  The Adaptec 7890 BIOS recognized everything.  More pleasing to me was that the motherboard came with 2 great cables, both terminated already, so I didn't have to get my fingers sticky in cable length, termination, and whatnot.  From what I can tell so far, this is an excellent machine.

I can definitely identify with your curiosity to experiment with Win2000.  I put Win2000 Server RC2 on this machine last night as well as another OS and it sings.  Win2000 is very stable, very responsive and overall seems to be a very good operating system.  I have the RTM evaluation versions coming and when I put them on it will be the true test.  It seems to take advantage of the dual processors quite nicely, with the feel and snappiness of a Pentium III always there no matter how many tasks I have running.  Setup set everything up properly and it worked great out of the box except for a USB controller problem that the other OS has as well.  I will get to debugging that tomorrow.

Just thought I'd throw you a note to let you know I would recommend giving Win2000 a shot... Enjoy!

I'm glad you seem to have better SCSI luck than I have this week, but it appears your SCSI installation wasn't hassle (no pun intended) free either.

Matt Beland [mbeland@itool.com], one of the regulars DayNoters, send along this Y2K thing that I just had to share.  Hope you don't mind Matt.

UPDATE 01/01/00 11:13 AM:  I have made my Y2K preparations as they are.  I have just finished backing up my Quicken data to floppies.  I figured this would be the hardest to recreate it there were some catastrophe.  I don't expect one, but I'd better be safe than sorry.   I am so dependent on Quicken for our financial data and it would be nearly impossible to recreate if something were to happen to the machines it's stored on (yes, I have it stored on multiple machines in the event of a hard drive failure).  My next step will be to turn my computers off before leaving for the trip to Virginia.  We'll find out what happens on Monday, when I expect everything to be just as I had left it and for it to work normally.

In the end I think there will have been a ton of needless money spent on Y2K preparations, but it's better to be prepared than to wish you had afterwards.

As I now think about it, I am beginning to realize just how awesome it is for us and for our kids to be living as the century turns.  It was quite a different world when our grandparents, an for some of us maybe our parents, lived through their turn of the century.  I can't even begin to fathom what this world will be like when the clock rolls over again.  I wonder what the big issues of 2099 will be? I am sure diseases like AIDS and cancer will be a distant  entry in the history books by then, but will recreational drug use continue to destroy our world?  I hope not.

Enjoy the new Millenium.  Best wishes for a safe, healthy and prosperous new century.

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Saturday, January 1, 2000

NEW ZEALAND, NATURALLY, welcomed the first new citizens of the new century. I say naturally, because, as I understand it, New Zealand was the first place for the time to change. A little boy born in Auckland is believed to be the first person born in the New Millenium, just after the stroke of midnight. Less than 10 minutes later a little girl was born in Tupou.

I am writing this information as I sit at my mother's kitchen table, awaiting the stroke of midnight and the new year. Suzy asked if I were on my computer to see if it was going to fail at the clock changed to 2000. I certainly don't expect it to fail.

FROM WHAT I HAVE SEEN, the biggest scare of the New Millenium may have taken place in Japan where alarms rang at two nuclear power plants. Apparently a system that monitors radiation levels at the power plant in Ishikawa rang out just after midnight. The second scare, also at a nuclear plant, came at a couple minutes after the stroke of the new century in Onagawa. Thankfully all is reported OK.

I TOOK A BREAK to watch the big crystal ball fall in New York City's Times Square and have now returned to my notebook, which continues to run on shore power. The battery did not activate. No Y2K here in Virginia.

At first glance the Y2K bug in America is turning out to be like many other events of late. Media Hype.

On another note, I can not for the life of figure what would possess someone to go to Times Square to be sardined among two million people for 24 hours. How do those people eat? Where do they go to the bathroom and WHY did some of them bring their young children?

I WAS HOLDING OUT as President Clinton addressed the nation that he might deliver a similar speech as Boris Yelstein had done earlier today in Russia. Once again I was disappointed. Instead, he was throwing one of those star-studded big bashes in the White House. Wonder if it was a coffee? Oh well, just as well he didn't resign as Yelstein had done. The replacement probably wouldn't have been much better.

I hope you are enjoying the new century.

UPDATE 01/01/00 11:13 AM:  A quick check of the  web looks like everyone made it, with  the final place to enter the new Millenium being somehwere in Western Somona.  It must be funny there, with their neigbors entering the new century a full day before Western Somona.

My sister called my mother's house this morning and said she had attempted to call here last night to wish her a Happy New Year and New Century, but couldn't get through.  Then she looked ast my web page today and figured it all out.  That's right, I had the one phone line tied up watching the New Century dawn on my notebook.

All of this Y2K stuff has me wondering.  Shouldn't it really be Y2M?   Y2K will really be in the year 2048 if I remember anything about bits and bytes.

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