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Sunday, August 20, 2000
The office/computer room at Wakeolda is continuing
with its makeover. This next comment may go a long ways in
explaining just how much of a pack rat I am, although I know I should
not admit any of this.
When I decided to move one of the bookcases in
this area I had to empty everything off the shelves, of
course. Stored there were about six years worth of PC
Magazine, in fact, on this shelving unit, I had the complete set
of issues for each year of PC Magazine, going back to 1992.
I say the complete set, I may be missing an issue or two, but not
many.
As I pulled the magazines from the shelves I had
to chuckle at what hardware and software items were making the
covers back then. There was one issue reviewing the
ultra-fast 486-33 and then of course there were many review of
Windows 3.1. It was good for an afternoon's enjoyment.
If anyone would like these issues they're yours
for the asking. Just
email me. I plan to see if our local libraray might take
them off my hands.
And I didn't even mention some of the DOS software
I have stacked up around here. I don't think I've ever
tossed a version of software, but hopefully I will get up the
nerve to change that very soon.
I thought the news over the weekend that
Valvoline was buying into a racing team was very
interesting. I guess they won't have any trouble finding a
sponsor!
UPDATE:
I must be losing it. For some reason I had placed this
update under the Saturday heading. Hope it's fixed now.
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Monday, August
21, 2000
The International news community today fessed up
to what all of us have expected for at least a week now.
There were no survivors to be found on this submarine which is
laying at the bottom of the ocean. Norwegian divers
confirmed this Monday when they were finally able to force open an
escape hatch on the sub, but found no evidence of survivors.
If you thought the cold war was over, I urge you
to reconsider your thinking. I base this on my suspicions
and the fact that it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks...or
wipe the stripes from a tiger's skin. You get the
message. The fact that the Russians (I guess that's what you
can call them now) were so slow to ask for our help means they
must not totally trust us. With an administration like
Clinton's who can blame them. End of sidebar. In
my mind it also means there was something on this underwater
ship they didn't want us to see and only called o our help as a
last resort. This lends support to my notion the cold war is
not over. Of course, we don't want them to see our secrets
either.
With the release of Microsoft's maintenance
edition of Windows, excuse me, but I guess the official name
is Windows Millenium Edition , the weekly mailing from Byte
magazine points us to a few articles and columns in the magazine
on this subject.
You may change your mind about Win ME when it's all said and
done. However, if you still must have Windows ME and want it
on the first day it's available Microsoft wants your
business. Here's
a link from the Microsoft store that will put Windows Me on
your doorstep the same day it arrives in stores. There are
pricing options that range from buying a full version, an upgrade
from Windows 98 and an upgrade from Win 98 Second Edition.
The Pentium series is moving to the next
generation as Intel plans to unveil its plans
for the Pentium 4 at a conference later the week.
The new chip is said to feature a architecture
makeover called "NetBurst" designed to handle
tasks--such as data encryption, video compression easier to handle
over the internet. The new chip is set to debut at a speed
of 1.4 GHz. Got to have more power.
My rank on the Daynotes
Gang on the SETI@HOME project is climbing, but
I expect any northern movement for me will now slow down. I
am currently in 19th position, but expect it will be a while
before I can pass Joe Hartman (17), who has completed 17 work
units to my 10 as of this writing. If
you would like to participate on our team, I am sure you would
be more than welcome. Bob
Thomspon at TTGNET is the gang's leader and the one who
suggested we "band" (as in bandwidth"
together. If you need to download the software,
go here.
Mark Bridgers [markbridgers@yahoo.com]
follows up on our conversation last week on the release of
Olympus' newest digital camera.
In keeping with the recent theme of
digital cameras, a review of the D490 has been posted here: http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/olympus/d490z-review/index.html
This is another good site,
though not as deep as Imaging Resource.
Sounds like a winner.
Go Deacs, (WTBS-- Wait 'Til
Basketball Season!)
Thanks for the heads up. The camera
was supposed to be released last week and I was going to wait a
month or so to see how the "street" pricing
settled down. It will be good to check out the reviews in
the mean time and salivate.
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Tuesday, August
22, 2000
I think I may have mentioned from time to time
that I have trouble with the machine named Wilma on my network
locking up at the most inopportune time. Like there is ever
a good time for a computer to lock up. When this happens
it's not a simple thing. You can't just reboot and be back
in business.
Usually, on the first attempt at rebooting it will
hang again and will be locked tight, paying no attention to the
three finger salute. You hit the power switch and you
heading to scan disk. After scan disk runs you may be lucky
enough to get to the a boot in safe mode and from there you can
shut down (restart doesn't always work) and maybe if you're lucky
when it boots now (you're on the third or fourth boot attempt at
this point) you may get back into the system.
I am sure I have screwed something up in the
registry and it's conflicting major league and I figure the only
saving grace is for me to strip this machine down to bare metal
and start over. I have been putting this inevitable process
off for at least and year now, but am finally sucking it up and
making my preparations for a new install, including wiping the
drive clean.
This machine started out as a Windows 98 box and
then I foolishly installed Win 98 Second Edition on top of the
original installation. I can't remember when these problems
starting happening, but I have been dealing with the frustration
long enough. On top of the lockups, with Win 98 SE installed
the machine would not boot to the network. After a new boot you
would have to manually log out and then you would be able to log
into the local domain. At one point I'd had enough of this,
so I accepted the option to blow away the Win 98 SE install and
revert back to Win 98. I am sure this didn't help my
situation any.
Therefore, I finally made the call to blow it all
away and start over. Usually I would jump right in and just
start a new install, deleting everything on the hard drive.
However, call me crazy or am I aging after all, I took a little
time to go through the machine to see what I had installed and
made some notes so I could bring this machine back to a somewhat
normal life. I even ran a backup, heaven forbid. This
may be the closet I ever get to keeping a change log.
Some of the most important work on this machine is
the PrintMaster graphics program Suzy uses, so I made sure I
copied her data off to another drive on the network and then
started the full backup.
As I am writing this I am watching the blue screen
of a Windows 2000 Pro install. He hard drive is well on its
way to being formatted as a NTFS volume (everything on that drive
is gone now, for sure).
The first thing I will attempt to install on the
new 2000 box are some of the Microsoft games Andrew likes to
play. His favorite is Monster Truck Madness, so that will
probably be the first test. If 2000 doesn't like these games
I will not have gone too far that I can't back up. In this
happens I'll be forced to give Win 98 another shot. I am
crossing everything I have that this is not the case. Cross
an finger for me if you will. Many thanks.
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Wednesday, August
23, 2000
The Windows 2000 install on Wilma went fairly
smoothly last night. I had a few hiccups, but nothing major:
-
At first Wilma couldn't see the remainder of
my network. She loaded using dynamic IP and I tried
hard coding an IP, but this was of no help either.
Since Wilma had been on the network previously, I went over
to Fred (my backup domain server) and removed Wilma from the
network. I then joined Wilma to the network with no
problem.
-
Connecting an outdated HP 693C color printer
to Windows was a bit more of a chore. I had this
printer connected to Coyote (a Win NT 4.0 machine) and
wanted to access it across the network, but naturally the
drivers written for 4.0 wouldn't cooperate with 2000.
Checked the HP support site and since this printer is
discontinued long ago, of course they didn't dream of
writing a Win 2000 driver. I played with this for a
while to no avail.
-
The next step for the printer was to see if
Windows 2000 had a driver that would install the printer as
if it was a local printer. Sure enough, the printer
was listed and installed without any problems, except that
it was a local install and the printer was located elsewhere
on the network. This gave me to idea to scan the Win
2000 CD for the printer inf file, but I could find nothing.
-
The next step was to move this printer to
Wilma. However, before I did this I went to my NT 4.0
machines and installed the DeskJet from the Win 2000 box to
make sure there was a driver. There was and I moved
the printer (physically).
-
However, there was no joy in Mudville.
No printing of a test page. I checked the device
manager and there were big yellow exclamation marks beside
the two com ports and the parallel port. Hmmm. Check
the properties and even took a look at troubleshooter.
One of the things it suggested was to turn plug 'n play off
in the bios. I resisted this for a while, but
eventually gave in. When I rebooted after the saving
the bios changes I check again in device manager and the
ugly yellow marks were gone. And the printer
worked. Printed a beautiful test page.
These were the only hiccups I have run into yet
with 2000.
I loaded Suzy's Printmaster and Andrew's Monster
Truck Madness with crossed fingers. Win 2000 seems to like
this software just fine, so I may be on my way to populating Wilma
with software. I guess Office will be the next
package. Heck, I wanted to begin filling the drive again
anyway.
I'm headed off the Bristol, TN to the Winston Cup
event this weekend, leaving tomorrow, so things
will be a little slow around here until I return the first of the
week.
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