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Have you wondered where we have been?
Nowhere. It's just been hectic as heck around
our house, some of which was caused by me and my
techno brain farts.
Where should I start? The main workstation that
Suzy uses on out network resides right here beside
the kitchen table. Actually, I use this
machine quite a bit as well, but when it comes to
her work, she finds its convenience a sure
thing. However, this machine is ancient.
I can't begin to tell you how far it goes back, but
this will give you a hint. Betty has a 90 MHz
Pentium processor and a 4x CD-ROM and used 64 pin
memory. At least I think it was 64 pin, maybe
you can remember better than I the correct nomenclature.
This machine also had a +/- 640 meg hard drive that
was running WinNT 4.0 and had gotten to the point
that if you wanted to save something to the hard
drive you had to delete something else. We're
about to get to my brainstorm or bran fart, you
decide. It struck me on Monday, that I had an old
machine in the basement (computer room) that would
serve her better. It was an old (seems like we
believe in old machines around here) IBM 300 PL that
was a screaming 233 Pentium with 64 megs memory and
a 16x CD-ROM. I had at one time
intended to use this machine as a Linux box, loaded
Linux on the machine, but then didn't have time to
learn the system, so the machine has been sitting
idle. The brian X was this machine would make
a good upgrade for Suzy's workstation. Sounds
reasonable. The first thing I did was bring the
machine upstairs and place it on the table that held
the monitor (the old machine was a tower) for her to
determine if the monitor would be too high.
She determined it would be fine, however, for me
it's a little tricky with my bifocals. Then I
moved what I believed all of the pertinent data from
the old Betty to a folder on a machine on the
network so she would have most of her files back
when we brought up the new machine. Next it was
time to move all of the connections to the new box
and begin to install an operating system. I
decided to install Win NT Server on the new
Betty. Most of the machines on the network are
NT. I have one w2k box and one Win98 box, but
have not ventured into xp, etc. Of course I
thought this would be a simple install. And of
course it wasn't. The first thing I was faced with
was this machine still thought it was a Linux
machine of course. I headed downstairs to find
a diskette that had fdisk so I could clean the
master boot record and once this was done I began
installing NT again. Time for a major brain
fart. When installing I meant to make this
machine a backup domain controller (I have selected
this option for each NT Server installation), but in
my haste forget to uncheck the Primary Domain
controller button. I realized my mistake too
late and thought maybe I could undo my mistake when
NT was up and running. To make a long story a
little shorter, I suppose since this machine was a
PDC, I was unable to join another network. I
had selected the domain named domain as an interim. To
make this story a little shorter, I decided my best
course of action would be just to install NT again
from the beginning, making sure that I selected the
backup operation when I got to the domain
controlling area of networking. Had no problem
bringing Betty back online as a backup domain
controller this time and was able to join the
network easily. The next step was to begin
installing some of the frequently used
software. The most important would be some of
the solitaire games and the Microsoft Office Suite,
not necessarily in that order, but necessarily in
that order. I hadn't paid too much attention when
I was removing the Linux info in the master boot
record, but now I seemed to remember that it was
choking on some bad sectors. This was going to
come back to haunt me soon. I installed office and
when I rebooted to finish the installation, I was
faced with the famous NT blue screen of death and a
looping reboot. I remember this problem from a
hard drive gone bad on Fred a few months back and
knew my next course would be to replace the hard
drive. It's now Christmas eve morning. I
wake up early and decide to go out locally and
pickup a hard drive, but first I update the flash
bio of the IBM 300 PL, thinking this would allow
this machine to accept a moderately sized hard
drive. The hard drive I chose was a Maxtor 40
gig drive (7200 rpm), which I would have thought
this bios dated July 2000 would have accepted
easily. The drive in now installed with the
jumpers selected for cable select. The 300 PL
is not seeing this drive, so I have to re-jumper the
drive for master. No problem there. Now
when I boot the machine it will only see 8 gigs of
this 40 gig drive. I am not a happy
camper. I should have found a throw away 10
gig drive I am now thinking. The drive comes with
an Ez-Bios patch the work around this problem, but I
want to avoid this route. Finally give in
attempt to run the patch, but it's written with Dr.
DOS and fails on my system. I now said screw
it and moved on. My plan was to install
everything and then after the holidays get a small
drive, make an image of this drive and then move to
larger 40 gig drive somewhere else on the network. Next
step naturally was that NT would not format this
drive to 8 gigs, so I chose a partition of 4 gigs
and began installing everything, where I encountered
no problems. After I installed the pertinent
software I began searching the IBM support site for
a workaround to the problem, but found none. I
then decided to see if the bios patch would run from
the CD once there was an operating system installed. The
patch installation was successful with NT and I now
have a formatted 4 gig partition and 34,138 megs of
unformatted space on the drive. NT is seeing a
total of 38,170 megs of this drive, which is not the
total 40 gigs, but close enough. It's now
Christmas eve afternoon and I have to stop all of
this and get ready for our run to church for our Christmas
Eve Lovefeast(s) services.
The Christmas Lovefeast is a candlelight service
that is part of the Christmas tradition for many
families here in Winston-Salem and other Moravian
communities. I say services because our church holds
three of these services on Christmas Eve. The
first one is at 2 PM and is called the Children's
Christmas Lovefeast because the youth provide all of
the music. There are also services at 5 and 8
PM. Katie sang at the 2 and 5 PM services and
I served at the same services. Suzy also
attended both services.
Now it's Christmas Day, which is really a
day-long affair in the Tucker household. The kids
are decent to us on the big day, they always have
been. It was about 8:30 AM when they urged we
should go downstairs and do the present thing and
when they head downstairs they are patient enough to
wait for everyone to gather, get coffee and get
situated before the unwrapping begins. The ,major
gifts this year included a telephone and television
for Katie and her room and for Andrew it was a
Playstation 2 and a set of golf clubs. In fact
Andrew is now golf club rich. I had mentioned
to a friend in Chicago that I was going to be
getting him some clubs and this friends took it upon
himself to send a full set of clubs down to
Andrew. I had a local pro shop make a set of
junior clubs to his height that can have the shafts
changed as he get taller. Both Katie and Andrew
were thrilled, which makes mom and dad equally
happy. We have the typical Christmas feast and usually eat
around five o'clock when some friends join us. And
after the feast it's time for more unwrapping. As
I said, Christmas is a day-long affair in the Tucker
household. This brings us to toady, a day
for everyone to get caught up on their sleep and
begin utilizing their Christmas gifts. Andrew
wanted to head to the driving range and both Katie
and Andrew wanted to go shopping to spend that money
they received as gifts, which is now burning a hole
in their respective pockets.
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