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Sunday, 24 June 2001
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No entry.
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Monday, 25 June 2001
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I found another bunch of Windows 98 licenses, so that's some OS downgrades I can avoid. Nice to dodge the occasional bullet. And my motherboard/CPU/cooler should arrive today. Fun.
Yesterday I tried out one of the USR Sportster external v.90 56K modems that I bought on eBay. Windows 98 detected it on COM1 at boot time, just like it was supposed to. But I couldn't seem to get it to connect above 9600 bps. I checked the COM1 port settings, and yeah, it was set to 9600. So I set it to 115,000 and rebooted. Still looks like 9600 bps. So I crawled to the USR website and downloaded the appropriate INF file, deleted the modem, and rebooted again. It redetected properly, and I pointed the installer at the INF file, and it seemed to install properly. And then I got busy with non-computer stuf, and didn't get a chance to check it out again. We'll see. And I'll also have to swap in the other modem and see if that's all good. Hope so. Hint for eBay sellers — don't use tape to wrap up cables for shipping! It leaves 'em all sticky and nasty to handle. Yuck! Use twisties, or wrap the cable tightly and pull an end through the loop a few times, or just wad it up in a ball. Anything but sticky tape!
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Tuesday, 26 June 2001
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Well, the INF file from USR fixed my modem problem. I connected last night (ostensibly) at 50,666 bps, which is pretty good. Subjectively, the web didn't feel too sprightly, but that might be partly because of being spoiled by the T1 speed at work. I reinstalled Opera 5, because I just REALLY like the way each new windows displays its actual connection speed. When I open a window and see something like 219 BPS, I just close it and go somewhere else, rather than waiting and waiting for something to appear in the window. Opera comes closest to being a browser for techies, who like to see under the hood. Everything Microsoft is being progressively dumbed down, and subjected to increasingly rigorous straitjackets from the Reich in Redmond.
I'm actually coming to the conclusion that Bill Gates is frightened. Every decision that has come out of Redmond in the last couple of years has born the marks of increasing paranoia, using the word in the popular, rather than the clinical sense. It very much reminds me of the behavior of a husband who is convinced that his wife is cheating on him, and so he embarks on an escalating program of stricter controls and enhanced scrutiny, all the while protesting how much he loves the woman, and how he's only being forced to take these strict measures because of his undying love for her. Come on now, seriously... don't you sense that kind of a tone to the Borg's pronouncements and marketing strategies? Speaking of which, how about this from the Register, for browbeating your customers? And the related report from ZD Net.
Here's how one customer put it:
One vice president of information services at a financial services company, who also asked not to be named, said he doesn't begrudge Microsoft's right to pursue unlicensed software but questions its tactics. He said he initially received a mild letter asking if his company would volunteer to be part of a compliance program. Then, in March, a sterner letter requesting the audit came from an outside law firm apparently working on Microsoft's behalf.
"They want to scare us into compliance. A Microsoft rep has never been here and asked us about it, and the information they have about our licenses is so inaccurate," the vice president said, adding that his company has spent about $200,000 on Microsoft products over the past several years. "For your business partner to be that bad, if there was a competitor some day, I'd switch. You'd think they have bigger fish to fry."
And another customer...
The health care CIO said he has no idea how he was selected and estimates the audit will cost him between $10,000 and $20,000. "We have very solid practices about who can buy software and who can't," he said. "I don't have enough hours in the day to be the software police. We're a rural health care facility."
Interesting. And I guess that's about enough for today's Reason To Hate Microsoft.
meanwhile, my motherboard and CPU came in as advertised, and I have all the other parts needed to put a new box together, so within (hopefully) a day or so, I'll take a whack at it. Woo-hoo!
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Wednesday, 27 June 2001
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Built the new PC today. Flawless. Happy birthday to me. Hey, when you're single, you can have a birthday whenever you feel like it. Nice mobo, adequate case. Built-in video works well Win98, Win2K Pro, and Linux Mandrake 8. I didn't plug in speakers, but the audio appeared to install correctly in Win98 and Win2K. I haven't even tinkered with the audio under Mandrake.
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Thursday, 28 June 2001
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Per Bob Thompson's recommendation, I ordered a Hitachi 19" CM715 monitor from Techonweb. They had a customer satisfaction rating of 6.7 out of 7 on resellerratings.com. Bob Thompson said it would be under $300, and Techonweb had it for $244, plus $41 shipping, for a total of $285 in my hot little hands. Suh-weeeeeeeet!
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Friday, 29 June 2001
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According to the UPS website tracking page, my monitor should get to me today, having left Willow Grove, PA on Wednesday, and then leaving Buffalo this morning. I guess UPS Ground shipping isn't too bad, as long as you're only a few hundred miles away from the vendor. So when I have this newest PC set up at home, it'll look sort of like this (at least for a few weeks, eh?)...
• Mid-tower case with 300-watt ATX power supply
• Intel "Easton2" D815EEAL2 Socket 370 motherboard with a 1-GHz Pentium III processor (retail box w/three-year warranty), with onboard video, sound, and Ethernet
• 256 MB Crucial PC133 SDRAM
• 1.44-MB floppy drive pulled from a dead HP Vectra
• 12-GB Seagate IDE hard disk (unimpressive, but lying unused on a shelf)
• 8-GB Seagate IDE hard disk (even more unimpressive, but lying on the same shelf on top of the 12-GB)
• Mitsumi 32x ATAPI CD-ROM drive (also unimpressive, but again from the spare parts shelf)
• Hitachi CM715 19" monitor
It's a bit hard to calculate costs for a system that includes used parts, because of course when the parts were new, they cost more than they would cost now. But I guess it would be fair to say that I'll have in the neighborhood of $800 into it with the monitor. Not too bad, I think. I certainly could have bought cheaper components to get the same speed, but I doubt I'll regret the Intel purchases, plain-vanilla though they be.
I split the 12-GB drive on IDE0 into three 4-GB primary partitions, each invisible to the others, with Win98 SE on FAT32, Win2000 Pro on FAT32, and Linux Mandrake on Ext2 installed in that order. Drive two has a ~256-MB Linux swap partition, and then the rest of the eight GB in a single primary FAT32 partition, used for install files, programs, and data.
I know there's lots of room for improvement here... faster ATA100 hard drives, different partitioning schemes for greater efficiency (FAT16 system partitions are faster for Windows systems, NTFS is more secure for Windows, a journaling file system under Linux gives greater security against losing data, etc.), an upgraded AGP video board, SCSI hard disks and controller, and so on and so forth. But I think I have a reasonably solid foundation here.
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Saturday, 30 June 2001
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No entry.