Tag: Computers

So last week I was asked ‘what is a normal question?’

I do upgrades and repairs primarily on XP Systems.  Why XP?  Installed base.  There’s hardly any software out there that won’t run under XP Pro x86 SP 3 except for stuff deliberately designed for other operating systems.

What other operating systems?  Well you may think I’m talking about Mac/Linux issues, but Microsoft offers other operating systems.  You’ve heard about Vista and 7 and there are infinite flavors of them to confuse you, but there are also ‘Business’ oriented variants starting with NT and “progressing” to “improvements” like XP-64 and Server 2008.

The primary characteristic of all these pieces of crap is that your old programs don’t work any more and your user interface changes and you have to learn a new one.

Are you doing something different with your computer than you were a year ago, or would you just like it to be faster?

Unfortunately Microsoft stopped supporting XP about a year ago and it is kind of vulnerable to crankiness like resource hog ‘anti-virus’ programs that behave more like viruses themselves.

Some of these things can be fixed, especially if you can boot from a utility drive (and everyone should know how to build one), others not so much.  The utility environment can do pretty much anything you need to do on the computer, you customize it at your own peril because it’s intended to be reloaded on a blank drive any time you don’t trust the 2 or 3 you have on hand for just such emergencies.

And that may sound like throwing hardware at the problem, but a 16 Gb Thumbdrive can be yours for a mere $30 if you don’t have stacks of old hard drives like I do in which case you will want one of these $25 parts.  The point is to get a utility drive you can boot from to take control of the computer and USB is a good and portable way to handle most modern desktops and laptops.

Next week- Installing XP Pro x86 SP 3, Part 1

So I’ve spent the last week in a dual Ubuntu/XP environment and while I haven’t succeeded in improving either one of them very much I’ve at least been able to alleviate my load time problem with Yahoo News.

Of course now my YouTubes won’t play, so it’s all a compromise.

And I hate, hate, hate the keyboard translations that make my numeric keypad useless for selecting and transferring text (Ctrl-Insert, Shift-Insert, Shift all directions to select text).  Works fine off the extra keys and their teeny tiny carpal tunnel inducing foot print.

Not able to get that scroll wheel desktop switch thing working again in this version either which slows me down some, though for viewing (not composing) it’s still an incredibly efficient environment.

I’m also not having much luck getting DOSBox to load my old tired games like Scorched Earth, or AVG to do scans of my NTFS Windows drives.  I’m itching for a clean lean install of XP to see if that solves some of my issues on that side, but I’m waiting for a 32 Gb USB drive as a platform and yet maybe I’m foolish to do that.

You see I’ve always had a hankering to run a superfast development system in RAM.  Take 10k lines of code and see how fast you can get a native executable.  Now I have unimaginable amounts of RAM just on my Video Card, but I’ve never been able to set up a development system that worked as well as my CCPM-86/Desqview dual boot on my 286-12.

What I do to amuse myself instead is speed install OSs and I had thought that a Flash Drive installation would be noticeably faster than a straight SATA or 133  or even one of my notoriously unreliable RAID setups.  What causes me to question my assumptions is the availability of this part which provides the secondary benefit I desire- being able to boot from an independent drive so you can virus check and fix configuration problems (Trendnet Easy Go?  Don’t install that.).

I also take ‘normal’ questions.

As my regular readers know I have 5 or 6 lives and one of them is as a computer technician.  I started out writing poetry for machines and some of my earliest training is in COBOL on Hollerith Cards.  My favorite set of tools a ‘C’ compiler with good symbolic debugging.

But there’s no money in that anymore and I got trapped in the world of hardware, building and fixing machines which there is also no money in anymore when you can buy a disposable piece of junk for $400.

For some people that’s just a month’s phone bill.

But you can get acceptable results just from assembling the piles of parts people accumulate and the resulting systems were quite wizzy bang in their time and you only have to use one quasi reliable but very common OS- Windows XP.

I don’t recommend running it in an environment of less than 256 Mb or a 450 Mhz + processor, but there’s a ton of non-dual core tech that works just fine for the usual things.

What are those?

I use Office ’97.  What else do I need?

If I’m doing a really professional presentation I use Pagemaker 6.5.

I use Firefox 1.5.0.12.  It still works, why fix it?

These all work just fine in that environment, the limitations are your memory (sometimes less than 768 Mb) and your bandwidth.  Sometimes they will only handle 60 Gb hard drives without BIOS fixes and run at the slower 33 and 66 ATA rates.

Of course my own problems fascinate me more than most and I’m still dealing with massive load time fail with Yahoo News and the kona29.kontera.com element.

My current line of attack on that may seem a little round Robin Hood’s Barn, but it serves several goals.

I have some drive space for an install of Ubuntu.  Ubuntu comes with a more up to date version of Firefox and has some organizational tools that would be helpful in producing the content.  Ubuntu is stable and virus free and has some good cross OS scans available which I could use on my own system and my nephew’s (pretty surely virused, and a laptop to boot).

So I look at this as kind of an information exchange.