At 20:11 12/11/02, Brain Swale wrote:
Hi Folks,
I've been absent for nearly a week due to an ailing computer. Like VERY
sick. Several hundred dollars later I'm back in business .
( I don't know whether to go ;-> or |:-( ) Probably the latter.
I certainly hadn't planned on that not-so-little adventure. And it's not
over yet.
ROFLMAO:
I have just launched into this adventure with the better half's
computer. Its OS is Windoze 3.1 running on a 90 MHz Pentium (I) with 32 MB
of EDO RAM and a hard drive with under 1.2 GB. Don't ask me why I've
allowed her to stay in the Stone Age, it wasn't my doing. She insisted on
being a Luddite.
She recently bought a new 15" flat panel monitor to replace a 13" VGA and a
bubble jet printer to replace a dot matrix while I was gone on The Great
Road Trip. Getting the monitor installed wasn't that bad. Put in a spare
Stealth 64 laying on a shelf and conigured it (had the old Windoze drivers
for it). The printer was another story, but fortunately Canon hasn't
changed its raster bubble jet data protocols much. An old Canon raster
printer driver for a discontinued model worked. Went through an extensive
search of some archive sites to find it though and then found about a half
dozen to choose from. Brute Force and Ignorance found one that worked.
The straw that broke the camel's back was sudden failure of Trumpet's
WinSock to log in to our ISP dialup. There are a host of issues with
Windoze 3.1 with current high speed 16550 serial port UART's and 56k modem
hardware. (Windoze 3.X only supports the original 8250 UART to 9600 bps.)
Drew up a roadmap to get from a 90 Mhz Pentium, 1.2 GB hard drive and
Windoze 3.1 to a high speed K6-2, 13 GB hard drive and Windoze 98. Found a
pair of Super Socket 7 mainboards, a pair of 500 MHz K6-2 micros, 256 MB
SDRAM, and a 40 GB hard drive to replace the 13 GB drive on my machine
(it'll take her eons to fill a 13 GB drive). Went shopping agressively for
rebates and fortunately, the cost on all this stuff wasn't that
steep. She's about to make a quantum leap in system performance. One of
the mainboards and 500 MHz K-2's will replace my 350 MHz K6-2 (which is
running as if it's a 333 MHz K6 on a plain Socket 7 board.
Total budget: $250 USD and I haven't busted it yet. With some of the
rebates, there may be enough left over to get a decent CD-ROM
burner. There may be an additional expense for some software to make
replacing hard drives easier. Doing so under Windoze 95/98[SE] isn't as
straightforward as it was under Windoze 3.1 or the simplicity of MS-DOS
(long file names and FAT32 complicates things).
I feel at least some of your pain,
-- John
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