my Compaq Presario 4840 Page

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About this page

On Monday Oct. 20th, 1997, I broke down and purchased a Compaq Presario 4840 from my local computer superstore. This page documents the 'life' of this computer, In hope that someone may benefit from my experiences. Also its a lot of fun.

I've kept it as one page for simplicity, that may change. Graphics are coming. I've tried to make it simply HTML compliant, if I've used any -isms that cause your browser trouble, let me know and I'll clean 'em up.

What's in About the PC?
This has specs on the 4840, the more I find out, the more I'll post.

What's in Neat Stuff?
This is notes on features that I've found and like.

What's in Warnings?
This is about things NOT to do if you have a 4840. (Things that I regret doing).

What's in Captain's Log?
This is my record of my experiences with the machine.

Where are the latest entries? (updated May 20, 1999)
This jumps somewhere down in captains log to the newest entries.

What's in the Message Board?
This is a place to leave messages, questions, comments, tid bits, stories, feedback, small gifts, etc.

What's the myTv program?
This is a little program I wrote that opens a window to display the video-in of the presario like a tv. Like ATI's ATIPlayer but simpler.

What's the picture page?
This is a page of pictures and a bit of documentation about the inside and outside workings of the 4840.

About the PC

Neat Stuff

[video] [phone] [3d] [266 MHz]

More Neat Stuff - 12-15-97

[Another look at the video-in]

Video In

I like this a lot. The behind the little door on the case are 3 RCA connectors. A Yellow one for video, and White and Red for R&L audio.

The software that comes with it -

Intel Video Capture - this is much like Connectix's QuickMovie, not as nice though. Capture size is fixed. It works well, took video of the 2 cat's last night. My complaint is that its too dumbed down. Its intended for doing stuff just like that - taking a short movie to save or send and it does do that well.

Phone/Video Phone - this is their OEM phone software that responds to the buttons on the case. There is a video phone option, its interface is a bit dumbed down, like the Intel s/w but time will tell if thats a good thing or a bad thing. Important to note that I don't know anyone as geeky as me who's bought a PC recently, so I have no one actually call with my video phone, but its still just as neat. I think there is a Dilbert strip about that.

The quality is excellent, and the preview frame rate is ok. I'll compare it to my color QuickCam when I get a chance and post the results here.

The paint program (can't remember the name) something like Color ??? plus or something. Its seems nice, very simple interface, reminds me of paintshop, has some decent effects, can take a twain scan or grab from the video in which is nice.

The Color ??? software is also installed as an 'applet' - one of the programs that sits in you system tray (down where the clock is). Clicking on the icon brings up a menu of programs and program teasers ("If you purchase the real version you get...") I'll give a full report later.

The Phone Thingy

Sad to say but one of my big concerns with a new computer was the integrated phone thingy. Thats one of the reasons I went with a retail / consumer PC vs. a more workstationy PC.

Compaq has been doing this for a few years, now everyone is following suit, from Toshiba with their LCD on the monitor, to NEC with their whole detachable drive, LCD module, to HP with their cool keyboard buttons. I just hope that Compaq has gotten the quirks and bugs worked out by now.

For those of you unfamiliar with this setup - there are 8 or so buttons on the Case (bezel?). The first button launches any program you set. The second button, does the same but it looks like a world and they set it to launch your browser. The third and fourth are the phone buttons.

Phone button one opens the phone program. It shows you a image of a desktop phone, with buttons and all, has about 10 speed dial buttons, looks to support caller ID, and a few other things.

Note there are 2 output jacks on the back. Only one (the colored) one gives output from the phone. I guess this is so you can have a 'speaker phone' speaker not with your 'computer sound' speakers.

Using the speakerphone I have to set my Mic volume quite high or talk right into the mic. I still have to learn about how Windows deals with the Volume Mixer - eg. the Record Settings vs. Play settings - That kind of stuff should be in the Windows95 manual. Which is more of a pamphlet. Hopefully its in help, or burried in the the Win95 resource kit.

The answering machine is normal for computer voice mail, supports multible boxes, has a built in female prompt voice, not sure if you can fool with those though.

WAKE UP!

I have some concern about it 'waking up' to answer the phone. I have a friend with an older Presario (last years model), who insists that it only answers her phone when its in the mood. Today I'm going to go and see if we can fix it.

In my preliminary trials I set the machine to 3 rings, kept our answering machine (set to 4 rings) on just in case. Put the machine to sleep (pressed the big white button). And then called home.

Ring.. Ring... Ring.. Ring...<click> "Hello.. I'm sorry we're..". Hmmm.. the answering machine. Thinking that the presario hadn't had time to actually wake up, and knowing it takes a minute or two for the answering machine to set it self up, I hung up mid announcement and called back...

Ring.. Ring.. Ring.. <click> "Hi -you've reached...." Good. It was working. I left my self several - just testing messages. Called back, tried my password, it worked, listened to them all deleted one.

When I got home I pressed the fourth button, which brings up the answering machine program. All was well. My four messages were there. It kept the deleted messge in the box - and marked it for deletion. Will try a bigger test soon.

3D - The ATI Rage Pro AGP

This is soo nice. I've been dying for a 3D accelerator ever since my brother and his P166 whooped up on me and my AMD586/133 in Quake.

His frame rate was much faster, his response was crisp, my was syrupy, and slow. He fragged me more than I care to talk about.

Revenge?

Now I'm almost ready. The Rage Pro is ATI's latest 3D chip. It supports all the latest 3D things and looks to be a contender in the 3D card arena (at least not obsolete for another year). The benchmarks I've seen put it in the top bracket of accelerators.

I've only had time so far to try out one game, and that was just to show off. The game came with the 4840 - Formula 1, by Psygnosis. One word: PlayStation. Another word: N64.

I could get used to that. The 3D is great. Textures, lighting, SPEED, its very very nice.

So I began my search for GL-Quake info. I am not only going to kick is patootie but with in High resolution, with lighting, shadows, and fog to boot.

Let Down

Someday, I will return the super 3D Quake whuppin. Just not real soon. Turns out ATI has OpenGL drivers for NT flavors. But not for 95. I've considered installing an NT partition -but that would be a tad much just for a game. Tech support said that ATI is working on the drivers, but they won't give out any dates.

Meanwhile. . .

Meanwhile I'll be making every effort to snag the game demos from ATI's site and actually try the Sega game that ships with the 4840. Its been soo long since my computer was a hot gaming machine, its gonna take me a while to get back into the swing of things.

266 Million Times a Second

Just plain fast. While no PC is lightning quick, dispite what ad's and magazines say, this one is a fair bit faster than my last PC. And you know, I think I like it. Its not that its faster, the interface just seems 'crisper' things seem to open when you click them, not a second later. Programs seem to open seonds after you click their icons, not a minute later. I like that. All my graphic proggys are easier to use with the speed boost, and filters don't take nearly as long :-)

Another 'In my copious free time' project is to load up a bunch of stuff I thought was slow on my old pc, watch it run on the new one, and hopefully convince myself what a good decision I've made.

-WARNING!-WARNING!-

Do not install the MPEG fix SoftPaq (bugfix)! if you have a Compaq Presario 4840 (and I assume 4850)

This installs an update to SoftPEG on your PC, but in doing so BREAKS the DVD playing software (SoftDVD).

The ONLY way to fix it (according to Compaq Tech Support) is to use the Quick Resore CD, which erases your system, and reinstalls is the base software.

I found this out the hard way.

NOTE: The software is on the CD, in a passworded pkzip file \data\win95b.zip
In theory one could simply unzip the good version back onto your hard drive and fix the problem, this would give an alternative to the Red Disk :-)

If you know this password please email me, so I can post it here.

***** Quck Restore Password Found ******

When installing a second IDE device on the same cable with the built in DVD, always make the DVD drive the SLAVE drive and the other drive the master.

Why? I haven't a clue, other than its in the "user manual" (the thin thing that it is) and in my experience it doesn't seem to work right the other way.

Not a real bad thing, but something to be aware of - The 4840 sends a 'Tray Close' message to the DVD (or any CD drives installed) on a reboot. I almost lost a disk when during a reboot I began taking it out of the open tray just as the computer told the tray to close. Could have caused a nasty scratch on the CD. - and it all the wierder because I have 2 CD/DVD drives - and have often had both trays open.

Captains Log

10-19-97

Admit need for pc, wife ok's it. Decide to go with a retail pc vs. mail order, because local superstores have 6 mos no interest financing. The 19th is a Sunday and its 8 pm - drat. Stores are closed. Sleep. Have dreams of a new pc.

10-20-97

The store

Went to local compustore, compared all the pc's initially picked the  266 MHz HP, didn't like the compaq's black case. On closer observation the compaq had 500 MB more hd, 2MB more video ram, a DVD vs a CD, and video capture. -The HP to its credit had a cool wireless mouse, and came with a AirTalk(?) - wireless radio internet receiver thingy, and the buttons were on the keyboard which I liked.

The decision

I want to make this PC last as long as possible. It will be a LONG time before she (Cassie) lets me upgrade again, so I needed the most I could get for my money now. BTW - you'll note that I didn't look at the 300MHz machines, they were about $300 more, and I just didn't see the justification. So I made my decision based mainly on features. I also looked at the NEC 266 MHz model.. it was nice, but was black (I like the tan) and I was a bit wary of the detachable disk/cd thingy. Same story with the IBM Aptiva.

The pick

With the mind that the one I pick - Il'll be stuck with or the next few years, I decided on the 4840. We filled out credit stuff (in Cassie's name, to guard against me losing my mind and go on a computer shopping spree - "Don't give a junkie keys to the pharmacy"). Also got a Umax Astra 600p scanner. Didn't buy a monitor - have a 17" at home.

At Home

Unpacked it and everything was there, plugged everything in an it booted up fine. Installed some software, checked out the built in stuff. Tried the video capture, it worked. Got hooked up to my ISP (AT&T), downloaded and installed Netscape 3.03 Gold. Surfed.

The first problem

While installing all my junk, I heard a loud high pitched squeal from the case. Squeeeeeeeeeeee. It stopped and then a bit later, Squeeeeeee. It seemed fairly random and intermittent. Not knowing Compaq has 24 hour tech support I decided to wait till morning to call.

Set up Answering machine. Used the suspend button. It turned off. Pushed unsuspend. Nothing happened. Pushed again (duh). Nothing. Turn it off and on. Did it again. And again. Nothing. Unplugged it, checked the plugs, checked everything. Nothing. Cracked open the case - wiggled a bunch of cables - maybe one was loose. Turned it on. Power. Yay. And Squealing. Boo.

10-21-97

A long story shortened

Here's the essence of it:

1. called tech support - advised to defrag and scandisk.
2. did that
3. called tech support - advised to Quick Restore
4. while doing that it still squealed
5. opened case and listened (duh)
6. keen auditory senses pointed me to the squealing hard drive
7. added that to fact of HD light being on while squealing
8. called tech support - told them it was the HD. They agree
9. will have someone come out, expect 3 days BEFORE they call to make appointment
10. return computer to store, exchange it for new one (30 day return policy)

Reinstall

Spend the rest of night reinstalling things I installed yesterday.

10-22-97 - 10-23-97

The Second Problem

Like any good geek I want to make sure there are no bug fixes patches out there that I don't have. So I load up the Compaq page, go to Presario and bug fixes. They list about 4. None seem to apply, except for one - an MPEG update (had noticed that the MPEG video was a bit skitterish with the first machine).

Downloaded file. Didn't install it yet. Went to show off the DVD to Cassie - didn't work. <Fumes>. Turns out my Zip drive installed it self as drive D: confusing the SoftDVD software who was expecting the CD to be D:, but in my personal confusion I figured maybe the bug fix from compaq would help. Fatal mistake. I installed the fix. (Should have known something was wrong when they suggested I remove some software before installing). After installing the fix, DVD still doesn't work. Error is different. Dang. Study the situation closely. Read some help. Doh. Figure out the Zip drive problem, use System control to set Zip to be drive E:, reboot. DVD is now D: , great, run DVD player. Error.

Realize the fix has broken the DVD software. Try to reinstall DVD software

The Password

The basic facts: The DVD software IS on the Quick Restore CD. It is in a zipfile named \data\win95b.zip. It is locked. Password protected.

Looked at usenet - seems the password for the older models is PREDATORnnn where nnn is the last 3 numbers of the name of the zip file. Didn't work. Used fast zip cracker, with PREDATORxxxxxx where x is any char. Let that run a few hours. Nothing.

Read post suggesting its tied to BOM file number. Tried PREDATOR and all numbers, letters I could find on the CD, scoured the net for any info. Nothing more found.

Called tech support. Tech support asked me why I downloaded the fix and told me that the fix wasn't for my computer. I argued with him a little, then gave in. Then I double checked. The docs for the fix said clearly 'for 4840'. He apologized and said it was a mistake.

Then he admitted they did have someone with this same issue. As for a the fix, he suggested I reinstall DVDsound(?) which I had already done 3 times. I did again for him, and it didn't work. He said the only other option is the quick restore (ugh).

I inquired about the password. He said those are things we don't want you to mess with. (!) I asked him why, He said he didn't know, thought it had to do with MS not wanting people to make copies of the SW, but I said the CAB's aren't protected, thats what I'd use if I want to make a copy. He said something about not having more than one copy (a backup copy) of windows, and that was about it. No password. Drat.

Resignation

I had already uncompressed the exe's from the install disk, searched them with a hex editor (for any sign of the password). And searched the CD for any clue. It was getting late, I resigned myself to reinstalling. I put in the red cd, and reset the machine. Wiped.

This time around I will take precautions.

10-24-97

Precautions

• Today I vow to never again wipe my hard disk unless absolutely necessary.
• I will install Remove-It in its most vigilant mode
• I will never download a bug update from the company untill after I've checked it out on Usenet etc.
• I will make my own Win95b zip, and store them on Zip disks in case of a driver overwrite
• I will find an old PC to devote to cracking the \data\win95b.zip password
• I will write a letter to Compaq's customer service about the password and bad fix
• I will write at least 3 PC magazines about the password and bad fix.
• I will get a tape backup as soon as I can afford it. I will use it regularly.

10-27-97

How many can you chain?

Here's a short inventory of my setup:


• Presario 4840
• Umax Astra 600P
• Parallel Zip Drive
• Cannon 4300 Printer

Keen eye will note that there are 3 parallel port devices listed above and the 4840 has but one port. But the Zip and the Scanner have pass through ports. So, in theory I could hook the Zip to the PC, the Scanner to the Zip and the printer to the scanner. In theory.

Hooked them all up. Turned it all on. Nothing worked.

I did get them all to work by unhooking them all, then setting up each one plugged into the parallel port alone, so I plugged in the Zip, installed the software, tested it, shut down, unplugged Zip, plugged in Scanner - repeat, and repeat for Printer. Then I plugged my chain back up again.

It works! For a while

Not to be content with mere functionality (And having had supposedly working setups crash at ALL the wrong times), I decided to test the setup. So I scanned a picture, Saved it to the Zip, loaded the picture off the Zip, and Printed it. OK. No problems. Then I thought, "What if I wanted to do something else, like load or save a picture, while something was printing?" So I tried that. Bzzzzzt.

The system froze solid. The Zip stopped zipping. The printer stopped printing. The mouse pointer stopped right over the file folder on the Zip I was trying to open. The printer beeped once. Its status light flashed green. I tried the 3 finger salute. Then the usual, system-hung-press-every-key technique. It was locked. The daisy-chain idea was busted - this was way too fragile. Total system hang is just unacceptable.

Did you want ECP?

Somewhere in this long string of reboots and installs I thought about checking to see if LPT1 was set in ECP mode (under Settings). Surprise! It wasn't.

To set it to ECP I shut down, and rebooted - pressing F10 durring the first few seconds after reboot, got me into system setup (I'll look at this in much more detail later). I found the settings for the Parallel Port, and changed them to ECP, saved my settings and rebooted.

On reboot, "Settings" showed that Win95 automagically detected that the port was ECP and what was listed as LPT1 was now ECP port.

Of course I tried my daisy chain again, now that I had ECP. No change. No different. Still a hang. LPT2

My ECP literature says that you can string somthing like 7 parallel devices off of an ECP port and all kinds of neat and nice things, but they should be ECP devices I'm sure. I know the Scanner and Cannon Printer are ECP, the Zip on the other hand...

My dim understanding of the chain situation is that the Zip is NOT and ECP device and really prefers EPP or Bidirectional mode, and they suggest that you Do Not, plug an ECP device/printer into the Zip.

So I needed to install a second parallel port.

• Model: DCU???
• Slot: ISA
• Ports:1
• Modes:Normal, EPP,ECP
• IRQs: 5 or 7
• IO Addr:278H or 378H??

Opening the Case

This was the first time I opened the case on this machine. I carefully removed the Compaq 'Tamper Evident Sticker' and stuck it on the rear of the machine. Got out my Torx - T15 bit for my driver, and unscrewed the 3 screws, that hold the side panel. I have to wonder about the tamper evident sticker, the use of Torx head over, say phillips like every other vendor in the world - makes me think they don't really want me in there, oh well.

The panel thing is cool. I like that, no big wobbly case cover to have in my way while I'm working in there. Now to business. To add a card you must remove the 'card cage' from the machine. Its a riser board in a metal box/cage sort of thing that has 3 ISA slots (maybe 4) and 3 PCI slots on it, and what you see when you look at the slots on the back of the machine.

Adding parallel card was easy. Card was set to EPP (not ECP), 278H, IRQ5. Rebooted Win95. Went into "Add New Hardware". One of these days I'll remember that you are supposed to go into "Add New Hardware" BEFORE you install the new hardware. I skip the auto detect new hardware, select PORTS--> Parallel Port. OK. It sets the IO Address wrong. No way to fix it here. I select ok, and finish the process. It wants to reboot. I let it. In settings the new LPT2's address is still wrong, (little yellow exlamation point) so I go in here and change it to 278H.It wants to reboot again. I let it again. This time it recognizes it.

Breaking the Chain

I now have my Zip alone hooked to my new LPT2, bidirectional port. The scanner and printer are daisy chained together off of the ECP LPT1. They seem to be working fine so far, although I must note that I have not tried to Scan while printing or vice-versa. I feel the likelyhood of that happening is a little less that accessing the Zip while doing either of them, but I will check to make sure.

The First Look Inside

Again, I'm going to add much more specification detail soon, but just to let you know about neat stuff I saw in there:

• The Pentium II, Slot 1 processor complete with Hologram sticker of a chip
• The HUGE, MONGO Heatsinks attached to the above, along with big ol dedicated fan
• Modem, Compaq's own with a Lucent chipset
• Picture of Kokopelli silkscreened on the motherboard
• Quantum Bigfoot Harddrive
• ATI Rage Pro Chip, and the ATI connector for TV card
• Jack beside ATI connector where video in goes
• Open jack beside CD Audio in Jack on MB (looks like cd audio in jack only bigger)
• Table for setting processor speeds up to 333 MHz
• 3 DIMM slots, one full
• Weird above board card near video section assumed to hold video RAM
• ESS Soundcard chip
• Warning on sticker -"Do not operate with cover removed"
• Space for 2 drives in front drive bay
• about 4 documented jumpers, about 3 undocumented ones

The LAN

We now have his-n-hers computers. Cassie has inherited my 486. soon to be 586/133, which should be fine for wordprocessing and playing Sherlock. And I of course have my 4840. Now if only they could talk to one another...

I got Cassie's permission and ordered 2 NIC's. They are BNC and TP compatable, Ethernet cards. For our little 2 machine show, we'll use BNC. I went with the AXEL brand. The seemingly cheapest in cards in the world. They were $16.00 each, plus wayy too much for next day shipping and handling, from PC Mall. In retrospect I should have gone with a more expensive better supported card, but I was curious to try the el cheapo cards to see for my self what they are like. Axel? The box the cards come in sys nothing about Axel. Its colorful with a picture and some pseudo-specifications on the back. Opening the box, into my hand dropped a floppy, and a clear plastic thingy holding the card and a BNC T-adapter. I waited for the flimsy sheet of paper that usually passes for a manual. Nada. I looked into the empty box. Oh well, they aren't much help anyway.

The cards look pretty standard, a BNC connector and a RJ-48 jack on the end, an open socket where the boot prom goes, lots of chips, no jumpers - a good thing, all in all a pretty clean design, no wires or hacks on the board. Not that this makes it a good card, but I know if signs of wires and hacks usually mean its a bad one.

Time to crack open the machines. I start with the Compaq, remove the panel, take out the card cage, remove the slot cover, put in the NIC, and put it all back together. Boot.

Oddly enough, Windows reports that its found a new device, and asks for the driver disk, I put that in, it loads drivers, prompts for reboot. On reboot it gives a 'Can't do something with DHCP'error which is a good sign that the card is working. Looking at my System control - all is well. The card is installed.

Pain and sufferin'

The good news is that the card in the 486 is working. The bad news is that I'm not sure why it is - or why it wasn't for the first 2 hours I messed with it. On first boot, Win95 found the card, installed the drivers, and rebooted. On second boot, it didn't give the 'DHCP error' and a system look showed a exlamation point by the driver. Dang. For the next 2 hours, I went through the usual PC diagnostic circus: Inventory IRQs, inventory ports, check for any conflicts, check for the conflicts that your check for conflicts missed, reboot a zillion times, adjust the drivers of the thing you think is causing problems, remove the drivers of the thing you think is causing problems, remove the thing. Start over.

Nothing seemed to make it work. The machine is a VLB machine, and I had the NIC in a shared slot. Ah-Ha! With no basis other than the fact that, that was about the only thing I hadn't changed I moved it to a plain ISA slot, and moved the SoundCard to the shared slot.

Its Alive!

It worked. Fancy that. It really worked. On reboot I got the 'DHCP error' message. Yay. OK, now to make sure nothing broke look at 'my computer' -hmm no CD-ROM. Soundcard has done that before, likes to loose the CD if you fool with stuff. I needed to reinstall the soundcard anyway, because I was getting 'Incorrect VXD' errors, so I pulled all the soundcarddrivers (deleted) from the System control, and let plug-n-play/pray/wish/guess/hope take its course. Another hour and a half later it works. Again, not really sure why it works in that I'm not sure why it wasn't working. My general theory is that 85% of all broken things just want a little attention, a wiggle here, a push there. Take it out of the case, let it get some air and most times, when you put it back in, it'll work. So now I had the NIC and the CD working. Time to network!

11-11-97

The Price Break

Thanks to some very cool people I saved over $500. Turns out the price on the 4840 dropped 500 dollars and my retailer has a 30 day price guarantee. So I called to make sure it was actually a guarantee and not just something they use in advertising, and sure enough, it was real. Just bring in my receipt and thats it. So I brought in my receipt - along with dreams of what to do with the 'extra' money. Dreams my better half promptly squished. She's so stuck in reality - where their are things like bills, and mortgages - so much unlike her husbands compu-fantasy world.

They took my receipt, punched in some numbers, checked the new price, $2199. (Was $2699) They credited my charge account $528 and sent me on my very merry way. I must admit that went a very long way to relieving my buyers remorse. It also kind of covered the extra I spent on a the printer and the scanner.

My only regret is that I didn't opt for the 4850 - to start with - it also dropped down $500 or so. The only differences are 16 MB ram and the 300 P-II. I'll be ok. I think.

11-21-97

Its 3:00 am.

I Could Get Used to This.

I'm sort of getting used to the 4840 now. I've got lots of my junk put on the hard drive. I haven't had to look at that horrible 'Red Disk' since the last time I wrote about it, and all in all things seem to be working. Amazing. I still get unexplained crashes but thats just life I suppose - neutrons bombarding the silicon causing bit errors or something - anything but shoddy programming. Things seem a lot 'crisper' on the machine. I was secretly hoping they'd feel 'TurboCharged', but crisper will definitely do.

Music?

I'm into music making and have been since I got my 3rd computer - an Amiga 500. Back then,I learned to use and got hooked on Trackers and making Mods. Today I saw there was an update to my favorite tracker - FastTracker, so I decided to install that. It installed great - no install really, just unzip to a directory and go. Its a DOS program but works fine under Windows. Loaded it up, and set it for soundblaster compatable.

For want of my GUS

I make a quick song, and hit play.. not bad. The ESS soundset didn't sound too bad. Then I went to add some left/right panning to a track.. oops forgot to set the program to stereo. There. Wait a minute. When set to stereo - it halves the sample quality - UGH! 22KHz.. wayy too much static. Unfortunately there's no setting for FT2 to use the ESS in its native mode, and this model isn't SB16 compatable. So, the next step is to see if I can get my Gravis Ultrasound (GUS) to live peacefully in the 4840. I'll try that Friday and see how it goes, I wont try to make windows recognize it (hmm.. a stealth card), and try to set it so it wont steal anyones IO address or IRQ or DMA. Just a note, the GUS is a wonderful sounding soundcard. Marvelous even. The Windows drivers, to be frank, stink. Then again, that was with my old machine, not my shiny new P-II. Hmm.. I think thats hope I feel swelling up. Compared to the 3 soundcards (1 SB Pro/ MS sound system compat, 1 SB 16 clone, 1 ESS1887) I've used in the last few months, the GUS is ULTRA Quiet. The others all hum and buzz, especially when the computer's doing something, eg disk acces. For mods - and esp. FT2 - its almost perfect.

Pictures?

Added a picture to the page today - its the one at the very top - the picture of the 4840. (The keen will notice that the 'feature-list' sticker is still on the front of the machine, it sort of represents the computer's 'new car smell' for me. I just don't want it to go away. So till it starts to look ratty or someone makes fun of me, it'll stay).

I took several pics with my QuickCam. I didn't get the photos of the motherboard, because that would mean removing the card cage that holds the parallel port card that the QuickCam is plugged into. When I'm feeling a little more adventerous I'll plug it in to Cassie's PC, and take the pics from there.

But I did get some outside shots, a pic of the ports on the rear, and one or two inside shots - although you can't see much with the card cage in the way.

Soon as I get a chance I'll post the ones I took, then take some more of the inside and all. The QuickCam does ok, but its a pain to get it to focus clearly when you're moving it around.

Encouragement Arrives

Have gotten a few emails of thanks, thats pretty cool. ("Good to know your computer stuff is appreciated somwhere, even if not by me." - Cassie, today). We have a sort of Techhie-Earthy relationship... I'm a geek, and well, she thinks I'm a geek.

But thanks to the folks who said thanks.

The Best Laid Plans

My plans are to

• Add spec. info to the page
• Move all my junk from old pc to 4840
• Run and post several benchmark results
• Add pictures of inside and out of 4840
• Install Linux without messing up my Win95 setup
• Buy a real DVD and report on how it plays
• Do info on the built-in Rage Pro's performance
• Tell about our voice recognition experience
• Get some sleep

To GUS or not to gus

Goal: install G.U.S. in 4840, have it lurk unknowingly in pc, till I want to use it with FastTracker2, at which point it performs flawlessly, sounding ever so wonderful.

I cracked open the 4840 case, its getting harder to pull out the machine, because of the huge tangle of wires that are connected to it. So I pull it out, just enough to clear the desk, and turn it sideways to get access to the rear screws. Unscrew the 3 torx screws and remove the panel. Pull out the card cage. Unscrew slot cover from the last empty ISA slot. My slot setup is:

            1     2     3     4     5      6
          [isa] [isa] [pci] [pci] [both] [isa] 

          1. Compaq's WinModem
          2. LPT2 card
          3.  ---
          4.  ---
          5. GUS
          6. Ethernet Card

Just before I put the card cage in I notice that the CPU cartridge and cooling assembly sticks right where a long card will go. Uh oh. The GUS is just about a full sized card. I cautiously push the cage in. Missed it by that much. It seems that you are allowed (that is to say, there is room for) 2 full size cards - one an ISA and one that's either ISA or PCI.

I set the GUS to Address 260 before I put it in. Note: being lazy and in a hurry I shorted the proper routine for doing this. What I should have done was to use the System control panel, and map out the free address space, and IRQ's and DMA's. What i did do was guess. So with my guess of 260, I put it back together and turned it on.

Working - Level 0

Level zero working for me is also called the smoke test. That simply means that when you turn it on, none of the rare and valuable blue smoke escapes from the chips. I turned on the pc, and tada - no blue smoke.

Working - Level 1

Level one, working is essentially, 'Wow, it didn't break anything else.' The 4840 booted, displayed the red on black logo screen, and actually went into Windows.

Working - Level 2

Working level two is very close to level one, but its more like 'OK, sure it booted, but does this work?' at which point they proceed to run something that causes the whole system to lock, usually accompanied by muffled snickering. If they run it, and it actually does what its supposed to do, then the system has reached working level two. Once windows was up, it was time to test it. Would the sound still work? I ran Compaq's Wav player - clicked on the 'choo choo' wave and yes it did work. I tried three or four more just to make sure it wasn't a fluke. They worked two. We have level two folks.

Working - Level 3

Now that we haven't broken anything, have we actually added something? Does the new thing even work? I went to a DOS prompt, set the environment variables the Ulrasound looks for, chose IRQ 10, and DMA 5. I cd'd to the FT2 directory and ran FT2. It loaded, I checked the settings, it was set for sound blaster. I clicked on the button to switch to GUS. Hang. Total system hang.

I chalked this up to running under windows, after all, most of the time I'll be using it, thats all I'll be doing anyway, who needs windows. So I turned it off. Which reminds me of another issue

OFF works! ON, well...

The 4840 is one of the newer green PC's, which means is has auto power management and can do neat stuff like turn itself off. There are 2 ways to turn the machine off as far as I can tell. (Not counting pulling the plug or any variation of that). The first is the switch on the back. Back in the stone ages of computer this was considered not only standard but using it to turn off the computer was a good idea.

Apparently we've gotten more sophisticated than that and its not advised to do that. Its advised to -'shut down' - which give the os a chance to clean up some files its been meaning to write and to generally tidy up. When you're locked or can't shut down, there is the second way to turn off the PC. You press and hold the 'sleep/wakeup' button for about 5 seconds. This shuts off the pc.

I said.. ON!

This seems to work fine most of the time. But every so often, and usually when I'm in a rush, it wont turn back on. I've pulled the plug, I've put the plug back in, I've flicked the switch in the back, I've pushed all the buttons, I've held all the buttons, I've pressed all the keys and still nothing.

Oh, 'On'

Today I think I found a clue. After this hang I turned it off, via Sleep button. Then pushed the sleep button again to turn the thing on. Nothin. This time I turned off the switch, and then on. Nothing. I turned the switch off and just waited a second with my hand on the case, then a few moments later I heard/felt a faint 'click'. I turned it on and worked. I'll have to try this when I have some time to kill, Win95 takes too long to start to just play with turning it off and on.

My feeble theory is that a power relay isn't resetting and it takes a while to actually reset, and somehow turning off the machine and waiting helps.

c'mon GUS

Alas.. I rebooted the machine into DOS 7 (hold f8 on boot). Got to FT2 directory rand FT2, set it for GUS... Black screen. Total system hang. Rebooted. Left card in machine, began working on something else. Will try to get GUS to work sometime later.

Benchmarks Schmentchmarks

I know that there are those who love and those who hate benchmarks, but either way they do serve a purpose, even if that purpose is just making you feel good about your PC - 'Oooo 35 bogo mips... now thats somethin'. I've got a list of benchmarks that I've got plans to run and last night I downloaded one more to add to the list. I got it from a link off the ATI homepage - so it should be one of those that makes me feel good about my PC.

Its called Final Reality, made by a UK games company - Remedy Entertainment of Helsinki, and put out by VNU European Labs - its a Direct 3D thingy (haven't been terribly impressed with direct 3d yet), we will see. The others are bootmark, the Quake benchmark, and and a couple more.

I'll give a report on how well the 4840 travels soon. Will be traveling for Thanksgiving and if we have room, I'll sneak it in the car.

Made the trip with presario fine. Pulled a sweatshirt over the PC and put it on the floor in the back of the car. (Don't want the would be thieves to have an easy time taking the PC). Same for the monitor - seat belted in of course. In case of an accident the last thing I want is a monitor flying at 65 miles per hour into the back of the seat. Trunk would be better, but the trunk in a Cabriolet is small. And in my Cabriolet its often damp - not good for the Pc.

Got to moms and it booted. Yay. No problem.

The Show

Someday someone somewhere had and idea about getting a bunch of small pc and equipement and software vendors together and having a Fest/show. God bless them.

In the DC area the shows are pretty regular, 1 or 2 a month. Which gives me just that much more reason to visit. This one as at a community college, in a gym. Which turns out to be a bit small for such an event. There were folks packed shoulder to shoulder, reaching and looking and bending and trading plastic for stuff with vendors.

I'm still not sure why my wife even lets me go to these things. Its like sending a kid to the candy store with money, you know he's going to come out with something.

Again, this show was kind of small, mom (who's quickly becoming a computer addict in her own right) and I have concluded that the best shows are the ones they hold at fairgrounds. Lots of room, and lots of vendors. But not to let size deter us, we shopped on. Eventually, our interests - her's software, mine hardware broke us apart, and we went our own way, 'pardon me'-ing our way through the show.

I only got one

OK. The lowdown is this: I bought a CD Writer. There I said it. Its my biggie Christmas present. It was about $400 including 11 CD's and tax and all. No big sale, but it was there, staring at me, ready for me to take home and use today I also bought a game and an office suite (Lotus').

One What?

One, HP SureStore CD Writer Plus 7110i


• A CD recordable/erasable drive
  
• Writes CD-R's and CD-RW
  
• Reads all CD's
  
• Speed - 6x read, 2x write essentially
  
• Internal IDE drive, comes with cable
  
• Also comes with 1 ReWriteable CD
  
• Comes with CD mastering software (Adaptec EasyCD)
  
• It makes data as well as audio CD's

Feel the burn

I brought it home, opened the 4840 - skipped all the directions for the CD Writer. Mulled over the relative merits of hooking it to the HD's IDE or the DVD's IDE. For no true logical reason, I chose the DVD's. I checked the DVD. It was set for 'CSL' or 'C-Select' - I made it the master. Set the CD-Writer to Slave. Plugged it all in and booted.

The 4840 popped up a blue and green box on boot saying it detected a new CD - and would I like to save the changes. Saved them. Windows booted fine. The CD was there. Put the HP install CD in the DVD drive. Ran Install Agent (which you are supposed to run Before you install the CD) - the Agent said everything was hooked up fine.

The wait

If fails me now but I think chores or family time or something interrupted, needless to say, I got pulled away and didn't get to play with it anymore.

Home again

Packed it all up, and put it in the car and headed home yesterday. Set it all up again today...none the worse for wear, did put a tiny scrape on the front of the case no major deal. I've got to get a checklist for moving the PC, all the things to make sure I have packed away. Also will remember to use Ziplock bags to hold all the cables and plugs and miscellaneous stuff. We don't need no stinkin' laptop!

The Perils of Double/Drivespace

Sometime last week I was fixing the sound on Cas' computer, (my old PC) and ended up putting in a different sound card. Well, in the myriad of reboots that it takes to install new hardware and get it all working I lazily just turned the machine off after one failed attempt. Bad move. Really bad move. All kinds of trouble. Oh boy. It seemed centered around the E: drive - the one that Win95 was installed on. It was an apparent error in Drivespaces compressed volume file. I've heard an error there can be the pits - they were right. After tons of I ran nortons diskfixer program, it gronked for a while, said it fixed some things in the compression structure, but said this "Fixing things in the compression structure can break other things in the compression structure, we strongly suggest you run this program again, to fix any possible broken things". Hmmmmm... my keen computer science senses were tingling .. Recursion kept coming to mind.

Fix it and fix it again

I lost count of how many times I ran the disk utility. Every time it would fix a different file, quit and give the 'run me again' warning. Eventually either it didn't find anything broken, or I got tired of running it, and I rebooted. Busted, It would get so close to booting then complain of missing a VXD or some kind or another error or just quit.

Cut your losses

I figured it was time to cut my losses, back up what I could, while I still could and wipe it. I'd been meaning to wipe the computer anyway - had windows debris on there from Win3.xx way back in 1990 or so, had almost 1000 files in the Windows directry, and even after going through by hand and getting rid of any that looked old or unused, still it was cluttered with junk. So the total wipe was due.

TGFTN

Thank God for the network. I used NET START to start up networking on her PC. Connected to the 4840, made a new directory and used xcopy copy the contents of the PC onto the 4840. 2 mistakes I made: 1. Not telling xcopy to copy system/hidden files, 2. Somehow lost long filenames. As it turns out the only really important stuff was data and the long filename stuff was irrelevant, and most all of the system stuff was related to Windows, which I was reinstalling anyway.

Wipe it!

My first intention was to salvage the C: drive with DOS on it. Gave that up. My next intention was to try to install Warp4 in a dual boot setting. It needed just more HardDrive space than I was ready to spare. A couple of neat things, I have an IBM HD in there about 750 megs, and it came with DiskManager the biggest feature of which is essentially a device driver that lets old machines access big hard drives. It also does HD detection. What a great program. You run it, it tells you what disks are in the machine and what the CMSOS settings for them should be. I installed OS/2's boot manager partition - and kept it even after I decided against installing OS/2 on that machine.

Serindipity

A neat side effect of all this is that OS/2 puts the DiskManager TSR on the bootManager partition, which means it loads automatically before anything else. (Before using Safe Mode - wouldn't load the TSR - quite a pain).

A or B?

Now to install windows95.. Should I use my Win95 disk or try to hack at it and use the newer disk to install Win95b (osr2). I'd seen on the web that the cabs work the same, just use the old setup files with the new cabs. After some experimenting I put them all in a dir on the machine and started setup. It worked. Note: some lawyers somewhere have written a bunch of nutzoid legal spider web that prohibits this and makes doing this breaking the law - Now we'll sell you this car, but you can't open the hood, or mess with anything, or drive here.- be ye warned fair consumer.

Windows installed great. Although it autodected the Nitro 64 video card as a Cirrus 54xx and the screen went screwy. Only a few hours later I was able to get the video working great. Essentiall, by letting Windows do what it was trying to do first. Then installing the Nitro Drivers - trying to install the Nitro drivers first just caused it to say 'something's wrong with your video drivers, run Add New Hardware' - which I kept trying to get around. When I let Windows pick what it thought were the proper drivers, it let me then, install mine on top of them. Yuck.

A few more hours and everything was up and running - Video, Sound, Hard Drive, and Network. The final total.. about a full days hacking to get it going.

Next I installed the software and restored all her files, and all that was left was to add a few games, and to change the desktop to a pleasing dark shade of purple.

Now I have to go through the backup I put on my machine and see if there's anything there I actually need. (better yet, just put it all on a cd).

From 33 to 133

Somewhere in all this I installed a Stacker 133 CPU replacement, that had come in the mail today. I busted the last one - paid 60 bucks to get a replacement. Now her PC zips along a reasonable clip. No probs in the install a real no brainer. Pull out 486/33 - put in Stacker 133. I need to run benchmarks to make sure its set up optimally.

Zzzzzz...

Time for bed. Not enough hours in the day.

Back to burnin

Formatted the CD-RW disk. Took about an hour. Thats a pain. It formats to about 500 Megs - you loose the other 100 or so to the file system and some other stuff. Copied big files to CD. Erased big files off my hard drive. Cool. It was a tad slow. But not too bad at all. Copied some more big files to CD. In my glee, took out the CD-RW and put it in the DVD. (DVD is MultiRead compatable reads everything). DVD shows the CD being blank. Uh-oh. Put CD back in Writer - all my files are there. Whew. Back in DVD. No files. Hmmmm. Chalking it up to wierdness, I moved on. I decided to make an audio CD, a compilation from my other CD's. This was one of the things I'd promised Cas it could do. Put the audio CD in DVD drive, put a blank CD-R in writer. Started the 'Make Audio CD' program. Chose Test Source CD. Bzzzt error. The following CD's are unavailable for use as Audio source CD's: D: (my DVD) and F: (the writer). Crap. It suggested it could be a 16 bit driver getting in the way, deep down in DOS. I rem'ed out the driver. Got a new one from Hitachi's web site (which didn't work). I'm learning to play guitar while I wait for my computer to reboot (honest - ask Cas)- I should be ready to go pro by next summer.

I want my Audio CD

I fiddled and fiddled. Nothing. I looked at the specs for the DVD - nothing about grabbing audio. I looked at the docs for EasyCD. Hmmm.. the deep down tech docs say essentially.. "This program will not, can not, and probably should not grab raw audio using IDE CD's". Drat. Double Drat.

Insight strike without warning

OK - I write music, mods using a tracker, so I'll just make a CD of my mod music. So I use FT2 to save a bunch of mods to WAV files. I go into the Make Audio CD program, and drag the wavs into my 'staging area' (where you put files to be burned on the cd). I get them all ready then click - Test CD Recorder. Bzzzzt!! Sorry, no CD recorders found on your system. Triple drat. Not deterred I go to the net and Snag two more CD-Audio mastering programs - they both say - sorry no cd recorder on your system.

Well honey...

Somewhere in there I have to explain to my non technical wife why I think the CD writer doesn't do what I said it would without using acronyms or terms I need to define. Whew. And how I could work around it. And how I don't know exactly whats going on, but I'm sure it we'll be able to use it.

Maybe somethings amiss

Okey dokey, maybe something isn't right. So I run the HP install assistant again. It says.. your CD is installed fine. Hmmm. Desparate I went to the booklet/manual that comes with the system. ($2000 for this machine and this is the only manual they put in there.. shameful). I'm look through the book, and stumble onto the page about the DVD. Theres a small note there: "When installing another IDE drive on the channel with the DVD, always set the DVD to SLAVE (not master). Hmmmm. Its worth a try. Shut down. Pull out power driver. Crack open case, pull cables. Search for flashlight to see in case. Give up. Use desklamp. Trying not to pull a muscle in hand, reach for jumper in back of DVD. Kick self for not buying a pair of hemostats (like a cross between a scissors and tweezers, great for pulling jumpers) last weekend at computer show. Pull out jumper. Set jumper in DVD to SLAVE. Repeat for Writer, setting to Master instead. Reinstall cable.. Boot. Aha! 4840 pops up another bootup message that its found a 2 CD-ROM drives and asks if it should save settings. Yes. DVD is now drive F:, Writer is now drive D: - go into Control panel, then System, then CD-ROMs. Set DVD to be D: and Writer to be F:. Practice my E chord through obligatory reboot.

...its around 4 AM...

Once in Windows, put in HP install CD again. Reinstall software. Reboot. Practice changing from E to A chord. Load 'Make Audio CD' software. Choose test reading CD .. It asks me which one I'd like to test! Yes. I choose D: (the DVD) - asks me to put an audio CD in the drive. It tests and Passes! Woo hoo.

The moment of truth. I choose, test Recording CD drive. It starts. I forget how tired I am. It tests writing data at double speed and and single speed and does the same for Audio. It passes! Yes. Yes. Yes.

I still have the setup for the mod cd I tried to make earlier. (I can save it all as one big ol file I think). I load the arrangement, click 'Record CD' and it starts. PTL. Its 50 minutes of audio, so it should take about 25 at double speed. Ah. Time for bed. Turn off monitor. Wake up Cas. "Honey, Guess what..."

First thing in the morning, take CD out of writer. The CD tray ejected automatically when was done. Glad I kept the 4840's door open when I went to bed. I wonder what would happen if it opened while that door was closed.

" I've got a CD out, you know "

I took the CD and put it into our stereo, pushed play, and Ta-Da!. Music! My music even. Started own record label.

Spend next 9 hours at work listening to my cd.

Updates
• Removed Gravis Ultrasound card from 4840, don't have time to fiddle with it to get it to work. Tried it again last night from a DOS boot, spit out a bunch of junk chars and hung. Oh well.
• Got nice info from Compaq's page on driver 'refreshing', essentially if you delete the device from the system, on reboot plug and play will detect the device and reinstall the drivers. I tried this last night, the modem was acting funny and the printer refused to print or do anything for that matter. So I deleted the modem, lpt1, and I think I did the soundcard too. On reboot it found the 'new' devices and resintalled the printer, which worked fine. I haven't tried the modem yet (the voice portion that is).
• Took a pic of the inside while I had it open, hope to scan it in this weekend
• Have gotten more encouraging e-mail. Thanks.
• Realized high cost of ink jet supplies while buying new ones at local office superstore - Photo cartridge: $40, Color cart: $18, 2 Black carts: $10, + Labels Biz Cards, 12 certificates = $80
• Looking at Drive Image for backing up the hard drive to CD. The advantage of Drive Image is that it stores the whole HD, and could seemingly make a one step restore process. Other methods would require reinstalling Windows ala the Red Disk, then restoreing the backup. The plus to this is that with the latter method I could easily do a partial recover.
• Make my first Gold table coaster last night. Making a compilation CD for Cas using the HP7110, one track - DC Talks track 2 - on our Cd was scratched. Cas spent an hour or two trying to find her favorites from our small collection of CD's and when she was done it was time for me to work magic and make a CD. Now I told my wife of the dangers of making a CD, and that scratches were probably bad. The intelligent woman she is, she said, well, check the DC talk song, I think it skipped. The lazy bum I am I said, That means I'll have to listen to the whole song, we'll just wing it.
  • A buffer underrun error occours when writing a CD when the writer runs out of stuff to write. It occoured in this case when while trying to read from the source CD, the DVD drive began to skip on the track. Meanwhile, the buffer was running out of stuff to write to the CD, eventually it runs out and 'we have a situation'. Creating for the most part a pretty gold coaster. I did listen to it, it plays wonderfully, and just stops about 40 seconds before the end of the song. I'm not sure if I'll be able to add more tracks to the cd or if its busted. I'll try again tonight with a new CD. This time I'll copy the tracks to the hard drive first.
• Looking to try out the Video Phone, trying to find something thats simple, easy - not a processor intense, eg. can run on a less than state of the art machine, and is essentially plug and play
• Liking the pc in general, had been doing everything I've tried to with it without many problems
• Reinstalled the ATI drivers. Tried the new(?) ATI drivers, because they were supposed to fix a problem that causes a benchmarking program, Final Reality, to crash. It didn't fix the problem. Reinstalled DirectX 5.0, no change.
• Ran a couple of benchmarks, will post results here. Tried running Boot magazine's Quake benchmark, didn't work.
• Called my big sis, (long distance even). She has a Presario too, a 51-something or another think. I helped her get her modem working, and had a Quake deathmatch with her. She blasted me pretty good - always apologizing after she'd blow me up.
• Awaiting a 1G hard drive from my brother. It was his main one and seems to have self destructed. I'll see if I can bring it back to life as part of my 4840 - hopefully running my alternate OS'es (Linux and not sure yet).
• QuickCam is acting up. Sometimes it works sometimes not. Not sure if its the machine. Plan to move it to Cas' machine, and use the ATI vid in from now on.

Suffered through a rash of General Protection Faults. Installed Trial version of First Aid. Didn't seem to help. Still getting GPFs. Went through and uninstalled some junk I'd been trying out. A couple seemed to be linked to MFC40.DLL and MFC42.DLL

MFC dll fiaso

Its probably that I just don't understand it, but I think the MFC dll idea is a big ol fiasco. It seems that there are several different versions of these programs. And that each software company ships its program with a different version, and knowing that its version is the latest and greatest, overwrites the one in my /Windows/System directory. This is wonderful, untill some other unknowing program goes to use the dll, at which point all hades ushers forth. Windows is kind enough to not give information overload on this situation and spits out the general GPF. Now here's where I have issue, all Window's programs have a resource embedded (at least they CAN). This resource holds all kind of esoteric info like, Program name, manufacturer id, Dates, and among other things a little field for VERSION. Wow what a novel idea. The cool thing about DLLs (and the only cool thing as far as I see) is that common functions only have to exist on the system in one place - the DLL, and all programs that use those functions can just share the DLL. This is supposed to eliminate untild gobs of redundant code on the system.

more MFC.. why don't they..

The obvious question is why don't programs that need DLL's check for proper versions before running? Especially fundamental ones like MFC40 and MFC42. Also why not use the registry for something real important like registering DLLs and logging which programs use the DLL, that way Uninstall doesn't have to say Removing this program may (or may not) adversely affect other windows programs, we suggest you wing it. The remove could simply check the DLL's registry entry for dependant programs and do the right thing.

Sorta fixed

I searched for all the MFC4x.dll's on my PC, there are about 10. I looked for the one that had the newest date (which really doesn't mean its the newset, but what else could I do?). I then copied the one with the newest date, over the one in my Windows/system/ directory. That fixed quite a few of the GPFs.

URL dll

The other mystery today has been URL.dll gpf's. No clue as to what causes it, but they come, and they cause all kinds of mahem. Get one, and every other program that starts causes a GPF in URL.dll, eventually leading to a GPF in kernel32 and full lockup. UGH.

my First Thesis of Computing

1. The operating system should NOT crash.

Corrolary 1: The OS should NEVER crash often!
Corrolary 2: Programs should not easily break the OS
Corrolary 3: 15 Reboots a day is too much

Wit: "Microsoft - How many times do you want to reboot today?"

The last 2 weeks have been pretty uneventful in the life of the 4840. I've been busy at work, and have not had much time to play.

GPF's: a Fact of Windows

My last entry talked about GPF's and wierd things happening. Well I took some time and made sure all my DLL's were up to date, and it helped. I still get the occasional (daily or more) random crash and subsequent lock up but I've learned all these years to live with it. My wife thinks it's absurd, and she's probably right.

Christmas

For Christmas I wrapped the box that my HP CD-ReWriter came in and placed it carefully under the tree. While mom and Cassie opened their presents, I also, unwrapped mine, and gave Cas a big hug and kiss for such a great present. I still love the CD writer, even though I got it a bit before Christmas.

Loadin' Em Up

There was a time, not long ago when I had only a one gigabyte drive. It was double spaced, and it was full. That meant every time I wanted to install something new, I had to take something off. Those days are gone, Yahoo -- oops thats proably copyrighted now -- Yippee!

I'm a download hog. Just a fat file tryin' out, spending way too much time on the net, hog. I'm in Hog heaven. I can download 20 megabyte demos without worrying a bit about the impact those extra megs are going to have on my harddrive (although I increasingly worry about the effect extra DLL's and Registry settings, have on my systems stability). Even better often times, are the Magazine CD's - ahhh,, 650 Megabytes of wasting time, all for only $7.95. I'm much more the utilty hog than the game hog, and so far I've been getting 'boot' mag - they always include a decent number of utiltiies and tools. And I got a subscription for Christmas - $20/year, vs $8/issue - not a bad deal there.

I've used up about half of the 6.5 gig drive and I've got every thing I want and a few I don't want on there. Now if I can only...

Backup

Backup, Backup, Backup. If theres one deep hidden reason I don't want to back up, its because I still like the idea of a fresh install, even if it means countless hours of work reinstalling.

If I went with a raw file copy - saved to CD, I'd end up with about 6 CD's for a full system backup. If I zipped it all, that would cut it down to maybe 3, probably 4 CD's. It would be great to make the CD bootable as well (the 4840 does support booting of the CD, it seems). It would be perfect if I only had to push one button, swap CDs a few times, and end up with a perfect backup.

I've looked closer at Drive Image, and it seems its a DOS proggy, and that means I can't use the CD's as a giant floppy like Win95 lets me. I need to just bite the bullet and do something, before I get a data error somewhere and end up with either a limping syste, or having to totally reinstall everything.

Sensory Overload...mmmmmm...

One of the really nice things about the PC for me is the Video In. I think its just great, so much potential, (although still capture is on the crummy side). I got inspired the other day and did something about it.

4840 TV!

I know that ATI makes an ATI TV program -but it really doesn't seem to work with the 4840 setup. So I thougnt, Wouldn't it be nice to watch TV on my PC? Of course. I would need a VCR or something to translate TV to Video Out - I had that. And I'd need a little program. So, I pulled out my Delphi 2. I have been working on and off on a little 'Poster Maker' program that takes video snapshot (using a QuickCam at the time) and make a 'Wanted' Style Poster with the persons picture right in the middle. So I found the source for that, and fiddled and tweaked and ended up with 'pcTV' or 'myTV' (I call it either). What is it? Its a little program (about 200k) that pops up, and displays whatever's coming in to the Video-in. It will work with any Video source windows knows about, but I just use it for the vid-in. It also has buttons to open up the settings dialogs, for size, and color/contrast. Then I fiddled with it so it's resizeable, and you can toggle it to stretch the screen if you like, make tv folks look real short and fat or reall tall and skinny if I'd like. To make it even better we had cable installed for my moms visit - the works too. Ahh... so now I can read email, type on cu-seeme (via quickcam) and watch TV all at my computer - oh and have an ICQ chat if I'd like. Bzzzzt. overload. overload. I need to put an auto close timer in there, so that some work actually get's done. Watched George of the Jungle (cute movie) the other day, on it while doing tons of other stuff.
I like my PC.

Delphi how sweet it is

The thing I like most about it is its a simple little program. Not big ol thing, and they're no OCX's or VBX's or DLL's to have to distribute with it. Just a plain old EXE. I love Delphi.

That said I'll post it and put a link up ASAP. Again its about 200k, should zip compress to about 120k or so. Remebmer, the TV is only for when your waiting for things to complete - like a Gaussian blur in your paint program or aa long compile. And also - You aren't just vegging and watching Matlock reruns your working and making the best of your time while you're at it.

2 Phone Lines

Working has its advatages I must say. Once of which is having money, which folks seem to like when they're selling you something. For the big Christmastime mom visit we got a second line put in. The reasoning was to have an easy way to get her computer's Cu-SeeMe setup working under real world conditions. I'm ashame to say that after days or tweaking and reinstalling, and reading, and staring blankly at the screen, I never did get it working. I blame AOL, her ISP and she doesn't want to switch, so - no Cu-SeeMe for mommy yet. Having two lines is sooo nice. (At least until I see the bill). I'd pay TRIPLE that cost for a Cable modem now, but alas the Cable co here is very slow in moving to cable modems (TimeWarner) - they've run the fiber and its in the plans, just not the near future plans. Ugh. Went out and got a little Radio Shack dilly that splits one line into two ($6.00) and we were off. Mom also donated a 2 line phone she had, which just makes it geeky. Now if I can just manage to clean up the computer room.

FastVid = Faster Video?

I downloaded and installed FastVid. Fast Vid, is a program that changes/optimizes some memory, video, cache settings on the PentiumPro/PentiumII. It is purported to speed up some applications framerate by as much as 2x or more. Installation is simple. Its a DOS program, and came in a self extracting exe. I put it in its own directory and ran it from a DOS box. It couldn't make changes to the settings, but the Vidmark benchmark worked and listed one number of (35fps, and another of around 96fps). To use it properly, I rebooted in DOS. And ran it. It has an interactive mode that asks you questions about settings (while explaining what they do when turned on and off). Once you've answered all the questions, it makes the changes, and saves a config file, and puts a line to call itself in your Autoexec.bat. My post - FastVid VidMark resuts are around 120fps and 115fps. This is supposed to be most noticable in DOS games.

So, I performed a timedemo in Quake, without fastVid: 26.4 fps (640x480) and After: 26.4 fps (640x480). Hmmm. I'm not sure why there's no difference, I have a inkling that its because I ran them both under Win95 (thats what I'd have to use to play Internet Quake, and would be the most, real world situation). Thinking about it now, I should try running the timedemo outside of Win95 to see if there is a difference.

So FastVid, does seem to Speed up video, but only for the VidMark benchmark as far as I can tell. Just in case it helps otherwise, I've left in in my Autoexec.bat.

-QUAKE 2-

Ooooh. Ahhh. Ohhhh. Bzzzzzz. Frrraaaap. Aaaaaaiaiiigh!

I went on a trip to the local Computer Superstore just to shop. (yeah, right, sucker). It was only $39.99 and they also had CD-R's a 5 pack for $10, w/ a $10 rebate, so in the end they would cost like 33 cents, plus time wasted waiting - not a bad deal. So I got them both.

Q2 - pre Install

I called my sister who got Quake around Christmas. She said something like 'I haven't stopped playing since I got it I've almost beat it and I don't know what I'm gonna do when its over'. I figure I'll tell her about internet Multiplayer in a week or two. I told her I got Quake 2. So whats it like, whats it like!? I haven't installed it yet, I just got home? 'You What?! What are you waiting for!?'

Q2 - Install

Quake 2 comes in a standard game box. Inside was one CD in a jewel case, and a little booklet. Man I miss the days of actual manuals. The booklet is pretty good, in that it covers the basics of the game, but you think they'd go a little in depth.

I've just figured it out! Those guys who used to write software for Atari/Intellivision and more recent game machines have moved to the PC and they brought there 'Instruction sheet' writers with them. I am reminded of instructions for a Nintendo game - this button does this, and that one does that. This is a bad guy. End of manual.

Honestly, the Quake 2 manual is not that bad, but I'm sure there will be scores of books with things and info that could/should have come with the game.

The install was painless and simple D:\setup.exe. There are 3 install options, minimum, standard, and full - at 15, 100 and 200 meg or something like that (its a big ol game). I chose standard which seems to put most of the files on the hard disk (I don't see the CD light coming on very much). I actually read the readme's, nothing real important just how to's, and tech support info mostly.

Q2 - Post Install Update Check

Again being the good geek that I am, I know the first thing to do after you install a new program, and if your really good even before you install the program, is to go on the web and get any and all updates/bugfixes/patches hints, tips etc. for your new toy. So went to the multitude of Quake 2 sites, sifted through a few weeks of QuakeNews, and figured there was an update to Quake 2 - version 3.10. I snagged it and a few utilities including info on editing your players appearance (Skins) and utils to mess with building your own models and levels, as well as iD's Quake2 SDK. I also snagged the latest version of GameSpy - which is just the neatest utility to find and join in on internet Quake 2 games (and also Quake, and Hexxen and others),

Q2 - Patch'it and Play

I ran the patch. It said everything was OK and my files were updated. Then I began the melee. I'd heard that the opening sequence/movie was 'Stunning/Incredible'. I thought it was nice - not thrilling, nice. My guess is the difference has to be the rendering - I'm using software rendering mode (normal) - and the other folks were watching it in 3D accelerated (openGL) mode. I wish, I wish, I wish ATI would get their act together and release the drivers - fast drivers too - for openGL under Win95. Their games section has been temporarily under construction since mid-December.

Q2 - the Net

Single player is fun - but network play is a blast. This weekend I gave it a good go at network play. My ISP (AT&T) only has 28.8 kbpsconnections in my area, and most times I connect at closer to 22k-24kbps. I used GameSpy to search out the current games (somthing like 5200 folks playing Quake out there at the time). Oh boy. I joined a game at random, picked one that had about 10 players, and a low ping time, and jumped into the fight.

Q2 - Whats it like on the 4840

Woohooo! Yeah. Its a blast. And a fast blast too. I've got a lot of work to do on my technique, but I have had a great time playing. Once or twice, I got a closeup look at some of the guys /gals in the game, and its scary. They look a bit too real. And they have a lot of 'life movement' - it reminds me of the first time I saw the game Mortal Kombat. The players sort of breathe, and bob when they're standing still. Fingers twitch while holding a weapon and they just seem to be 'there' rather than that - 'the porch light's on but nobody's home look'.

What about framerates and all that?

My subjective tests say - its fast. I ran the game at 640x480 full screen. And it was quite fluid. I ran an adhoc test for frame rate - at the Q2 console you can type timeframe or something like that, and it will have your character do a complete 360 and then report the frame rate. Now I was just fooling around and did it in a small room (where I wouldn't be killed if I stood still, as I was still in a multiplayer game) and it spit out around 36 frames/sec. Just for kicks I did it later in another small out of the way spot, only this time I lowered the resolution to the minium 320x240 - and it spit out 96 frames/sec and looked pretty crappy.

Resolutions?

I tried at several resolutions, just to see what it felt like. 320x240 was incredibly smooth and ugly. 640x480 was smooth and pretty. 800x600 was just approaching unsmoothnes, and 1024x768 reminded me of playing it on my old 486 machine - jumpy, and surprisingly not that much prettier than the lower resolutions.

Sound?

Near as I can tell - great. I have the sound from the 4840 going into a older Mitsubishi amplifier then out to a KLH satellite/subwoofer set. It can be as loud as I can stand. I found I play much much better when I'm not having the crap scared out of me by the way too intense, realistic sound effects. So, I keep the sound down a bit (only turn it up to show off). I tried playing a round with the sound way up, and found myself jumping out of my chair a lot more than I'd prefer.

Other new Installs

In light of the new year, I purchased Quicken98 and TurboTax. This will be the year I get PC finance right. I'm not trying to to anyting difficult, just manage a some household accounts. I hope TurboTax does well, and saves us the fee we were paying our tax preparer. (and gets us a refund). I'm sure the 4840 is up to the task. I did have one crash just as I was putting our budget into Quicken. I chalk it up to discouragement trying to play a hand there. The whole think went screwy, and of course I hadn't saved yet. Our new bank has free PC banking, and we decided on PC Bill pay as well ($6/month). It works out to be about 2 times as much as if we did paid bills by hand but has the potential to be much easier, and with autoremind even easier. Time will tell. Cas has given me 3 months to prove it works better.

Encouragement Arrives, yet again

Thanks to folks who've written. I got a bunch of e-mails just recently and they've been an encouragement (as always). Nice to know the record journeys of the CP4840 are apreciated.

Emperical Testing

I'm working on doing a complete bootMark for the 4840. Whats a bootMark? There a magazine boot, they test PC stuff. They have a list of benchmarks they run on PC's the results of all those they called a bootMark. But they have a web page for submissions/listing bootMarks of machines and I'm interested in finding out how the 4840 stacks up against the other stuff out there. And seeing what areas I may need to tweak it on. There are about 10 or so benchmarks that it runs and I have to take the time to run them all and record the scores.

Speaking of benchMarks, with help I got FinalReality running, with the new drivers, things were OK but I had my color depth set to 24bit, and it expects 16bit - once I changed that, everything worked great. Looks nice. It still 'jumps' every now and then, and I think it may be the 4840, I've seen it in other Direct 3D games on the 4840. I also ran the Benchmark/demo for a game called 'X' a space game. Its pretty. Some of the ships start to look alike, and the scenes seem similar after looking at the benchmark a couple of times, but it's quite pretty. I also tried TerraMark - and the game demo. Ugh. The folks at boot said they loved the game. Yuck. It looks like all the other 3D things, lots of ugly textures that seem to clash, and give me a bit of a headache. The game is a whole lot like 'Decent' (which I dont' like very much). I admit I've never mastered the art of moving in three dimensions using just a keyboard and a mouse, and I always feel like I'm driving a car but missing the steering wheel - I even bought a Cyberman a long time ago - that was worse than using the mouse/keyboard combo. That said I didn't enjoy the game very much. You fly around, shooting things, in a 3D world, getting Dizzy and queazy, and trying to figure out what you're supposed to accomplish. Now with that said, the benchmark/demo does show off the 3D acceleration nicely.

Dreams of a New OS

I've wanted the 4840 to be a multiOS PC from the time I purchased it. I didn't figure on FAT32, and the pains of adding a new OS partition. I recently looked at the Be OS - and mmmmm... nice, very nice. Its not ready for prime time, but it looks to be a great operating system. I have 3 Linux install CD's to choose from, and I've contemplated going to NT dual boot.

I want this to be painless (crashless). Soon, I'm gonna fork over the money for partitioning sofware, (that should friggin come with the machine, but thats another gripe). There are 2 contenders PartitionMagic which was performing wonders years ago, and QuarterDeck has a newbie, PartitionIt that according to them best PM in several areas. The only problem is the cost - $45 or so for PM and $65 for PI. Its a bit of a cost for whats mostly a one shot deal, but I know the piper's worth his pay. When I get a bit of extra, I'll get one of them. Then go to putting as many OS' as I can... well at least Linux.

Making the Backup

I've set aside this weekend to backup the system. The plan is to find appropriate software and make a complete backup to CD-R.

Finding Software

I set out on the world wide web to find backup software. I searched, and searched. Windows95.com. Yahoo. Shareware.com. I found some, none seemed to be just what I was looking for. What am I looking for? A push button solution. Push start - after about a half hour it says 'Insert CD 2' and after another half hour 'Insert CD 3' and after another half hour 'Thank you.. your system is backed up, to restore, boot with CD 1 in drive'. Ha!. I should know better. After looking and trying a 5-6 programs, I found 2 that seemed to support the CD, but neither seemed to do what I wanted to do. I found mention of a program that comes with some CD Writers, a backup program made just for CD-Rs. But it only supports 1 or 2 models of CD-Writers, Ricoh and another. Other messages also noted that they had no plans of making it support other CD-Writers.

Be there ANY backup software

I looked at the backup software that comes with Win95 - what a joke. The software doesn't backup any system files. Duh. So lets say you install GumChewer 2.1 for Windows 95. You then backup your files using this software. Now somewhere down the line, you get a crash or error, so you have to reinstall and restore. So you reinstall. Now to restore - it restores your GumChewer 2.1, you go to run it, and get an error. What happened? Win95 is nice enough to store all settings nowadays in the system registry. Which is NOT backed up by the software. So now you have a useless backup of your system. What a waste. This is surely an accountant/lawyer decision by the folks at MS - 'If we let them backup the entire system, that will mean we could stand to loose 0.4% of our profits to pirating using our software. But what about people needing a real backup? Thats what 3rd party software is for.. and besides we have people working on it in our new Windows Plus Plus (only $59.99).'

However it happened, the inability to backup system files, makes the bundled backup software utterly useless for system backups.

If I hurry I can still make Cheyenne

Cheyenne has a trial ware version of their backup software. I downloaded the 5 disk set, and gave it a go. Using the default settings caused my system to hang. This happened 2 more times until I realized that in looking for tape drives (and not finding any) the system hung. I disabled looking for a tape drive and it ran fine. Now to backup.

Floppies or Zips nothing else

Fiddling with all the settings and even reading the help - it seems that the software (as with most backup software) will only backup to removable media. UGH. Now as far as I am concerned, a CD-R or RW, is a removeable media. Unfortunately, my opinion has very little influence over the operation of my computer. I do mean to look into this issue - the Zip has a utility to make it look like an unremovable media, so it seems possible to do just the opposite, make the CD look like removeable media. So in the list of 'Devices to backup to' - it only listed the floppy, and the Zip. No tweaking or twiddling could get it to use the CD. Although, there is a simple Copy feature/option that will recognize the CD-R, this seems to be the equivalent of XCopy, no compression or organization or anthing special.

When all else fails.. Zip

I have exhausted my options. I will use something simple -like pkZip. So I tried my Windows version of PkZip - making a test run, of just making the backup a file on the C: drive. It got about 2/3 through the files and quit - 'Too many files in zip'. Ugh. OK. To the net for an update. Yes there is an update. Does it fix the problem? Not mentioned in the readme or docs, have to test and see. I do the test again. Yes it works. OK. Now to span disks. The docs say to span just zip to a disk, when its full it will prompt for another. Seemed easy enough. I should have known better. I stuck in a blank CD-R, began zipping to it. An hour later - ERROR - DISK FULL. Push OK. (no other options) I pushed OK. Busted. No files on the CD-R. No Space on the CD-R. As my wife so nicely reminded me - this whole backup thing is much more suited for using a CD-RW disk - then if I mess up, I can just erase it. (She's so smart). I only have 1 CR-RW disk, and its full of stuff and I didn't feel like spending another 25 bucks for a new one. But in retrospect, the CD-RW is the much better choice for figuring this stuff out.

Bitten by the non-removable thing again

Its obvious now that the reason it gave the error, was that it saw the CD-R as a non-removable drive and treated it as such - with the error message. Now I have yet another golden coaster. I looked at WinZip, which supports spanning also. But it seems its method is the same as pkZips - check for disk full then prompt for eject - if its a removeable media. No go there.

The ARJ option

I knew Robert Jung, has a utility named ARJ. Its an archiver thats much like pkZip and all the others. But I now know that Robert is a wise man. In a break from all the action, I began thinking about what I needed to do. I needed to have the archive of my HD in 3 pieces, each one CD sized or less. Then I could put them via Copy onto the CD's. I could Zip them, then use a 'file spltter' to split the Zip into 3 pieces, and use them. But that would mean copying the entire archive back to the harddrive, and reassembling the pieces before I could open it. Then in my mind, -bing- a light went off. I remembered that ARJ supported making arbitrary sized volumes - that is you can say 'Zip these files, into MYSTUFF.ARJ and if it gets to be a 900k in size, split it. And when it was done, you'd have on your disk, MYSTUFF.A00, MYSTUFF.A01, etc.. each 900K (or less for the last one). So I got on the net to find the latest version of Arj. And I found Robert Jungs latest home page. And he has something new.

JAR it up!

His latest compression software is JAR. Its a command line interface software. 'Expert Friendly' as usual. I'd bet Robert has a Unix background. It's shareware, and includes 16 and 32 bit versions. I downloaded the software. Installed it in its own directory and proceeded to read the docs.

The Backup Begins

After reading the docs and working out a proper command line to use, I rebooted into DOS,(I didn't want any pesky Win95 sharing or open file problems). I ran the 16 bit (DOS) version of JAR with options to get all files on C:, Hidden and System files too. Using normal compression, and adding extra bits for error recovery, and (the important part) - making the volumes 600 megabytes each. I figured 600 was a safe number - the CD's should hold 650, and I would have probably felt safe going with 625-630 even, but I wanted to leave lots of margin. And besides, it wouldn't make a difference in the number of disks. Assuming a compression of close to 2:1, it would mean somewhere between 1.5 and 2 gigabytes, which would be 3 CD's. I also wanted to leave room for any utilities, such as JAR, to be put on the CD as well. I used the 16 bit version, because this means I could extract the files even outside of Windows in the event of a crash. But this also means I'd have to do something about backing up Win95's long filenames

With those settings, I started JAR, and went to bed.

The Backup, Day 2

I woke up this morning and went in to the computer room. The screen said 37% complete, and prompted for ok to start creating volume 2. I typed yes, and it began creating volume 2. It worked on volume 2 clear through the morning and into the afternoon. About 3 PM, it finished 2 and prompted to start 3. I again typed yes. It was about 7 PM when it finished. A 'dir' revealed 3 new files - BACKUP.000, BACKUP.001, BACKUP.J - the first two 600 megabytes long, and the third about 350 megs.

Burnin' the Backup CD's

Now it was time to burn the data to CD-R. I rebooted into Win95 and put in the first CD-R to write to. I made sure the drive was set 2x Write, and did a 'Right-Mouse-Button' drag of Backup.000 to the J: (my CD-RW) drive. Using the right mouse button forces Windows to prompt you for what you'd like it to do - Move the file, copy the file, or make a shortcut. I chose copy file. It began. I expected it to take about 30 minutes, instead it took closer to an hour. When it was complete, I took out that disk, made sure to label the disk as well as the jewel case and put in the 2nd CD. This time I chose to 'copy' Backup.001 from the pop-up menu, and then chose, 'paste' in the window for the J: drive. This too took about an hour. I repeated the process for the third CD and Backup.j it took a bit less time. (smaller files). I lastly copied the JAR directory and files, on to CD 1.

Prepare the CD's for use

I also chose to 'Prepare CD's for use by normal CD drives' this sets some directory stuff so that the CD is readable by drives that don't support Direct CD - it essentially make the CD look like a normal CD. You can take the CD back and forth between Direct CD mode, and Normal CD mode (although I'm not sure how many times), but you can only write while its in Direct CD mode.

Forgotten Filenames

I was just about to call it a night, when I remembered - I had not backed up the long filenames. Which means that if restored using just what I'd backed up, I'd have thousands of files with tilde's (~) everywhere and nothing would work. So I went to use MS's Long File Name Backup - lfnbk. Unfortunately for some reason it kept saying 'this program only works with FAT disks'. I checked DejaNews, no one seemed to ever have this problem. I checked MS's web site, no info there either. I downloaded it from there place, just in case I had a bad install. Nope. That one gave the same error. My guesses are either its the FAT32 or something to do with the DirectCD driver anyway. Also looking at the docs for lfnbk, the only 'backup' option was also a 'REMOVE' - as in this will backup all the long filenames and also REMOVE them from the drive. BZZZT. Not something I think I wanna do. So I did a web search on long file name, and spotted a page for a program named DOSLFNBK.

Aha. Another gifted programmer. This program *Non destructively* (is that too much to ask?) backs up your long filenames, to a normal file, that you can put in a safe place, and can take a backup file and restore the long filenames to a drive. Yes! So I downloaded DOSLFNBK, a small download (~500k?) unzipped it to it own directory, and backed up the long filenames on my C: drive. The resulting file Backup.LFN was about 1 megabyte. Next I put CD 1 back in the drive, made it writeable again, and copied my DOSLFNBK diretory, and the backup file to the CD. Then made CD 1 'readable' again. Time: 12:30AM

Backup Summary

• No generic solution exists for simply backing up a Win95 installation to CD-R or CD-RW
• ARJ or JAR do well at creating backup volumes that can be sized to fit on a CD
• Using JAR to make a backup archive of my hardrive (about 3.4 gigs) took a long time about 15-18 hours, although with tweaking of JAR's settings I may have been able to speed it up some - and you can set JAR to run without requiring input, then you could do most of it over night
• Writing the 600 Megabyte JAR volumes to CD-R took about an hour each
• Using LFNBK.EXE to backup long filenames, doesn't work on my PC and if it did, it would be a ugly way to go about it. DOSLFNBK does a much better job. (and works on my PC too)
• The method I used seems to have worked - only a crash will tell. The major caveat of this method is that i had to have enough space on the hard disk to hold the backup before I wrote it to CD. As I put more stuff on the hard drive, this will no longer be possible, meaning a better solution needs to be found. Figuring a way to fool the PC to seeing the CD-R as a removeable drive looks to solve this.
• I expected it to take about 4-5 hours total to backup up the system to CD. In all it took most of an entire weekend. Now that I have a clue what I'm doing, if I did it again it would be faster, but would still take one all night plus most of a morning.
• This method also makes incremental backups all but impossible to run. I can always back up data files, but backing up, future software installations, may be an issue. Using CD-RW's I could just erase the CD and start again. Or just create another set of CD-R backups. But again these would be full backups' not incremental.
• Unless I figure a way to make this much more 'normal', I will continue to have a longing for a DAT backup drive.

Adding a new OS in 734 easy steps
In sheer bravery (or stupidity), with backup safely in hand I set out today to install not one but two new operating systems.

Yes, 2 new operating systems, all while not messing up my Win95 setup. They said it couldn't be done. They're wrong (I hope).

Break it up over here

The first thing I needed to do was to repartition the hard drive. I chose Partition Magic because it will let you add, resize and fiddle with partitions without destroying what you already have set up. There's also Partition It, and fips which work similarly.

From 1, come 4

I ended up making 5 partitions.

1. Original Win95 Fat32 partition (5 GIG)
2. Linux partition (600 MB)
3. Linux swap partition (100 MB)
4. WinNT4 partition (400 MB)
5. Boot Manager Partition (7 MB)
Partition Magic did this well. It took a long time (as in better sleep on it long time) to shrink the main partition to make room for the others. Making the 2 partitions in the free space was a breeze. Boot Manager allows you to boot from multiple parititions. I'd used it before, when I was using OS/2 and its a neat little program.

The Linux Install, First Try

Ok to install Linux, shouldn't be a big deal. I've done it several times before. Now to decide which version to use. I have disks for Slackware, Redhat and Debian. Now, the Slackware and Redhat disks are at least a year old or more, and thats equal to 7 in computer time, so I decided on installing Debian which came with a magazine I got in December. Installation of Debian is not as straight forward as Slackware. It took a lot of reading and rereading the prompts to figure out what exactly they wanted me to do. Once that was done it wasn't so bad. Once you get the OS installed you run 'dselect' to install all the actuall software. Now this thing was confusing for me. Selecting a package, jumps you to a help screen, which then jumps you to a sub package selection screen - its quite wierd. And I had to do this for each package of about 20-30. Once I had all my packages selected, it's time to install. The magazine notes, say that you have to run install at least 3 times, to make sure everything is installed, because there are a fair number of dependencies between packages - this one has to be installed before you can install that one. All in all it seems to have worked, it just felt a bit shaky.

XWindows and Rage Pro? Not on my Machine

Ugh. What a headache. Summary: Install. Doesn't work. Fiddle. Doesn't work. Go to net. Gather info. Gather update. Install. Configure. Doesn't work. Reapeat at any step ad infinitum.

Still haven't got XWindows up yet. I've got the latest drivers - they even list AGP Rage Pro (@Work and @Play cards) - running XWindows pauses the system, then spits out an 'not enough memory' and a bunch of other errors. I have downloaded some info and config files from a ATI page, when my patience returns I'll give it a try.

Temporary Wierdness

I think all the fooling with XWindows temporarily whammied the video - because it took me three tries and one or two cold hard reboots to get Windows to act right. First time, it loaded into Safe mode. Second time it loaded into regular mode but the screen was ALL messed up. Third time I booted into DOS, ran Scandisk, it fixed the /netscape/cache/cache.db (its always fixin that file), then gave me a handfull of free clusters back. Rebooting again, everything seemed to work. Then I got the notion to run scandisk from in Windows. BZZZT. Bad move hombre. Hang. Hanged. Hung. Mouse moved. Nothing else did. Ok. Power down. I rebooted, tried again and the same. Near as I could tell, either the Linux install fried something, or it was the 'fix' from Microsoft, for using Non UltraDMA drives in an UltraDMA machine, with Win95 that caused it - I hadn't used scandisk since I'd installed it and that was the only system kind of thing I'd installed. Wait a sec. Thinking on it, I had installed a trial version of Norton Utilities - hmmm.. I have something to look at next time. More as this develops. My solution has been to avoid the problem, for now. Don't run windows scandisk. I also turned back on the DMA box in system settings for the Hard drive (I read a suggession that said this could stop the system from doing that 'Hard drive light on, hard drive not active, system is frozen for about 5 seconds thing' - which is also what the fix I installed was supposed to do.

Movin on

I'm going to the computer show in Gaithersburg, MD, this weekend, I think I'll pick up a new Slackware or Redhat CD while I'm there.

Win NT - and I thought XWindows was hard

In retrospect its a bit clearer. And I am presently working out a plan. I wouldn't suggest trying it any other way.

I set out from my Linux XWindows frustration to load NT 4. In my childish innocence, I hoped to start installing NT while in Win95, and have it magically ask, which partition I'd like to put it on, then go on installing beautifully into the new NT partition. That was dumb. The first try was from Win95 - inserting the CD brings up the Welcome to NT window. I clicked the Install/Setup button and hoped for the best. It quit soon with an error - something about needing access to the drive or partition. In retrospect, and after having actually read up on installing NT - it most probably was because NT4 has no idea what a FAT32 partiton is, and my Win95 parition is a FAT32 partition. And having no idea what it is, it can not write its special boot stuff to it. (Seems like a great place to patch the software wouldn't you say?)

Undeterred I press on

Okey dokey, I tried it again (and a couple more times) just to be sure it wasn't a fluke. It wasn't. So I got the bright idea to just open a DOS box and look around on the CD, maybe there was another way to have it install. I tried acouple of exe's to no avail. Then I ran one, that began a DOS based setup. It wanted to make 3 install floppys, and I let it, carefully labeling each one. Then it proceeded to copy what must have been the entire CD to the hard drive. Then wanted me to reboot with the first install floppy in the drive. So I did. It started, gronked away, and then asked for the second, then it sorta paused, and said it couldn't find the drive with all those files that it copied just a minute ago, and that without all those files I was going nowhere. And it did. Press F3 to reboot.

Deterred...

Now I'm discouraged. I reboot into dos, to delete the mass of files the install put on my disk. Got tired of waiting for it to finish went to bed.

NT Theory and Plan

Been thinking about NT, and reading newsgroups. I now have a little less fuzzy idea of what I should do. It appears that NT is a fat partiton hog. It wants to be the main and only thing. But its possible to fool it and work around it. Here's my thoughts:

1. Make the soon-to-be NT partition, a FAT partition, and bootable
2. Install a minimal version of DOS to the new NT-FAT parition (with CD drivers and MSCDEX)
3. Add the NT-FAT parition to boot manager's bootable choices
4. Boot to the new parition
5. Run the NT install program (I think its a dos thingy too)
6. Let it make the disks, and copy gobs of files
7. On reboot, it should be able to recognize the simple FAT partition and go about its business of installing NT
8. Gloat in my cleverness.
The problems possible, are not having made enough disk space, and also NT,not recognizing the partition because its not the 'first' parititon on the drive. If thats the case then I'll have to move the Win95 parition down and make the first parititon the NT-FAT one. What a pain.

Or...

I got an email from the 'People-Waiting-For-The-Be-OS-for-Intel' mail list today, they've updated their web site and faq, this means that they're at least working on it, and hopeuflly itl'll be ready real soon now. In that case I'd go and forget about Linux and NT and devote the HD space and my time to fooling with 'Be' but alas as of today its vapor ware, and could be months (computer-years) down the road.

When they beat you up, go play games

With the score: "New operating systems: 2, Brian : 0". I needed a break. So I went to playing games. Then I saw a page that offered a shot at nirvana - a DLL that enables you to play Quake on any accelerator that supports D3D. To make a ..long.. story short, It don't work for I. There are at least 3 programs that say they're 'wrappers' for making D3D emulate OpenGL. I got 'em all. I tried 'em all. All I got was black screens, errors and more experience in cold rebooting. So I played a few unaccelerated rounds of Quake, I played single player for the first time. Using all the cheats, I have to admit I'm pretty good. Its pretty good in single player mode, but multiplayer is better. I think I figured out what it is - SPEED. In multiplayer no one, just stands or walks. Everyone runs and jumps and fly's by you on the screen. In single player they kind of walk toward you, they do duck though, which is pretty cool. If iD would make the baddies run and jump more, it might be a little better. (Not that I, of all people need the game any tougher than it is - I'm not sure I'd make it off of level one if I couldn't cheat).

Racing

I installed Nascar 2 this week. Wooboy. I like Nascar (the game) but it was a bit dated. Nascar 2 is very nice. All its missing is 3D acceleration (for my card - they have a version for 1 or 2 others). The graphics are nice, and it feels pretty solid. I really, really want a wheel. I had been working on a homemade wheel, and it actually works, but its been tough to get it to 'feel' the way I'd like to. I think I'm gonna scrap that design and go with a handheld design, similar to R/C car controls, or the old Atari paddles.

I also downloaded a demo for IRC - International Rally Car (?) racing. Its a one track demo, with one car. Almost arcade like, no car setup or tweaking. Gas and go. its a bit of fun. After a lap or two I got the hang of it. The car though was way too loose. It slid and the back end gave way on every turn even slow ones, while I think thats part of the fun of a Rally simulation, it was a bit much after a while. I could have been because of the keyboard controls (didn't have info on how to use a joystick or if it even supported one yet). The other thing that I didn't like was the inability to leave the road - the road is bordered by 'rocks' that can be anywhere from curb height to canyon height. And even on the curb height, if you bump them they always bump you back on to the track. A hard bump can send you flying or even flipping, but you never leave the safety of the road. I'd like to have to watch out for signs, and trees and all that good stuff too. The graphics are great. They'll mush a playstation or n64. And I didn't notice any system pauses like I had earlier.

I've downloaded another Rally racing demo but havent had the chance to even look at it.

Drivers and Benchmarks and other things

Looking on the wide net it appears there are at least 3 possibly 5 different Win95 drivers for the ATI RagePro, out there. There are the old ones, that the machine came with. Then there are the official new ones from ATI's site. Then it looks like there are some made for G-Police, and then there are some 3.31 (I think thats the number) drivers that are supposed to be unofficial but loads faster. Still there are no Win95 OpenGL drivers.

I have downloaded the SGI OpenGL extensions for Win95. Their demos are nice. I'm trying now to get Delphi to recognize them and use them. (I've taken a course in programming OpenGL) I'd like to see if I can make anything useful, or at the very least port my project (in C) to Delphi. I have to sit down and read -UGH - who ever has any time for that anymore.

Heres a hack a script to write: One that uses the Text-to-speech to read a document, saves the output to a wave, compresses the wave to a TrueSpeech or RealAudo format and mails the file to my work account, so I can listen to the documentation while I work. Just start the script before bed, and point it to the files you'd like to hear. RealAudio already has a handheld player - if only I had an extra $500.

Benchmarks, oh yea, almost forgot

The preliminary results are in. I've run 2 or 3 and have the results, its just I haven't taken the time to make a little benchmarky pagiepoo. After this weekend I vow.

If you keep encouraging him, he'll never stop

Thanks again to folks, for the email.

Been Busy

I've been quite busy lately, and this entry will group up the last month or so in the life of the 4840

Working Well

The system has been for the most part working well. My typical usage has been running my email program (Pegasus), and an occasional game of Quake II and my web browser. GPF's are minimal - only one or so reboots a day.

Linux

The free OS. I wrote earlier that I purchased the RedHat v5 disk set. It took some work but I now have it installed and running. I used Partition Magic to squeeze the Win95 partition down to about 4.5 GB. (took all night and a little more to run). That left me with about 2 GB free to play with. To get the install right took me about 4 or 5 times, and as many repartitioning sessions. I first tried to use Partition Magic to set up a 1.6 GB Linux Partition and a 400MB swap (or something close to that) And PMagic wasn't able to specify what kind - then I tried with the partitioning software that comes with RedHat, not FDisk, but the other one - it seemed to work, but then the Partition Manager boot menu didn't see the Linux partition anymore. Turns out from looking at it through PMagic, the utility, made the new partitions a part of an Extended partition, when the others should have each been primary partitions. So I went back to Linux, and used the Linux FDisk which worked well, except it doesn't (read: I couldn't figure out how to make it) let you say 'and make this partition use the rest of the disk', so there was a bit of fiddling, to eliminate all the free space and I ended up with about a 2 GB Linux partition and a 200 MB swap file - again thats off the top of my head, I'll 'truth' up the specs later.

a Coolness

The 4840 can boot right off the CD. I find that incredibly cool. No making installation disks or anything - just pop in a bootable (eg. Linux) CD and boot. (Mac folks are laughing now..."and next they'll have icons"). I thought this was broken when I put in the CD-RW. But eventually figured it out when my computer wouldn't boot to the Boot menu, but right into an intstall for Linux. I thought I'd really screwed up the HD - then I looked, and the Linux install disk was in the CD-RW drive (which is now the master drive) D-uh!

But its nice to be able to make a bootable CD - hmmmm .. a 640 mb DOS partition... all set just power on..

Install it all

Installing RedHat Linux was a breeze, just answer a few questions and push ok a bunch. I didn't try to setup networking yet, (I've done it a while back on a Slackware system) - it asked more questions than I felt like answering at the time, and now its on my 'ta-do' list.

Oh, you wan't graphics with that?

I had the darndest time getting X work with this machine. Lots of reboots and re-downloads and frustration. Let's just say thanks to the folks at SuFE (and all the other GNU helpful folks)- who devote untold hours to getting things working, specifically X-windows for the Rage Pro. I downloaded their server. The included server refused to come up using anything but VGA-16 mode. Its amazing how wierd and incredibly large 600x400 seems nowadays - I guess after you add buttons, and scrollbars, and borders, and titlebars there's not much room left. The new server supports the XPert@ series and I tried the Xpert@work and it worked.

Now what?

For now I'm just basking in the glow of my accomplishments. Linux runs, its an option off of my boot menu, and I haven't really missed the HD space its taking up. My plans are to get Open GL (MESA actually) up an running on it, and trying some software I wrote for a project. Also just as a programming platform.

What about NT

Thinking about it, the only thing I'd really like to move to NT for is native OpenGL drivers for the RagePro Turbo (ATI has now officially added Turbo to the end of Rage Pro -because folks were getting it confused with the Rage II

- Lesson learned here is, when picking a product line designation, make sure you can extend it, and make sure when you do - its kind of consistent, like - "basic, enhanced, pro", "I, II, III" , "version 2, 3, 4" . Try to avoid mistakes like " 2, 3, 95, 98" or in this case, "Rage, Rage II, Rage II+, Rage Pro (now renamed Rage Pro Turbo)."
But other than the drivers, there's nothing I'm wanting to run that I can't. So I've stolen the space I was going to use for NT and returned it back to the system.

Overclocking Shmoverclocking

A little birdy told me (via email... those birdies are high tech nowadays) that I could overclock my machine with little or no ill effects. I sat on this thought for a while, then one day in February, while the case was open so I could take some inside photos, I decided to give it a go. So I found the little note telling you where to put the jumpers and I put the jumpers so that the CPU would run at 300 MHz. I restarted, smelled for smoke, looked for smoke. Nothing. Good sign. It booted, and went into Windows. No problem. Kewl.

It is better to be fast than to look fast

Its not enough to go fast, one must know how fast she/he is going. So I ran my benchmarks (which I've found I don't like to do, because my PC play time is fairly limited, and running benchmarks usually involved lots of sitting and waiting for it to finish). The results which I will post on my comming-real-soon-now benchmark page, stank. I ran 3 or 4 benchmarks, and they all came out SLOWER than when the 4840 was right-clocked. Hmmm. Back to the way we were. I shut down and un-over-clocked the 4840. So much for my free lunch

Hello.. My.. Name.. Is.. Brian...

Voice recognition. Neato technology. In helping a pal a while back I downloaded a technology preview (read: limited alpha version, probably very buggy, but free to willing guinea-geeks) of Microsoft's voice recognition engine. After a fair bit of training (an hour or so) - it works pretty neat - its a discrete engine which means it only recognizes words with pauses in between, but for free it was impressive (I'm not ready to give up the keyboard yet). It has a neat correct feature, that follows the cursor around as you voice type, and presents you with other choices for the word you just said, and you pick one by saying 'choose-two' or 'choose-one' (2 and 1 being the number of the alternate word).

I want more

Not being content I wanted more. I wanted continuous speech. I wanted to talk and be heard, and even more so, transcribed. So I bought IBM's ViaVoice - it was $30-something and Dragon's was still $89, cheapness always gets the best of me. I don't like it. It installed easy, and brings you into the setup w/no problem and comes with a boom mike/headset. Out of the box, the recognition, stink.stank.stunk. It recognized nothing I said. I trained for about 15 minutes and it got better. But the killer is the UI - the folks at IBM assume you'll want to just read the whole thing in pages at a time, THEN go back and look for errors, much like OCR, now that I think of it. So in their paradigm they don't allow for voice editing like the other software does. To fix a mistake requires you mouse to the mistake, open the coreection menu, and dialog, then pick the right word or type it in. Again this isn't bad if you're in their pardigm, going through afterwards and correcting mistakes, but if you want to correct as you go, well, its kinda painful.

I was fairly dissapointed in ViaVoice, expecting it to work like, well, I expected it to. Alas, I have spent about an hour more training it (you read the Mark Twain story about the Piltdown man) and I wasn't too impressed with the accuaracy afterward, but in reality, I haven't really used it very much at all since I trained it.

4840 Jacks

This is just a note to remember to figure out what audio is mapped through what jack on the back of the 4840 - I know that the modem is only echoed through one jack, but I'd like to know if thats the only thing.

Modem upgrade

It had been a few hours since I last did any upgrades to the 4840 and I was bored and I read that my local access number for my ISP was up to 33.6 Kb/s (woo hoo!)so I went to the Compaq web site to see if there were any updates to the firmware for the modem. And it appeared there were. WooHoo. Download update. (its a big one.. yay.. must mean they put lots of speedup goodies in there). Install update. Reboot. Reboot again. Dial ISP. Brrrrring. Brrring. Beeee --- oooooooo--- cshshshshshshs--whoop- whoop- whoop- (that about to connect at High speed modem sound) -- cshshshshshshs--- .

I tried this oh, 10, 20 times, each time it would begin to connect, make the cool "I'm at high speed" sound, and soon after hang up. The dialing software was clueless.. still saying "Dialing..please wait" long after the connection was broken. So I uninstalled, and reinstalled, same thing. I put ATZ in the modem 'additional init strings' line. This time, no 'woop-woop-woop' sound, but it conncted - at 24,000 bps. I got that out of the box. This goes on for a day or two, then I fiddle one day, and download a version of the upgrade right from Lucent (turns out its the same - duh). But this time I look at the modem settings - to check for an obviously wrong part. - There it is - under modem settings, where you set the speed, checked is - "Only connect at this speed" - How could I have missed that? So I unchecked it. Dialed again. "woop woop woop" - connect at 28800 bps. Yay. Dream of what to do with the extra 3.2 Kb/s.

Note: Have yet to connect again at 28.8 kbps. Will try the other modem (Cardinal 33.6) with same number to see what it connects at.

Proxy Problems

The 2 PC's are networked - and I have the 4840 set up as a proxy server. Which means that when Cas' PC want's to get to the net, it asks my PC for the info, and it goes out and fetches the data, and relays it back to Cas' PC. This actually works and we can simultaneously surf and all that good stuff. Found a little probly-poo the other day. Trying to run Cu-SeeMe - it 'binds' to the network cards IP address (which I need to make the proxy work) - so instead of using the IP address my ISP gives me (12.77.etc.etc.) it uses the one I have for the network (127.0.0.10). This screws with Cu-Seeme's authentication stuff, and reflectors wont let it connect with that address. So currently, I have to disable the ethernet card in order to use Cu-Seeme, or other programs that ask your IP address. I'm sure there's a simple solution.. just have to find it.

Web Cam

The other day out of the blue, it hit me. What if I ran a web server on my PC, and then had my cam dump pictures at regular intervals to the disk, which I could look at using my web browser from work? I'll call it web cam. Then I remembered that it was an old idea (remember MIT's coke machine) - and that there were probably hundreds if not thousands of cam's hooked up to the web. Hmmm so much for the patent idea. But I'd knew for certain that there were no web cams showing my pets sleeping around the living room (unless Cas' is a lot more geeky (and sneaky) then she lets me know).

One down

Now the hunt was on. As always - there was one overriding concern - Size - (tiny), behind functionality that is. I'd tried the built in Personal Web Server - but for 2 reasons I dropped it, one I couldn't get it to Start or Stop consistenly without rebooting, the other turned out to something else entirely.. I was running the proxy on the same port (80) as the web server runs on. My current fix is to just stop the proxy server when I want to run the web server. The permanent fix is just to have the proxy server run at a different port - 8080 probably.. that should be rather painless to do when I get to it. And I didn't really like the interface and setup for the Personal Web Server

Back to the hunt

So I went back to the web to find a good, small, CHEAP, web server - or camera server. Philosophically I favor a general purpose web server, and other software to grab images. I looked for image grabbers - I found 3 or 4 - all shareware. One was really nice it even puts a timestamp on pictures, runs as its own web server, and allows you to use netscape's 'push' feature to cram 'pseudo-stream' images. I found the web server - Xitami - Thanks Xitami gals/guys - great software. Freeware it is. And its pretty standard and supports all CGI and as much as you wanna weigh down your server with.

Now to find something to grab pictures with - I have a Color QuickCam so I tried the QuickPict software - it allows you to capture images regularly to disk - but it only works with the QuickCam (which has a rather short cord - and REALLY slows down my computer. My plan was to use an old CamCorder - with a 20" cord, to extend out into the living room and get a good shot of the pets.

Can't find it, make it

A long time ago I wrote a piece of software to do this - but I made it to save GIF's not JPEG's. The ATI captures only in full color, and the default conversion to 256 colors is quite the ugly. So I have a couple of choices: live with it, write my own dithering routine, or figure a way to save images as a JPEG's. So began the hunt for a Delphi JPEG component. I found one, for Delphi 2, and would have begun to use it, except I found out Delphi 3 (which I also have) has native support of JPEG's - YAY. Just code it in Delphi 3 right? That'd be too easy - the component I use for video capture (free) - isn't compiled for D3, so I'm sort of stuck. I've decided a DLL is the answer - write one half in D2 the other in D3 and use DLL calls to link them.

Free for all

When ever it gets finished I guess I'll make it free for all to use as right now there doesn't seem to be a free video grabbing solution. Will probably be summer before its done (too much real work).

Sleeping in my house

While I'm trying to get it working I did use one of the shareware frame grabbers, to watch the pets from home, my ISP is fairly decent and doesn't usually randomly disconnect me - so the IP address I get in the morning usually makes it through the day. Now I can watch the cats and the dog, laying about the house, and getting on the Futon - now I need to set up a server that plays "Get Down From There!" when it gets a message. - Hmmm I could just make a cgi program in Delphi.. cool (more stuff to add to the list).

The Real Deal

On those same lines, I thought I'd try out the latest offerings from the RealAudio folks. It turns out their encoder and a basic server are available for free. My office system doesn't support RealAudio (or any audio for that matter) so its probably not going to see very much use, just yet, but it has great potential. You can even have it serve up a live video/audio stream (which taxes the 4840 quite a bit). So in theory I can broadcast over the internet from my house - jittery and slowly, but there.

The Video Hi

This opens the way for the Video Hello - well actually that was opened with Quicktime and VideoForWindows. I envision a rough movie and slide show - on a CD. Somewhere between cards and video phones - a little gold cd, sent at Christmas time. - Pictures of the kids, and the trips and the changes in the house along with video clips and stuff. - Just for family (I'd like to keep the friends we do have) - Just about all of our immediate family has PC's (or access to one), so it seems simple. Now if only there was cheap, video editing software available - just simple stuff, like wipes, fades, titles. Pictures

Using Illustrator I was able to annotate one of my inside photos of the 4840 (nice)- I plan to add the Picture Page, and the Benchmark page tonight.

Accelerated Quakeing...almost

Went to web to look for accelerated drivers - ATI said they'd have betas up on March 15.

Turbo.. I guess

I installed the new 5.0 Rage Pro Turbo drivers. Performed obligatory reboot ceremony. Hmmm.. Not bad. Worked. Didn't notice a great speed increase but that was fine. So I went to play my new Open GL quake - woo hoo.. Hmmm selecting 'Default OpenGL drivers' gives me an error. Hmm.. working at it for 15 minutes and still no accelerated quake. Back to the web.. Doh! - The beta 'drivers' were ready March 15, but the OpenGL ICD (OpenGL32.dll)- well.. that will be another week. Arg

TV..or not TV

I also noticed they released a 5.0 version of their ATI player, so I started the 4 MB download and went to bed

Not TV

I installed the ATI player - no problems. I ran the ATI player program, problem. Only 2 buttons in the upper right - MPEG playback and Video Playback. There was no -TV button, and Record video button. I fiddled. Nothin. So I ran the Intel video capture program - BZZT - Error ATI MMC Capture component broken or uninstalled or something - sorry Crap. No video in. Thus yields progress.

Ahem.. Quake?

Undaunted by my recent loss of functionality and continued lack of OpenGL drivers, I went to play accelerated Quake. Turns out theres a guy with an ATI Rage Pro page. Turns out he has a section on OpenGL and Quake. Turns out the mistakenly ATI posted the OpenGL32.dll to their beta website. Turns out it wasn't ready so they took it down. Turns out this guy was able to get his hands on it, and posted it at his site.

Installing opengl32.dll

This is a 2 step process. Step one. Copy any and all files in the windows/system relating to OpenGL to a very safe place. ( I made a directory 'opengl.bak' and copied everything that began with an Open or OG there). Second step, copy the new file OpenGL32.dll (or sometimes named Opengl32.ati) to windows/system over top of the original - make sure you have a backup. Thats about it.

You can also just copy the OpenGL32.dll to the directory of the application you want to use the DLL and in theory it will work just for that application/game.

Hmmm aint there supposed to be a ceiling there?

Ok. DLL installed. Rebooted just for good measure. Start-> Programs -> Quake II --> Quake II. Down -- Down-- Down -- Enter. Right -- down - down -- right -- Enter.

Get into Quake II. Go to video settings. Select 'Default OpenGL driver' select full screen. Exit. New game.

Cool. It worked. Higly accelerated... hmmm and dark. Sort of muddy. Hey wasn't there a ceiling there last time I played? And that wall that keeps disappearing/reappearing.. hmmm. And my hand - its sort of there, but its sort of not.

the Scoop so far on GLQuake 2

Turns out there is a bit of an error in the Z-buffer - not sure who's end its on ID's or ATI's - but the latest version of the Quake2 engine, brings the error into sharp focus with transparent walls and translucent things that should be solid. Running an earlier version of the Quake2 engine, like the one off the CD is supposed to make things look much better. I did try the Quake2 preview/demo - and it did fare much better, although there were still quite a few visual glitches. ( Note - in the preview demo. when you lightly-kill one of the big guys with the machinegun arm, flies buzz around - which is gross. Thats missing in the full version. Hmmm. )

A Sucker and his credit card...

I'm sitting at work the other day and from somewhere I get a gentle urge to go to my local computer superstore - not sure if it was juat breakfast wearing off or if it was just my old hardware addiction kicking back in - at any rate, lunch time found me in the parking lot of the store trying to scarf down a Ranch Chicken Pita so I could get as much browse time as I could. There was a time where you go to the clearance table and find deals here. Real deals not just wimpy markdowns. My instincts drew me to the clearance section, past the digital cameras (drool) and the 3D accelerators (ha' got one). In the clearance section - one thing, returned PC's - marked a whole 10%-15% off - woo hoo. I got a pc, and 10% is not a big motivator. I do my usual loop round the store, cruising the PC aisle, checking for faster models - Got a chance to fiddle with the 4860. They had the demo of In_____ (can't remember) - up and going - its a 3D game, ala' Descent (very ala' Descent) - you ride a bike, and fly around and shoot at stuff. They had a MS Sidewinder 3D Pro Ultra Mega Turbo with Force Feedback hooked to it. Cool! I went to play. Uncool. The game wasn't set up to use any of the features of the joystick. Fast forward ten minutes, 2 help screens, and lots of fiddling later. Had it working. The feedback was barely noticeable. The gameplay was traditional fly around but the graphics were pretty. Although I really am tired of the smooth walls, smooth floor, smooth ceiling, in a maze, abstract texture everywhere genre of games.

Speaking of Joysticks

I make my way around to notice that the ForceFeedback was about $100. doh. I wander down the Aisle thinking about that neat rotation action and how handy that would be - so I check all the other models for the rotation feature, then .... on a second shelf.. a tiny joystick clearance rack. Hmmm... (I feel my wallet tugging on my pocket). There were about 30 sticks to choose from, most of them at about 50% off, no box, but they'd let you bring 'em back if you didn't like 'em. There were 2 wheels also - the Thrustmaster GrandPrix 1 and their other model with pedals. There was also a very cool, very professional looking flight controller set - F16 style stick and throttle with about a dozen buttons, knobs and switches - I really liked the flip up switch cover. After careful deliberation, and a slight scare from a guy who looked like he might buy one of the sticks, I got 2.

How much money did you save us this time, Honey?

I got a Cyclone 3D : 3D stick, Win95 interface stuff, 17 programmable buttons! - that was $9. I also got a wheel. The Grand Prix 1 - its missing its base clamp part - that was $30. Needless to say the afternoon was a web searching/driver downloading frenzy at my house. I read mixed reviews of the Cyclone 3D - some folks said great interface, yucky stick, some said wonderful stick. All good with the GrandPrix 1

Testing.. its a tough job

Time to give them a whirl - Load the drivers. Load the programming program. Fiddle. Get bored, boot Quake2. Not bad. The stick is programmable, and plugs in between the computer and keyboard. You can program it using the programming program, (as well as load/save your settings). And you can also program it on the fly. You push the program button, hold down the button you want to program, type in the keys you want it to be, and let the button up - I've been pushing the button once, before turning off the program just for good measure and it seems to work. I wonder if only a single key is allowed or if you get a couple of keystrokes - could be interesting.

Man with Quake - there are just too many settings to just whip out a great configuration. This is something I need to plan. I think I'd like the joystick to make me look, and the HAT switch to do the moving. I couldn't really get this working. I had it the other way around, but the movements were a bit too quick using the hat and I didn't feel like looking up how to set movements slower in my Quake2 FAQ. All in all I was pleased, I was able to move around and do what I needed to. I may try a 2 handed approach - moving around with the mouse - my preferred method, while using the joystick for weapons and controls - when I get a free couple of hours I'll experiment - I may even last a few seconds longer in a deathmatch.

Welcome Racefans

I have a friend who really want's to race against me in Nascar2, (my pastor) and I've been trying to find a way to improve my game before he runs circles around me. I think I found the way. First problem, the GP1 is front heavy so it doesn't want to sit on my desk, in fact it wants to flip over forward. Hmm. I can set the whole thing on top of the desk but that places it a tad high, and it wants to scoot around, or I can place it in my lap, but that puts it a bit low, and we still have the wiggle problem. I lived with it on the edge and just held on tight this time, I'm working on other ways to lock it down.

My first try in Nascar2 wasn't real successful, I got to the joystick screen and it kinda went loco. Hmmm. Aha - I didn't calibrate. So I went to calibrate in Win95. Oh. I have to add it. OK. Hmm it made it Joy2 - now I took off the Cyclone, so its the only joystick, I want that to be 2 and the GP to be 1. The place to change it is in the dialog, but disabled. ug. So I delete the GP1, and change the Cyclone, to be GP1 - actually its not GrandPrix1 - there's no setting for that, but there is a setting for the Formula T2 (the one with the pedals). I choose that - it works. Now I can calibrate the stick. It works. Cool. Back to Nascar2. Select analog joystick - and I'm racing . Oh yea. This is nice. I'm actually driving around the track as opposed to the mix of screetching, crashing and spinning I usually do. I like it. Time to try the other game.

Formula 1

I loaded Formula 1, it went fine, selected joystick - it worked! It even let me use the gas pedal to click (The GP1 - has gas and brake pedals mounted behind the wheel, and they are both proportional controls, not just push buttons - very nice). I chose Quick Race, and waited. AHHHH. All the textures were scrambled. It looked like a plaid nightmare. Ever optimistic, I assumed, random glitch, exited, restarted. Hmmm random glitch again. Ug. I figure - its the new drivers. Time to revert. I wonder if its possible to go back. I'm looking forward to getting my video-in back.

Restore the oldies please

My first try was simply to go to Video prefs, and select the RagePro (v.4) driver from the list. Nope that didn't do it. My next tack was to just delete the driver from the System list. Its a plug-n-play device, the 4840 should recognize it on Win boot and do the right thing. It looked scary for a while and went through about 3 reboots but it seemed to work. Video-in still didn't work. Arrg. Off of the main directory of the C: drive is a directory named CPQDRV - in there, are the original drivers and an install program. Running that whines a lot about newer driver, but it works and my video-in also works. Going back to Formula 1 - things looked they way they should, great.

Back in the race

If I can just get that wheel to mount somewhere I may never have to go back in an arcade. F1 is great with the wheel - I just feel 100% more into the game, Its now a simulation more than a game. Very nice. Feeling haughty, I upped the difficulty to hard. I soon learned its no fun racing waay behind everyone else. The best I could do was fight my way to 24th place. I am realizing that F1 cars handle immensely different from Nascar2 cars - now all I need to do is spend time getting used to them.

WARNING

This is a little piddly thing but it almost lost me the F1 CD: When rebooting the machine, if a DVD/CD drawer is open, it will close. I was rebooting, and at the same time taking the F1 disk out of the DVD drive, and a that instant it began to close, squishing the cd - out of instinct I quickly pulled the CD out, not thinking I could just be putting a nasty 'ol scratch on it by doing so. This time I was fortunate. I'll remember next time not to fiddle with the drives right on a reboot.

Adios el Door-o

After being knocked to the floor for the 12 time, and coming apart on impact, the door kindly requested to be put on a shelf till I stopped opening it up so much. The 4840 looks a bit on the ugly side minus its front door, but now I have simple access to the video input, and the CD-RW drive as well. I took off the model info sticker that runs down the right side. (stuck it on the back of the machine). With that done it doesn't look so bad. I don't think I'll put the door back on anytime soon.

CD-R Update

I am pleased to report that the HP 7110+ CD-RW drive is completely operational and functioning perfectly. I've just begun a new 'archive' CD of all the junk I've downloaded but don't want to delete - and it went effortlessly - just pop it in, copy stuff and thats it. I desparately need some sort of organizing/labeling system though. Its getting a tad tough to find what I want. Now I have them in their jewel cases - my recent thinking leans to putting them all in a nice CD case, (all in one place) - and then using a simple cataloging program. I just figured a way to get about 6 free Zip disks - move all the junk on them to CD - duh. Will be doing that soon as I get the time. I haven't used the Zip drive at all since I got the CD-RW. It still is handy for taking data to/from different machines - just don't have much use for it right now.

Compaq Phone thingy's OK

Bill paying time tonight. Decided to use the Compaq phone to call the bank automated line. Worked like a charm. Called, the number, pushed the on screen buttons to navigate the menus, checked my balance, and my drafts, and all that stuff, and hung up. POP. The dialog for the tone navigator thingy popped up - it remembered all the buttons I pushed and how long between each and gave me an opportunity to save it to a file to be associated with that number. It even let me edit the sequence and the delays before saving it. I had to restart the phone for the edits seemed to take effect but its pretty cool.(note: on restart, I had a total system hang midway through dialing - I'll just chalk it up to Windows wierdness) I saved the number in the phone book, but the next time I just keyed it in on the on-screen keyboard. It recognized the number, and asked if I'd like to run the tone-script associated with the number. I said yea, and it bleeped its way right through for me. Cool. I finally turned in the paperwork for my PC Banking deal, so that should be coming in before too long, and I wont use the number much, but till then I'll be using my Compaq phone as much as I can.

Video phone?

This rash of success has me wondering about video phone possibilities. My enthusiasm was in a trough for a while, but now I think I'm up to fiddling with it again. And now I have 2 PC's and 2 lines to do the fiddling with. It would be nice if it actually worked - I'll fiddle with it sometime soon and see what develops.

Aaarggh AHHHA!YAAA!...ah..the sounds of frustration

Last couple of days, the PC has been behaving a bit more strangely than usual. Every so often - it just stops. Sometimes the mouse cursor just disappears, other times it just freezes where it is. Waiting does nothing. The hard disk light isn't on. CTRL-ALT-DEL the first time, does nothing. The second time it reboots. Ug. Happens at random. I have a crash protector running. It doesn't protect.

Nuts

Not sure if I did this before or after this last rash of wierdness, but at any rate the 4840 had been acting wierd for a while, so on a whim, I downloaded the Trial version of Helix's Nuts-n-Bolts. I've heard its a great program. Ok download goes well, a few megs. Install no problem, of course, it wants a reboot. Reboot.

Armed n Dangerous

Armed with my new tools I set about the task of finding the cause of all my systems wierdness. I checked the registry. I cleaned the registry. I looked for broken shortcuts. I disk checked the hard drive, I fixed all broken clusters, and the whole ball of wax.

Uh oh

When the tool you use to check for errors causes an error, thats probably not a good sign. I was using Nuts-n-Bolts discover program - a system information tool, that reports on all the junk you have in your PC. It was going ok, then I chose to the info on Physical memory - ClickeyClikety- BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR (the sound the hard drive makes as the PC hits a General Protection Fault. Sure enough. GPF. Ok - its a fluke, restart, try again. GPF. Restart again. Again, try again. GPF. Uh oh. Now I'm wondering if I have memory problems. Maybe a bad DIMM or something. So I run the diagnostics, everything checks out ok, then I run the 'advanced' memory tests. It runs. Checks the cache. OK. Checks RAM - Ascending test - gets to 97% and reboots the machine. Really not good. Now I'm convinced I have bad memory somewhere.

How many combinations?

OK the next hour or so consited of trying all combinations of 2 DIMMS and 3 Slots. And running the memory tester with each configuration. My testing has concluded one of 2 things: either both DIMMS are bad, or nothing. Where nothing means the causes of the error are either nonexistent or so hooked into other things and complex that I might as well live with it. I tend to believe the later. The only thing for certain is that some combinations cause the machine to reboot at 97% and others cause it to freeze at 99%.

The Witch Hunt

Now I commence the real Witch Hunt - the guilty party is somewhere in the PC and you betcha I'm gonna find it. My first thought .. Virus. Nah., run my checker often enough. Second thought, conflict. That would explain the hanging and the mysterious problems with Nuts-n-bolts.

Video vs PCI

Looking I found that my Rage Pro was in conflict. It seems it was being forced to share an address space with the PCI-to-PCI bridge. (not having a clue what exactly a PCI-to-PCI bridge was didn't deter me). I set out to elminate the conflict. Ha. 45 Minutes later, I'm looking at 'Safe Mode', have fiddled with every BIOS setting, and now it appears there are more conflicts than when I started. My wife asks if its going ok. Restraining my anger, I simply say - No. She reads the entire page of meaning in that one sylable, and comforts me.

There's always the Red Disk.

I am defeated once again. I'm tired, sleepy, and weary. I just want it to work. If I use the disk it will work. The disk. So in my 640x480x16 world (the Rage Pro is in an intense state of conflict and thata all it will do) - I begin the process of filling the lifeboats. 3 Zip disks and 35 minutes later, everything I really need to backup (I hope) is safely stored away.

It begins.. again... almost

I put the Red Disk in my CD-Writer (its the master/boot drive now) - and power off then on the 4840. It boots - then says - Can't Read Drive O. Drive O? I don't have a drive O. O? I reboot. Same thing. Great. It can't understand the CD-RW drive as boot, so I pull the cable on the CD-RW drive, move the jumper on the DVD back to CSEL and put the Red Disk in the DVD drive. No problems this time. Quickrestore begins, warns me about the dangers which are about to ensue, and then begins to format and copy away.

Spared

About an hour or so later, its done. The 4840 has been quick restored. I reboot. The Boot Manager window comes up! "Select -- Windows 95 or Linux". I select Win95, it starts. I click the properties of the C: drive - sure enough its only 5 GIG. Yahoo. Quick Restore, did not mess with the Linux partitions. Awesome. I had resigned myself to fiddling with Linux later in the year, but it was saved. Very nice.

Eh, you wanted video capture with that?

OK. I give the 4840 the once over, things seem fine, stuff is where it's supposed to be. So I go to use the video in. I install Cu-Seeme and it says it detects the ATI video in, but can't initialize/ use it. There must be some mistake. So I try the ColorStudio thingy. No option for video in. Hmmm. I try Intel's Video Capture. Nada. Cannot initialize ATI Video In. Don't panic. Check the obvious stuff. Yes, there is a device listed in multimedia control panel. Hmm.. Check for conflicts. Stupid PC-to-CPU bus conflict. It set to 00000 which is in use by motherboard. Can't see for the life of me how this could affect the video in but I know that fixing this is at least a step in getting video in. So I begin to manually config - then change my mind. I reboot, and go into the F-10 BIOS mode. I choose reset everything and reboot. I then go back in and change the Parallel Port to ECP. (default is normal mode). Reboot. In Win95. Check for conflict. None. Whew. Note: I'm pretty sure this is just about what happened, but I was in a state of semi-panic, and wasn't taking notes or acting methodicaly or rationally at the time. So I might have missed something I did. I do remember a "None found or corrupt vmm32.vxd error once on reboot, but it went away.

Somewhere in here I reinstalled the video drivers from the C:\cpqdrv directory a few times. The first time I just tried the Video-Capture drivers. Thats when I got the missing vmm32.vxd error - that forced me to reboot into safe mode. From there I reinstalled the vid drivers, and it didn't seem to take, and I ended up rebooting and installing them yet, again. That one seemed to take. And afte all that fiddling. I tried Intel's Video Cap proggy, and it worked!

Back to Square 2

Now I'm back to square two. I have a clean, dual booting machine. My Win95 install is pristine, and will remain so as long as I can stay disciplined enough not to put every piece of softwarwe I find on it. I also reinstalled the scanner software, no problem, and the Zip drive software, no problems.

DVD - where have you been all this time?

Resting on my laurels, I put in a DVD (my only DVD, the one that came w/the PC). It starts, changes the screen resolution, Error. Ah.. drive naming trouble.. Zip drive stuck itself in as D: again. Move things around. DVD = D:, CD-RW = E:, Zip = F: That way if the Zip's not there I don't have a hole in the middle of my drive list (was E: in my last setup). Retry DVD. "Time Warner Presents...". Cool. It works. Now I need to figure out just what files, the stupid DVD software uses (all of em') and them make a backup of them all.

Post Restore Era

It's been just over 2 months since I resorted to the quick restore disk. And things have been - well - hmm... they've been. Some have been good, some indifferent, some really bad.

The Digicam, II

A while back we purchased a Kodak DC-210 Digital Camera to go along with the 4840. We got it from our local camera store, but realized after we purchased it, that we could save over $100 if we got it online. So we took it back, and then realized that we really couln't afford it. Yet.

Yet arrives

Yet arrived sometime in Late may, early April. Kodak announced special prices for developers (Like most good companies do. Its nice to have folks who write software for your stuff). And as it happens I'm a software guy and signed up to be a developer - so I could get a fairly decent price on the 210. So I secretly orded it and about 5 days later surprised Cassie with our new digicam - again.

Gadgets beget gadgets beget gadgets...

The usual problem with cool stuff, is you have to get the cool accesories (expensive accessories) to make it complete. So this round of gadget buying turned out no different. We wanted to use the 210 as our general picture taking camera - and especially for our upcoming vacation. That means I'd need to be able to either download fairly often, or be able to store a weeks worth of pictures. Well, a laptop is kind of out of the question for the moment. I priced Compact Flash cards, and the best priceing was for a Microtech 30MB card. Well then I thought about getting all 30MB of pictures off the camera using the serial cable, it sends at about 80K/s - times 30000K equals a lot of time downloading pictures. So... I looked into Compact Flash readers - they plug into the parallel port and you just plug the card into them, and it appears as a drive letter on your PC. MicroTech also made one (CameraMate), and it was in the cheaper range.. so I added one of those to the order. A few more days later - we were set. The 30MB card holds about 113 hi-res, best quality images and over 400 low-res, worst qualty images. We were set.

Does this have ANYTHING to do with your computer?

Installing the CameraMate card reader on my PC was quite an experience. And like far too many computer install scenarios, I'm not exactly sure, why it didn't work or exactly what I did to make it work. It has a bunch to do with Plug-n-play's autodetect, and a very little bit to do with my foolishness.

The CameraMate is a parallel device, bringing my total up to, lets see.. Zip drive..scanner..printer..QuickCam.. Five devices hanging off the back of the machine. And it gets its power from guess where? The keyboard port. So along with the QuickCam, and the Programmable Joystick make for 3 things hanging and sucking power from the keyboard (of course they don't all work chained like that.. I have to take the joystick out of the loop to use the other two).

Simple...yea right

The CameraMate comes with one floppy install disk. You plug it in the appropriate places (the built in ECP port) and then put the disk in, run install new hardware, select 'Have disk' and that should be it. Hours later... after much hair pulling and mumbling it worked. I'm not sure at all what happened. I installed it - it didn't work. I uninstalled it. I repeated that a half dozen times. I searched the disk for any other help or files to try running. Ran a DOS thingy that installs a DOS driver that lets you detect and format (NOT read) a CF card. (In retrospect I think that may have been the the fix for me). Sometime in all the work, I put the CF card in, the 4840 went 'Bee-Boop' (the boop higher in pitch than the Bee), and then the cursor turned into an hour glass for a few seconds, then there it was, a brand new 'G: drive' in the my computer folder, then it popped and opened up the G: drive for me displaying a sole 'dcimages' folder. Clicking on that opened it up and there were all my pictures. Awesome. It takes between 1-5 seconds to copy a picture from the card to the computer. I haven't been bored enough to time how long it takes to grab a whole cardload. The 4 meg card that came with the camera reads in just a jiffy.

Its always something

OK, with the pictures read its time to take the CF card out and go about my business. Pull. 'Boop-Bee'. G: drive still there. I close all the open windows. Hit refresh on 'My Computer' G: drive still there. Put in CF card,(Bee-Boop) open G: drive. All my pictures. Remove CF card. Boop-Bee. G: drive still there. Put in DIFFERENT CF card (Bee-Boop), open G: drive, same pictures. Hit refresh. Same pictures. Uh oh. Close all windows. Remove card. Double click on G: drive. Hour glass. System hang. Reboot.

Diagnosis...

My initial thought was that it has to do with a window or file on the drive being open, the driver can't remove the drive because someone it still using it. But further exploration doesn't reveal who is using it. Maybe some background program like CleanSweep (but I didn't have it installed at the time so go figure). At any rate, its a 50/50 shot now when removing the CF card. Sometimes the G: drive does nice and disappears, other times it stays there, and I just try to remember not to mess with it.

The drivers are always stabler...

There are at least 2 other companies that market the same CF reader (CardMate) under different names and they have different (and hopefully, more stable) drivers - so I've thought to try their driver in place of mine, but as of yet none of the other companies have them available for download.

The Archival Plan

Now endowed with the ability to take an infinite number of pictures, I am in desparate need of some way to organize and catalogue them. I've spec'ed out a program that I plan to write someday that stores the images in a database along with any other useful information, and descriptions. In the mean time, I create a new folder for each set of pictures or group, and when I get a bunch I copy them to a CD.

The First Game One weekend Cassie was out of town, so bored I wandered over to my favorite software store and parused the titles. I came home with Jet Moto. Oooo ah ooohh. I somewhere back there also purchased a programmable Joystick. Its a traditional style joystick, its got also about 17 programmable buttons on the base, along with a left/right twist - the twist however isn't proportional, its just a left/right switch. So I loaded up Jet Moto, and programmed the stick and went to it. I'll never feel the urge to go to the arcade again. The only difference I could figure is that I wasn't standing and I had to hold on to the base of the joystick, a problem to be solved with a few clamps. I was able to run it in the highest resolution, fully accelerated, all the bells and whistles on, and not notice any slowdown. Thats why I paid $2K for this machine. Very cool.

Games, Games, Games..

I went on a games streak for a while, looking for anything to use the 3D acceleration. I downloaded the latest ATI driver and Open GL DLL. I ran every 3D demo that looked decent. I liked Battlezone a bunch, the all of a sudden, when I ran it the top half of the screen would be garbage.. sort of a visual feed back look. I couldn't get it working right so I ditched the demo. I downloaded every 3D racing sim demo I could find. Some had really cool graphics but the gameplay was just OK. I went back to the old F1. Ooops, the graphics UGG. Seems the new drivers cause a problem with F1, but Psygnosis has a fix. For a week solid I tried to get that stupid fix. Seems the web guys there, were 'working' and the link was broken the whole time. Meanwhile, my game fever gave way to programming fever.

A Webcam on every PC

A long time ago I'd looked at web cam software for the 4840 - why else did they put that video in port on the front if they didn't want us to set up web cams?. The software I saw was OK, but I was looking for something else, so I decided that I could make my own just a easy. And I did. But it only saved GIF's which was peachy when I just had a black and white camera, but not so hot in 16 million colors. It took me a while but I got a way to save in Jpeg's (I could have done it in Delphi 3 natively, but I wanted to use version 2 so I could use some other tools I have for it). And a week or so ago, after a fair bit of CompuSlaving I had a version that worked. After a few more days I had a version that worked, did a bit extra and looked pretty good. I've run it for a few days straight and it hasn't eaten my PC. I set it up the other day to capture from the VCR - and could listen to the channel on my TV radio at the office, while getting screen shots from the web cam, kind of neat.

Just so you know, there is no free video Before I was able to get working again on my web cam I had to get my Video in working again. The new ATI drivers, while being faster and supporting native Open GL - do not yet support Compaq's crazy video in configuration. So in order to get my video-in back I had to reinstall the original drivers from the C:\CPQDRV\ATI directory.

AAAAAHHHHHRRRRGHHH!!!!

I try to explain to my wife why my NEW computer doesn't do what I want it to and I can't. Several problems have creeped up and not gone away

• The sound on the modem has disappeared, I've done everything from physically removing and reinsatlling the modem to deleting all the drivers, to do removing the sound drivers and everything associated. Still when I dial, it mutes the entire computer. Needless to say that means the whole phone center thing is just a waste of disk space at the moment.

• On startup I get three dialog boxes that are empty with the exception of a yellow exlamation triangle, and an OK button. The come before the network log on and I have to clear them in order for Windows to start.

• I am afraid to try to play a DVD

• The Cannon 4300 Prints about 1/10th of a graphic page then stops. Eventually Windows says - something is wrong with the printer. Continuing, resetting,does nada. I've reloaded the drivers. Downloaded the new drivers. Nada. The new drivers support auto ON as well as auto OFF which is nice. But seeing how it doesn't actually print much of anything when its on, I don't know how nice this really is.

• The Pause has returned, the hard drive light on, system pause thing has returned, and I haven't taken the time to retry all the fixes.

• THERE IS NO WAY TO DISABLE THE BUILT IN DEVICES VIA CMOS!!! I could really get angry with the engineers who made this boneheaded decision. Built into the 4840 are the Sound and Video cards, and you can not disable or configure them via CMOS. ARRRRRRGGGG. In Theory this should not be a problem, but not many folks with 4840's live in Theory. In all the CMOS setting are a joke.

Let it slide

I went home to visit with my mom and found tons of old slides. We had the idea that I could scan them all in and then give a CD's for Christmas to my siblings with all pictures on them. I'd heard of a 'slide adapter' for a scanner. Searching the newsgroups revealed that its not even worth it. The quality is at best screen qualtiy just not enough DPI on a normal scanner to get good quality. I do admit I spend an evening trying to piece a contraption of my own together to get the scanner to scan a slide. The results stank.

More stuff

I've decided sometime soon to get an HP PhotoSmart scanner, its a front fed deal that scans pictures and slides/negatives. It sells for half the cost of the next slide scanner, and should do well for me. I had no luck getting one installed in a friends computer last year, but I'll give it a try anyhow. I have another friend with a 4860 who has one installed and says it works great.

Let the Show Begin

I'm in the software store (where I shouldn't be) and my moneys screaming to get out of my pocket, and I'm doing my best to find something to spend it on, and then I spy a box I hadn't seen before - Kai's Power Show. Hmmmm. I looked it over. Very nice. Very nice. Its made to do just what I want to do for Christmas, give a very nice computer slide show with sound and music and transitions and the works. I plop down my 50 bucks and take it home.

Nice..

I've used it for about a week. Its nice. It suffers a bit from 'translation' - in that it was designed on/for the Mac first and then ported to the PC - and its lost a bit in the translation, and the manual refers several times to features that are available on the Mac version (I can see in the illustrations), but not on the PC version. There are also a couple of things in the preview/edit screen that don't work intuitively at all - very surprising considering Kai's passion for intuitive interfaces. But that said it does stuff that I've not seen anything else do. Mainly it's a just a slide show program. But it's added a bunch of transitions, like page curl, and ripple, and lots more - and also a fair number of neat text effects - this is one of the non-intuitive parts - even following the manual step by step (which doesn't exactly match the program) - I found putting text down and applying an effect to be a pain. You can also have it play a sound with each transition, and have it play a CD track if you'd like. Pretty neat. When you've got it all together, you click create show, and it makes a master show file, and creates a subdirectory with all the slides and images. Then you can copy the show file, and the directory to your distribution media (in my case a CD) and send it off, along with the install file for the show player.

Try one...

A little bit ago we took a cardload of digital pictures at a friends wedding. I was able to load the pic's into Show, weed out the funky ones -oops almost forgot, first I had to go through, find the ones that were sideways and rotate them - what a pain, there should be a quick app that does just that - I used a trial version of ThumbsPlus, but I had a bit of a hard time getting it just to turn the pictures 90 degrees to the right. It does support batches though which saved me loads aggrivation. OK, once that was done, I loaded them all into Show, weeded out the obviously messed up ones, and used the 'Quick Show' options - which is the equivalent of a show template - not nearly as flexible as it could be but lets you quickly set up and create a show. I didn't choose any sounds or music to play - just wanted to get the bride and groom a disk by the time the got back from their honeymoon. I double checked the setup, and created a 'Show' - which I then made a CD with. Along with the Show player install file. We haven't heard back from them yet on the show.. we'll see.

THE SECRET BOOK

Somewhere in my browsing around Compaq's web site, I saw mention of something called a 'Technician's Manual'. It wasn't for the 4840 but that got me thinking. So searched the 'buy compaq' site, for a mention of it. Nothing. I searched the web, nuthin. So I got on the phone. I called Compaq's sales. The guy didn't have a clue what I meant, but pointed me to Compaq's Product information dept. - apparently they keep track of all the stuff Compaq has (why he couldn't look it up on his computer is still a mystery). So I called the number he gave me and sure enough I got Compaq's Product information line. I told him what I was looking for and the model it was for, and he looked for a while and then came up with a part number. Yes! I told him I wanted to get one, he said I'd have to call the order line. So I called the order line. Gave the guy my part number, and he didn't have a clue, said that it wasn't on his list of 'things we sell'. He suggested that I call Product information. So I said OK, and called Product Info. He said no he couldn't sell me the book, I'd have to call sales, and to tell sales what he said. So I called sales, different rep. still no clue about the book. They suggested I call Warranty or product replacement so I called the number he gave me, they did have a clue, and he looked it up in his computer. He showed that they didn't stock that Item. (?????!?!??) - OK. *He* suggested I call their out of warranty parts company (not even a Compaq company) - so I did. I got a guy who was able to look it up on the computer, and even give me a price ($17) - and said he'd be able to send it to me. GREAT! But he'd have to order it from Compaq (!!!) - and there'd be a $7 processing fee. OK, I said do what you have to do just gimme the book. $27 and 5 weeks later. I get the book.

THE SIMPLE SECRET BOOK

The book was perfectbound - like from Kinkos. Its about 100 pages. Its for the 4800 series but DOES NOT cover the 4840 and above -- apparently it was written before they were born.

It does go into the 4800 series a bit, but at the level of a reference manual - it the kind of thing that really should have come with the machine. My biggest question was 'Is this really all there is to the CMOS settings?' And according to the book, the answer is yes. It doesn't cover what to do in trying to install an alternate sound or video card.

One Surprise

The one surprise has to do with the modem slot. The manual says that the modem slot (ISA slot 1) is NOT a regular ISA slot. That it has about 6 pins that differ from the ISA Spec and are special to Compaq. (!!) And accordingly, plugging the modem in any of the other slots won't get you real far.

Scanner... Take Two I went home to visit my mom, and found all of our baby/childhood pictures and slides - I thought wouldn't it be great if we all could look at them. Then I thought - Hey! What about a techie solution - I could put them all on CD-R and give them at Christmas.
I already had a scanner, and I could get one of those 'slide/negative' adapters for a few bucks and scan away. Well once mom let me pack up the bags and boxes of slides and memories and cart them away home, I did a little research and ugly reality hit: Those film/slide adapters essentially don't cut it for very much more than a thumbnail scan. For example, my scanner Astra 600P has about a 300 DPI resolution - and a slide is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 inch square - so somewhere around 300x400 would be the best I could expect from the adapter. I got approval from finance (Cassie) and it was time to buy.

HP vs. everything else, a cheapskates tale

OK, so I did my homework, looked at all the slide/film for sale out there. I noticed that most were in the 1,000 - 2,000 range, some in the 800-900 range, and only one in the 399 range - the HP PhotoSmart. It has great specs - 2400 dpi, 30 bit color. Turns out the HP uses a fixed focus thingy where it seems most the others have a variable focus which may explain the price difference. At any rate, the HP would have to be really bad to justify paying twice as much for another model. (note: just recently I found out about the newer Olympus slide/film scanner - thats just a hundred or so more than the HP - its a film/slide only scanner - but it supports APS - don't think we'll ever shoot with APS film though. At least not for a few years). So with my choice obvious, I headed down to my local ComputerWareMartStoreHouse, assured that I wouldn't be encumbered or bothered by any pesky associates or salesfolk in my shopping. And surely, I was not, I was allowed to wander, poke, and paruse at my liesure without the presence of a associate. This is a good and bad thing. Its great not to hear sales drivel and technofibs when you're shopping, but sometimes you need to ask really important questions like: "This one here looks open, will it be on discount?" or "There's no price here, is this for sale or do you just put it out here for show?". Alone, I looked up and down the paltry scanner aisle. Alone I found the display for the PhotoSmart, and this time it was price marked. $399. I looked under the counter and there were 3 in stock. The first box was beaten and a little worn. The second was clean and unblemished. I picked it. Then I thought, accessories. I really shouldn't be allowed in the store with permission to spend. I ought to send my wife or a friend with a list and money. Walking around I found the only sale flyer in the entire store. In it I found two certifiable, bona fide bargains on stuff I could use. They both were rebates, a cheap trick in itself, but if you're the patient kind, or the kind needing an excuse to buy, they work nicely. The first bargain was PrintMaster Gold - I've got an early Windows version, and for quick and easy jobs it does a great job. This one comes with a zillion pieces of clip art, a thousand pictures, a crippled version of a card making program, and a CD of something else (I forget). That was 39 with a 30 dollar rebate.. I'd buy it for 9 dollars. So it got thrown in. The second was PageKeeper. This program is your all purpose 'document database'. Just the thing I need to keep track of several hundred new scanned slides. It was 29 with a 24 dollar rebate, total cost of about 5 bucks. Only thing, see they don't put the scanner software near the scanners. OK , maybe its imaging software.. nope not near there either. Aha, found a lone rack in the aisle of just OCR/Scanner software - nope not there either. Reluctantly, I hunted for an associate. Posed my delima. He actually knew what I was talking about. Supress look of surprise and delight. 2 Minutes and 3 aisles later we found it - under the Operating Systems/Utilities aisle. My 2 bargains in hand, time to head out before I spent any more

Welcome to Patience 101: Installing New Hardware

Got home from hunt. Proudly presented my fresh kill to the clan. Woman impressed - "oooo, good job, honey". Cats indifferent - left the room. Dog dissapointed - "you don't have any cheeseburgers in that bag, do you?"

Like a good geek I opened the box and read the instructions. It comes with 3 pieces of hardware. The scanner, a ISA SCSI card, and a 6 foot cable. Open the computer. Remove card cage. Install card (jumperless card). Close up system. Reboot. Windows has found new hardware "Symbios etc...", install drivers for new hardware. Found more new hardware 'Unknown', you got a driver for this? Put HP CD in. Hey its a scanner. It installs drivers. Windows finishes booting. The CD autoplays. Ooooo a movie. "Welcome to the HP photosmart system, in this video you will...". Skip past most of 'How to install a card'. Install Scanner Software. "Please insert calibration card into scanner". Calibration card? I don't see no card. Grab paperwork and books...rifle, rifle.. flip.. shake... Aha. The last 'page' of the manual is an envelope - inside are a white calibration card, and a small scan holder (you put stuff to tiny to scan in it, and it keeps the scanner from chewing it up). "You must reboot, for blah blah blah...". Reboot.

That story was a lie. Well sort of. I forgot about one small problem I had. It turns out simple enough, the Parallel Port Compact Flash Card Reader software, acts really ugly (slows down/pauses the whole system for minutes at a time) if you disconnect the reader from the parallel port. Of course it took me hours to learn this fact, and to realize that it was the fact that I disconnected the reader (when I took out the extra parallel port) and not a problem with my new scanner that was causing the computer to freeze up. So just add in about 4 hours of frustration, punctuated by 4 minute reboot times, and about an hour of searching (and not finding) any reference to my 'scanner problem' on the net. Then at the end add, a big doh, and a sigh of relief at about midnight when I put 2 and 2 together and plugged in my card reader, as I was explaining the problem to my wife - "No its not working yet...Its all screwed up, honey and its takes 4 monutes to boot, and it always hangs up right.... hmmm it didn't hang...."

Using the Scanner

In a word: Coowell. Put a slide in the little slot, and all of a sudden a little blueish light comes on inside there, then something in there just sorta grabs a hold of the slide, and starts to draggin it in - then wham shazam, you see that little slide as its being pulled in right on your screen. Amazin.

The Unpassable Bargain

While making my clearance shelf rounds around town - I stopped in Staples. There in the protective glass case sat two unpassable bargains. The first was a Seagate Travan 3 (3.2 GB) internal tape backup - 50 bucks. The other Reveal's VM100 - this is a device that plugs into the serial port and uses your sound ca$ to give you voice mail on the PC - I didn't need it, have no direct use for it, but they marked it down to $12 dollars. It would have been criminal not to get it. So I did. Mo' installs

Open machine (again). Hmmm....no free ISA slots. Backup drive comes with an accelerator card (2MB/s) - documentation says it can use the floppy but it may be slower. I think I might want to eliminate all potential problems and variablity, and decide to do what they say. The parallel port card draws the short straw. Out it comes, in goes the card. Boot up machine. Nothing new pops up on the screen, obviously not a plug and play card. I put in the disks, they install Seagate Backup. Still no tape drive recognized. Under options, there is a 'add new hardware' button - which opens up the add new hardware applet. There's a new category - 'Tape drive controllers' - ooooh. Hmmm which one to pick. The card itself has no markings. (I worry about folks who don't take credit (blame?) for their work.) Look through manual. It says choose Connor. OK. It installs and then the Tape drive is autodetected, and the drivers for it are autoinstalled and if I recall correctly the the Backup software immediately recognized the addition, without having to reboot the system. Nice.

Well enough, alone.

I looked on the net for information about the Reveal VM100, and found just a little, and it turns out that Reveal is either in severe limbo, or totally bankrupt and out of business. They have just sort of poofed and gone into Chapter 6. So I'll leave the VM100 for an experimental toy when I get time. If I could get programming spec's on it I can think of a couple of great programs to make with it. Someday.

Of Modem Sound and Red Disk Its been 3 months, 12 days and 16 hours since I last recall hearing sound from my modem. The last thing I remember was fiddling with new sound card drivers and then trying some DOS utility to fiddle with the settings on the ESS1887. Since that day, when using the modem, the machine mutes all sound. OK, this is not a problem with connecting to the internet - I trust its working there. But as for the whole Compaq Phone Center, its a bit of a hassle not being able to hear or talk. I wasted about 3 days of my life over the past few months trying to get sound to somehow restore itself. I deleted every driver, reinstalled every driver, I looked in devices, I looked in CMOS, I checked for conflicts, and of course nothing got any modem sound back. I feel as though I have gained an insight into the workings of Windows sound, but otherwise, it was totally unproductive. Alas, what else could I do. Also pressing on my mind was the odd fact that my windows startup was now guarded by 3 (three) little dialog boxes in succession each with no words, title, etc. only a blue little icon, and an OK button. And each time rebooted, I was forced click OK to dispatch the first of these little guardians, he would be replaced by the second, and then she would be replaced by yet a third. Once the three were routed, then and only then could I have access to the land of Windows. This happened on every start/reboot of windows, which can be quite often on a bad day. On my quest to defeat the guardians three, my first assumption was that they were the result of some program trying to autorun/run a startup but that no longer existed on my machine, and windows just couldn't figure out how to display a coherent error message. I first looked in the obvious - the Startup folder. No luck. Next I opened up win.ini and looked at the RUN= and LOAD= lines. Nothing there either. That left one place to look, the bastion of all things odd and wierd, the registry. I went in slowly, taking a tedious systematic approach. Leave no path unsearched. I scoured every branch and key of the registry individually, searching for the origin of the guardians three.

Did you know?

That there are no fewer than 5
different ways to have a progam
automaticly start in Win95?
2 in win.ini
1 in startup folder
2 in registry


Eluded...

In my search I found several programs being autostarted that I did not want to be and I was able to stop their progress, but as for the three.. nothing. I investigated and determined that the messages were coming from MSGSRV32 but how and why were beyond my (knowledge+time)/patience factor. Now I had not one but two compelling reasons to Wipe it. So using my new tape drive I ran a full backup. It filled one 4G Travann Extra tape, and part of a 3G tape. I also copied most of my settings/files to a CD-RW just in case. I put in the Red disk, began the Quick Restore, and went to sleep

If no news is good news, then news is...

Its been just about 10 months since my last entry. Those ten months were, for the most part, uneventful. I have done my best to resist the urge to stick another piece of hardware into or attach it onto the back of the 4840. The current list is:

Inside

• Compaq Winmodem
• HP SCSI-II Card
• Addtron PCI Combo Ethernet Card
• Connor Tapedrive Controller

Outide

• Zip Drive
• Photosmart Scanner
• Astra 600P Scanner
• Microtech Cameramate Compact Flash Reader
• Epson USB to Parallel converter cable
• Epson Photo 700
• Occasionally: Kodak DC-260 Digital Camera

For the most part, the 4840 has been stable. Its routine uses include, surfing the net, writing programs in Delphi, writing CD's, downloading pictures from the Kodak DC-260, and printing those pictures

Two days ago after a particularly good crash, I ran Nuts-n-bolts DOS based disk checking utility (DMDOS.EXE). Usually it reports either "Disk is fine" or something like "Lost Clusters.. shall I fix it?" This time it said "Sorry, this directory entry looks messed up and is probably a file - should I remark it to make it a file?" Well knowing that it really was a directory, and not a file, I said no. It got to the next directory in my list and said the same thing. And the next. And the next. Once I saw where this was going I thought it best to stop here, and look to getting a decent backup method actually working

Scotch or Masking?

I had given up all hope on my tape drive, as I had never successfully used it. But now with doom inpending I thought it wise to give it one more shot. Open with the case, out with the card cage out with the Tape controller card. Ok settings -- IRQ 9, I/O 370, DMA 2. Should conflict with nothing alreaady in there. Reboot. Hmm.. Control panel now shows it recognizes it, but I don't here any whirring when I put the tape in. Do a web search for new improved better tape backup softwarwe. Find none. Try Seagate Backup. (came with the drive). Hmm. nothing. Doesn't recognize the tape. Fiddle for an hour nothing. Get distracted by something else on computer.

I thought somewhere in my mind that its probably simply a power cable but that would mean shutting down the machine, opening it up and fiddling so I decided that task was best left to when I already had to shut the 4840 down for something else.

He who hesitates is up a creek

Fast forward a day. After a long day of work I come home to check the old email and putter around on the PC. I'm puttering and I go to close something. I can not recall what exactly I did, because instead of using my years of Windows crash knowlegdge and doing the smart thing - writing down the error I got, and what I was doing when I got it, when Windows popped up a GPF by Explorer in Kernel32 - I just clicked close. Click. Rattttttling of the drive followed. Pop. GPF in Explorer. Click. Rattle. GPF in explorer. Click. Rattle. GPF in explorer. Click. Rattle. GPF in explorer. (Rattles are getting longer). Okay - new approach, lets just Shut it down. Start button. Shutdown. Restart Computer. OK. Wait... It starts shutting down. BSOD. (blue screen of death, named so because its appearance means that something has gone critically wrong with windows -and a reboot is iminent.) CTRL-ALT-DEL. Reboot. The Windows startup screen flashes briefly, then it pops up "Please type in location of command.com eg. c:\windows\command.com".

I figure it must be a fluke so I reboot the machine again. Same thing. I type in c:\windows\command.com. I type in lots of stuff. I reboot several times. Then a spark of an idea. Boot from a floppy and see what you have on your hands here. Start frantic hunt for a Windows boot floppy. Finally gather a motley collection of floppy suspects and begin trying them one by one. The first couple are DOS 6 floppys, and they can't read the FAT32 formatted Hard drive at all. Then I find one labled (incorrectly thankfully) McAffee Recover disk 11/97. Its actaully a windows boot/recover disk. I boot it, and type in C:\ [enter]. "Error: Invalid media type". Jump ahead and hour or so - Reboot. Type in C:\ [enter]. "Error: Invalid media type".

What Happened?

Near as I can tell, here's what happened - in its death throwes, Explorer was saving out to a log file somewhere trying desparately to save a record of its horrible fate. My shutting down the PC while this was happeneing caused it to save write garbage somewhere out on the disk. That somewhere was important. My initial hope was that the msdos.sys file had just gotten erased or corrupted, and that a simple boot from floppy and a jaunt with a text editor would repair the damage. Now that the C: drive is returning invalid media something is quite wrong.

Whatever you do, save the data!

Now that we're in the digital age, with the digital camera its natural to save all our pictures on the hard drive. As they kinda stack up I write them out the CD. As it turns out, there a pretty important stack still on the harddrive (infant pictures of our new son). And I'd like very much not to lose those. That immediately rules out the Red CD as well as the ol' format it all and chalk it up to experience technique. So today I begin the long Journey of reconstruction. As I wrote earlier the last time I took this Journey it cost close to 800 bucks. I do not wish to travel that route again.

So its up to the software guys to bail me out of this one. My first (and hopefully last) try is Spinrite by Gibson Research. I've looked at Mr. Gibson's website and tried some of his freeware and have been quite impressed. Programs that do some cool and even amazing stuff, that are the size of a wordprocessing document instead of needing 3 CD's to install. Spinrite looks to be the mother of all disk fixers. Hard core, down to the magnetic flux on the spinning platter software. So I went again to his website, and read up on Spinrite 5. Looked great. I clicked on the purchase option. Sticker shock. 90 bucks. Oww. I then thought back to the busted hard drive, and all the pictures. I called the Dowtin accounting department. "Honey, I want to spend a hundred bucks on software to fix the computer. Can I?" "You what?" ...long explanation and justification.... "OK, spend it, love you, bye.". I call Gibson Research, am greeted by a nice lady, I tell her what I want, she asks for my payment info, and then gives me a code to put in the website to download my copy of Spinrite. I download it. (97k - TINY!). I try it on the machine I'm using - it looks good, very powerful.

But Will it play in Peoria

Now to see if it will work at home. I get home and have about 15 minutes of computer time allotted so I have to work fast. I reboot to a floppy, stick in the spinrite disk and have at it. "Spinrite can not find any harddisks it can work on". DOH. Reboot using a Win98 boot disk - similar response. DOH. DOH. DOH. DOH. doh. doh. doh. [fades off].

Later that night, I worked at it for an hour or so, to no avial. I then pulled out some of my old utilities. One was DriverManager - it has some raw disk tests. That would at least tell me if the drive is working right. I ran the tests, they all passed. OK. Used FDISK to just look at the partitions. They look fine. Getting sleepy. Bedtime. It will still be broken in the morning.

Where have you been old friend

"Computer, this is the captain, bring up my log"
"Captain, last entry in log, made nearly one year ago today"
"Great Scott! we must have been caught in rip in the very fabric of space and time itself"
"Or, Captain, you have just been too lazy to make an entry into the log"
"..um.. er.. well anyhoo.. Captains' Log stardate..."

Of Spinrite and Awful Disk Errors

As it turns out Spinrite is a wonderful product, just not the one I needed. Spinrites job comes in, while you're still reading the disk but having errors of one sort of another, it can salvage the disk itself by analyzing the disk for its weak areas and moving the data off of them, and then marking them bad. It can also recover data from 'bad' sectors and do a bit more. In the past year, I've used it several times on wierd acting disks with success. But, alas Spinrite could do nothing to help the old 4840 at this point.

She hates to hear those words

"I need to go to the store, honey."
3 Hours and 60 dollars later I'm back from our Amazingly-Limited-Inventory-for-a-Computer-Super-store. This time I have "Lost and Found" by the folks who make Partition Magic. In all my years I've yet to find a recovery utility that really works for me, and it was with much scepticism and consternation that I forked over the money. The entire program comes on 1 or 2 floppies. That can be a good thing - they could be sharp engineers who know how to write efficient code. Or. Not.

After a bit of fiddling with the configuration it seemed like it was actually going to work! Then I said, "Please select a drive to recover the files to." Hmmm.. -- Fast forward to me in the manual .. "Lost and Found is _NOT_ a disk repair tool, it is a data recovery tool, and as such it does not make any changes to the data on the disk and requires a second drive to restore recovered data to."
Second Drive. Hmmmmm.
Well I have a zip. Lets see 10 disks per gigabyte, 6 gigabytes equals 60 disks, at $12-$20 a piece. Not liking this math at all. Best case, I don't need all the data and we just use 20 disks. Still not cheap. I figured I'm in at the very least 200 bucks in Zip disks any way I slice it.

I gotta go back

So now I am once again at the Amazingly-Limited-Inventory-for-a-Computer-Super-Store and I start thinking about my options. I figure I have three . (1) Zip disks, (2) Hard Drive (3) Orb. Jaz was too expensive an option. The zips I just thought would be a waste, after this is done I wouldn't want that many disks - my parallel port zip drive is too slow to use except when I need to. A new hard drive seemed like the best option, but it was a bad week for hard drive prices, and they didn't have anything in the size I needed in the $200 range. [ Future note: Jump one year in the future to April 2001 - same store has 60 GB for $150 hard drives!] I'd been interested and following the Orb Drive. A 2 Gigabyte removable drive, for under $200, with $30 cartridges. I honestly thought it'd be vaporware and never actually appear on the shelves. And tada there it was. And it came with one disk already in the box. So now I'm looking at reasonably another $30 for a second disk and I should be set. So I again give the cashier a bunch of money, and walk out with a little bag of stuff on my way home.

Me and My Orb

Back home, installed the parallel port Orb drive with little trouble, had to to a bunch of floppy fiddling because of the abscence of a working hard drive, but in an hour or so things were going well, and Lost and Found was doing its work. Doing it slowly but working. I leave it overnight and wake up to "Error in program... things have completly run amok etc..". ARRRRG. Try again. Many hours later, same thing. UGGGGGGG. Call tech support, try a few things, switch to Text mode instead of hte pretty graphics mode. At a different spot, crash. ARRRRRG.

After days of trying to figure out whats wrong. Turns out its the software version and there's an update/fix on the web. Interesting question, how does one with a busted pc get an update off the web. Luckily I brought a spare.

I'll Find you once, and thats it!

Did you know that the license for Lost and Found allows it to be used on ONE DRIVE, in ONE COMPUTER only. Neither did I. I messed up and tried it in the working computer to see if it was my PC that was causing the trouble. The progrtam disk itself is copy protected so you have a bugger of a time if you tried to make a dupe disk, and it needs to write to the disk to run, and somehow it got 'fixed' on the new pc and that caused all sorts of chaos and required a fair bit of ugly hacking to get around.

Long and Short

The long and short of it is after a week or so or going at getting it started, it it worked. It copied the files to the Orb, thereby saving all my precious data. Whew.

Still going...

Whats inside today...


• Compaq modem still
• Generic ISA PCMCIA Cardreader card (slot in back)
• SCSI adapter for HP PhotoSmart Scanner
• Realtek ethernet card
• d-link ethernet card
• Maxtor (Promise) Ultra 100 ATA/100 UDMA IDE adapter
• MediaVision PCI VideoConferencing card
  
Thats about it. Actually one or two cards too many, and for now the PCMCIA reader and Mediavision cards sit on the desk till I figure out what to do.

Data Sprawl.

About 2 weeks ago it came to a head. I'd gone through my 'find stuff to delete' procedure for about the third time in as many days and I didn't find anything that wasn't either very handy or absolutely necessary. And I was trying to set up our website for the new one, and add and edit pictures and it was just not working so... time to upgrade. I'd seen an ad for a Maxtor 60G drive for $175 w/a rebate so off to the store. They actually had a few in stock. It was a 5400 RPM drive (vs. 7200 RPM) - but I think the Quantum Bigfoot they put in the 4840 is aomewhere around a 2 or 3 RPM drive, so I didn't think I'd notice the difference in 5400 vs 7200. So I give the guy money, he lets me out of the store and I go home grinning. Price note: the last hard drive I purchased was in 1995. It was an IBM 750MB drive. On sale -a steal at $300+. It really was a great deal at the time. Now its 80 times times the stoage for half the price. hmmmm.

Say ahhhhh...

Time to open up the 4840 again - physical install went great. Open case, unscrew hardrive cage, had about 15 minutes of wasted time trying to use the supplied 3.5 to 5.25 adapters - then I realized there were screw holes on the bottom of the drive that matched the drive cage, and I could mount it directly. Connected the cable, swapped the master slave jumper on the Quantum Bigfoot and rebooted with the Maxtor MaxBlast installation disk. That went fine.
In partitioning decided to break the disk up into several partitions.

1. Operating System
2. Main Data
3. Secondary Data
4. Alternate OS place.
My brother taught me the value of a separate OS partition. That way you can wipe and format and reinstall your OS without having to move your data. I figure around 5 GB for the OS partition should be nice. I had the old drive set up with a 1 GB OS partition and that had begun to fill up. For the data drive I thought that 40-50 GB was a bit too large, so I just split the difference, and have one 25 and one 20. My thought for the first data drive is for application storage, and the second for more raw data storage, eg. Audio, Video, Images etc. I made a 10G at the end for future alternate OS storage - eg BE OS, or Linux or something.

WinScrawny 1.0

I rebooted it and it worked great. Now for the installation. The Maxtor software will move all your data to the new drive and make it look just like before only bigger. I thought about it and realized that I didn't want that. It was time for a reinstall, and cleaning out. Then I remembered a program called 98Lite - it allows you to slim down Windows 98 and remove the IE4/5 hooks. The program has an interesting story - Summary : Shane Brooks, mild mannered research Biologist, feels Win98 ran too slow on his computer, and set out to replace the 'slow' Win98 explorer with 'fast' Win95 parts. He did it and now sells his work as a cool product.

I'd tried to use it before, but it does it's 'best' cleaning only on a new install. (or it did at the time). So now that I was in the middle of a new install, I'd give it a shot. I fortunately have a second computer connected to the net, which makes getting all this stuff - and the things you forgot to get before you start working on the PC -- really easy. The 98Lite download was about 350kb. I put it on a floppy,. and ran it on my newly formatted drive. It installed itself, and I ran the program. You have 3 options - Sleek, Chubby, something else, I forget. I was only interested in the Sleek option which removes a much of the Win98 explorer stuff as it can, and attempts to provide the most streamlined OS. On Sleek install it requests the Win98 CD. And it copies all the CABS & install files into its directory. When you're done with that process, it asks for the Win95 cd, and it gets the explorer files and a few apps. Then it starts the regular Windows install. This went fine. I wasn't sure if it took, then I saw the startup screen which displays a "98Lite" logo instead of the Win98 logo. And sure enough once in Windows - there was the WIn95 explorer. Fast and lean as can be. Very cool.
Why? Thats simple - speed. In the old Win98 whenever I would click on the start bar the 4840 would have to access the disk. Opening a submenu had a noticible delay with disk access, sometimes into the 3-6 second range. Even with nothing in memory on a fresh boot it was slower. Now, I did like being eble to edit the startmenu on the fly, and just drag things around, but the whole was more trouble than that was worth. I also have no need whatsoever for the integrated web stuff.

I reinstalled several apps, got the networking stuff up and going and downloaded a browser. Note: I thought I was stuck with copying something from the laptop to get a browser. (98lite -sleek takes out IE entirely :-). Then I remembered good ol' command line ftp.exe. I ftp'd to ftp.opera.com and got their latest and I was up and running. Next I thought now that I finally have room, lets give BE a go. I ftp'd to ftp.be.com and asked for the free Be package. 50+ MB.. thank the Lord for cable modems.

2B or nah

I ran the Be os install, which makes a big ol 500MB file on the disk and can make a boot disk and gives an icon to 'click to start Be'. I clicked, it went blackscreen and nothing. Drat!

Now I'd run this same version of Be on the 4840 a few months ago without any trouble at all. Just not enough harddrive space so I dropped it. I made a boot disk, and booted with it.. it got to the Devices part of its initialization and quit with a 'drive not found error'. Hmmmm I rebooted normal and then I noticed the message "EZ Drive thingy installed" Rut roh.

Good and not so

The Easy Drive thingy is a great thing. Its a device driver that gets loaded off the master boot record first thing.. and lets old BIOS' use new drives. Its software so thats a negative (takes up a bit of memory, may be a bit slower than native), but it works. Problems could be possible conflicts, how it runs with other operating systems, and to boot with it from a floppy you have to press F8 on startup, then insert the floppy and select Boot From Floppy.
Well, now I figure it out, I think that the 4840 BIOS _SHOULD_ be able to handle a 60G drive. I do an tedious search - and find that Yes, its possible that the BIOS wouldn't recognize the drive as what it is. But I figure its still not likely so, I re-partition it and format it the old fashoned way. I reboot with a Win98 boot disk and go from there. All seems just fine. Install Win98 Sleek, and some apps then I happen to click on the 'F ' drive (was going to put Be there again. And it gives a drive not ready error. Fiddle. Still drive not ready. So I jump out to DOS and look, drive not ready. Hmmm. I thought it may be a Windows problem. So I repartition, and I don't make the Last partition - I just leave about 10G of unallocated space (assuming Linux can partition it later). On reboot and reinstall things were fine. All disks read -- whoops except for E - so this time I let Windows Format 'E:'. That seemed to work but on reboot the whole drive was corrupt and wouldn't reboot on its own anymore. Next came the BIOS upgrade. Searched for an upgrade on Compaq's site and believe it or not there was one.. Not one to adress the issues I was having but it was something, so I installed that. Although this time it showed that it recognized the 60G drive with 57 some odd gigabytes of space. No difference. Also note that I have found NO was to get the BIOS to show you the standard bios stuff like, HD Parameters, Floppy Boot settings, time, date, memory etc. -so you can't even see if its autodetecting the HD w/the right parameters or not. Through the Maxtor utility, it appears that it was not getting them all right, the sect/track setting was off by about 4 - like 255 vs 259.

Brasmfrabit... snagaragl..

Now I'm ticked and I need to either take the drive back, or spend more money. So off I go to the store to find a "IDE ATA/100" controller card. Found one, w/rebate too. Maxtor ATA/100 card, which is really a Promise ULTRA100 card. Get that home and the first problem is the cable length. Compaq's riser board/card cage means the cables can't just run up from the board to the drives they've got to snake around all the cage and then to the drives. It was an 80 wire cable about 18" long, and it just made it to the hard drives. I left the CD-RW and the DVD on the system IDE ports. The box explicitly said 'Works with your current IDE controller to give you access to up to 8 drvices". I reboot. No go. Not a single thing. Wont even boot. I fiddle for about 45 minutes to no avail. The PC is showing no signs of detecting or using the Promise card at all. So I break down an call - Tech Support. They put me on hold for about 15 minutes and I talk to a tech. We go over whats happened so far and he gives me a couple of things to try to no avail. Then I'm passed on to Level 2 tech support where I get a nice lady who takes me through a couple of more things, again to no avail we talk about my machine and she says "Well we've had some trouble with Compaq's and this just may be the case here. " I thanked her for her time and hung up. ARRRRRRG. I try to look in the BIOS and see if theres a problem - and there is precious little there of any use - you can either turn the HD conroller OFF or toggle 32it acces and UMDA acces, thats it. No settings to say "don't boot off this disk or anything". Seems that its trying to boot off the CD - not finding a proper boot media, giving up and not really giving control over to the Promise card. Easy solution just run everything off the Promise Card and disable the internal card. That works except, the Promise card DOES NOT handle CD-ROM access outside of Windows. UGH.

Add the CD-ROM controller card from the other machine into the 4840 - connect the CD-RW to it. Run 98Lite, which thankfully copies all the cabs needed for installation. Now can start again. Seems to work.

Can't we still get along

Win98 lite finishes and we boot and works - but getting all sorts of conflicts, the sound card which has never caused trouble can't find a way to initialize, the network card wallahh... oop.. No CD-ROM support! Fiddle fiddle fiddle. Turn

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