| Monday
January 24, 2000
Solved several minor vexations regarding the iWill VD133
motherboard and Intel Pentium III 600 system running Windows 2000
Professional Gold Code. See last week for
details. This system uses Kingston PC 133 ECC memory.
The I/O Magic DVD 8x DVD ROM IDE drive works fine as the
only CDROM/DVD drive in a system, but with Windows 2000 if that is the
Master on the Secondary IDE, there is a delay of almost 2 minutes when
Windows 2000 comes up: you see the splash screen, the fuel gauge goes to
40% or so, and it sits there, no lights blinking no drives grinding
NOTHING happening for about 2 to 3 minutes; then it boots up normally. I
have since put the Hitachi DVD ROM IDE drive in there as master, and it
works fine, with or without the I/O Magic drive on as Slave. I have no
explanation, but I will try to get one. Understand that if you are
prepared for a long wait for boot up to Windows 2000 the I/O Magic DVD
works, and the WINDVD software that come with it will play movies under
Windows 2000 with no decoder card: this system has a 3dfx Voodoo 2000 AGP
Video card and the Hitachi DVD ROM drive, and a Pentium III at 600 MHz;
and the movies show fine. I make no doubt they would show using the I/O
Magic drive that the software came with...
I am assembling another Intel Pentium III 600 system on a
Tyan Trinity board; this board has the property of allowing a Pentium III
at 600 or a socket 370 Celeron at something lower. I intend to put Windows
98 on it, and see what happens with both those chips using Kingston PC 133
ECC memory ( although with the Celeron we will run the system at 100 MHz
not 133).
I will then transfer all the material including the page
maintenance from Princess, the Compaq Dual Pentium 200 Professional
Workstation that has served me so well for several years, to Fergie, the
new Pentium 600 with an iWill board. Fergie is of course a very fast
Princess. My wife tells me that may be undeserved in her case, but it's
too late to change it now. Anyway, I will shift all my "main"
operations from this Windows 2000 Professional system to Fergie. That may
not be as simple as it appears: among other things it means that every bit
of this web will have to be sent up to the web site again to get them
synchronized for time and date. That will take all night...
Other utilities and such look to be simpler to move or to
reinstall. There ought to be enough disk space...
I will then test out the new Pentium III 600 Windows 98
system and if that goes well it will replace Parsifal as my main games and
text writing machine. The old machines will become servers. Princess may
get Linux; with those dual processors she ought to do very well as a
general purpose communications and print server.
Roland Dobbins has been playing with the OmniSky Palm Vx
system and loves it; his and my experiences will be in the next column. If
you are looking for a pocket computer, think real hard about Palm Vx and
an OmniSky radio modem. The potential is enormous including for remote
control of major systems.
I have had to "twit bit" certain people who
simply can't stop sending me abusive mail with no content. Anything from
them goes to the bit bucket and I will never see it. I don't like doing
that but there are two people who waste my time without contributing
anything, and this is a simple defense. Outlook 2000 Rules work quite
well...
I have been religiously sending spam to SpamCop (see www.spamcop.net)
and have had the satisfaction of closing down about 25 spam operations,
according to Yahoo, Earthlink, AOL, and a couple of other services. That's
the good news. The bad news is that I seem to be getting EVEN MORE Spam,
some of it stuff that was closed down and is now sent to a proper address
rather than the one I got the original from. I am beginning to dream of
staple guns and burning buildings again. I also reported that I didn't
want any spam to the Direct Mailers Association, and I think that has
generated a bunch more Spam also. Clearly something has to be done, and
will be done. The reaction when Congress gets around to doing something is
likely to be extreme, and the cure may be worse than the disease.
Shameless Self Promotion Department: I note that THE
BURNING CITY is available at AMAZON although it is not yet in
print. If enough of you order it they'll print a lot more of them...
I was reminded today of Hillary Clinton's comment when
asked if small businesses would have problems with the costs of her health
care scheme: "I can't be responsible for every underfinanced business
in the country."
Why are politicians more and more like that?
TOP
|
CLICK HERE for
a Special Request. 
