Monica

Where should I buy a new computer quickly? My ideal machine will be here in a few days, will work out of the box (I don't have to install an OS and drivers and crap), and will come loaded with Win98 or Win2k but absolutely will not have been infected with XP. I probably also need some peripherals (printer, scanner, maybe USB hard drive), and if I buy all that stuff from the same place I want the configuration to have been done for me. It also, of course, has to come with an installed network card. Oh, and this is a desktop machine, not a portable.

I suspect that the OS requirement will prevent me from just going to Circuit City or whatever on Sunday.

Note that I haven't really mentioned price. It shouldn't be way out of whack, of course, but I'm willing to pay to (1) reduce my effort and (2) reduce my downtime. And I do not personally do any hardware installation that involves opening the case.

Suggestions?

The mouse on my machine at work has gone spastic over the last few days. I suspect it needs to be cleaned, but when I asked our sys admin about it (I couldn't see how to take it apart) he said he'd clean it and gave me another mouse.

Unfortunately, the replacement mouse is awful. It's too big for my hand. Using it hurts. I asked the sys admin to please give me my mouse back when he's done with it (or another of like kind), rather than just tossing it into the bin, so this will be fixed eventually. It's only been a couple hours, though, and already my wrist and hand really hurt. And this is a Windows shop, so there are a lot of situations where I really do have to use the mouse.

The previous mouse had no obvious label. (It had 2 buttons.) This one is a Logitech 3-button mouse. It is a little wider and a lot longer than its predecessor. I think it's also a little thicker. The previous mouse wasn't especially good, but it was a lot better than this.

I should probably just buy my own mouse for work -- then I can find something that's ideal for me, rather than just cheap in bulk. (I already bring in other personal hardware adaptations, so what's one more?) The (Logitech?) optical mouse I have at home is pretty good.

I went to CompUSA today to augment my poor little 6-gig drive, which is mostly full. (Well, Partition Magic is holding 1 gig hostage for unknown reasons, but I've reached my frustration threshold there and no longer care except as a matter of principle. Remember when a gig was a lot?)

After staring at the wall of hard drives for a couple minutes and being unable to find all the specs I wanted (seek time! give me seek time!), I asked the nice sales person who was hovering for help. I said: "I have a 2-year-old computer, a SCSI card, and a free USB port. I want cheap not-too-slow disk space, preferably external so I can use it for backups. I don't care about games. What do you recommend?" He dismissed SCSI immediately (and in fact they didn't seem to have any SCSI drives in evidence); I half-expected him to ask me if I was up to date on my goat sacrifices or some such. [1]

So then he said that I want either USB or Firewire. Tell me about Firewire, I said. I need an adapter that's about $50, and it's fast. USB is slow if it's version 1 (probably the case on a 2-year-old computer), and according to the disk packaging as fast as Firewire if it's version 2. (Actually, they're claiming it's faster, but I detect marketing fluff.)

A 40-gig USB drive costs $150. The smallest Firewire drive (I think it was 80-gig) was something like $350. Plus the adapter, of course.

Every time I have spent extra money to get the latest and greatest for a computer, I have regretted it. I still begrudge the $100 I spent in 1997 to upgrade the Pentium 133 package to 160 (? different chip, details forgotten), which was going to make all the difference in the world. Maybe it even did, for a month or two.

So I figured that if I find the USB too slow, I can upgrade to version 2 (that card also costs around $50). Meanwhile, the next computer I buy will almost certainly have the latest USB version as part of the package, while I'd probably have to buy Firewire (or move the card, if I'm not keeping the old machine). And having a USB device means I can use the drive to lazily produce off-site backups; I have a large hard drive at work (but no Firewire there).

And, when Firewire is the norm and USB drives are a quaint oddity, well, I'll probably think that 40-gig is on the small side anyway. :-)

[1] "SCSI is *NOT* magic. There are *fundamental technical reasons* why it is necessary to sacrifice a young goat to your SCSI chain now and then." -- jfw@proteon.com (John Woods)

I am new to the ways of USB devices, though I still think it's a documentation failure.

It turns out that when installing the driver, the camera has to be connected and turned on. Never mind that the driver is on a CD and -- in one go-round -- I explicitly navigated to the correct file on that CD. If the camera isn't there, Windows apparently just blows you off and lies about installing the driver.

So I can now download pictures (yay!). It appears that I'm not very good at taking pictures of myself, though, so updated userpics will, for the most part, have to wait a bit. (Arm's length is too close for the flash. Tomorrow perhaps I'll figure out how to use the timer, or go outside if it's sunny.)

Sometimes -- randomly, we think -- our file server goes catatonic. Its video card has been flaky for a while, so we don't always know what's going on when this happens. I almost never turn the monitor on, and VNC only works for the first few days of a boot, it seems. (So a reboot consists of a blind power-cycle.) This is the machine known as "hub", because once upon a time it was, but it's since been replaced with a Linksys box. I bought Hub (new) in 1997 as my desktop machine and downgraded it to network hub/firewall in 1999. Good thing we have a replacement file server in the works.

It's not really a file server in the traditional sense of that word anyway; nothing important exists only on that machine. We had the machine lying around, and it's cheap insurance against disk failure in a desktop machine. And it's a way to pass files back and forth.

Dani has been having trouble getting that replacement machine to see the network when booted under Linux. Tonight he put Win98 on it and that sees the network just fine, so it's not a problem with the card. This is pretty much his project, though, so I'm mostly staying out of it until it's ready for users.

Dani's desktop machine has been having network problems for the last few days. Through trial and error he determined that it was probably due to things being booted in the wrong order. He almost never reboots his machine, so he probably got hit with one of the random power flickers that motivated me to go out and buy a UPS for *my* machine. (My theory is that we got a flicker and his machine came back before Linksys did, and Windows probably isn't smart enough to detect a network that comes into existence post-boot.)

Or maybe he accidentally jiggled something on his router box while plugging in the Linux box a few days ago. Shrug.

There's probably an easier way to run a home network than the maze of routers and cables and stuff that we have, but what we have works so I'm not motivated to change it. When it comes to hardware configuration, I follow a hill-climbing algorithm and settle for the local maximum. I am not a perfectionist.

I need more disk space for my home machine. There seem to be three options (one of which I hadn't heard of before last week): add another internal (IDE) drive; add a SCSI drive (I have a card to support a scanner), or add an external drive that plugs into a USB port (this is the one I hadn't heard of before). There's a lot to be said for an external, portable device, and at $179 plus shipping for 20gigs (other sizes available) it seems reasonable to me. (I haven't really kept up with typical prices.) An internal drive would be cheaper, but I'd have to get it in there. I have no experience with SCSI drives; they're more expensive than IDE and I'm not sure what the payoff is. (Seek time?) So I'm thinking of getting one of the USB ones.

That's frustrating. Yesterday evening something wiped out a bunch of home directories on jtan (my unix service provider), and they don't know what happened yet. Maybe disk failure, maybe hackers, maybe something else. They're in the process of restroing everything from backups, but tapes take a long time to play. (I wonder if disk mirroring is even feasible -- not for everything, but just for the user files.) Currently it looks like they've restored to a full backup from a couple weeks ago but haven't run the incrementals yet. When they're done I'll have lost a couple mail messages that I saved yesterday but nothing major; it just looks like it's going to take a while to get there.

(The incoming mail is fine. In fact, I've been monitoring my mail by using emacs to read directly out of /var/mail. The only lost mail is stuff that I moved from my inbox to saved files yesterday. There was some of that, but not a lot.)

The sad thing is that they have a new machine coming in this week that they're going to replace the main user machine with, once they do an orderly clone and test and stuff. And it's not because this machine had become flaky. So if this is a disk problem, pity it didn't wait a few more weeks.

Oh well.

Just to clarify, though, I still think my provider is the best I've seen. I can't imagine that my previous provider would have been anywhere near as good at recovery or as dilligent about tracking down what happened so they could protect against it in the future. My impression after several years with them is that Telerama just didn't give a hoot about supporting shell users, but they weren't honest enough to say so.

I'm trying to debug a problem with my (home) file server. (Why do I have a file server other than my desktop machine? Because the machine was downgraded from its job of network hub after a failure that led us to just go buy a Linksys box, and Dani and I are geeks. Well, we actually do have a pile of shared data there, and this saves us from sharing drives on the "real" machines.)

So anyway, a while ago the monitor, or maybe graphics card, started to flake out. But it was only a file server, and the company that sold me the thing has since gone out of business (yes, the monitor was still under warranty, on paper), so I didn't work too hard to fix it. Then this past spring we got a power surge or one too many of those on-again-off-again power bounces, or something, and the machine became very ill. (My real machine has a UPS, but this one doesn't.) We brought in a better geek than either of us to try to revive it, and the eventual conclusion was that it was time to reinstall the OS. Ok, fine, it's a nuisance but it wouldn't be the first time.

Our geek suggested that as long as we were doing this anyway, we should upgrade the box from Win95 to Win98. This went against my gut instinct (you debug by changing exactly one thing at a time), but I talked myself into it. This was probably a mistake.

So we brought the machine back to life, though the monitor or graphics card is still funky. Fine, I said, I'll just install VNC, turn the monitor off or remove it entirely, and be done with it.

Now I have a mysterious behavior that I've never seen before. The VNC server starts automatically at boot; that's fine. I can use it remotely without problems. If, however, I turn the monitor off, then (1) VNC freezes (no further contact) and (2) turning it back on does not get me an image on said monitor. Once I turn the monitor off, in other words, the machine thinks it no longer has any video and it's not interested in getting it back.

I've never heard of a peripheral being able to affect the OS in this way, so I'm leaning toward it being the card's fault. But first, there are settings in Bill98 to explore.

I had already explicitly set the "power saver" options for the monitor to "always on", so that's not it. The display settings think it's a generic monitor; that sounds right. I tested the monitor theory by disconnecting and reconnecting the cable; everything is fine if I do that. (So it's tied to the monitor losing power, not losing connectivity.)

While I was writing this I was also conducting another experiment. I shut the machine down, turned the monitor off, and booted. When I was sure it was back up, I turned the monitor on. Voila, I have video. I turned the monitor off and back on. I still have video. (I also have a message reporting that "new hardware" was found, and it proceeds to "install" my "default monitor". I am not making this up.) I started a VNC client and cycled the monitor again; I still have VNC.

So, if I turn the monitor off and never turn it on again, except to directly talk to an already-running machine, everything will be fine. But if I boot the machine from the console and the monitor happens to be on (which is likely, if I'm at the console), then things are hosed.

Is that weird or what?