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Computers
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The thing that frustrates Lynn the most is the fact that most of my hobbies, and a lot of the necessities of family life (like budgets and finances), have segments that have weaseled their way onto my home computer . She never knows whether I am working or playing when I'm hunched over the keyboard in my basement office (which is often).
I cut my programming teeth on FORTRAN and Macro-Assembler programming for PDP-11 mini-computers, and have worked my way up through 8086 Assembler and Pascal to C and C++, and now do recreational programming in Microsoft's Visual Basic and Access. Never bothered with (and have no interest in) Macintosh computers. When things go wrong (as they always do), you have very few options to do anything about it with a Mac. With Windows-based machines, you can treat them like toasters (which is what a Mac proudly compares itself to), or you can use it as a Swiss Army Knife, but at least with a PC you have the choice. And they're a heck of a lot cheaper than Macs too!
Computer #1 (1983-1987; purchased for $7,100!) was an IBM PC2 (Rev 2 of the original IBM® PC 4MHz 8088 and precursor to the XT) with a whopping 256kb RAM, one 5.25" 360 kb floppy, monochrome (green) monitor with a whiz-bang Hercules® Graphics card (720 x 648 resolution in 2 colors - green & black), a new-fangled bootable Maynard® 10 MB hard drive (85ms access time - I paid $1,100 alone for that puppy), a zippy 1200 baud Hayes® modem, and a 9-pin Okidata MicroLine 92 dot matrix printer. (It is interesting to note that, even way back then, there were lots and lots of 3rd party vendors doing real good work and making very innovative products for the PC). I paid for the entire (substantial) down payment on my first house doing contract programming on this machine!!
Let's think about that 10 MB hard drive for a moment. I've bought a number of hard drives over the years; the first one was that $1,100 10 MB Maynard hard drive for the IBM PC2. In 2005 I bought a 250 GB replacement drive for $68.00. The most recent purchase was a 1 TB (1,000 GB) additional drive for under $80, and advertised better prices have been seen since. If we compare the cost per megabyte, we have:
Quite a drop! |
Computer #2 (1987-1992) was another true-blue IBM machine; a PS/2® model 50 (12 MHz 80286) with 1 MB RAM, one 3.5" floppy drive and an external 5.25" floppy drive for backward compatibility, a 14" EGA monitor, and one 20 MB hard drive. I bought an external 1200 bps modem to go with this puppy, and during its lifetime the 9-pin printer from the previous machine died, so I replaced it with a fancy new 24-pin Epson® LQ-800.
Computer #3 (1992-1996) was bought while we were living in Germany, and was finally recycled at a local recycling fund-raiser. It still worked up until the end - it was a Gateway® 486DX2/50 ISA machine with 16 MB RAM, 952 MB of IDE hard disk space (initially purchased with two 200 MB drives, but I upgraded both over the years), an ATI® Ultra display board with 15" SVGA monitor, a NEC® CDR-73M double-speed CD-ROM, Media Vision® Pro Audio Spectrum® 8-bit sound card, US-Robotics® 14,440 external fax/modem, and a mongrel $20 ISA Ethernet card added later once we got home and subscribed to broadband. While it was my main machine in Germany, I added an HP® 560C Inkjet printer to the Epson.
Computer #4 (1996-2001) is an aging beauty I still own (it looked a lot like the setup pictured to the right). It started out life as a Gateway 2000® 200 MHz Pentium® Pro® (P6-200 PCI machine with Venus motherboard), with 64 MB RAM, two Quantum® Fireball 3.8 GB hard drives, a Toshiba® 8x CD-ROM drive, a 4MB Matrox® Millennium video board driving a Vivitron® 21-inch monitor (yowsa!), an Ensoniq® Vivo90 full-duplex sound card with Altec Lansing® subwoofer speaker system, Telepath® (USR) 33.6 fax/modem with full speaker-phone capability (which I use), a 3.2 GB Iomega® Ditto tape backup. The Altec Lansing speaker system is still being used on my current main machine.
I added (and removed) a few things to the computer over the years; more hard drives (a Quantum Bigfoot 6.4 GB drive and a Maxtor 15.2 GB drive), and an internal 2x4x Sony® CDR (CD-ROM writer) I bought at a computer show for $65, a D-Link® 10/100 PCI network card, two 64 MB SIMMs (for a total of 192 MB now), I removed the Ditto tape backup to make room for the internal CDR, and I popped the 200MHz Pentium Pro chip and replaced it with an Intel OverDrive® 333MHz Pentium® II processor with MMX®. Not the screamer it used to be anymore, but the improvements kept it useful for a few extra years.
Computer #5 (2001 - 2005) was a top-of-the-line Gateway® S2000 Professional series with a 2 GHz Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor, 512MB PC800 RDRAM®, two Western Digital 80GB 7200RPM Ultra ATA100 hard drives, ATI® Radeon® VE display board with 64MB DDR with TV-Out and DVI, a SoundBlaster Live!® sound card, a 3Com® PCI 10/100 Ethernet, a 16x/40x DVD-ROM, a 16x/10x/40x Recordable ReWriteable CDRW, a 56K PCI Modem, an Adaptec® 2940 Ultra/Wide SCSI controller that formerly controled a Hewlett-Packard ScanJet 4P 300 dpi flatbed scanner, and Boston Acoustics® BA735 Digital Speakers w/Subwoofer, all in a Mid-Tower Case with 3.5" 1.44MB diskette drive, 5 PCI and 1 AGP slots, 4 USB ports, 1 Serial Port, 1 Parallel Port, and 2 PS/2 ports. Not content to leave well enough alone, I've modified the beastie a number of times - I bought a 3-port IEEE 1394 (FireWire) board (one port integral with the other front ports on the chassis, the other two out the back in traditional manner) to handle video capture and processing through a Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge (since replaced by a USB 2.0-based Dazzle DVC 150). I can now pull in analog (from cable, a VCR, or my Sony HI-8 CamCorder) or digital (from a digital CamCorder, DVD player, or other digital video device) video to be captured to hard disk for processing and output. Captured video takes up a lot of disk space!! I captured a 16 minute video clip and it bloated out to a 3 Gigabyte AVI file!!
This machine has since been re-born as the house server running Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition®, when I took the new no-name machine (described below) as my main computer. I removed the Ultra-Wide SCSI board and moved it to computer #6 (below) so the scanner could stay connected to whatever machine I am using as my main machine.
Computer #6 (2005 - 2008) is a home-built no-name machine that was originally intended to become the new house server, but got pressed into service as my main machine when I encountered software that was too taxing for the previous machine. I picked up an MSI (P4MAM2-V) motherboard and a new-style Intel Pentium-4 (2.66 GHz, with a 533 MHz hyper-threading bus) CPU bundled together on sale for $80 ($110 off list). A bit later I found 1 GB DDR DRAM boards for $119 on-line, so I picked up one of those. I had a spare 200 GB drive, and an old CD-ROM drive that came out of my main machine when I bought the DVD-Writer. All I needed was a chassis and a power supply, and MicroCenter had them on sale ($20 for the mid-tower chassis and $40 for a 450W power supply). So my new 2.66 MHz hyper-threaded P-4 with a Gig of memory and two 200 GB drives cost me about $260 total. It was only used as my main workstation for a while, until I decided what to buy as a new machine (story below). When that happened, it morphed into a Linux machine running Fedora 8 for a while.
The saga to replace my current machine with a new one was an interesting journey. It all started on the 27th of December 2007, when I placed an order for a PowerSpec® G350 machine (Intel® Q6600 Quad Core processor, 3 GB RAM, 1 TB disk space, NVidia GeForce® 8500 GT display board with 512 MB display RAM, Windows Vista® Ultimate, two LightScribe® DVD/CD burners, etc. etc. etc., AND the ability to “downgrade” from Windows Vista to Windows XP if wanted) from MicroCenter online. The machine was projected to be delivered 2 weeks later.
On the 26th of January, 2008, an email was received saying that the machine had been on backorder for 30 days, so it was being cancelled. Company policy is to cancel any order that hadn’t shipped within 30 days. I hopped back online and saw that machine still available for purchase, along with the slightly cheaper one (the E360) with the same processor, 2GB RAM and only one CD/DVD burner, so I replied to the email telling them what I found online and suggested that I’d just re-order the same thing. They responded by pulling those two machines from the web site.
Since those two machines had the configuration I most desired (quad core processor, Windows Vista Ultimate, 2 or more GB RAM, industrial-strength video display, etc.) at an amazingly low price, I was intent on buying one of them or something like it.
I checked the MicroCenter web site periodically, and early in the morning on the 4th of February, the E360 machine reappeared on the web site, so I ordered it. Later that day (about 4 pm) an email arrived, once again telling me that the order had been cancelled, and the possible reasons given were either 1) out of stock, or 2) credit card problems. I knew the credit card was fine, so I called the 800 support phone number to see what their reason was. I was told that both the E360 and G350 had been discontinued and would no longer be available. I asked the service guy if he could tell me if the MicroCenter store in Cambridge MA had any E360’s in stock. He told me that yes, they did have them in stock, but he couldn’t say how many. I called the store directly, and was told that they had three in stock.
A trip to the store after dinner revealed that one machine had been sold already, and the two remaining were the display model, and an “open box” return. The open box return machine had been certified as okay, and the only things missing were the wireless keyboard, and wireless mouse. Neither of those two items were of interest to me (I use most of my machines through a KVM switch [KVM = Keyboard, Video, Mouse], and the keyboard and trackball are working fine), so I negotiated a discounted price for the machine because of the missing items.
Once home, I unboxed the machine and opened the case to install the extra RAM (two 1-GB DIMMs) to bring the total RAM up to 4 GB (only 3.4 GB usable by 32-bit Windows), then I hooked it up to the KVM switch and fired it up. It booted into a pristine new install of Window XP® - not what I wanted. I did some research and found that the recovery system was stored on a locked hidden partition named RECOVERY, so I tried (2-3 times) using the system recovery tool to wipe XP and install Vista. No luck; no matter what I tried, the only OS available for restore was XP.
The next morning, I called the MicroCenter 800 Tech Support line to ask how to get to Vista, and the support tech told me that only XP was on the hidden partition, the Vista install was on the DVD disk that came with the machine. WHAT DVD disk? Didn’t get a DVD disk. So… the “open box” system was missing more than a keyboard and a mouse!
After that I called the MicroCenter store to talk to the manager to see if I could get a copy of the DVD disk that was supposed to come with the machine. He went on a hunt for it, but could not find the disk either from my machine, or from the display machine. To compensate, he gave me a clean new copy of Vista Ultimate from his store stock.
I installed Vista that evening, and it all went well. Of course the clean new copy of Vista didn’t come with any of the specialized drivers for the display board or the TV tuner that came in the machine, so I had to hunt those drivers down and install them separately, but that was pretty easy over the internet.
I tried the included Windows Easy Transfer utility that comes with Vista (an updated version of the tool that came with XP). I have never tried that tool, preferring in the past to reinstall all my applications manually, and move my data manually. I was curious as to what exactly would get transferred, and how. I figured that it was a good time to try the tool, for if it didn’t work to my satisfaction, I could re-install Vista and start from scratch again without losing much effort. It ran for over 60 hours! Up to eight of those hours were wasted because a user-interaction-required question window popped up at some point during the work-day, after I had started the tool and left for work, so I was not able to respond to the question until I got home that night.
It finally finished up, and initially all looked well. The data (~400 GB) got moved, and my Outlook (not Outlook Express) email, settings and contacts were transferred, but the email address book in Outlook was empty. No problem, I’ll go into the contact list and set the properties for each contact list to be used as an address book… wait a minute… that option is grayed out on all my contact lists! I poked and prodded but could not get any address books to appear in Outlook. So I posed a question on the configuration forum on the Microsoft Office Online web site, and got a quick reply for the (non-Microsoft-employee) forum administrator:
My Post:
I used the Window Easy Transfer tool in Vista Ultimate (after installing Office Pro 2007) to move my files and settings from my old XP machine to my new Vista machine. All my Outlook settings transferred and were established, BUT... none of my contact lists are in my address book, and the properties option to use contact lists as address books is unchecked, and grayed out so I cannot check it! Address book services is loaded.
The reply was:
You never use WET with Outlook. It creates an Outlook profile that is corrupt. Create a new Outlook profile. Use a valid method to migrate your data. While you are at it, open a support incident with Microsoft. They created and have not addressed or even acknowledged this problem. They should be embarrassed.
I tried the suggestion – didn’t work. Continuing the Windows Easy Transfer quest over the weekend, lots of tweaking and poking had no effect, but one last experiment finally worked. I shut down Outlook completely, then popped open the Control Panel, and in “classic” mode I fired up the “Mail” tool, which among other things manages Microsoft Outlook profiles without firing up Outlook. I deleted the profile I had, and created a new one, setting up the email settings manually, and linking to the existing PST file from the old machine. Works perfectly now.
Lessons learned about Windows Easy Transfer tool in Vista – 1) It took forever (>60 hours) for me, but I suspect that it was because I asked it to move data from two drives; and 2) the “transfer of files” portion is very handy, and the user account settings moves favorites and other parts nicely, but the transfer of Outlook data doesn’t work. Right now, I feel it is worth the hassle, as long as the fix is known. Repairing the damage done in Outlook takes about 5 minutes, once you know how to do it.
Have only encountered one program so far that is “iffy” under Vista (The Master Genealogist v7). It needed tweaking of the “run” rules (right-click on PROPERTIES on the program icon) to be able to run cleanly. I set it to run with Admin rights, and it seems to be fine now.
So now, I introduce to you, my newest computer...
Computer #7 (2008 - ???) is a delightful muscle-bound PowerSpec® E360 machine from MicroCenter that arrived in early February. It's a 2.4 GHz Intel® Q6600 Core 2 Quad Processor with 4 MB of RAM (originally came with 2 GB, but GB sticks for it were on sale for $14 so I bought two and installed them), two 500GB Hard Drives in a Raid-0 configuration (which merges the two drives into one virtual terabyte drive) and one terabyte drive as a separate drive for a total of 2 terabytes of hard disk storage inside the chassis, a
LightScribe® CD/DVD-RW,
a Hauppauge®
TV Tuner (NTSC/ATSC/QAM),
10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet Network,
8-in-1 Media Card Reader (wow is it faster than a USB card reader!),
430 Watt ATX 12V Power Supply, and Windows Vista® Ultimate. It initially came with an Nvidia GeForce® 8500 GT Video Card with
512MB Video Memory, but in early December 2009, it died (read all about it here), and it turned out that the motherboard was the culprit and it took my video card with it, so when the motherboard was replaced I also had the 8500 GT replaced with an Nvidia GeForce® 8400 GS Video Card with
512MB Video Memory; almost a one-for-one replacement. Later (Feb 2010) the dedicated fan for the CPU heat-sink died, and the BIOS kindly told me that the next time I booted the machine, so a quick trip to MicroCenter got me an exact replacement fan and heat-sink for all of $10. The machine is back to its screaming self.
Hooked up to this machine is a new HP Scanjet® G4010 flatbed scanner (replacing the SCSI-based ScanJet 4P), a USB 2.0-based Dazzle DVC 150 video digitizing device which hardly ever gets used because of the Hauppauge card and its inputs, two external 250 GB hard drives (one for photos and one for MP3 music), and an EZ-Dock raw SATA Drive docking station that lets me switch between two TB drives for backup and a 1.5 TB drive for video archive. All I have to do is power down the drive, pull the warm drive out of the dock, put the cold drive into the dock, and fire it back up. So I have 2 TB of always-online storage inside the chassis, 3.5 TB of swappable storage via the EZ-Dock, and 1/2 TB in external hard drives. That's 6 TB of instant or quick access storage.
Other computers lying about the house include: Lynn's laptop - an Acer Aspire One 10.5" Netbook, with a 1.6 GHz Intel Aton N270 processor, 250 GB hard drive, and Windows 7; Audrey's laptop - a Dell D810 with 60GB drive and 2 GB memory, bought at auction at MITRE. Audrey's desktop machine - a Dell OptiPlex® GX260 I bought at the MITRE employee auction for $230 (a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB of RAM and a 160 GB drive); Audrey's old machine - a Gateway® 
667 MHz Pentium® III with 256 MB RAM, DVD-ROM, 48x CD-RW drive, a 7200 rpm 40 GB and a 5400 rpm 30 GB hard drive; an ancient Gateway® 120 MHz Pentium® with 64 MB RAM that I occasionally use as a sandbox machine (removable hard drives in trays so I can swap drives easily and boot Linux®, Windows98®, Windows95®, Windows 3.11®, and DOS® 6.22); a couple of Sony® Vaio® Z505 notebook computers, an IBM® ThinkPad X31® and an X32® notebook computer, an OLPC® (One Laptop Per Child) experiment I acquired by buying two and donating one to a 3rd-world child, and another no-name machine that's currently out on loan to a family member.
For the other no-name I had fun and went to a local computer show/flea market and bought a micro-tower ATX case that included a 150 watt power supply, 3.5" floppy, 42x CD-ROM, and keyboard-speakers-mouse. Then I bought an empty PC-Chips® M754LMR motherboard with mounting space for either a Slot 1 (high-end) or a Socket 370 (low end) CPU chip, an on-board 64bit 3D AGP Graphics Accelerator with 8MB frame buffer, an on-board 3D PCI Sound system, an on-board 56k fax/modem, and an on-board Davicom® 10/100 Ethernet LAN (all these on-board features mean they don't require cards and slots). Then I bought a low-end Intel® 366 Celeron CPU (Socket 370 style) and 64MB of memory to plug into the motherboard. The total for the case, motherboard, CPU, memory, and parts came to $350. Finally I bought a Maxtor® 8.1GB hard drive for an extra $105. The only thing missing was a monitor, which I was able to come up with. I've since tired of the micro-ATX case and upgraded to a mid-size ATX tower case, and added another 64 MB or memory while I was at it (for a total of 128 MB), and I've since upgraded the CPU to a 450 MHz Pentium® III in a slot-1 form factor.
The Sony Vaio notebooks are sweethearts. Purple titanium! Its a Z505 SuperSlim Pro (3.75 lbs, 1.15" X 10.8" X 8.9"), with a 650 MHz Intel® Pentium® III processor running Microsoft® Windows® XP; 12.1" (1024 x 768) XGA TFT screen; 12.0 GB hard drive; 128 MB SDRAM; 1 type II PCMCIA card slot; integrated stereo speakers; and with built-in USB, firewire, MemoryStick, ethernet, and modem ports. Optional goodies include an external 8X max. DVD-ROM drive, external 4X4X20X max. CD-RW drive, extra triple-capacity battery, and carrying case.
I also added some other older laptops, an IBM® ThinkPad X31® notebook (1.7 GHz Intel Pentium M® processor, 1GB memory, 40 GB hard drive, wireless connectivity, and and an X3 UltraBase docking station that contains a combination CD-RW and DVD drive) and a ThinkPad X32 (2.0 GHZ Intel Pentium M Centrino processor, 1 GB memory, 60 GB hard drive wireless, and another X3 Ultrabase dock) bought at the MITRE employee auction in 2007 & 2008. This replaces an HP Omnibook 4150 notebook computer I also bought at MITRE auction a few years back, and finally donated to the Woburn Historical Society for use during their monthly presentations.
Lynn had a new machine for a while, a PowerSpec 6655 with a 2.66 GHz Dual-core Pentium-D 805, 1 GB PC4200 DDR2 RAM, 250 GB PATA drive, a Samsung 17 inch LCD monitor, and a Canon Pixma MP160 All-In-One photo printer-scanner-copier. She had this on a computer cart in her sewing room for about a year, but she obtained an auction-acquired Dell D810 laptop as her machine for a while, and this PowerSpec 6655 is now hooked up to a 42-inch Ölevia 542i Hi-Def LCD TV in the family room. The Samsung monitor is relegated to being a spare. Her machine now is a cute little 2-pound Acer Aspire One 10.5" Netbook, with a 1.6 GHz Intel Aton N270 processor, 250 GB hard drive, and Windows 7.
In my basement office in the Family TreeHouse where the network hub is, I run my main workstation, the sandbox machine, the house server, and occasionally my work-owned Dell® Latitude E6500 laptop off a Belkin® FIDZ104T 4-port KVM (keyboard-video-mouse) switch, that lets me share my monitor, a Logitech® trackball, and a generic keyboard among up to four machines. Saves space, and is very convenient.
Current computer inventory:
The house infrastructure supporting all this is a bit more elaborate than most.......
I've installed CAT5 Ethernet cable throughout the house, all terminating in the laundry room at the home-grown distribution panel . I've run nine drops so far, with a few more to go for completeness. In most of those places I've also run broadband cable TV and phone lines, with all three terminating in a single junction box with a triple-socket cover-plate holding one connector for each type of cable. I bought all my cable, connectors and stuff from You-Do-It Electronics® in Needham MA, a great place to shop - pure heaven for techno-nerds!! All the drops collect in one spot where the distribution panel is, and the panel is fed by my Comcast®-supplied Motorola® Surfboard® SB5120 cable modem that gives me unbelievable, stupendous, incredible, high-speed 24-hour access to the internet.
Connected to the cable modem is a LinkSys WRT54G 4-port plus wireless 10/100 Mbps broadband router that allows me to share the cable-modem connection with all the computers in the house. Naturally, I have encryption enabled on the wireless portion of the router.
Also connected to the cable modem is a Netgear® DS116 16-port switch/hub that allows me to connect up to sixteen wired computers to the cable modem simultaneously.
Sitting on the network and accessible to all house network computers (permanent or visiting) is an HP 4050N LaserJet® Network printer I bought at auction for $51. It was hardly used at all after 5 years of ownership (~1100 pages printed, toner cartridge was 7/8th full). I had a dickens of a time figuring out how to reset the IP address for the ethernet network connection, but once I did it was trivial to get any and all computers printing to it.
Now that we own a second house up in Maine, I've duplicated the IT infrastructure up there, where we're attached to Time-Warner RoadRunner broadband cable ("Basic" service, 1.5 Mbps downstream, 250 kbps upstream). There's a house server (the no-name Pentium 4) running Windows Server 2003 and hosting an internal web site with local information, a Linksys WRT54G wireless router connected to the cable modem, another HP 4050N LaserJet® Network printer, and everything's configured to match the setup at the TreeHouse, so we fire up our laptops up there, and the wireless SSID and access code is the same, the printer network address is the same, the local house web site address is the same. Works like a champ! I've also got a Panasonic BL-C131A wireless webcam pointing out a window onto the front lawn so we can keep track of comings and goings!
Happy Computing! And remember: There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary, and those who don't!
Copyright © 1973-2010 by Eugene F. Vogt. All rights reserved. Last modified 22-Jun-2010 8:25 AM ET. Send questions or comments to the Family TreeHouse WebMeister. View our Privacy Policy.
