The Vent and Rant Thread

[Catire]

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[pshrynk]

Originally Posted by Catire

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Oh, that sucks, man!

[DawnFalcon]

Mm you could put in a quicker HDD no? A more "modern" 2.5" (say a 80-100GB) which had a decent sized drive cache would probably do wonders for the speed.

I'd also like to throw a props out to the guy who mis-installed our boiler, ensuring it'd fail the first time there was a real cold snap. AND managing to run a pipe into next door's roof (no, really). Idiot.

[kindlekitten]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I've had to go through that.

Dennis

@ the Bugsy stories! I love to be able to remember my fur friends in stories! this was far from the first and far from the last. one of the things we accept when we have fuzzies in our hearts

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by Catire

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Ouch ....

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Mm you could put in a quicker HDD no? A more "modern" 2.5" (say a 80-100GB) which had a decent sized drive cache would probably do wonders for the speed.

I've no doubt it would. So would installing another 256MB of RAM, which would make it possible to actually run WinXP with something approximating performance. (Fujitsu said back then it maxed out at 384MB RAM, but there has subsequently been a 256MB upgrade module released for it, so maybe.)

But both would cost money. Anything I can do in software and clever configuration is fine. Anything that costs money won't happen. I'm doing this as much to see what performance I can wring out of limited hardware as anything else. (There are folks on the Puppy forums running it on P200s with 64MB RAM for limited uses, so my hardware isn't the lowest end.)

The shift to an ext4 file system appears to have provided about a 1/3 boost in drive I/O performance and faster loading for large apps, so I'm pretty pleased. I'm about to redo the Xubuntu partition as ext4, to provide some Glucosamine for its arthritic joints.
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Dennis

[DawnFalcon]

Well yea, but you can get them cheap off ebay, and I admit I don't have the patience to work with crap PC's, I either upgrade them so they work reasonably well or I set them aside.

I'd probably run a very stripped-down 98SE (I have an install which is about 80MB, and there are far smaller ones out there!) on that hardware. It'd be plenty fast enough and still do the basics.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Well yea, but you can get them cheap off ebay, and I admit I don't have the patience to work with crap PC's, I either upgrade them so they work reasonably well or I set them aside.

I've always enjoyed seeing what I could wring out of limited hardware. My first home computer was an AT&T 3B1, a single user workstation made by Convergent Technologies that ran a port of AT&T System V Release 2. It had a 10mhz Motorola 68010 CPU, and could boot and run Unix in one megabyte of RAM. Give it more (I had 3.5) and it flew.

My first PC was an old XT clone. That one I did spend money on: it got a replacement motherboard with a 10mhz NEC V20 CPU. The V20 had improved microcode, and could run apps compiled for the 80186. I had a couple, so... It also got an AST 6-Pak card with 1MB of EMS memory, configured as a 512KB EMS RAMdisk, 256KB of cache, and 256KB of EMS for things that could use it. It also had a Hercules mono graphics card and amber monitor, and two Seagate ST-225 20MB hard drives.

One driver was able to reallocate unused video memory to main memory, and the Hercules card let me grab 64KB, so it was a 704KB RAM system. The startup routines copied the command processor and a few other constantly used utilities to the RAMDisk and made it first drive in the PATH, and pointed things that used temp files like PKZip at it as the location. Sped things up nicely.

I ran the MKS Toolkit, a DOS package of all the Unix tools that made sense in a single-user, single tasking environment. The Toolkit included a remarkably complete implementation of the Korn shell, with everything save asynchronous sub-processes. I had aliases that made the DOS PRINT TSR act like the lp spooler. Booted to the Korn shell, you had to dig a bit to tell you weren't on a real Unix machine.

The big feature was the MKS INIT program. Installed in full Unix compatibility mode, MKS INIT replaced COMMAND.COM as the boot shell. After drivers for mouse, RAMDisk, cache and the like got loaded in CONFIG.SYS, INIT would load and print a Login: message. Supply a userid and optional password, and INIT called LOGIN. Login looked in an /etc/passwd file for a matching ID, changed to whatever was listed as that ID's directory, and ran whatever was specified as the ID's sell. I had an ID that ran the MKS Korn shell, one that ran JP Software's drop-in 4DOS COMMAND.COM replacement, one that ran vanilla COMMAND.COM, and one that ran DesqView.

No need to reboot to switch environments. Exit whatever shell I was using, and control returned to INIT and let me login using a different shell.

When I migrated to Windows for Workgroups 3.11, the structure was still usable. WfWG could run replacements for Program Manager, which were specified in the SYSTEM.INI file. So I had Toolkit IDs that replaced SYSTEM.INI with a version specifying the preferred replacement, then ran Windows. I spent most time in an IBM employee written freeware offering called Workplace Shell for Windows, which emulated as much as possible the Workplace Shell for OS/2. It didn't have Program Manager's 40 program group limit (which bit me hard), had icons on the desktop, and other useful features. When I went to Win95, there was no learning curve for my SO, because the stuff it added were things she'd been using in WPS4Win.

It stayed in place till I went to Win2K. (These days I run Cygwin for a *nix environment under XP.)

(I ran WfWG on an 8MB RAM 16mhz 386 machine. I compared performance with my 3B1, running full multi-user Unix SysV R2 on a 10mhz processor with 3.5MB RAM, and looked in the direction of Redmond, WA and said "What are you doing?" I still say that a lot...)

I'd probably run a very stripped-down 98SE (I have an install which is about 80MB, and there are far smaller ones out there!) on that hardware. It'd be plenty fast enough and still do the basics.

I have Win98SE, and 98Lite, so I could do that, and I've thought about it. But 98SE retained the Win3.X/Win9X "resources" limitation, and there's a fair amount of stuff I consider necessary nowadays I don't believe will run under 98. (I did just find an open source framework that apparently permits some NT specific software to run under 98, but I don't know details on what is supported.)

I also considered installing IBM PC DOS 7 on a 2GB partition, just for giggles. I still have a boatload of DOS software, some of which is still in use in a DOS box on XP.
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Dennis

[Dylrob]

Ugh, I'm such an idiot! I left a glass of water next to my laptop and Rodney, the curious soul that he is, knocked it over. (Hopefully it'll be okay when it dries out.)


Oh, and Cassie just stole my mouse pad...

[kindlekitten]

sounds like they need to go for a walk!

[badgoodDeb]

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

sounds like they need to go for a walk!

Around the aisles at Best Buy (insert your favorite store) to get a new laptop?

[ShortNCuddlyAm]

I know many stores in the UK (no idea for the US) have a no dogs (except guide dogs) policy - I wonder how they'd react to a pair of ferrets

[Fledchen]

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

sounds like they need to go for a walk!

I imagine that walking a ferret would be as hopeless an endeavor as attempting to walk a cat. There are harnesses and leashes for ferrets, but I'm not sure how useful they are!

[badgoodDeb]

Take the ferret cage (pictured in avatar) and put the whole thing in a baby buggy. Or pram, if you are on the other side of the ocean! Voila --- ferrets going for a walk.

No, not in the store, I guess.

[wodin]

Originally Posted by ShortNCuddlyAm

I know many stores in the UK (no idea for the US) have a no dogs (except guide dogs) policy - I wonder how they'd react to a pair of ferrets

Do you know how easy it is to get a "Service Dog" vest for you favorite pooch?

And they come in all sizes, I saw one the other day on a tree pound Yorkie! I just had to stop and say "Hi", and a sweetheart she was too!