Building Computers

You can walk into almost any store anywhere these days and buy a computer, but do you know what you are getting? Most people neither know nor care. They simply expect it to work, whatever they get.

As misplaced as their confidence might be, it was worse just a short time ago. Hardware and software was much worse. There are a variety of reasons, particularly for poor hardware, but it mostly boils down to attempts to push feature-laden, sexy-appearing machines as cheaply as possible for as high a price as the market will bear. The usual shortcuts involve overseas manufacture (repairs, if possible, will cost more), cheap cases (opening the case almost guarantees getting a variety of painful cuts), weak power supplies (that cause a variety of mysterious symptoms), and crappy video cards (Dell's most notorious weakness, shared by many others, and the one component most likely to fail in all machines).

Those who want their computers to work and to actually do something were, until recently, forced to carefully select the critical components for the machine and either have it built or build it themselves. Bleeding edge gamers must still do so. For the rest of us, building a machine has become optional, although you must still know what to be aware of (or beware of) when shopping for a package deal.

The machine I am using right now was purchased as is. I hope never to open the case. It came with Windows XP Home which, at the time, I was expected to be able to support on my job without a machine at work on which to gain any experience or run any experiments. It also came with two optical drives, one DVD+RW/CD-RW and one DVD-ROM. It has a Pentium 4 running at 2.50 GHz, 512 MiB of RAM and a 120 GB hard drive, adequate to support its intended purpose of producing DVDs for Project Gutenberg. The only things that came with it were the keyboard and mouse; there was no monitor or speakers.

But that is the exception. Mostly I have my computers built. I start by selecting a case. Cases usually come with power supplies, but if I'm not happy with the power supply in the new case, I'll replace it with a higher quality one. Next comes the motherboard or, as some would state it, the chipset. However, the computer I just had built for Cathy (and Delia, although she doesn't want to use it) included the motherboard, too.

In general, I prefer AMD processors over Intel processors. AMD tends to run a bit hotter but perform better. However, I'm not at all happy with some of the available chipsets / motherboards and have wound up going for more conservative configurations with Intel processors over the past few years. I also go for higher quality processor cooling. Burning up a processor and motherboard once made me a tad bit more conservative.

With the case, power supply, motherboard, processor and as much memory as you can afford all in place, the new computer is mostly ready. Adding hard drives is almost trivial. If there is no video on the motherboard or the supplied video is inadequate, there are many inexpensive video cards that are simple to plug in. Sound, like video, is either on the motherboard or inexpensive and easy to add. If you are replacing an old computer, you may want to take the video and sound cards from the old one for the new one; you may also want to scavange the old hard drives.

When I built what is now my backup computer, I installed removable trays for the primary and secondary hard drives. That allows me to quickly swap between different operating systems. In addition, each tray has its own cooling fan, giving the hard drives additional cooling, contributing to a longer life. I've never seen this feature in an off-the-shelf computer. That wasn't the only additional cooling I installed. Cathy's new machine came with additional processor cooling and I've added extra fans on my backup computer.

If you have the impression that I stress reliability over performance on my machines, you would be correct. I don't do gaming or anything else that demands high performance, but I hate having a machine fail on me at any time.

I'll delve into the weaknesses of operating systems later.

Recovery Progress

Judging from the lack of comments, few besides myself are interested in this topic. I guess I'm just documenting my progress for future reference.

Today I managed to restore the munged bridge unit so it would once more connect wirelessly to my router. I then connected the backup computer and attempted to get it connected to the Internet. The computer works now but I wasn't able to restore the network connection for the Windows 98SE operating system ... and I ran out of time before I could try with any of the other operating systems.

The time waster was that I made a backup of a number of files to CD-ROM that I want to use on the main XP computer. The CD burner software has never worked particularly well on that machine and it has been a long time since I used it, so I had to play with it some to come up with the exact incantation to use when the system froze up each time. It took about four tries before I finally got my copy made.

If I have to make another CD-ROM within the next month, it will probably only require two tries. Either that, or I'll blow the machine up in the process. I never can tell in advance which way it will go when I'm using Windows.

If I had gotten the network working, making the CD-ROM would have been unnecessary. I could have used network file sharing to get the data from one machine to the other. But Windows never makes things easy for me.

Next, I suppose, I should try one of the Linux systems and make sure it can use the Internet. That shouldn't take too long.

[Update: this update is being made from Debian Linux (Lindows 4.5) on the backup computer. The network connection works fine from Linux.]

Recovering My Computers

My current primary computer, formerly my backup, now works with one of the two printers (the all-in-one that includes a scanner) and my camera, so I can now process the photos that Delia asks me to make of the displays she prepares for her work. I had some Wild Animal Park photos on the same memory chip as the fragrance display photos, so I'll upload one of those instead, to demonstrate that it's working. I'm sure you'd rather see wildlife than a cluttered store display.

Well, that didn't work. Xanga didn't want to do the upload. It didn't matter which photo I picked. But that's probably a Xanga problem, not a problem with my machine.

Anyway, I am now able to back up my PDA on the computer, too.

It all sounds so simple, too, as if moving these functions to this machine and this operating system was easy. It should have been easy.

It rarely is.

Take the PDA for example. It should have been a simple matter of installing the software, connecting the cradle and hitting the Hot Sync button.

Installing the PDA software seemed to go well. When I ran it, though, it kept asking which serial port the machine should connect to. It shouldn't connect to a serial port. It should connect through USB. There are four USB connectors on the computer, two in front and two in back, and far too many USB cables on top of my desk, where the cradle is. When I finally found the correct connector and plugged it in to a live socket, it said it would load the USB drivers and reboot the system one more time (I lost track of the number of reboots).

But I couldn't update my LiveJournal connection because I ran out of memory. The newly installed software had uploaded two large picture files and a video, standard with the PDA system but which I had deleted previously, and I had to delete them again so AvantGo could talk nicely with LiveJournal.

I can now back up the PDA desktop (calendar, address book, to do list) but I still haven't installed the software to support the PDA word processor and ebook publisher.

And I still haven't reconnected my backup computer, which used to be my primary computer, in order to retrieve all of the data files and book files I have on the hard drives there.

Computers are labor-saving devices that simplify our lives. We can accomplish marvels impossible just a few short years ago.

And if it appears that we are living longer, that illusion is created by the increased levels of frustration making it seem to take longer to get anything done.

The Universal Cure

Today Delia has been suffering from headaches, bad headaches, the kind that put you in bed all day. She has been taking NSAIDs (Non-Steroid Anti-Inflamitory Drugs, stuff like Advil, Aspirin and Tylenol) and muscle relaxants. And, this evening, The Cure.

Not too long ago, it was my turn with the headaches. I am not allowed NSAIDs, so I just lay quietly in a dark room until the pain passed. And, naturally, they fixed me The Cure.

A few weeks ago we were taking turns catching bad colds and were making the cure so constantly that we kept running out of onions and chicken.

The Cure is homemade chicken soup. We make it with lots of onions. I use ginger and anise in mine. Delia makes hers differently, as does Cathy. Even Derek, when he comes down with something in Boston, makes his own variation on chicken soup.

It helps a lot.

Escallation

Last week was a bad week. The problems have grown since their beginning.

For some time now, Cathy has been complaining that her computer didn't work. It would reset itself after just a few minutes of operation. Her virus definitions were up-to-date, so I finally took a look at it. A quick test indicated that the battery that keeps her ROM BIOS alive had died. I asked her to clean off enough space for me to move the monitor and disassemble the computer.

It took her over a week to clean up enough space for me to work.

I made sure which kind of battery the machine uses, then went off to get a new one at a cost of just $3. The machine hadn't been disassembled for several years, so disassembly required a bit of force. When taken apart, large amounts of dirt poured out of the box. Therefore, I wasn't terribly surprised when replacing the battery and reassembling the box didn't fix anything.

The computer was now completely dead.

I took it apart several times more, a task that was now simple, but could find no obvious signs of damage. So I took it back to the people who had built it for me. Of course the machine would require special proprietary parts they might not be able to get promptly, they said. I gave up on the idea of repairs.

They had a much smaller selection of cases than they used to stock, and the quality was disappointing. Only one box was of decent quality. It was also small and expensive. Given the choice between a good little box and a big piece of crap, I naturally chose the little, quality box.

The new box had its own motherboard. I had to add memory (512 megabytes) and a processor (2.4 gigahertz P4). I also decided to add a DVD+/-R+/-RW drive. The hard drive and floppy could come from the old machine.

They could have, but Cathy had the hard drive full of crap. She wanted to keep it all. The new drive would need some new software, and it had no place to go. I added a new hard drive, having the stuff from the old hard drive copied over.

When I got the new machine home, three things didn't work: sound, the printer and ... the high-speed connection to the Internet.

I got the sound working. Cathy says she always got the bad printer indication on the old machine and that it goes away as soon as you try to print something.

I couldn't get the computer to see the Internet, so I decided to run some tests on my machine downstairs, to see if I could figure out how to fix the problem. I managed to duplicate the problem on the other computer, but I couldn't make it go away.

Now both computers were unable to talk to the Internet.

I'm asking Cathy to back up her programs and software to DVD+RW. We may have to upgrade her operating system. I'll take her machine back to the people who built it tomorrow to see if they can find out how to make it talk to the Internet. If that fails, I'll buy a copy of the upgrade package and install it when I get home.

Meanwhile, I've had to press a backup computer into service for my use downstairs. I can probably never go back to the system I was using. It took me all day yesterday to get the backup computer set up as my primary computer, connected and talking to the Internet. Well, I was also doing laundry, but that doesn't really count.

Anyway, after several days, I was finally able to read email again. I have to train the new email program to recognize Spam, but that is a fairly quick process.

I didn't have my telephone working again until this morning. It had been integrated into the old primary computer. When I started using the high-speed link, I never removed the modem or phone connection. I had to do that yesterday, hooking things up wrong in the process. I don't use the phone that much and didn't notice that there was a problem until Delia got home and tried to contact me.

She had to come downstairs last night to tell me the phone wasn't working. I figured out right away that it wasn't plugged in. This morning I finally figured out that I had been connected to the wrong phone circuit.

And I have screwed up one of my two bridge units, the devices that give me wireless connection to the router upstairs. When I typed in the access password incorrectly, the unit vanished from the setup program and I haven't been able to get it back, not even by doing a reset to factory parameters.

You have to be very careful with computers. They don't forgive errors.

You would think that Cathy, deprived of email and IM contacts for weeks now, would be anxious to be back in contact with the world. It seems, instead, that she is content to use the new computer to watch prerecorded DVDs.

The AmEx Experience

For a while, several years ago, I was a licensed Life Insurance agent for Primerica, a subsidiary of the Traveler's Group. I was working on one of the two securities licenses I would need to become a full Financial Adviser when I quit the job. I could no longer do the work!

I have a history of migraines, but they have only rarely been serious. Once was in the late 1970's, when I was doing a lot of specialized report generation for the State Department to help them prepare their negotiations for the Panama Canal treaties. The stress of that assignment gave me other health problems, too, and the migraines disappeared when the special reports were no longer required.

The migraines would last up to three days. During the most intense period, any bright light or any loud noise was agonizing. I would seek the quietest dark place I could find to ride it out. Two headaches could ruin a week.

Migraines are curious phenomena. Before they start, you can feel them getting ready. Then there is a period of up to three or four hours in which you can suffer what they call the aura, various kinds of visual or auditory malfunctions. My usual aura was the kind they called scintillating scatoma, bright flashing lights and bright jagged lines and geometricals that completely obscured the visual field, effectively blinding me. Then the aura would be replaced by wave after wave of pain.

The migraines from the reporting didn't have much of an aura and I could often work through the pain. But when I was working for Primerica, the migraines were mostly aura followed only briefly by pain, partly because I had learned how to treat them.

The people I was working with didn't react well to my suddenly going blind every once in a while, although my clients never knew. The levels of stress didn't diminish. I bailed out.

When I posted my resume on the Internet, I originally left out some of the work I had been doing as being inapplicable to the kind of job I was seeking. When I lost my customer service job, I updated the resumes. I not only included the information about the customer service job, I added the information about my brief experience in the world of financial planning.

American Express Financial Advisers called me. They had discovered my updated resume and wanted to know if I was interested in working as a financial adviser for them. I took their computerized personality profiling test and sat through their presentation, then declined their offer. Although the conditions and benefits were much better than what I had enjoyed with Primerica, the work would have been just as stressful. I would have three months in which to pick up the three licenses (Life Insurance Agent plus two Securities licenses), which would require an investment of about $1,500 on my part initially, to be repaid double when I have the licenses. But I can't risk having my migraines return to cut short a promising future.

From what I've seen of them, American Express would be a very good company to work for. They are actively expanding right now and have many openings for people able to get the licenses and to work with people on planning their finances, a not-unpleasant task which is also financially rewarding. I don't really know why it stressed me so, since I enjoyed it while I was working at it.

But if you've had even one severe migraine you'll understand why I'm extremely reluctant to go ahead with this potentially rewarding career.

A Damn Cold

Cathy brought home a cold. It knocked her down for a day. I caught it. So far, it has knocked me down for two days and part of a third.

The first day, my head was totally stuffed up, my ears hurt, and I was totally unable to function. Delia made chicken soup and, wisely, avoided contact with me. I remained unconscious as much as possible.

I was wakened before 5:00 on the second day with a severe pain in my throat. It was impossible to get back to sleep. I was unable to talk before about 11:00 when, for some reason, my voice shifted to a very clear, deep bass sound. It was very strange going from a weak, scratchy whisper to an effortless basso profundo. Unfortunately, that wonderful sound soon vanished. The pain lingered.

This morning, the dreaded coughing started, shortly before 6:00. I have a tendency to develop bronchitis and, once I have it, to hang onto it. Chest colds may plague me for weeks ... unless I get a supply of my super cough medication. My supply is limited and I haven't gone to the specialist who prescribed it for many years, so it may be difficult (and expensive) to get a refill.

It's a beastly cold, one I don't want to spread. This morning I notified the teacher of my creative writing class that I would miss this week's session rather than risk spreading the infection to others, and I have to notify the people who were going to give me a job interview, American Express, that I'll have to postpone it for health reasons. I may have to postpone other appointments, depending on how my week-end goes.

It has been a couple of years since I've had a really bad cold like this. I didn't miss it at all.

Cathy's New Toy

Cathy bought herself a new Beretta. Unlike the car from Chevrolet that she bought many years ago, this one is 9 mm and fits in her purse.

After she brought it home, she spent a couple of weeks repeatedly taking it apart and putting it back together. She wanted to be able to do so almost automatically or at least effortlessly. She also wanted to work out some of the stiffness from the new mechanism, to get a little initial wear before starting to use it.

Cathy has a friend who is training for a career in law enforcement. They shoot together. Cathy has been either borrowing a weapon or using the .32-20 revolver I gave her some time ago. But .32-20 is an uncommon size and the ammunition is expensive. Ammunition for either 9 mm or .45 is much cheaper. Cathy wanted a quality weapon in which she could use inexpensive ammunition.

On her first trip to the range, Cathy used up three 50-round boxes of ammunition, which cost her much less than one box of the revolver ammunition would have. She showed me her very first target with the new arm. One shot missed the silouette by about three inches. Of the cluster of five shots in the head area, all were in the black and one might not have been fatal; three of them formed one ragged hole. The four remaining shots in the chest area would probably have been fatal: two dead center and two just to the right of center, in the heart area. Yes, the heart is on the left side -- when the person is facing away from you -- but when that same person is coming toward you, you want to hit the chest just to the right of center.

I've made sure that Cathy respects her weapon, knows how to handle it properly and is aware of the damage it can do. But I didn't teach her to pamper it the way she does, making sure it remains clean and in good condition. When she isn't using it, cleaning it or taking it apart, she keeps it locked away somewhere, I don't know where, in a locking pistol box she got for it.

Cathy is only dangerous when she wants to be.

She Flew

I used to be able to get up at 5:00 and not suffer. Now I suffer. Part of it is due to my diabetes. Diabetics typically feel best in the evening hours. Still, the flight left in the morning and getting up at 5:00 left us just time enough to get dressed, toss the bags in the car and drive to the airport. No coffee, no breakfast, and we both took our baths last night.

Delia doesn't wake easily. Without my prodding she wouldn't crawl out of bed at all before the sun is well up in the sky. She is able to get up on her own at 9:00 but not at 5:00. When the alarm went off, the first thing I had to do was to get Delia up and moving. Then I got dressed.

There were no serious misadventures on the way to the airport. Delia forgot her toothbrush and will have to buy a replacement in Atlanta or in Panama. I had trouble remembering how to adjust the mirrors in the van because it has been so long since I've driven it. But traffic wasn't too bad and we found a decent parking place.

The line to get through security was about 200 meters long. The bridge across the street is about the length of a football field and the line ran all the way up and back the full length of the bridge before going into the security snake, the area where it doubles back and forth. There were four lines for ticketing for our carrier and a baggage security area to go through before going to the security line.

Normally the First Class line is the fastest moving. Today, however, they had e-ticket kiosks where people with bar-coded e-tickets could check themselves in, scan their tickets and print their own boarding passes without waiting for an agent. International, First Class and those going to NASA needed an agent, as did those purchasing tickets.

Delia has been suffering pain in her back for years and it has been particularly bad lately. She almost broke down and went to the doctor yesterday ... until she figured out how the various doctors available to her would treat the problem, none of which would have been satisfactory. So she lived with the discomfort but did ask for a wheelchair when she checked in. Sometimes it isn't justified, but today it was. This has the added advantage, too, of bypassing the long security line, half as long by this time as it had been when we entered.

Soon after I arrived home, Delia called. She said that they had started paging me in the terminal. Mine is a common enough name that I was able to reassure her that it was somebody else with the same name, not me, that they were trying to contact. I may even know who it is that they were after. The little pirate has caused me no end of problems because he lives just a couple of miles from me and is always engaged in some kind of shady deals. I even met him once.

Delia wanted to talk. I, however, was now engaged in preparing breakfast for Cathy and myself. I had roasted a couple of different cuts of beef before Christmas and for New Years Eve and I had ground up some of the meat to make hash with. The hash could cook for a little while without burning too badly but I needed to turn the heat down (it came out dry). So I once more wished Delia a pleasant flight and we both ended the call.

Delia is still up in the air. She usually calls from Atlanta, when that is her stop-over, so I expect to receive a collect call later this afternoon. She'll be gone for three weeks. Cathy will join her for a few days in a couple of weeks, leaving me alone with the canine.

For those of you in Panama: be ready! Delia is on her way.

Hot Car

Our alarm dog alerted us to another danger Friday morning. This time it was a cop.

When I poked my head out of the door, the officer asked me if I had seen anybody around the red sports car parked in front of the neighbor's property. I told him quite honestly that so many cars come and go in the neighborhood that I had given up trying to keep track of them and their owners. It was at this point that the officer informed me that the car had been stolen.

Pretty soon there was another police car there along with a tow truck that hoisted the car up on its back and hauled it away.

Delia hadn't noticed the car at all. Cathy had noticed it only because it was badly parked, blocking the access road beside our property.

The car seemed to be in good condition, not banged up or stripped down, so I assume some kids took it for a New Year's joy ride.

A brand new sports car can be hard to resist.