Re: The Case is Altered


"JF" <jf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:oRSim0ACwLLHFwKZ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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Ventilation holes clogged with dust reminded me that it was time to give
my workhouse computer an autumn clean. A bit of surprise when I opened
the case and read my record of mods label. I'd had the machine more
years than I imagined. Time for a bit more than a clean out; time for a
new PC. I've always put my own machines together because I can always
do my own board-pulling repairs when necessary. Useful when you live in
the twigs.

I started with a new case. Medium priced but nevertheless a work of art
from China. Chinamen are crap at cooking but they do make exceedingly
nifty pooter cases. This new one was in dural -- half the weight of my
old case, thousands of stamped edges yet not a burr to be felt. Amazing.
I was able to slide my rack-mounted hard drives in and out of their
housings without skinning my knuckles. Neat as ninepence spot welding.
Ally can be a bugger to spot weld.

A nice feature was the reinvention of the IEC power output socket for
daisy chaining a monitor's power supply. With such an arrangement the
monitor is often really switched off along with the PC and not just the
raster or back light zapped. Not so nice was the miserable fuseless 13A
plug on the power lead. I haven't seen one of those strange plugs for
about ten years.

The new motherboard, a Fox Com, which packed an Intel Celery CPU, was
also ***-made. The case and board made an excellent pair. A single
connector did away with the old problem of finagling the right front
panel controls and LED leads onto the right IDC pins. There was no
speaker. At first I thought the case maker had slipped up but I soon
found a surface-mounted squawk button transducer on the motherboard.
About bloody time, too! Not only were all the bright Technicolor IDC
connector strips properly shelled, but they were correctly polarised,
too with keyways in all the right places. It was impossible to misalign
a ribbon connector \endash\endash a curse with the old Taiwanese boards
which, IIR, resulted in the owner of an English screwdriver bringing an
action because many of his PCs didn't work after assembly. It may have
been Alan Sugar. Also not a jumper in sight, either equestrian or
electrical.

From my reading of some of Microsoft knowledge notes I got the
impression that the XP's validation/activation protocols would not
take too kindly to a CPU change and a BIOS serial number change. I
thought that the 'no!' votes they would chalk up would cause a
severe case of the XP sulks. I changed my program/system hard disc too
by Symantec Ghost cloning the original disc to a new disc. Despite all
these changes, validation failure didn't happen. Most odd.

I got the whole thing working quite quickly in a breadboard state, that
is with all the gubbinalia spread out on the desk uncased. (Joke Alert:)
More a question of Intel outside rather than inside. So there it was:
all working neat as a newt's nostril for less than GBP200. Without an
expansion card in any of the few slots, too. A far cry from the GBP900
that an AT board and memory cost me quarter of a century ago. It took an
age of fiddling to get that puppy working in breadboard, and when I did,
it was to have a row on the Usenet about the strange piggy back memory
RAM chips that IBM used in those far off, dark days.

NB: My anonymous spurring partner swore that there was no such
thing, that copulating chips couldn't possibly work, and
therefore I was a liar. The Usenet doesn't change! A few weeks
ago one of my adorning sock it to me anonymous fans tried to
ring my robust Missouri neck by calling me a liar because,
according to him, the Usenet didn't exist quarter of a century
ago!

My Iiyama swivelling monitor comes with Pivot software to rotate the
screen image through 89 degrees to A4 mode. It's not necessary with
this new Fox Com motherboard because the graphics video driver includes
a swivel feature. Neat as a tot of grog.

Once everything was properly assembled, all that was left was to ensure
that my utilities still worked. Some them are quite old, up to about
20-years, and work blindingly fast from the command line. Norton's old
'Filefind' being a case in point. Entering, say: FF ab/p results in
all the files that begin with ab being revealed. Unlike most
Windows-based applications, it find every file regardless of attribute
or attribute of parent sub-directory.

Another program I can't do without is Microsoft's WINFILE. A small
nipple-neat file handler. It's been dropped from XP, probably because
it gives users too much control over the contents of their hard disc.
The NT version works devastating well under XP. If you know anyone with
Windows NT, see if you can cadge copies of files WINFILE.EXE,
WINFILE.HLP and WINFILE.CFG. It's great for doing all the things that
Windows Explorer won't let you do.

NB: Also it uses proper terms such as files, directories and
subdirectories. No 'folders' baby talk nonsense.

PURGE and ZAP are freeware packages that ignore Microsoft's possessive
attitude towards some applications such as Moviemaker, Pagemaker and
Outlook Express which are installed under XP (not XP-CORP though)
without the user having any say in the matter. Once installed they need
the crowbar approach of PURGE and ZAP to expunge them from your hard
disc. They won't shift the index.dat files from Iexplorer. These are
supposedly the footprint files that have forensic applications for the
FBI.

NB: Dr Eric Shipman's undoing was that he thought that
altering the patient records date-stamping of his Windows-based
application was enough. It wasn't. The plods took a tape
stream of his pooter's hard disc and quickly discovered that
the DOS date stamping didn't agree with the application's
date stamping. Farmers like tampering with their herd book files
to prove that that supposedly 20 week calf really was a 20-week
calf when it was sent to market and not a 16-week calf blown to
20-weeks weight with massive doses of female hormones. Some
wiseacre showed a couple of farmers how to reset the CMOS dates
and times on their pooters and now they're all doing it to
fake calving dates! Some odd gestation times in this part of
Surrey. Probably all over the country by now.

1DIR is a command line directory program that replaces DIR. I've
shortened its name to D. It has the advantage of ignoring file
attributes and showing the full contents of directory rather than what
Microsoft says you can see.

NB: Even so sometimes MS have the last laugh. I've tried
stripping the hidden and secret attributes of the content.ie5
file using the command line:

ATTRIB -H -S c:\tempor~1\content.ie5\

It works once but the wretched OS always restores the attributes
to what it deems acceptable levels. Anyone have better luck than
me?

Look at CNET and you can be forgiven for thinking that the world and its
son have reinvented the 'dump rubbish' wheel and want twenty dollars
or so to register for a fully featured version of their wunnerful
crapware. Cheeky bounders. The only one that works really well, and one
that I've been using in its various reincarnation for a decade, is
Abelsoft's Wash and Go. It works faultlessly and is fully featured.
You have to put up with a few chimes when exiting an unregistered
version. Only one feature is crippled. Use it with confidence. It's
about the only clean up program I know that will find all those Service
Pack 2 installation files that the set up program should've removed.

I think enough has been said about the brilliant free program,
Irfanview. Suffice to say, it has never been equalled and makes many of
the commercial offerings look silly. It proves that there is such a
thing as a free launch for all your files: pics, movies, mp3s etc.

Ashampoo's Window Power Up is another must. It's cheap, and for an
extra fiver the German authors will send you a personal CD-ROM
containing the application and a registration key. It has literally
dozens of options for carrying out all those configurations that
Microsoft don't trust you with. They range from the useful, such as
turning off 'can Windows phone home?' error messages to bizarre
oddities like removing those little arrows from desktop icons that
indicate a short cut.

There are anomyizer features such as the ability to cloak your PC's
identity on the web.

The duplicate file search facility does not rely on matching names and
file sizes. Like the Norton utility that Symantec had to ditch, it runs
a binary check on the files before offering them as likely matches. The
ability of Windows to create duplicate files is worthy of respect!

Nearly all the features with the possible exception of the boot
configuration screens and some others that write to the BIOS, can be
activated by fiddling with registry keys in pagefile but it's a
tiresome business. Far better to let Power Up do it.

When I first started using a microcomputer in 1981 or 1982, it was a
Tandy TRS80 Model 1 with de luxe features such as lower case letters
with proper subscripted descenders. No lower case 'p's that looked
like capital 'p's. With a pair of full-height disc drives in a foot
warmer power supply, the whole thing cost around GBP1000. About the same
price as an Adler electric typewriter. I needed a new typewriter at the
time anyway. Then there followed an XT around 1984, then an AT about a
year later followed by a second AT. Each purchase necessitated the sale
of a kidney to finance it.

This latest ***-made pooter is the cheapest and best yet. It's good
of the Chinese to industrialise their country and so louse up their
environment just to expand the wealth of the west by getting them to
spend less. In Spain I bought a pair of Chinese made binoculars for
about euro20. 60-20 I think. For quality they match my East German Leitz
binoculars which I bought from Dixons for silly money about 20 years
ago.

The curious subject line is appropriate and is offered with apologies to
Ben Jonson fans.
--
James Follett. Novelist. (G1LXP) http://www.jamesfollett.dswilliams.co.uk
Bloody Earthsearch on BBC7 every weekend for nearly six months and now
Power
Corp are to make a movie of Follett's ICE.
http://scripts.digicc.com/powtv/prog_synopsis.php?id=655

p.s. Keep an eye on the length of your sig file, please, James. This post is
OK, but you *did* quite blatantly transgress the other day when you appeared
to take the same cavalier attitude to a very simple and easily followed rule
as you did a few years ago. Don't forget, James, your "jokes" about the
"officials checking nose lengths" may come back to haunt you some day. Take
care and have a Happy Hanukkah/Chanukah - ***. who cares how they spell it
these days, so long as them goys let us celebrate it. (BTW, are they having
a special Hanukkah/Chanukah celebration in your home town this year? Or are
you still recovering from assorted ramadins and fatwahs?) Take care, Jimbo,
and don't you give up on me too soon, ok?)


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