Just a quick update. The new replacement floppy drive arrived from Ebay but sadly didn't work. I do think it's more to do with high and double density drives. I was also struggling with the ribbon types cus the PC style has a twist and the Amiga doesn't seem to have this. I decided to fit the dodgy replacement floppy that I have been using, and then I hit a snag. I couldn't see any way of getting the old floppy out. In the end I went on the forums and discovered I could remove the front panel or bezel by simply gently pulling it off the main case. Then you squeeze the two clips on the floppy tray and the whole thing slides out. This I did and took me all of a minute to swap the drives over. Still managed to get the ribbon in the wrong way round. All working and all running just fine. Just like an old car the machine took a few starts from cold but she did come to life and is all back together now and unlike a few weeks ago, working just fine.
Travelled all the way to Romsey to pick up an IBM Desktop an IBM PC 300 GL 230 - C 333 MHz And why ? Well I liked the shape of the casing. It is a real shame that more of the design skill of the earlier consoles did not get transposed into the newer desktops. There seems to be little regard for what computers really look like today. The easier options seem to have become the accepted standard and folk really don`t expect their computers to look smart. Maybe things will change when more machines find themselves sat below the TV screen.. The IBM styling is quite interesting in so much that they attempted to give each specific section of hardware a differing shape. The main case is ribbed to give a radiator cooling affect, inferring heat and speed no doubt. The floppy is thrust out proud of the rest of the case to offer itself to you, and the CD drive is set in suggesting inner storage. I would guess the guys at IBM thought they were creating a unique machine and took some time with the design. On the other side of the coin the good folk at Compaq really gave only a half thought to their casing, providing a gentle curved fascia as a very modest design gesture. One thing about the Compaq I do like, is the easy to open slides at the back to give ready access to the inside. One thing I hate about Compaq is the loss of the BIOS stored on the hard drive has made this machine useless. IBM Desktop an IBM PC 300 GL 230 - C 333 MHz General Type: PC Recommended Use: Small business, corporate business Product Form Factor: Desktop Width: 45 cm Depth: 45 cm Height: 12.8 cm Weight: 11.4 kg Processor Type: Intel Celeron 333 MHz Upgradability: Upgradeable Cache Memory Type: L2 Cache - Pipeline Burst Installed Size: 128 KB Mainboard Data Bus Speed: 66 MHz RAM Installed Size: 32 MB ( 0 MB soldered) / 256 MB (max) Technology: CDRAM Form Factor: DIMM 168-PIN Storage Controller Type: 1 x IDE - integrated Controller Interface Type: ATA-33 Storage Floppy Drive: 3.5" 1.44 MB floppy Hard Drive: 1 x 3.2 GB - standard - ATA-33 Graphics Controller Type: AGP - integrated Graphics Processor / Vendor: S3 Trio3D Video Memory: SGRAM Installed Size: 2 MB / 4 MB (max) Max Resolution (external): 1600 x 1200 / 8-bit (256 colours) Video Output Supported: RGB Input Device Type: Mouse, keyboard
Always worth mentioning to folk what you do when you collect computers as I do. Take the other day... I was a local school and I happened to mention to the ICT guy there that I collected old computer stuff. When I left there was a big box of goodies left at the back of my car.. All the old Archimedes educational software for the 3000 series computers. What a great gesture. There are well over 300 disks here crammed full of Acorns best educational works. Sad to think that schools have probably junked all their software. Lucky old me. There is even the RISC OS Application Disk Software.
Very odd little box arrived today with SIM City Architecture 2 inside. Along with the guide is a Software Catalogue from Action Sixteen dated 1992. [ Digital Integration Limited ] with the following featured games... North and South, Sherman M4, Jupiters MasterDrive Superplex, Mystica, Destroyer, Rotox and F-16. On that SIM City thang this software allows you to create cities in different times - Ancient Asia, Medieval and the Wild West... Dunno about traffic jams in the wild west. Interesting that along with the Sumo Arena, Water Wheel Well etc you still get the Fire Department. And with Jousting Castle and Church you still get the Police and Fire Department. I guess the firemen arrive on horseback... :-) Please note that to run this application you need the original SIM City game.... and an Amiga.
The great subscription scam.... I use to quite like Norton as a piece of clever software. When I had my Windows95 machine struggling with all kinds of problems and finding Cleansweep a pain in the rear, I tripped across Norton's very wonderful Utilities package. In those days with a ZIP drive you could actually back up a running version of Windows onto a 100MB disk and run this in emergencies. With WinDoctor and Speed Disk I kept the machine clean and healthy. I also had Norton AntiVirus and all was fine in the world. I still have the computer but sadly no Norton because in about 2000 I updated the computer and it fell over... At the time I thought it was something I did, but having reflected on it our friends Norton had moved on from Win95 and their threaded software update caused havoc on my machine... It just wouldn't work. And because of issues with MS no doubt, the working version of Windows had long ceased to be a part of their application. All these changes to the software came from the updates... To which I subscribed. And lets not forget that I actually bought their software in the beginning... Thing is they dumped me in the gutter without even a sorry. Took me a good weekend to rebuild the hard drive, and now she is off line. No more Norton. Moving on though, as you do, I still had Norton on the Win98 machine, and still do. Works fine generally. Thing is though on other machines I have been less fortunate and when I have had cause to reinstall legitimate purchased software, their catalogue flips out and you cannot run live update. Further, if you have one Norton product on the machine that is no longer supported then LiveUpdate just won`t work and so all your software is dumped. Norton have taken to providing a Norton removal tool so you can also successfully remove software. Thing is with the apps running and sometimes no way of controlling the thing you need a big boot sometimes and Norton have now provided the removal tool. And so, what is this weeks gripe. Well my beloved Win98 machine had a bad week. It all started with a lock out caused by Broadband. Seems when I disable radio on this machine applications like Media Player get confused... And having to restart from the button there was a severe validation problem and the hard drive refused to play ball. So I grabbed my Norton Utilities disk and tried to check the drive... Did this, but got me worried about losing the drive all together. And so I removed the drive and formatted a new drive and installed a fresh version of Windows on this. Took me a while, what with updates and the like, but after some hours I was back up and running. Now... remember that this is the same computer that I removed the hard drive from and I have active subscriptions and I purchased software... You guessed it try as I might I could not get Norton to work. Even though it said I had an active subscription, and even though I activated the product it still wouldn't get past the LiveUpdate... Anyway. I have Norton SystemWorks for Win98 in a box that cost me £60 saved for a rainy day never been opened. So I removed the other Norton stuff and put this on. Not possible to use.. Took forever to load. Took forever for my machine to boot up and then slowed the computer to a standstill. All academic cus the updates wouldn't get past LiveUpdate again. Anyway I tried another version of Firewall and another version of Virus Checker and these would not work either. And to top it off Norton wouldn't uninstall so I had to use the tool, which then also uninstalled components of my network card. I was getting pretty annoyed. The problem is three fold really... One is that although you buy the software, you have no control over what the updates do to your machine. Second, with multiple applications of Norton on your machine, a hiccup in any of the ' catalogues ' can cripple the whole lot. And thirdly the software is just too clever for its own good and demands an importance that requires a fast machine on line all the time... And the point... Well... Norton has cost me a fortune over the years and still does, and yet I sit today not being able to use any of it. They care not about what the specific upgrades do to your computer, and they fail to provide an integrated update service. Thinking about that... Strike that. I don`t want an integrated service, I just want Norton Utilities to update when I ask it, Norton Firewall when I ask it and so on. I don`t wan`t a universal Live Update... It doesn't work with varying applications on various platforms. It is really quite useless. The dreaded Ccapp still fails on both the Win98 machine and XP machine, and on the XP machine I get a load of errors when trying to switch off. Goodness me, its not rocket science. I just get the feeling they haven`t got a blind clue what they are doing, and care little about those that still may be running lower order machines. This should matter not, cus all they have to do is politely, advise that because are not supporting your application, they are not going to upload it to your machine.... Instead of buggering it up. NEXT: Autodesk... Hmmmm... We are talking big money for a version of Autocad 2006... This is less than a year old. They upgrade to 2007, and in less than a year any drawing created in 2007 will not be seen by a 2006 version. So, if you are in business you have to upgrade. This has cost even more money. Autocad costs thousands, not hundreds by the way.. So wouldn't you think that they would have their activation process working just fine. You would think.. The activation key for Autocad is 64 letters and numbers long.. So I guess one or two folk are going to make a mistake. I cannot register my version. I decided to take 2006 off stupidly and now I can't even reinstall as Autodesk say that its no longer valid. If I purchased a brand new tv system costing say £2500 and in less than a year the makers came round and put a hammer through the screen, I guess you would get pretty annoyed. Well, that's what Autodesk have done. They have said that you can keep your earlier versions but sadly do not recognise the activation keys... As with Norton its a computerised checking system that has got confused. You can sort it with a couple of phone calls, but really this checking and validation process is their problem not mine.. After all we purchased the software legitimately. And so what do you think the outcome is going to be of Windows Genuine Advantage. I dread the day. I could go on, but I won't. Other than to say this. As we supposedly progress in the world of computing ask why is it that we seem to spend just as much time at the machine watching installations and downloads and updating as we did when we just had the humble DD floppy disks. Faster machines, bigger hard drives have just resulted in over complex bloated software with a over rated belief in self importance... For goodness sake it really doesn't have to be this complicated. I am still drawing and composing letters on a computer just as I was in 1995. You should try Norton removal tool. For some reason when you launch it, the software wants you to type in the words they display in a box. My goodness haven`t we progressed :-) scuzz
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Last updated 4th March 2007
Chandraise Kingdom