Recent content by Barry K. Nathan

At one point in time, MS actually did sell standalone MSIE packages (think of a box approximately the size of the Win95 boxes, which says "Microsoft Internet Explorer" on it). Might have been MSIE 4 but I'm not sure. Anyway, they were about US$40. I may be remembering incorrectly, but I think...

In one of the more extreme cases I've seen, all the X11 programs were outputting garbled unreadable text and things like that. My experience is that usually the upgrades go well (especially when upgrading to 7.3, as opposed to upgrading to prior releases), but once in a while something will go...

Another story on the same site along the same vein (this one is much newer): Engineers, the silent, Anti-Social Killers

Google translation here Seeing the pictures alongside the machine translation is just unbelievably funny... BTW, is that someone's bank account number there?

This is what Win2K does when the page file somehow gets changed to a different drive letter. :( The fix involves editing the registry, if I remember correctly, but that gets you into chicken-and-egg problems. I think there's an MS Knowledge Base article somewhere that talks about this problem...

Note to Tannin: This, not the lack of a floppy drive, is the real kicker IMO. If NRG had a CD writer, he'd be able to just download Seagate's AAM utility, put it onto a bootable MS-DOS CD (thanks to floppy emulation), and run that. I've actually done this with IBM Drive Fitness Test and IBM...

I haven't tried it, but I heard a while back that it had a "run everything as root" paradigm (i.e., that it was insecure). I don't know if that's changed since then.

In October 1998 there were still BX boards on the shelves with BIOSes from May 1998 or so, at least in the US. I guess I made the assumption that the motherboard and CPU were of similar age. Now that I think about it, I have no idea whether that assumption was correct.

It could be an old BIOS that doesn't support the CPU (if you have another CPU there that does work with this mobo, you could put that one in, update the BIOS, and try the Celeron again). That, not a dead battery or the like, is what it's usually been when I've seen that kind of garbage.

PC floppy controllers I forgot the word PC in my previous post (the old 68K Macs use PIO on their floppy controllers, which is why the mouse pointer can't keep up during floppy accesses on those machines).

Actually, floppy controllers do use DMA, and it's not noticeably CPU intensive under Linux or *BSD...

FWIW, I've received 10,000RPM SCSI drives from IBM that were scarred and scratched right out of the bag! (not dented though)

I've heard some people argue that the recent VIA processors are the best x86 server CPUs (if you don't need massive CPU power anyway) because they don't need fans, and that means one less thing that can fail.

I've had this problem with this sound chip too. I really think it's drivers: Under Linux, I originally had a problem with the thing freezing a lot, but updating to the latest driver made it work. (No driver update ever made it work properly under Windows; I replaced it with a Sound Blaster Live...

Still needs horizonal scrolliing on both Mozilla and Konqueror.