Category Archives: PC

Happy new keyboard day to me!

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When I initially set this site up all those years ago, I never really planned for it to become a daily “blog” type thing. That just sort of happened. Much in the same way that I never intended for it to become a daily thing, I also never really planned to stop posting, that also just sort of happened.

As I write now, I have just had a birthday (33 candles, happy birthday to me!). As I sit and think about it, I have had more changes in my life -very drastic changes- in the last year (18 months to be fair) than I had experienced in the other 31+ years leading up to it. Without going into too much boring detail, I will just say that now, for the first time I can really remember, my life doesn’t suck. I am not unhappy. I can’t think of anything that I would really want to change or improve (sure I would love to be rich, and I have always wanted to have chiseled abs, but one mustn’t be greedy). A lot of what I used to post about here was self-deprecating, and with the changes in my life over the last year or so, I am just about out of that type of material. I guess what I am getting at here is that happiness just isn’t a very rich subject to write about.

That is the deep, philosophical reason for why I haven’t been posting anything lately. Now for the shallow, material reason that I haven’t been posting anything: My keyboard sucks!

I bought a new keyboard about a year ago, I remember writing a post about the process, but I can’t seem to find it now. Anyway, I always have a problem finding a keyboard because it has to, and I mean has to have four very simple features:

1) It has to be a v-shaped keyboard. Most companies call that “ergonomic”, but I happened across a keyboard that used that term for a standard keyboard. I guess having some wrist padding on the front of it also qualifies it as such. When I do get to writing, I write a lot and I write pretty fast. A standard keyboard starts to really burn on my wrists after only thirty minutes or so of concentrated writing action, so when I do decide to write something, I need the relative comfort of the v shape or it is right out the window.

2) The left, down, and right arrow have to be lined up side by side. I always thought that this was the only configuration for them until I started trying to find a new keyboard. For some reason a lot of keyboards now have all the arrow keys lined up almost in a cross pattern; like a video game controller. I can’t use them when they are set up like that. When you spend 30 years typing on them in one configuration, it is difficult to change to another layout. So any keyboard that doesn’t meet this very simple standard is out of the question.

3) The backspace key has to be a double-sized key. I am so used to using a larger backspace key, and I use it so often to correct myself while typing that if it is a standard, letter-sized key, I will end up with sentences that look like this “Teh=he cow jumpd=ed over teh=he mon=on”. That is assuming that the key next to the backspace is the “=” key. I don’t look at the keys while I type, but I also don’t really look at the screen. When I am typing, I am putting it to paper (well, the keyboard) as fast as I am thinking it, and I know, even without looking at either, when I have made a mistake. I will correct the mistakes as I go without ever having to look down. Unless, of course, the backspace key has been secretly replaced by another key, in which case I will be throwing a whole bunch of random characters in that I will have to go back and decipher later. So, no double-sized backspace key, no keyboard for me.

4) The [insert][home][page up] keys have to be in a single row right above another row with the [delete][end][page down] keys. For unknown reasons, some keyboards have changed those rows to being only 2 keys wide but three keys high. That may save them a fraction of an inch in overall keyboard width, but it seriously fucks with me when I am trying to find the keys. I may not get a hell of a lot of use out of those keys, but they need to be where they should be, and in the right damn order, when I do need them.

It would seem like those four things would be easy enough to find in a keyboard, but in practice, it is hard as hell to find all four on the same keyboard. First off, it seems that the v-shaped keyboards are falling out of favor. It used to be that if you searched keyboards at any pc supply website, you would get at least half of the returns for v-shaped ones. Now it seems that there are usually only one or two, usually either Microsoft or a brand that you have never heard of. Never anything in the middle of the road on that one. Not a cheaper one from a company that you may have bought some other product from to be able to judge whether you would like it or not based on previous experience (unless you count Microsoft, but if I get to basing whether I will like a keyboard on how much I hate the latest version of their OS, I will never buy another MS product. I still think it has been straight downhill since windows 3.1), either Microsoft of Nakashimiashi. Nothing else.

The last time I bought a keyboard, every Microsoft keyboard that I could find was missing one of my four key features. In fact the only keyboard that I could find which actually had all four was a Belkin, which I am sure you will all recognize as the leading manufacturer of pc accessories (I put that in as sarcasm, but for all I know they really are). The keyboard looked just about like this one:

I started having problems with it almost immediately. Since the shape of the keyboard is basically like a little hill, with the t and y keys right about the top of it, one would assume that the keys were somehow set up so that the keystrokes would be slightly off from straight down. One would be wrong. So while my hands were not sitting flat, it was required that I push the keys down straight, else they would be hard to push, and also stick a lot. This was a nuisance for sure, but something that I got used to since it was my only option other than a keyboard that either wasn’t v-shaped, or one that was missing most of the other features I was looking for.

As time passed though, the problem got much, much worse. The last time I actually tried to type anything other than an instant message on it, I had to spend at least 3x as long correcting myself as I did writing it in the first place. The keys were sticking on nearly every word, and some of them didn’t get pressed hard enough (or straight enough down) to show up at all. Note that the keyboard still function just fine, you just have to hold your hands slightly raised from it while you type. If you rest your palms in their natural position, you can’t push the keys straight down. That is both maddening and painful.

After having to type something on my pc, the wife decided to gift me a new keyboard for my birthday. See, she hated it so much after just one session, and a short one at that, that she had to do something about it. She ran into the same wall when trying to find a keyboard that was suitable though. When she finally did find one that matched all of my criteria, it was actually a Microsoft one. The one that she bought me looks just like this:

The layout of the keys is right, but the shape is just a bit odd. Some of the keys really are curved a little bit, and it feels a bit odd to type on it. However, it doesn’t seem to be having the same issue the old one did when it comes to pushing down the keys. Also to note that I didn’t install whatever it was that came on the cd with the thing. I have never done that with any microsoft product that I have plugged into my machine; every problem I have with my pc is with a microsoft product. Be it windows or messenger (which I use very rarely, and which always encounters an error on close), every pc problem is microsoft related and I somehow doubt that adding more ms products to it is likely to help -like putting gasoline on a fire to put it out. For now it seems to be working just fine for me.

And who knows, maybe if the keyboard works out okay for me, I might go ahead and throw a post up here from time to time.

I make no promises.

Technology sucks

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After years of screwing around with computers without ever running into any defective hardware or devices, I have really taken it on the chin of late. I detailed the problem I had with the eMachine that I recently bought, but I am happy to say that I am merrily typing away on that machine right now. So it did eventually get fixed, so no harm no foul.

Unfortunately for me, there have been other problems with computer related devices. A printer for instance. I bought a new printer shortly after I quit my job knowing that my antiquated cannon bubble jet wasn’t going to be able to print out anything approaching an impressive resume. I bought a Lexmark P4350, which worked fabulously for all of about five minutes. There are far too many motors or bands or something in that machine that relate to the paper feeding. One of those little bugger isn’t working right, so I have to feed the paper manually, one sheet at a time. I can send it in for repairs, however since I never took the time to register it, and of course don’t know where the receipt is, they are considering it a repair on out-of-warranty merchandise, which will likely cost a hell of a lot more than the machine itself did. Stupid broken printer.

Then there is the RAM that I bought to put into my shiny new computer. I put it into the slots, plugged the computer back in -which threw an amazing spark as the cord reached the case- and hit the power button. Of course the computer wouldn’t make it past the POST with the new RAM in it. Using the tried and true pull one, then the other technique, I was able to determine that only one of the sticks was bad, so at least one of them still works. Which is quite fortunate, since I have no way to get my money back on that either. I really should keep better track of my receipts. This one was over a month old though, since the RAM just sat uselessly on a shelf while I waited to get the new computer back. I don’t know what your house looks like, but around here something as small as a receipt, given a month to roam the landscape, is deep into the endangered species list, more likely already extinct.

So today I had to justify buying a new printer. That is actually a pretty easy thing to do. All you have to do is go check the prices to replace your current ink cartridges to see that it really isn’t all that much more to buy a new printer anyway. The brand name this time is Brother. I chose this one specifically because I had an old Brother electric typewriter (one which I got at a huge discount for buying the floor model after it was discontinued at Staples) which worked flawlessly for several years before it was eventually cobwebbed when I got my first computer. My boss happened to have one of the same model though, and it was still plugging away eleven years after he bought his, so it does have some staying power.

It is kind of like a crap shoot when you try to hook anything up to Windows. Xp certainly has a better compatibility list than any previous version, but the so called plug-and-play devices are still more of a plug-and-pray situation. The new printer was the latter, of course. Not only did Windows not have a driver for the printer, the printer’s own software would not install in Windows. It would just tool along for a while and all of a sudden stop. The hourglass went away, my cursor was still active, the task manager said the program was running, but there was just nada. The printer showed up in the printers section of the control panel but was listed as not having a driver, yet when I put the driver disk into the cd tray and told it to load the driver it just sat there staring at me…Mocking me.

So I searched out the drivers on the internet. Downloaded that. Uninstalled all of the previous printer drivers, rebooted the system just for good measure, and tried again. Nothing. I went to the manufacturer’s website to search out any known problems and that was where I ran into the first big problem: they don’t even have this model number listed on their website. I mean I know technology has a pretty short lifespan, but could it really have been so quick that the printer had become obsolete in the time it took me to drive home? I guess so, since I tried to register it by serial number while I was at the website and it didn’t like the serial number. I tried removing some of the letters to try to make it look like the models that they did have listed, but wasn’t ever able to get it registered.

I was able to get it to work though. It turns out that going that extra mile and actually connecting the computer to the printer can have a great impact on your ability to get the correct drivers loaded. In fact, once I actually plugged the god damn thing into the computer the cd started to autorun and went through the installation with very little interaction from the flesh bag at the keyboard. It works just great!

Unfortunately the registration problem is very real, and with the luck I am currently having with any device that has a microchip, I am sure that I am going to have to send this thing in for service sometime within the next couple of hours. I wasn’t sure if this was a tech support or customer service issue, so I e-mailed both of them. Hopefully one of them will be able to tell me what the problem with the serial number is, and why the model isn’t even listed on their website. Unless, of course, this is a one of a kind prototype that was stolen from some technology expo, then sold to Wal-Mart through the black market -I find that answer a bit unlikely.

eMachines

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Much like I will be offended when I am getting screwed by a large corporation, I will also give credit where credit is due.

I have posted a few entries about eMachines, mostly pertaining to why it is that I continue to buy the machines when they are pretty obsolete right out of the box. Since I don’t want to waste the time looking up old posts, I will sum it all up in a quick sentence: Buy a $300 eMachine, put in $300 worth of upgrades (video card, RAM, etc.) and you have a $1500 HP, Compaq or Dell. That is the type of math that I like (also it is much easier to find an eMachine that comes without a monitor, and the monitor alone is generally at least a third of a system price from other companies -on a low end system).

I have also had extremely good luck with eMachines over the years. My first was a 366 (466? I forget which) which I continued to upgrade well past the time when it was a viable system. I was able to get about six or seven years of use out of it, in computer years that puts it past a dinosaur, hell it has already become fossil fuel by that point. My next few computers purchases were all eMachines as well. I have just had really good luck with them.

So it was that in the middle of May I was thinking about upgrading to yet another computer. After pricing them on the major websites, I determined that it would again be far cheaper to buy a base eMachine and throw in some upgrades. I happened to see one for $280 and decided to go ahead and get it. Of course it only had 256mb of RAM, which really should be criminal on a machine that is running Windows XP, the OS alone requires more than that to function correctly. Of course it was only going to have 256mb long enough to fire it up the first time anyway so it wasn’t of any great concern.

I started it up just long enough to get past the “welcome to Windows” crap, as well as downloading the latest Windows updates (and if you don’t have your machine set to automatically update you are just asking for trouble; Windows is about as secure as a bank working on the honor system), and powered it down for some upgrades.

In went a shiny new 512mb ATI graphics card (pci-express) which would be the biggest upgrade from my current system (which is using a 128 mb card through a PCI slot). Threw in a gig of ram and powered the machine back up. I downloaded the latest Catalyst software for the video card, logged in to Guild Wars to download about a year of updates, and waited. Off and running in about a half an hour.

My wife was actually using the machine at the time (although she didn’t know it) when, after about an hour of play, it started to experience some display issues. The minimap was not showing anything on it, while the rest of it appeared to be functioning normally. Until she got to the middle of a major mission when, of course, the PC just shuts down. No BSD, no warning, just all of a sudden the machine is turned off completely. My keen observational skills lead me to believe that something may be wrong with the system.

Now, the eMachine in question uses an onboard nVidia graphics accelerator (which I had disabled in BIOS prior to poweing it up with the ATI card) and PCI bridge. I briefly thought that it may somehow have something to do with it not running with the ATI card, although that didn’t really make any sense. I know that they are rival companies and all, but the ATI card should be able to work in any system regardless of what other hardware happened to be in it.

Since I had not used the machine for any length or time before I installed the RAM and the video card though, I really had no way to know if it was the video card, RAM, or PC itself that was the problem. I started testing it in a kind of backwards way. I uninstalled all of the software associated with the video card, as well as the card itself, then powered it up again. I tried to play the game for a while in this configuration, and eventually got to a random system shutdown. So, not the video card. Next up to take out the new RAM and put back in the old. Do you know how long it takes to boot Windows XP with only 256mb of RAM? Jeebus it took forever (a little too long I suspect). I didn’t even try to play the game with only 256mb of RAM and onboard video because, well, I don’t think it would have even loaded it. So, just while mindlessly surfing the internet, system shutdown. No BSD, no warning, just powered right down.

Being the psychic that I am, I knew that the first thing the customer service representative was going to suggest was reinstalling the OS, so I decided to go ahead and try that prior to calling them. It would not reinstall the OS, but instead came up with an error about a corrupt fill in the Windows/system32 folder, which is never good news. Could I have already downloaded a virus? It took about four attempts to get the OS to actually reinstall, but reinstall it did. So, back to the internet. Back to a random shutdown. I was less than happy.

Now to contact customer support. I decided to use the online chat with a representative feature, for two reasons: 1)It would give me time to read what I was saying before actually saying it, as I was a bit fucking pissed off upset, and 2)The support reps are invariably in a foreign country, and I really can’t usually understand the majority of what they are saying.

There was one thing that I wasn’t planning to tell the rep, though, and that was that I had already removed the cover and upgraded the system (of course they would know it when they got the machine back, I just didn’t want the rep to imply that I had somehow screwed the machine up while sticking a card into a slot). I didn’t log the session with this guy, but I probably should have, because it was about the worst customer service I have had in a long time. I tried to be as precise as I could in the description of the problem; I gave the model number, the part number, the serial number, the problem with the system randomly powering itself down, and a detailed description of the errors that I received while trying to reinstall the OS (there were a total of four such errors, each one different). His first words (well after the “thank you for contacting support” B.S.) were “Why were you trying to reinstall the operating system?”

Since I am supposed to be giving some kudos to eMachines right now, I am not going to go into a lot of detail about this particular support session. It can basically be summed up with the following:

Me: There is something wrong with the system. It is randomly shutting down. I have tried to reinstall the OS and it has had errors during the installation. Once it did reinstall it continued to have problems with random power downs.

Rep: J00 juz need 2 reb007.

Me: It will not boot, in fact, even the system restore cd is failing to load.

Rep: Joo juz need 2 use teh systm re570re cd

Me: I have tried that, it will not work.

Rep: Joo suxor n00b,

It wasn’t really that bad, but that is kind of how I felt about it. He was repeatedly asking me to try what I had already tried, despite the fact that I assured him I had already tried it. At one point he decided that the “solution” to the problem was that the system restore cd was bad, which would explain all of the system power downs how, exactly? Oh yeah, the spelling might be a bit exaggerated as well. Anyway, eventually he agreed to pick the machine up and get it looked at.

So, on their own dime, eMachines sent me a box to put the system into, along with a fedex pickup slip to send it back to them. Which I did a couple of weeks ago. Today I got curious about the status and decided to contact support again, this time, however, the person I was chatting with was quite friendly.

I had thought that the hard drive was most likely corrupt, as that would explain why the system wouldn’t reinstall the OS. It turns out that I was wrong. It was actually the motherboard that was bad. The machine is currently awaiting a replacement.

So this low dollar machine happened to have a problem, and eMachines went ahead and picked it up, paid for the shipping both ways, and it is repairing free of charge, despite the fact that I had already taken the cover off of it. I don’t know if the other companies have since changed their policies, but it used to be that removing the cover voided all warranties.

Besides, a lot of people say that they have had problems with eMachines, but if they are willing to repair it with zero out of pocket cost to you, what could the problem really be? Aside from the problem with the first customer service rep, which was likely due a lot more to my frustration than his actual support; I know that he had to suggest what I had already tried, that is part of what I am sure is a checklist that they have to go through before they have a system picked up.

I have been perfectly happey with every eMachine I have bought so far, and this one, while it was less than perfect out of the box, was fixed without cost to me. kudos to eMachines.

After writing this, it occurred to me that I might have accepted a non-disclosure agreement, but I checked with eMachines to make sure before I posted it. I wonder if they would have said it was fine if I had written a scathing review? Ah well, I spent the time to write it, so here it is.

A lesson learned

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So you know how when you call any form of technical support line they treat you like you are about three years old -and stupid for that age-? Turns out they do it for a pretty good reason.

I am pretty good with Windows, not in the I can use a computer sort of way, but in the diagnosing problems with hardware/software sort of way. I don’t have a lot of confidence in myself when I have to start screwing with the BIOS, but I do it when I have to (on my own machine at least) and nearly always have good results (not counting the time when my mom’s pc had a boot sector virus and I just gave up and bought her a new machine).

I am familiar enough with Windows 95, 98 and XP that I can usually troubleshoot problems and repair them over the phone (that being software/driver type problems, not major problems). I was trying to help a guy out with what I thought was a software related problem just yesterday.

Microsoft recently released an update for the Windows Media Player, it totally fucked up the microphone on my machine. Well, technically it didn’t fuck up the microphone, it just made it so that I wasn’t able to use it with the program that I wanted to use it with (teamspeak being the program). For unknown reasons the update set all my settings back to default, thus not using the sound card that I had installed recently, and also for unknown reasons it set my mic volume all the way down and my line in volume all the way up. Yay Microsoft! I was able to solve the problem on my own machine in about ten minutes.

There was another guy playing the game I was playing who also was having problems with his microphone. I had never talked to him before, as he was new to our group, but I assumed that his problem was the same as the problem that I was having. I walked him through all the steps that I took on my machine to get it working, but his still wouldn’t work. After about fifteen minutes of text chat trying to fix the software problem I decided to ask a few different questions.

I had him run a mic test on his pc, which was not able to detect a voice at all. I asked him to check where he had the mic plugged in (a lot of people mistakenly plug it into the line out slot), which was correct. Then I asked him if he was sure that the microphone worked, which, as it turns out, is the question I should have asked first. He plugged in a different microphone and it all worked just fine.

I am telling myself that the other steps were necessary anyway, though I really don’t know if they were; his settings all seemed correct as I was walking him through it. At any rate it was a lesson learned. There is a pretty good reason why the technical support people think that you are stupid, usually you are.

Farewell old PC

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It was a different time back when I bought that PC. 466mhz was a pretty decent speed for a processor, 32megs of RAM wasn’t very good, but was certainly usable. The 4.3gig hard drive was a bit small, but there wasn’t that much to put on a PC at the time, what with everyone except college students still barely getting 56k internet connections. Windows 98 was the latest craze when I bought the machine.

That little Emachine held it’s own for seven long years. Sure the ram was upgraded from 32 to 256 over time, the hard drive went from 4.3gig to 40gig, a cdrw drive was added, as well as a 32meg Nvidia graphics card, other than that the thing was stock. It was yesterday that I finally had to realize that no amount of TLC could keep it going any longer. The motherboard finally just gave up.

I am not entirely sure what part of the motherboard is bad; the power still comes on, all the drives flash when the power is activated to them, after that there is nothing. No keyboard response, no way to enter BIOS, it won’t start from the windows98 cd, it won’t boot from a 3.5″ floppy, it is just dead this time. Still, it had a pretty good run for a five-hundred dollar investment some seven years ago (I am not going to count the upgrades since they were just necessary to keep the machine usable over time). It was a good PC, I will remember it fondly.

That is the reason why the PC I am currently typing on (purchased slightly over a year ago) is an eMachine, that is also why that was my first choice to replace my fallen comrade. I tried to go through DELL as I did to buy my Mother’s PC, but they want $99 for shipping if you spend less than six-hundred dollars now, as opposed to the free shipping if it was over four-hundred a month ago. I tried GATEWAY, but their systems are so horribly overpriced that there was no way I would buy one. So I found myself looking for yet another eMachine.

I went to the same place I bought this one, JR Computer World, to find that they seemed a bit proud of the systems they had for sale as well. It was a trip to the nearby (and accursed) Wal-Mart that finally sealed the deal.

How can the local Wal-Mart sell a 2.0ghz machine, with 512megs of ram, a DVD/CDRW combo drive, a 120gig hard drive, an Nvidia geforce 4 video card (integrated) and a 17″ CRT monitor for $574? I don’t know, all I do know is that it is a way better system than Dell or Gateway was offering and for a better price. It turns out that the reason Wal-Mart is taking over the world might really be because they offer much better values than anyone else. Who would have thought?

I suppose that if you really only use the PC for internet and email, even possibly occasional free games from POGO or POPCAP, maybe the system that I bought for my Mother would work for you. If, however, you want to be able to play some pretty graphics intensive games (such as Guild Wars), or if you have a lot of photos to store or share, you need a better system, espcially if you have a broadband connection.

I guess I am the odd man out on my system choice. Most people that I talk to say that eMachines are useless junk, I have found that they work far better than any other system I have ever owned. Not to mention that a seven year run on a motherboard is pretty good when it is being used every single day.

One additional bitch about all of the other companies that sell PC’s is that if you call them up and ask them what slots are available inside the machine they never know. When I called up eMachines, they sent me the specifications of the inside of the machine, complete with exactly what was installed, which slots were not in use, maximum RAM, maximum processor speed and etc.

Too bad the old PC had to crap out, I had always wondered if I could make it a whole decade before it died.

Hollywood movie porn names?; Onion horoscopes; Mom’s PC

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• This is something that I have been kicking around, inside my mind, for at least a month. Are film makers really trying to get Hollywood to start giving out Oscars for the worst named film? The summer releases this year seem to indicate that yes, they are. Or at least my assumption is based on the titles of said films.

Cinderella Man is the first up. It is a gay porn take on the original Cinderalla story. The prince eventually tracks down his lover, based on the size of his cock ring? No, it turns out it is a story about boxing during the depression. I know that you can only name one boxing movie Rocky, but come on, Cinderella Man? What the hell were they thinking? Of course the critical acclaim and box office gross for this movie seem to show that everyone other than me doesn’t think it is gay porn, I will attribute that directly to their lack of cynicism.

Next up is a movie called The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. I assume that this is supposed to be one of those chick flicks where women cry a lot. I don’t know, I don’t care. The title implies, to me at least, that the sisterhood that they speak of is not friendship, it is lesbianism. The traveling pants is a euphemism which implies that the women take turns being the dominant one.

Yes, I know that this is a very chauvinistic point of view, but it is so not my fault. The movie industry named the movies, they should have known that calling a man Cinderella might not be understood as a movie about a prize fighter trying to keep his family alive, and fighting only to meet that end. Similarly, using the word “Sisterhood” in the title of a movie sort of implies lesbianism, and when you throw in the “traveling pants” part of the title it really seals the deal.

I am certainly not a person that hates homosexuals, that being thin ice to skate when you have family members that are of that demographic, but were there no other titles available? Say, like, Dude That Beats the Shit Out Of Everyone, Helping To support His Family, well, that title seems a bit long, how about, “Poverty to Prince”? Why did Cinderella’s name have to come into this? With the crying chick movie it is not so easy. I can tell you right upfront, however, that most of the women would never fit into those pants even a year after graduation. Had they chosen a small necklace, or something of the sort, that would have been far more believable, and it would have added the bonus of being plausible. By that I mean that the women might continue to send a piece of jewelry around, while the pants that don’t fit would go into the recycle bin.

But, the big question remains. Which is the worst named movie of summer 2005?

It is Thursday, June 9, 2005

• I have been reading The Onion for quite a while, yet have never linked to it. Consider that situation remedied.

If you have never visited the site you should know that it is a must read. It is updated weekly, on Wednesday’s I think, with new content. It is news much in the same way that that George W. Bush is a level-headed leader with America’s best interest at heart: It is utter bullshit, but frequently hilarious. Some of the features may seem a bit campy, but when compared to what passes for actual news these days it’s not really that bad.

The horoscopes are probably my favorite part of the whole site. Not because they are always funny, not because they are usefull, but because they are never vague references that could apply to anyone. There is never anything like “Venus is passing the shadow of Mercury, therefore a difficult situation in your life will become a bit less difficult.” No, no, they are pretty damn specific. I have chosen a couple of samples from this week’s horoscopes to give you an idea:

Leo: (July 23—Aug. 22)
You must learn to stop screaming “Rape! Rape!” at the top of your lungs. Everyone can see perfectly well what you’re doing without the grandstanding narration.
Aries: (March 21—April 19)
You’ll be forced to run more than 50 miles by some cruel bastard who’ll rig your hat with a fiendish device consisting of a candy bar, a piece of string, and a six-foot stick.

The rest of the site follows the same lines. If you have never been, you must go. Funny, funny stuff.

It is Sunday, June 5, 2005

Mom’s New PC

My mother finally broke down and (with a bit of help from me) bought a new pc. It turns out that even people who don’t spend an enormous amount of time online still want their machine to run faster. In her case, having a 366mhz processor and 192megs of ram, it was a fairly inexpensive venture, well in the grand scheme of things anyway.

I went through Dell to order her new machine, hoping to get the cheapest model available (as they have tv spots with 299 dollar computers). Turns out that there is a 99 dollar shipping charge on their pc’s if it is under 400 dollars, so I was forced to make upgrades. Which is good, I guess, since if you buy 100 bucks in upgrades you don’t have to pay for the shipping. The upgrades that I made were doubling the RAM (to 512mb) and adding speakers (so that she could still have sound on her old pc). Of course the advertised 299 dollar PC didn’t have an upgrade option on the RAM, so I had to use a 349 dollar model as a base. After doubling the RAM and adding the speakers, it was over 400 dollars, which qualified for free shipping…Golden…

There is one tiny thing that I misled my mother about though. I was trying to get her a pc for about 300 dollars, and failed by about 100. Yet, the pc that I bought for her came with a free 15″ flat panel monitor upgrade. I asked the sales guy and he said that it would cost 70 dollars for it if you were to buy it outright, so, I just knocked 70 bucks off of the total that mom owes me for her new pc. I was in need of a new monitor anyway, and I could get another one for the same price I am paying on her PC, so it’s really a wash (I also gifted her the 13.2″ monitor that we had been using on our old pc). Yet, I didn’t tell her about it in advance, and I kind of feel bad. But, if she wants that flat panel monitor, I can get it for her for the 70 bucks that I knocked off of the price when I bought it for her, so, no big deal.

I suck

The first week of the new posting type jobby has passed, yet I never added an update on any other day than Sunday. That means that there is no way I could possibly know if I like it better or worse than the old style. Oh well, I am about the only one that reads this anyway.

PCs

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Sometimes being the resident computer geek in the family is a bad thing. In a couple of previous posts I bitched about my mother-in-law’s computer, and all that I had to do to get it working again. In this post I would like to bitch about my mother’s computer and all I had to do to get it working again, but even I am sick of hearing about it at this point. Suffice to say that it took me about six hours to get her computer working, involving completely removind her old hard disk and CD Rom, replacing them with other (used) components, followed by countless hours of trying to find both drivers for some of the components as well as trying to troubleshoot the error messages that I was getting after I installed the new OS. I plan to make all of the .dll files, as well as the drivers, that I found public here in the next couple of weeks, since they just took so damn long to find. I could understand that the drivers for a particular modem might be hard to find, while I can’t understand why when a lot of people experience the same missing .dlls when installing windows 98. It took me a couple of hours to find all of the .dlls, and one of them came prepacked with a trojan! I downloaded all of the files with my new system, scanned for viruses, then saved them to a floppy which I used to transfer the files to the system I was trying to rebuild. As I said, I plan to post all of these files on this website, since I found at least a dozen posts from windrivers.com that were needing exactly the same files, and the only one I found had a trojan on it. I did take the liberty of saving the file as a stand alone, which should make it show up as an actual .dll when you see the file. Again that is all in the future. Near future, hopefully.

• In semi-related news, I am trying to help out my neighbor as much as possible around the house. Her husband is currently in Iraq (not on vacation), and she rents from my boss. –(this is totally aside, but, this may also be why I am not gaining as much wealth as I hoped to. I want to help people when they need help. If my personal knowledge can save them from calling a ‘professional’ to fix it, that will likely save them hundreds of dollars.)– I had to fix a shower in her master bathroom, it took about an hour longer than it should have, but that was directly related to what they had done as a ‘quick fix’ for the problem. No details will follow; It is fixed and I asked only that she pay for the parts.

On my way out the door I was apologizing about not getting over there sooner, mentioning that I had been working on my Mother’s PC. It seems I should have just kept my mouth shut.

You know how they have a ‘poster child’ for damn near everything these days? I found the ‘poster child’ for pc’s. The subtitle should read, “This could happen to you.”

Okay, so in defense of this person, they do have McAfee Antivirus installed, but (and a big but), they don’t have a current subscription to it. Meaning, in a nutshell, it scans the pc for viruses that were out in 1999 and no further. That is sort of like wearing a condom today to make sure you didn’t get a disease from that hooker next year, it doesn’t make a damn bit of sense and no one, in their right mind, would believe that they were protected.

I was not able to actually run her pc in the current state. I had to use ‘selective startup’ to get to a point where I could download a program to get rid of most of the bots. Thankfully, none of the spyware was that bad, the bad ones coming from porn sites, of which there were none on her pc. I did only a quick look at her pc. I ran only “adaware” and “hijack this” on it. She still has tons of stuff in her system tray (when you hit control-alt-delete) that I don’t recognize, but don’t want to fuck with…I think I have just realized why the techs always want to blank your pc: They don’t know either. They can set it back to factory standards, but they don’t know how to clear the latest malware. Maybe I am as good as them?

I dunno. I have made every PC that I have ever faced work again. Sometimes it takes minutes, sometimes it takes hours. Well, even that is not true, since my mother’s old PC is sitting by my feet (boot sector virus), and I can’t seem to make that one work. If only I could find a website that gives me the flash bios for her motherboard…

PC issues

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More Computer Problems! I bet you are happy you checked in today!

Before I get going on this I just want to mention that I am going to name a hell of a lot of programs that are free for download, some of which are extremely usefull, I am not going to link to any of them though (nor am I going to link to the viruses and spyware that I mention). If you can not find one of the programs on your own just email me and I will point you to it. Now to the PC problems.

The PC with the problems this time was my Mother-in-Law’s. Even though my Brother-in-Law is Microsoft certified, he is strictly a hardware tech, this pc was having serious software problems. It turns out that I am this families resident computer geek so I got the joy of looking at it. Lucky me. It isn’t that I didn’t want to help them, more that I really hate getting involved with big pc problems since they can often take so long to fix that it would seem so much more effecient to throw it out and start with a new one. In this case that was not an option. A lot of files necessary for their business are on the machine, as well as a lot of imaging software (very expensive imaging software) that will not work on machines that are not running windows 98. Note that the machine is using windows 98 as a lot of the problems they were having would likely not have happened if it was a newer OS. Anyway, on to the problems.

I plugged the machine in on Monday evening. While it only has a 400mhz processor, it has 384mb of ram and two enormous hard drives, still a usuable system (in theory). It took, and this is not a joke, about fifteen minutes to get it booted to windows. That was just doing a normal startup and letting it load everything that was in it. Once it was loaded the mouse moved very slowly, like it would go an inch or so across the screen, completely freeze, then go another inch or so, rinse and repeat. I opened the task manager to see a listing of about 30 files, the PC being a Hewlit Packard I was able to quickly figure out which ones the machine was actually needing, but the others ran the gamit from outright viruses to malicious spyware to worms. Just for fun I tried to connect to the internet and it told me that there was no modem installed on it (even though they had been on the internet when my wife picked it up thirty minutes before), and it could not detect a modem when I tried to manually install it.

I ran Hijack This on it and found that there were about 100 things running that should not have been there. I deleted all of them with the Hijack This software and rebooted to find them all back. Next I went into msconfig and manually disabled all startup items, then I set it to load only the system.ini and win.ini (this is a trick I often use on my old pc to get better performance on graphics heavy games). The reboot went a bit faster this time, but Hijack This was still showing tons of crap that shouldn’t be there. This time I removed every single item that Hijack This had found, which would be a really bad idea if the pc wasn’t as totally hosed as it was. I was still not able to get it to detect the modem, so I booted to safe mode.

For reasons that I still don’t understand, the modem was detected in safe mode, but windows would not search for a driver in safe mode. I was thinking that I might have gotten rid of some registry crap that was killing the detection of the modem, that would require a restart to take effect. I ran Ad-Aware while in safe mode anyway, but it simply froze. Not the machine, just the program. So I booted it back up in the (I’ll call it clean boot) selective startup mode. The modem was no longer identified, the majority of the crap was back, and I was feeling a wee bit helpless. I said fuck it for the night, that being in addition to various other words of curse that I may have uttered at the piece of shit.

The next day it was on. The two biggest problems with the pc (as found by google searching for some of the files loaded) were a vicious spyware called ISTBAR and a recent virus named Bagle.b. I figured that the spyware was the reason that I was not able to run AD-Aware, so I decided to tackle that problem first. Symantec.com has a fix for it, but it could not even detect it on the PC, even though I could search for the term ISTBAR on the system and find over 40 references to it, all zip files, oddly. So I did what us back room techs do; I deleted every occurance of the ISTBAR that I found then ran Hijack This again. I found several files with ISTSVC.exe in them, so I searched for that term and deleted all of them as well. I closed everything that was running in the close program dialog -except explorer- and ran Ad-Aware again. It worked this time.

On the next clean boot Ad-aware would not run, but all references to ISTbar were gone. As a bonus the PC also detected a modem. Of course the modem driver could not be found solo online; I had to download a zip file with the driver for every operating system from windows 95 to windows xp, it was almost 5 megs, and I am on a dialup…Once the modem driver was installed, I was easily online, albeit very slowly. I then downloaded Spybot, Spyware Doctor, Startup Mechanic and Registry Mechanic. The only usefull file out of that bunch was the Startup Mechanic. It was not usefull in that it got rid of anything for me, no, it just showed the directory where I could find the file myself and delete it manually…Once again, in theory…

It actually took me cleaning the suspect files manually from the machine to get rid of the known garbage. The PC is running at least %1000 better now, but I am still not able to get rid of two files. One is in the system.ini and the other in the win.ini directory. The problem is that none of the software I used ever told me exactly where they were. In addition to that I am not able to get completely rid of a few references to the ISTSVC.exe that are in the startup group: As far as the computer is concerned there is no file with that name present, but I know it is there since I can see it when I run msconfig.

The viruses (and let me tell you she had the beagle.b virus, the Netzky virus, and one other that I can’t place) were far easier to take care of than the Malware. She (Mother-in-Law) is going to buy a new antivirus program and bring it over tomorrow to see if we can get rid of the last little signs of all the crap that was on the machine. I am honestly not all that optimistic about it, I mean if symantec.com can’t find it what are the odds that some other virus protection can? I must also mention that I re-subscribed to my Norton virus protection as a result of this. My thought was that I would be able to scan her machine using my info, that was not the case. I thought briefly about sticking her hard drive into my tower, but that idea was quickly nixed when I remembered how long it took me to get that hard drive to work correctly.

Perhaps it is the anal, perfectionist part of me that really wants to get rid of every single trace of the problem in her PC? I think most people would be happy to get it back in working order; probably ecstatic to see that it is working at least %1000 percent better. I dunno. I just really wish that I could find the system.ini file and the win.ini file that are seeming to keep it from running spyware and virus scans. Of course the software that would do that is worth more than the pc at this point.

Even as I type this I am downloading another program. If this one doesn’t find it, and if the antivirus that she buys doesn’t find it, then I am just going to show her how to use a couple of the programs that I downloaded. I will probably delete Hijack This from her machine since she really could do damage with it, but the program Startup Mechanic shows basically the same thing, only they identify the files by necessary, usefull, useless, harmfull or unknown. In my experience they have been right on every count. I do wish they knew what the unknown ones were though, since those are the same ones that no other program has been able to identify and point me to.

I sure hope that the next time I post it isn’t computer related. I would think that you share that sentiment, but if you actually read this whole post you must at least sympathize.

Computer service

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Strange posting schedules seem to have become the norm around here. I would like to say that I am planning to change that, but I am not sure if I have any intention of trying to. For the most part I am going to just use this site for what I never really intended it for; random bitching when I am really pissed.

I may actually get back into posting a bit more frequently though, just because one can only play so many on-line games of dominoes before getting really tired of it. That being said, don’t expect much.

The reason that I decided to bang something out tonight is because of yet more computer problems…Not mine though…

To start the story from roughly the beginning, the PC that is used where I work was initially bought in about 1997. The software that is used for the purposes of the store can not operate on any system later than windows 98 (it has to have a pure DOS environment, something that you really can not do with windows me/xp). Sometime around 2000, the owner was trying to upgrade his system. Problem was that his daughter was trying to build him a new machine using all of the old parts (a new motherboard and processor, everything else the same) including the antiquated windows95 operating system that was already on the hard disk. It went horribly wrong.

It took a couple of technicians several days to get the machine to a workable condition, but even then a lot of the stuff didn’t really work quite like it should. Most notably everything related to the files for the store. I wasn’t able to get any support from the software manufacturer for the store files since they went out of business, but I was able to get some support from the manufacturer of the actual PC to POS software, and got it all working again. It took a damn long time and I prayed I would never have to do it again.

One day, in December of 2002, there was a huge power surge in town (for unknown reasons), which shouldn’t have been a big deal since the PC was plugged into a battery backup/surge protector. Problem is that the surge protector was plugged into an outlet that was not grounded. You know where this is going. Thing is, the communication cable between the PC and the Cash Register was connected, and the Cash Register was also not grounded. The power supply in the PC was completely fried, the motherboard in the Cash Register was partially fried, the communication cable was fried, and, as a bonus, all related surge protectors were also fried. It was a bad day.

The Cash Registers are under warranty (service contract actually) so that was not a big deal. The communication cable only actually burned the contacts in the connectors, which was easily fixed. The PC, however, was a totally different story.

The PC was taken to a shop called Computers and Things in Casa Grande, Arizona. They said that not only was the power supply bad, but the motherboard as well. I actually believe that was probably true. After the surge hit you could smell electrical fire from a long ways away from the pc. They were going to build a new tower, using only the existing hard drives. There was a problem. They said that the hard drives were so horribly infested with viruses that they were not even able to complete some sophisticated virus scans, the drives would simply freeze up. After a lot of discussion (and my steadfast gurantee that I had backed up every important file on a weekly basis) we told them to throw away the smaller drive, format the larger drive so that I could use it for backup purposes, and install a new primary drive. When we got the tower back we thought everything was golden.

It took me, again, several hours to get all of the store files reinstalled and the communications between the register and PC to work properly, but I did. The hand held scanner, however, never worked properly. I had to remove that communications port (via the device manager in the control panel) and restart the PC every time I needed to use it. I thought that it may be something related to different versions of DOS on the new system, hell, even now I don’t know why that was necessary. The thing is that it worked for our purposes, albeit a bit laborsome to use it, it worked.

Fast forward to last Thursday…

The PC had been running so slow, and randomly freezing, that I thought that it might be horribly infested with spyware. I attempted to download AdAware, but was never able to since the thing kept freezing. A tech that I know (though more an internet tech, as he owns an ISP) ran a program called HijackThis on it and found that there was some spyware, but not much. I did a disk clean-up on it, then tried to defragment it, freeze again. The bosses called an actual PC tech to take a look at it. At this point I was thinking it was either a worm of some sort that was in the Regedit or a bad hard drive, but since the hard drive was only a couple of years old I was leaning towards the former. I told the tech the symptoms, one of which was a “windows protection fault” during boot, which he said was symptomatic of bad RAM. The RAM test came through fine. He tried to run a hard drive test on it, but it froze before it got 2% into it. He said that he wanted to take it back and put it into a “clean system” to check it for viruses and trojans, which seemed like the next logical step. Problem is that he was trying to take the old hard drive, the one that was there for backup purposes only. When I told him that, he re-booted the system into the BIOS. The guys at Computers and Things had actually installed windows onto the drive that I specifically told them to only put back in so I could backup my files. I never thought to check that when we got the pc back from them, I was more worried about the whole “does it work” factor. It was at exactly that point that I knew the truth.

The guys at Computers and Things had installed windows back onto the old, worn, possibly corrupt hard drive. They then installed a brand new hard drive as a backup. They did exactly the opposite of what I asked. Bleh. I really should have actually checked it myself, if not in the BIOS, I could have simply clicked the drives to check their size and seen what they had done. Let this be a lesson to me to never take the word of a ‘tech’ without using my own limited knowledge to verify. The hard drives, both, went to the shop.

It came as no surprise to me when the tech, who was working with me yesterday, called me to say that the hard drive was bad. Of course the hard drive is bad. It is eight years old, it is used on a PC that is turned on and off a half a dozen times a day, it lived through a power surge that destroyed the rest of a PC, yeah, no surprise there. The only upside being that I have been using the other drive for backup purposes exclusively, thus it was working fine. Installed windows onto it and the PC was all better, to a point. Of course there were no drivers for the devices, took me a good hour to find the modem driver, but the machine runs just fine now. I didn’t try to get the store files running today though, since the one program has a utility on it that stamps something from the hard drive into a file called ‘reset.exe’, which can only be deleted by a tech at the POS manufacturer. I am sure that I will have it all up and working by Monday, but I am so pissed that Computers and Things used the wrong hard drive that I just had to bitch.

The “Computers and Things” that I am talking about is located in Casa Grande, Arizona. They are a bunch of shysters. Do not ever take your PC to them. Unless, of course, you enjoy paying hundreds of dollars for extremely inadequate service. They will take your money for sure, what you get in return is a computer that is just as broken as the day you walked in. Broken a bit differently, of course, but, broken is broken. They also offer the c2i2.com internet access, which is as worthless as they are. I went through c2i2 for internet access for about a year, I could never keep a connection for more than a half hour. Stay Away.

Meta; PC; Games

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Okay, so just an open question here. Please do respond if you have any personal knowledge on this issue.

Since the problems (conveniently discussed below) with my old PC continue, I decided to try to find some other sorts of malware/trojan/virus removal programs. Most of which I got from download.com. Here is the problem: They all give you a ‘free trial version’ which will show you all sorts of malicious crap on your machine, but not a damn one will actually remove it unless you pay for the program first. But, you see, I wouldn’t be looking for a new program to remove this shit if the current programs I have could do it… Currently all of the programs that I have to remove this sort of thing completely freeze the PC when the trojans in the registry are being removed. They simply will not do it. How in the hell does a company expect me to pay 30 bucks for their product when they won’t even let me see if it will actually do the job that it was designed for? It is like I just said to my wife, no one would ever expect you to buy a pretty new car just based on looks, they always give you a test drive.

I do understand that in the world of computer software it would be far too easy simply steal the products, hell I have a copy of Paint Shop Pro that is on something like day 1246 of my 30 day trial period (I actually did buy the license for it, but lost it on a system restore and never bothered to register it again). Isn’t there some way that they can make it possible to actually use the software before purchase? I was thinking that maybe it could quarantine all of the objects, even if only for 24 hours, to let you run any system scan you want to make sure that it actually got rid of the crap. Then, if you don’t purchase the license, it just reinstalls all the crap that it got rid of. There has to be some way that you can actually test this type of software before laying out cash for it.

The open question is: Do you know of any programs that will actually remove the trojans from the registry before making me pay for the program? Or, failing that, a program that will simply give me the actual path name so that I can do it manually?

Any help would be appreciated

It is Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Well you may have noticed that it has been quite a while since I posted anything here. No real reason why, well I guess there actually are a couple of reasons why, just they aren’t very good reasons. The main reason is that I just really didn’t feel like it. The other reason is just a lack of interest stemming from very little response to what I do write. I never expected that I would be getting hundreds of emails every day, but I would have thought that I could have generated a hundred in the course of a year, which did not happen.

As the anniversary for my site approached I briefly thought about not renewing the domain and giving up altogether. Why I decided against that is something I may never know. I guess I really do enjoy having the site when there is something on my mind that I really want to bitch about. It is a pretty liberating feeling to know that you can throw all your opininons out there for the world to see, regardless of the fact that only a handfull of the world ever actually read them.

This is all self-inflicted of course. If I had chosen to do something other than feature a couple of stories that I wrote a long time ago, like, say, have an actual theme, or actual content, it might make the readership swell a bit. Unfortunately, my only expertise is in the butchering of deceased bovines, I doubt that this would make for very stimulating reading for anyone who was not in the industry. I could spend more time commenting on news items, but that has been done to death IMHO and done far better than I could do it anyway. If I was really interested in generating some hits I could simply feature a Porn Pick of the Day, as it seems that the only search strings that result in hits to my site have the word porn in them.

When I made my decision to keep the site open, I made another decision at the same time. I am not likely going to ever be back to doing a daily update. That being the case I am going to quit wasting the time to save each page individually. I am going to start having a weekly update page with any posts made during the week separated by Horizontal lines. The latest update will always be at the top, and if the page seems to go too long I will add handy linking to the particular days (not that I forsee this as being necessary at my current posting schedule). This will have the added benefit of making it easier for me to set up an archive system, if I ever get off my ass and try to get caught up with that. The major benefit of this (for me) will be to have multiple posts on the same page, thus people who only visit once a week (and never click any links) may actually find something worth reading and, hopefully, commenting about. It’s my fantasy damn it! I can pretend to believe anything!

• Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. I treated my wife to dinner at a local place and we exchanged cards. Of course we actually exchanged gifts on Friday night, as we both bought each other computer software, and they were both newer titles, and we didn’t expect that either of them would work correctly on the old PC. Boy were we ever right, but more on that later. The games that were exchanged were Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 , which she bought for me, and Leisure Suit Larry – Magna Cum Laude which I bought for her.

If you have never played any of the Leisure Suit Larry titles, you should know that it is not exactly the type of gift that you should buy for a woman unless you are very sure that she has the sense of humor to appreciate it. The entire premise of the game is that you are a guy, a real loser, and the entire game is spent trying to get women to have sex with you. This lends itself to a lot of hilarious situations, and it is one of the most entertaining series of games I have ever played. The wife also loves the humor and situational comedy, that is why I felt confident to buy it for her, as a Valentine’s day gift no less. I even went so far as to pay extra for the uncut and uncensored version, just to gurantee the most humorous gaming experience. Yes, it is fun. I would highly recommend it.

The latest Roller Coaster game is pretty sweet as well. They completely changed the interface and I have been having a hell of a time learning the new commands, but it has so many more options that it makes up for it all. The single best part of it is the option to ride the rides. That lets me actually get onto the roller coaster and see why the people don’t like to ride them. It took me a while to figure out how to import the roller coasters I designed in the other games, but once I did I was easily able to see why no one wanted to ride them.

One of the coasters that I built has an intensity rating that is about 24 (which the game calls ‘ultra extreme’) and having seen it run through on the pc screen, I can see why. There is probably not a span of more than a half a second where there is not an inversion, there are so many loops and corkscrews that I lost count, and it is a launched coaster; launched directly downhill. I can see myself having a lot of fun with this game just trying to make the most fucked up riding experience (for me at the monitor). The strange thing is that when you sit down in the chair and watch the ride, you feel yourself leaning into the corners (at least I did, but that may have been just since it was such a new experience). Definitely a very enjoyable game. I will probably write more about it later, after I have gotten a bit more used to the interface and all of the available options.

Getting back to the issues with the old PC. The old PC only has a 466mhz processor, but it does have 256mb RAM, a 64mb 3d video card and a 40gig hard drive. It meets most of the requirements for games that are coming out today, the only one that it really lacks is the processor. The thing is that all of the titles will install and run on it, then randomly freeze. Not like just run really slow and choppy, but complete lock up. It didn’t seem to me that it should do that if the processor was just a bit slow…

I spent quite a bit of time on Friday night trying to figure out just what the hell the problem was. I found that by running Ad Aware from safe mode I was able to remove a lot of crap that I wasn’t able to do while in normal Windows (98) mode. Then, via AntiVirus.com, I found that I have two Trojans in my Registry. The unfortunate part of that is that it doesn’t actually tell you anything other than a name (which a search of my pc did not find a match to). I downloaded a Registry Editor from Download.com and got the same result. If you know anything about computers, you should see where this is going.

The only way that I am able to get rid of the trojans (which are both just spyware, but they are memory resident) is to boot into safe mode and run Ad Aware. Then I have to go to either a normal or clean boot, either options is going to load the Windows Registry, thus reinstalling the damn spyware. If I knew the actual command lines for the damn things I could just go into the Registry and delete them myself. Problem is that if the trial version of the Registry Editor told you the command lines you would never need to actually pay for it. I am certainly not going to pay the $29.95 to buy the Registry Editor for this PC, since it may or may not actually be worth that much at this point, but I sure would like to be able to get rid of those damn PC slowing trojans.

I actually have a ‘rescue disc’ for the pc in question ( the one that I am typing on right now, as it were) which could restore the entire thing back to factory settings. There are many problems with that option, most of which are not all that serious, but one is horrible. I could get past any of the problems with most of the after market stuff, like the cd burner, the video card, all of that. The problem is with the hard drive. When I bought the 40gig hard drive for this pc, it took me several hours of fucking around in the BIOS to get it to work properly and recognize the size of the drive. The drive did not come with any sort of an instruction manual, so I had to do a long guess and check game to get it to work in the first place (not to mention that I had to modify a cable to get the thing plugged into the motherboard, since the motherboard did not support this type of drive). That is something that I am really not planning to do again, unless it is obviously necessary.

If you happen to be privy to information about removing trojans from the registry of a windows 98 system without simply wiping out and re-installing the software, please do tell.

That is all for today. Tune in at some future point for more…