Upgrades:

• RAM- 192 Mb total
  
• D-Link 10/100 Ethernet NIC
  
• Polk Audio mini stereo speakers
  
• H-P Deskjet 630 printer
  

Function: client PC

OS: Win 98 SE

Upgrades:

• 20x CD-ROM drive (replaces 5-1/4 floppy)
  
• Samsung 10mbs Ethernet card (addition, Cable modem requires 2 NIC’s in server mode)
  

Function: Dedicated Internet server (via Time-Warner Roadrunner)

OS: DOS 6.22 and Win NT Workstation 4.0 (primary)

Notes: I don’t quite know what to say about his box.. "plain vanilla" about sums it up, I think.

LAN upgrade diary

8-19-99 Installed surplus P120 chip, a gift from a neighbor, in the Compaq Deskpro 590. Went real smooth! Thanks, neighbor!

8-21-99 Added modem and sound card to Compaq Deskpro 590. Somewhat to my surprise, they installed on the first try with no problems at all.. remember, we are talking Windows NT here.

3-15-00 Moved the LaserJet 1100se printer from the Compaq Deskpro 590 to the Aptiva 2137-E16. Though it worked fine as a local printer on the 590, I never could get it to work as a shared network printer under Win NT. On the Aptiva, it works fine and dandy as a network printer.

4-29-00 (Presario 4814) replaced Philips CDD-3610 CD-R/W drive with a brand-spanking new H-P 9310i CD-R/W drive. This is a 10 x 4 x 32 unit, and installation was a snap. Alas, it is not supported by Adaptec Easy CD Creator Deluxe v. 3.5c, so I’m stuck with the bundled OEM version of Easy CD Creator. To my utter amazement, the old Philips CDD-3610 fetched $70 when auctioned off on e-Bay!

6-2-00 to 6-5-00 Removed the IBM Aptiva 2137-E16. Reconfigured it as an early birthday gift / late wedding gift for my son Robert, and his wife Cassie. Removed 5-1/4 floppy drive. Pulled the old hard drives and installed an 8.4 Gb Western Digital along with a clean Win 98 install. Added an H-P 8250 CD-R/W drive (4 x 4 x 24) and a USB SmartMedia card reader. The latter works in conjunction with the Toshiba PDR-M1 digital camera, which was also part of the package. Yes, of course there was an ulterior motive in this gift. Namely, to insure that we get lots and lots of pictures of our granddaughter, Mikaela! <BIG grin>

6-3-00 Added H-P Pavilion 9694C. Added RAM, second hard drive.

6-6-00 (H-P Pavilion) cloned OEM hard drive to the Western Digital 45 Gb, thus making the WD the boot drive. The OEM Maxtor 40 Gb will be used as transient storage for graphics and digital audio. Added Lexar Digital Film Reader (USB SmartMedia reader) and 4-port USB hub.

6-13-00 to 6-15-00 Removed the Computer Warehouse, Inc. 486/66. Reconfigured it as a ‘just because’ gift for my youngest sister, Esther. This is her first PC. Removed the Ethernet card. Reformatted HD and installed a clean copy of Windows 95. Added Panasonic KX-P1123 dot matrix printer, Realistic amplified stereo speakers, and Sony CDP-1304 monitor.

8-3-00 Aptiva 2137-E84 arrived. Everything looks OK, and the initial shakedown looks promising! I then dropped in the Samsung Ethernet card and swapped in the hard drives retained from the 2137-E16. While I was able to get the machine to boot in safe mode, I wan not able to achieve a normal boot, despite many hours of tinkering.

8-4-00 to 8-8-00 Gave up and installed Windows 98 on the Aptiva 2137-E84. The Maxtor 13.6 Gb is the primary (boot) drive, with the OEM 4.0 Gb Seagate being an auxiliary drive. Also moved the H-P 9310i CD-R/W drive (10x-32x) from the Presario to the Pavilion, thus allowing me to move the Pavilion's OEM 8083b drive (4x-24x) to the Aptiva. I've wanted to do that since we first got the Pavilion! I blanched to see that 10x drive sitting in the Presario, when the lightning fast Athlon 800 machine had only a 4x. This left the Presario with no CD-R/W drive, of course, so I popped in a 5-1/4 floppy drive to fill the hole. I haven't had a 5-1/4 floppy drive online for quite a while, so I hadda do it just out of principle.

Loading Win98 on this machine was a real adventure. The install kept bombing out, with several different failure modes. After much testing, it turned out that the Samsung Ethernet card was the culprit. I had it in Plug-N-Play mode, which the Aptiva just did not like. Using the brute force method of resetting it to "jumperless" mode and assigning resources manually did the trick; Win98 installed perfectly on the very next go. When Plug-N-Play works, it’s great. But when it doesn’t, and that happens more than you’d think, it’s a right bastard. In retrospect, this quite likely is why the machine wouldn’t boot normally with the HDs in their original (2137-E16) configuration. Ah well, hindsight’s 20/20. And, actually, I’m sure that I’ll be better served by a fresh Windows install.

The next step after getting a clean, bare bones Win98 install was to clone the DOS 6.22 / Win 3.11 partition from the 2137-E16. This turned out to be incredibly easy. I used Partition Magic to make a suitably sized partition and copy the partition data over all in one go. Then I booted from a DOS floppy, typed sys c: and presto! Everything worked perfectly! I then installed Boot Magic, and that was that.

8-15-00 to 8-26-00 Upon our return from El Paso, installing the H-P 5pse scanner along with its Symbios SCSI card was the first order of business. This turned out to be problematic. Always a finicky process (the H-P 5pse resulted in so many service calls that it’s legendary among PC resellers), installing this hardware on the E84 bordered on the nightmarish. After the first couple of attempts failed, I researched it on the HP web site. I learned that the 5pse is not supported under Win98, only Win95. Incredible. H-P is not usually so shortsighted. But then given the track record of the 5pse, they’d probably like to just forget it. (Though it’s a great scanner, once you get it working!) I’d been trying to install it using the realtime mode drivers, which do not require an IRQ. And which, I might add, worked like a charm on the Presario. In desperation, I tried using the normal mode drivers, and danged if it didn’t work! Yippee! It wasn’t quite as easy as that, mind you. It would boot only in safe mode at first, and in addition to the SCSI card and the scanner, an Unknown Device was detected. However, once I disabled this UD, all was well. Not elegant, but you takes what you can get!

After that began the process of installing all my software on the Aptiva, and removing software and fine tuning the Presario in preparation for Dana taking it over. This part went well, with no problems whatsoever. To my amazement, even the Aptiva’s Lucent Winmodem got along fine with my old DOS comm program, Telemate. I never was able to accomplish that with the 2137-E16.

8-26-00 to 8-28-00 Installed 3dfx Voodoo 3 2000 PCI video card in the Aptiva 2137-E84. Sounds so easy. But in reality this was yet another nightmarish ‘adventure’. :-(

The 3dfx wasn’t the first card I tried, you see. I bought an ATI All-In-Wonder 128 PCI first. I wanted the video capture function, as well as the front-panel audio inputs. The TV function would be gravy, I figured. Plus, since the Aptiva uses an ATI chipset for its onboard video, replacing it with a spiffier ATI seemed to make sense. Wrong!

I tried the installation a bunch of times on the 26th, and never did get it to work. The one lucky thing is that it proved easy as pie to re-enable the onboard video after the bombed installs. After installing the ATI card the system would autodetect it as a standard VGA card, per the installation instructions. However, at that point there was no way to add a video adapter or monitor. They did not appear on the Add Hardware menu! &*#$ed Wintel computers.. :-(

The next day, I thought about trading the All-In-Wonder 128 for another card. But I really, really wanted the video capture feature, so I packed the PC off to CompUSA and ponied up $39 for "professional installation". The old dude working there proved to be real sharp, and after 3 hours of farting around he found some back door that let him add video card and monitor to the Hardware Profile. It worked! Pleased as punch, I took the PC home and hooked it up to my Proview PX-988. It autodetected the monitor, and all was well. I set the res to 1600x1200 w/ 32-bit color, and spent a happy half-hour playing with Photoshop, Graphics Workshop, and so on. The difference in performance was astounding! Then I rebooted for the first time and.. Disaster! No video at all. Rebooting to safe mode got me some incredibly ugly 16-color VGA, and Device Manager revealed that no video adapter or monitor was detected. Despite several hours spent tinkering with it, I had no luck in finding the old CompUSA dude’s back door. Double :-(

The next day, incensed at having spent $39 +tax for an unstable installation, I returned the Aptiva to CompUSA. Only to find that the old wizard works only on weekends, and the young dufuses (dufii?) on duty had no idea how to make the thing work. This after having to get testy with them to even get them to look at it right away. Disgusted, I swapped the ATI for the 3dfx Voodoo 3 2000 PCI video card. Took that home and bingo! Perfect install first time! Or so it seemed.

8-29-00 Upon getting some sleep, then enjoying the spiffy 1600x1200 32-bit color for a few hours next morning, I discovered that my scanner no longer worked. Triple :-( A little digging revealed that the Voodoo3 had commandeered the SCSI card’s IRQ. And that I was fresh out of IRQs. After verifying that IRQ sharing was turned on in the BIOS setup, I was left with two choices; try to get the scanners real-time mode drivers working again, or to disable something to free up an IRQ. Since I’d already tried the first, repeatedly, I disabled COM port 2, reinstalled the scanner drivers, and the scanner magically resumed normal operations.

Yes, conventional wisdom says that with Plug-N-Play devices, and with IRQ sharing enabled, this last contretemps should not have happened. But it’s common knowledge that not all devices play nice when it comes to IRQ sharing. Apparently, all the devices which could share IRQs already were. In retrospect, it seems likely that the lack of a free IRQ was the whole problem with the ATI All-In-Wonder video card. I don’t know whether to call the ATI card dumb for it’s inability to seize an IRQ, or the Voodoo3 rude for taking over the wrong IRQ. The former, I think, since it was relatively easy to understand and come to grips with that problem. I’m only a bit disappointed with losing COM 2. While I had planned on installing the power-management and monitoring software which came bundled with my UPS, and which requires COM 2 to work, I don’t really need it.

After a few hours of playing with the Aptiva, enjoying the stunning hi-res video, and including numerous reboots and scanning operations to verify the stability of the setup, I called it good. At that point I no longer needed the Presario 4814 for backup, and so we moved it into Dana's room.

8-30-00 A strange, vexing problem with the Pavilion. (!) All of a sudden, I couldn't run Exact Audio Copy ("No ASPI Host Adapter Found"). A quick check showed that the ASPI drivers were in place. Then I noticed that the CD-R/W and DVD drives weren't even listed in My Computer. Whoa! Further poking around revealed that the CD-R/W drive was totally dead; the tray wouldn't even open. "Ah ha!", says I. After popping off the side cover and reseating the power connector for the CD-R/W drive, everything was back to normal. Flaky connector, apparently, which is not all that uncommon. It's happened to me a couple of other times. Still, on a PC this new, it's a real vexation!

9-2-00 Conclusions about the Aptiva 2137-E84; I’m torn. Setting up the machine provided lots and lots of "interesting times". IOW, a Chinaman would say it’s cursed. So is it indeed a "Friday computer"? Have I been soured on Aptivas? No, I don’t think so. While it’s true that the 2137-E16 never gave me even a fraction of the trouble that the E84 has thus far, I think that 90% of the problems I’ve encountered can be put down to quirky third-party peripherals.

9-4-00 In a few key ways, the past three days have shown the E84 to be better than the E16 on a day-to-day basis. For one, the Winmodem handles DOS mode so well. That was a major drawback with the E16, given my ongoing involvement in Fidonet. Then, too, this E84 handles transitions to and from standby mode gracefully, something the E16 never could manage (though it was light-years ahead of the Presario!). Yes, the E84 has shown a tendency to become clunky and truculent when left to run MP3 encoding overnight, which the E16 never did. It doesn’t crash, mind you. It will finish the task of encoding the MP3 files. But it’s so lame and sluggish that an immediate reboot is mandated. In its defense, this in no way unusual for Wintel boxes. I suspect memory leakage. It’s a fairly speedy booter (a minute 40), and the reboot does put things right, so it’s no real hardship. I give the Aptiva 2137-E84 a thumbs-up! Great keyboard, the best case design in the business, and while its no Athlon 800, it’s no slug, either. Indeed, it’s noticeably perkier than the Presario 4814, more so than its 66 MHz clock speed advantage would seem to justify. And it’s got a RAM disadvantage over the Presario! Time will tell, but for now, and considering the low, low monetary investment, it’s difficult to see how I could have done better. Viva Aptiva.

10-8-00 (Aptiva E-84) OK, I've had enough of the crashing, locking up, and just generally up and puking after a 4-hour thrashing with Graphics work, MP3 generation, CD burning, dl'ing, etc. Acts like funny RAM, despite the fact that it'll pass a 48-hour looping RAM test with IBM System Doctor. Pulled the 2 x 32 meg chips.. they are a matched set! Installed a 1 x 32 meg PNY chip that I know to be good.

10-11-00 (Aptiva E-84) Been running 2 days.. slower, but system reliabilty does seem improved. A couple of 6-7 hour workouts as described above hasn't caused crashes or sluggishness.

10-12-00 (Aptiva E-84) Replaced test RAM with 1 x 128 Kingston PC100 chip. Booted fine and system seems transformed. Menus are snappy, boot time's improved. Only had a chance to give it a 2-hour test drive, but left it running processes all night; dl'ing from Napster and converting a huge batch of WAV files to MP3.

10-13-00 (Aptiva E-84) Machine's been up and running without a reboot (or a problem) for 26 hours. The difference is like night and day! The system is so much sweeter, it's hard to describe. Still has that "just booted" feeling, even after crunching MP3 files all night, then an early morning eMail session, followed by being left to run a batch 'net dl and more MP3 encoding while I was at work. Eureka!

10-14-00 (Aptiva E-84) Machine ran some 50 hours and change without a reboot. And even then I locked it up by doing something stupid; trying to decode a MPEG file that I knew was damaged.. I pronounce the operation a success!

05-01-01 (Pavilion 9694C) My old H-P scanner, the one which I moved heaven and earth to get working on the Aptiva, now refuses to scan in color. B&W scans are perfect, but no color. :-( I chose a Canon slimline scanner at Best Buy; the specs looked good, and since my space is limited, it seemed ideal. It's a USB-only unit, getting it's power via the USB port. This proved to be it's downfall, in my particular case, for despite several calls to Canon tech support, I never could get it functioning. Seems there's a bug in most all Athlon machines which prevents a (relatively) power-hungry USB device like a scanner from working. Cameras and keyboards and so on are fine, mind you, as are USB devices with their own dedicated power supply. Basically, the USB chipset used by 90% of Athlon machines just doesn't provide enough juice to power such a peripheral. Armed with this info, I returned the Canon and selected an H-P 4300cse. This unit sports both a parallel and a USB interface, and thus gets power from it's own wall-wart transformer. Setup was a piece of cake, and I'm happy with the results.

05-25-01 (Compaq 4814) Removed machine from LAN. Dana took this machine to N. Illinois, and will use it as her "college PC". Removed 5-1/4 floppy drive, Ethernet card, swapped printers, gave the HD a spring-cleaning.

06-12-01 (TcPC) Added to LAN. Added 5-1/4 floppy drive and Ethernet card.

08-18-01 (H-P Pavilion 7920) Bought PC at Best Buy, added it to the LAN. Upgraded machine with 10/100 Ethernet card, and moved Canon BJC-250 printer from the TcPC to this box.

09-07-01 Bought 3x 256 Mb PC133 RAM chips from TigerDirect.com for the spectacular price of $29.99 each. Alas, when I swapped two of them into the HP 9694C the machine became extremely flaky. It would boot, but almost immediately crash. Booting to safe mode and checking the system info told me that the RAM was being recognized, but the machine simply does not work. It may be a compatibility problem 'twixt the Athlon chipset and the cut-rate RAM (SimpleTech brand).. who knows?

True to form, the Aptiva 2137-E84 accepted the RAM, and works just fine. Indeed, it screams now! Well.. compared to before. The difference is most notable with Photoshop. I loaded up a 22 Mb bitmap and did some editing to test it out. Saves were almost instantaneous, a big difference. Now I'm in the curious situation of having a 300 MHz K6-2 machine with 512 Mb of RAM, while my 800 MHz Athlon machine has only 256 Mb. :-) It may not seem like a logical upgrade, but, in practice, it worked out well. After all, the K6-2 needed more help than the Athlon...

That left me with a spare 256 Mb chip, so I swapped that into the Pavilion 9720. It requires PC133 RAM, so it was a no-brainer. Doubling the RAM definitely perked it up! This leaves me with 2 spare 128 Mb RAM chips, of course, one PC100 and one PC133. I suppose I'll swap the PC100 chip into the TcPC when I get a round tuit...

09-28-01 to 10-01-01 Built AMD Athlon 1.4 GHz system.. actually, I built two, one for my buddy Shelton Bridges. Assembly went smooth, other than a bizarre problem with the floppy, where a tool-long screw bound it up when bolted into the case. Oh, and the ATI All-In-Wonder video card was a bit challenging to get operational.

10-05-01 to 10-08-01 Consolidated 3 systems (Homebuilt Athlon 1.4 GHz, H-P Pavilion 9694C, and IBM Aptiva 2137-E84) into the main computer workcenter. All run through a Belkin Omniview 4-port KVM switch, allowing me to control them with one keyboard, video, and mouse. All in all, a sweet system!

12-26-01 Installed an SMC 5-Port 10BASE-T/100BASE-TX Dual-Speed Ethernet Switch on the main 'loop' of the LAN (i.e. all the 'puters installed in my main workstation, aka the Star Trek Command Center.. [grin]). This lets the Athlon machines speak to each other at 100 Mb/Sec instead of the previous 10. It smokes! In tests, a transfer of 1/2 Gbabyte of data takes a minute 18 to 1:22, depending on individual file sizes. Formerly I could grab a sandwich followed by a smoke during a transfer like that! So that the entire loop could talk at 100 MbS, I yanked the old Samsung (Realtek) Ethernet 10T NIC from the Aptiva 2137-E84, and replaced it with a spiffy new SMC 100BASE-TX card in the PCI format.

Of course, the cable modem is limited to 10BASE-T, so there's no need to upgrade that loop of the LAN. Indeed the cable modem could never keep up with a 10 MbS data stream in the first place, and so the AST/Bravo RR server needs only 10BASE-T. The 'slow' loop of the LAN also includes the lines to the outlying bedrooms. There's a slow machine in Dana's room at the moment, so that's no sweat. It is kind of a shame to have Janice's H-P Pavilion 9720, with it's D-Link 10/100 NIC, using the 10BASE-T mode, but then there's rarely a need shovel massive amounts of data 'tween her machine and mine.

All in all, at $54 including tax, perhaps the most cost-effective upgrade I've ever accomplished. As the price of switches continues to drop, they make much more sense than a hub. ** Indeed, I expect they'll soon be in the under-$30 commodity range soon, along with USB hubs.. I may just upgrade the remainder of the LAN then, merely out of principle. As usual, upgrading the little IBM Aptiva was like fallin' off a log.. indeed, the whole project was like a walk in the park. Now, my current consulting project, building a dual-NIC WinNT 4.0 machine for use as a buddy's RR server.. well, that's another story.. :-/

** A word on hubs vs. switches- the best analogy that can be made, perhaps, is comparing each node of a LAN which relies on conventional hubs to a radio reciever, while a LAN which uses a switch becomes more like a line-of-sight microwave repeater. Hubs distribute a broadcast signal, while switches aim a targeted signal. Now, granted the huge increase in local-node throughput I've seen is due to the fact that I'm using the newer 100BASE-TX equipment, period, not that it's a switch vs. a hub. But switches are a more efficient solution, and can help immensely in a heavily-populated LAN where packet collisions are routine. [shrugs] They appeal to my inner Dilbert. :-) Plus, at the miniscule price difference, why bother with a hub? There was a time when packet switching technology was prohibitively expensive for a home user, but those days are no more! In short, always go for the Ethernet switch over the hub!

12-27-01 My latest computer addition is also my latest audio acquisition; a pair of KLH model 911B mini-bookshelf speakers for the computer center. Seemed a waste having that 100-watt amp in there & no speakers hooked up to it. The little KLH's are rated for 100 watts, 80 Hz to 20 KHz +/- 1 DB. They sound amazingly good for as small as they are. And at $10 for the pair (after rebate) you certainly couldn't beat the price! Got to love those after-Christmas Blowout Sales! ;-)

04-24-02 Blew up the Aptiva 2137-E84 installing a Microsoft IE security patch. The same patch installed just fine on two other machines, but trashed the Aptiva to the point where it won't boot to either Win98 or DOS 6.22. I'm a bit cheesed, 'cause this patch was supposed to protect against malware and virii.. yet no virus could have smoked my system more thoroughly than it did!

05-03-02 Began the process of rebuilding the Aptiva 2137-E84. Alas, it did not go well. Numerous lockups installing Win98, freezing at the BIOS screen, etc. So, in disgust, I decided to make the Aptiva 2137-E16 my primary platform for old DOS games. Yes, the IBM/Cyrix 166 MHz processor gives up a bit in performance compared to the E84's 300 MHz K6-2. But not as much as you might think! It's plenty fast enough for playing Commander Keen and the like. That still leaves me with a spare Aptiva case to build my Dream Athlon machine...


05-04-02 Stripped the 2137-E84, and mix 'n' matched the parts to get the 2137-E16 running. It keeps the 20x CD-ROM, but gets the E84's bigger hard drives, 4-4-24 x CD-R/W, and RAM. Am using the onboard audio and video. In contrast to the E84, setting up Win98 on the E16 went smooth as could be. Even setting up the DOS partition (of which I, of course, had a CD-R backup) went without a hitch. So, indications are that it may just live up to my first E16's reliability and ease-of-use. [knocks on wood]


Interestingly enough, it became apparent when I was stripping the 2137-E84 down that the motherboard had been replaced, or at least removed, at some time in the past. I suspect that someone hacked the poor little PC, resulting in it's flakiness. It's difficult to see how my first E16 and that particular E84 could be so far apart in the reliability department, otherwise.


05-05-02 Paid a visit to the MarketPro Computer Show at the Agricenter, picked up the parts needed to build my version of a "Maximum bang for the buck PC" using the spare Aptiva case. Based on an ECS Elitegroup K7S5A motherboard with Athlon 1800+ XP processor, I also snagged an 80 Gb Seagate HD, a Hi-Val 24-10-40 x CD-R/W, and 512 Mb of PC2100 DDR RAM at the show.


The assembly went quite smooth.. much easier than I expected, truth to tell. Since the OEM IBM implementation of ATX used a non-standard power connector (AT- style), I had to replace the power supply. However, the IBM swing-out carriage was a perfect fit around a generic 300-Watt ATX power supply, so I still retain the no-tools aspect of the excellent IBM design. The motherboard itself fit the case perfectly, though the clearance between the power supply and processor fan is very, very tight. All in all this project was a real pleasure.


Along with a few odds 'n' ends like a case fan, CAT-5 cable, etc., the total damage to my plastic at the show was $440. Even counting the $50 I paid for the case, and the $70 for the video card, the grand-total is still only $560. Dirt cheap for a PC this powerful! And it's all housed in that great case...


05-10-02 Replaced the Athlon 1400's Nikko stereo reciever with a Kenwood 50 watt/channel unit I happened to have laying around. Yes, the power rating is half the Nikko's.. but in practice 50 watts/channel is plenty! While I was happy with the Nikko, overall, some of the switches were getting a bit noisy, occasionally introducing pops & crackles into the recordings. Yeah, a good cleaning would put it right.. but since I had the Kenwood in reserve I decided to take the easy way out. :-)


05-11-02 Added a Creative Labs Soundblaster PCI-16 soundcard to the Athlon 1800 XP machine. The onboard sound just wasn't cutting it, the output level being very low. Hooked into the Kenwood amp, an acceptable volume level could be achieved, mind you, but there was an aprox. 20 db level mismatch compared to the other input sources. I don't know if this is a generic fault of the ECS K7S5A's integrated sound, or a fluke. Certainly I have seen no other complaints on this score. And, with discrete soundcards being available for such low prices, it wouldn't cause me to discommend the board, in any case.


I obtained the PCI-16 at Computer Liquidators, an $18.95 overstock blowout. Since CompUSA is selling the same card for $30, I think I did OK.. Yes, I could've gotten a generic PCI soundcard from the same source for under $10. But I've always had good luck with Soundblasters; easy setup and reliable operation, and this card proved no exception. So I count the extra $9 or $10 to be money well spent!


05-17-02 Added a PCtel HPS56 AMR modem to the Athlon 1800 XP machine. ECS wanted $30 +shipping for their unit. Since I can get a generic 56k PCI modem for $20 at CompUSA, there ain't no way I was paying that! However, I did want to use the AMR slot, if for no other reason than to keep a PCI slot open for future expansion.


Much to my surprise, neither CompUSA, Computer Liquidators, or Best Buy had AMR modems in stock. What to do, what to do? e-Bay! Hey, if it's good enough for NASA... [grin]


A bit of surfing turned up several candidates, with opening bids ranging from $1 to $12. I won the bidding on the PCtel unit for $9, plus $1 shipping. It arrived in good shape and, despite the plain-jane packaging and the CD-R install disc (!), setup was a piece of cake, and it works just fine. Life is wonderful.


12-28-02 Welcomed the CWI 486/66 machine back into the fold. Replaced the defective 32x Memorex CD-ROM drive with a used 20x IBM I had layin' around, installed a spare Samsung 10T Ethernet card, and away we go. I reckon that, at some point, I'll wipe Win95 off the drive and install Linux...

01-01-03 Rearranged my CD-ROM and CD-R/W drives (and one hard drive) to better match the drive speed to the CPU speed of the PC in which it's installed. I mean, it's silly to have a Athlon 1800XP machine running a 5400 rpm hard drive and a 24x burner when you have an Athlon 1400 machine running a 7200 hard drive and a 40x burner, right? :-) The project went well, with the only hitch being that, in every case, Nero v. 5.5 refused to see the new CD burner. Seems silly, 'cause CloneCD had no trouble automatically detecting the new drive! In any case, uninstalling and reinstalling Nero did the trick.

 

Note-this diary was created on 7-28-00. The inclusion of such info in the LAN machine description section was causing it to become unwieldy. Events previous to that were reconstructed from those notes, credit card bills, and so on. As such, the log is by no means complete nor inclusive prior to August of 2000.

Gone but not forgotten

Past Members of the McBroom home LAN

IBM Aptiva 2137-E16

Upgrades:

• RAM- 64 megs total
  
• Accton SOHObasic (Realtek) Ethernet NIC
  
• 8.4 Gb Western Digital HD (replacement)
  
• 40x CD-ROM (replaced OEM 20x drive)
  
• H-P 8250 CD-R/W drive (4-4-24 x)
  
• Generic 14" monitor (800 x 600)
  
• Canon Bubblejet printer
  
• Modem software upgrade to 56k v.90 specs
  

Function: Secondary client PC (Karen's PC).