Smug Mac Guy gets his Comeuppance back

I was going to title it "...get his Mojo back", but that has the wrong connotations.

 

So I got to spend some quality time with my hands inside some vintage PCs these last two days.  A couple of things come to mind:

 

They sure don't build 'em like the used to. This is both a compliment and a curse. The actual cases and parts are built more sturdily than we see today.  I can see using one of the tower cases as something to stand upon when you need to get the stuff from the back of the top closet shelf. Most recent cases would crush if you were to even sit on them.  On the other hand, now I remember Why I Defected To The Mac – PCs are frustration incarnate. Trying to figure out why windows won't finish booting is No Fun.  The Windows 2000 machines seem to be much ore robust, but Win2k can't stop a disk crash or a blown out power supply.  If I can get the admin password, perhaps I will be able to use "recover" instead of "reinstall from scratch"on a couple of machines.

 

They sure don't build them like they used to, and boy am I glad. The admin office uses a mix of really old IBM PCs – todays victim appeared to be a Pentium 200 Mhz system running Win98.  It wouldn't boot all the way into windows, but would come up in safe mode. I decided to try a reinstall, and added memory before starting,  I moved it to a better location and blew the power supply thru carelessness. (yes, they use both 110 & 240 in that building.) I replaced the PS, although is wasn't an exact match, and got back to the business at hand. And it won't boot at all, it just beeps at me.  After a while, we figured out that you have to use only certain arrangements of memory in the three slots, and I didn't have a sufficient mix of ancient DIMMS to make anything work but the 64Mb it had before I arrived to "fix" it. Bring on the Plug & Play era!

(later on…):

 

I got a bunch of good helpers this morning, and we managed to get most of the school lab computers updated to reasonable RAM levels.  Most of them still run Windows 98, so I can't help them all that much.  The 200 MHz system mentioned above  is pretty  hopeless --  we  can't get it to boot from a floppy, so there is no reasonable way to  reinstall windows.  Next!

The office computers are a bit of a history romp – nothing newer than 350 MHz Pentiums, with the same RAM nightmare I outlined above.   We're gonna give it a good try this later today or tomorrow morning, but I don't hold out much hope. Thee is a group coming in next week with more computer geeks, so maybe they can pick up where we left off.

Up Next:  Tomorrow we leave MGLSS and head back down to Arusha.  We will get to see the New Life Band in concert from about 5 to 6 PM, then join them for dinner somewhere in town.  Should be amazing.