Geoff The Spy

Like so many of us, as he upgraded his PC, my friend John&#185 didn’t know what to do with the old one. He had a relative, a grown man, with no computer, and John asked if I’d set him up with this old one.

This is something I’ve done dozens of times, and I almost always reinstall Windows. This time, I thought I’d try something a little different.

The end user wasn’t going to play games or work in multimedia. He was going to use the computer for web surfing and email. Instead of Windows, I installed Ubuntu Linux.

My thought is, this guy doesn’t know anything technical. Why saddle him with an operating system that’s got a bullseye on it, attractive to anyone writing spyware or viruses?

The install went flawlessly. I inserted the Ubuntu disk, answered a few questions (actually, John did all of this) and let the PC do its thing. The only bumps in the road had to do with installing Flash (I wish Ubuntu came with this already installed) and attempting to upgrade the video driver.

I rebooted after updating the driver and ended up with a blank screen! Damn you penguin. As has happened so often in the past, I had fixed the computer to the point of breaking it!

The bad video driver was quickly removed. John watched as I typed some cryptic commands into a text based terminal screen. One bad part of Ubuntu (and all Linux distributions) is, most people would be lost at this point with a dead PC! There are fewer ‘Geoff’s’ to call for technical assistance with this esoteric operating system.

John was pretty pleased (and hopefully his relative will be pleased too). The old computer is quite agile and more than beefy enough for its new assignment.

Refurbishing this computer was the purpose of his trip, but John brought more goodies with him. His wife’s company had thrown out some older laptops… which she then rescued from the trash. I could have one, but there was a problem. It was unusable!

The laptop, a very sweet Fujitsu Lifebook Series B subnotebook (a tiny laptop, perfect for traveling) had Windows 2000 installed and was password protected. The password kept me from getting to the programs and the lack of a CD drive kept me from installing a new operating system (like Linux) as a replacement.

In situations like this, I become obsessed.

The Fujitsu has only a USB external floppy drive. It was a comedy of errors as I realized none of my current home machines had floppies, plus I had no floppy disks. There was lots of ad libbing and part swapping to be done.

I scrounged the hardware, then headed to the net, trying to find a solution. Amazingly enough, there are simple single floppy programs which will read and then allow you to overwrite a password. I didn’t have to crack the code. I just inserted my password where the original had been.

I felt like a spy as the computer was now programmed to consider me the administrator.

This was great for me, but you have to worry about the level of protection built into today’s modern computers. In essence, Microsoft led the original owners to believe these laptops were under electronic lock and key. A guy in his pajamas sitting on the floor shouldn’t be able to crack open this laptop… but I did.

Before I went to bed, the laptop downloaded a few years worth of patches from the Microsoft site and was fitted with a wireless card.

This morning, I brought the machine downstairs and played with it a little while eating my breakfast. I was proud of my accomplishment.

“Why do you need another computer,” Helaine asked?

It’s an obsession I suppose. Some folks go nuts over shoes or jewelry or cars. For me, it’s wire and computers. Neither should ever be thrown out – ever.

&#185 – John’s friends call him “Big John.” He is a massive man, well over six feet tall. John’s heart is proportional to his height.

Another Computer Repair

I went to dinner by myself last night. Helaine and Steffie are away. At work all the usual suspects were otherwise engaged. I headed to the Greek Olive.

After my omelet, I schmoozed a little with Tony, the owner. Somehow we got to talking about computers and he showed me an old laptop he had which he had been told was incapable of going on the Internet.

Sheesh! This is such a big crock. The amount of money spent on new hardware for little purpose amazes me. Usually it’s a machine that has slowed down. The owner figures it’s worn out. It doesn’t work that way.

There’s no doubt, in today’s environment this machine is slow. But, for Internet surfing and reading email, it’s fine. Well, it’s nearly fine. It needs about $20 in additional memory. I’ll get to that in a minute.

To me, seeing an unused computer is like having a puppy follow me home. I am unable to help myself.

The first thing I normally do is look for the computer online to see if anyone else has any advice which will make my job easier. A label on the cover says “Viva Book Hand Technologies.” That was worthless. Nothing showed up on Google.

Imagine how obscure a laptop must be to not even show on Google! After all, this is Google, where even typos can bring thousands of hits.

The bottom panel of the laptop had a little more info, including the FCC ID number. That wasn’t much help, but it was some. The manufacturer, long since gone, was located in Taiwan. The laptop had been sold under a few names including ILUFA and Chaplet as the M175.

It has an AMD K6 processor running at 300 mHz. There is 32 mb of RAM. That’s very little (which is why I’ll order Tony some more). The hard drive is 3 GB. That’s tiny, but only if this machine is going to be loaded with programs. As a barebones mail and web machine, 3 GB will suffice.

I copied the license information down and reloaded the operating system from scratch. Then I went to Microsoft and ran all the updates.

Though the laptop is the computing equivalent of one of my Dell laptops, it was very sluggish. I ‘borrowed’ a 64 MB memory stick and threw it in. Still sluggish.

When I scrolled the screen it was painfully slow. Text rippled from top to bottom instead of smooth motion. That is a warning sign that the video driver is no good. I went to the Device Manager in the Control Panel and, sure enough, a generic video driver was being used and a warning was posted.

I installed Belarc adviser, an excellent program that scans and reports on your hardware and software. It could identify the video system. Then I looked at what was being reported to Windows. Just some gibberish and coded data that I couldn’t uncode.

If the manufacturer were still alive… or if this had been a popular model, I’d be able to go to school based on other people’s queries. There was nothing.

I went to Drivershq, loaded up their Driver Detective and hoped for the best. Bingo! The video system was an old Chips and Technologies device. C&T doesn’t exist anymore, but their drivers live on.

Before long I had the drivers going and the screen responding pretty quickly. Make no mistake. This is not a speedy machine. It’s an ‘it will do’ machine.

Right now, I’m finishing up by installing Flash, Java, Adobe Reader and a few other things Tony will need. Then I’ll go back and ‘strip’ the operating system, turning off programs and services he doesn’t really need which only serve to make a system like this more slovenly than it needs to be.

This will never be a P4 3.8 gHz machine – but it doesn’t need to be. On the Information Superhighway it’s a 1996 Chevy Cavalier – and most of the time that’s plenty.

More Penguin Grief

I have now reloaded Mandrake Community Linux onto the second PC. It has been named – all computers have a name – Bullwinkle. This one I’m typing on will become Rocky. Later there will be a Boris, Natasha, Peabody… you get the idea.

The installation went easily (after all these installs, I should know how it’s done). Unfortunately, after the CD’s were on the computer a new ‘evil’ reared its ugly head.

The Mandrake people had decided to change the directory structure of their mirrors (mirrors are other computers that carry files in exactly the same way as the mater server). This killed all the hard coded directions to specific files!

I had been working for a few days trying to install video drivers. Now, files that were crucial to the process were unavailable. I kept going back to Google and the Mandrake site and then finally, I found a glint of hope. It wasn’t the exact answer, but enough of a hint that I was able to find the files and move them into my machine.

Are they correct? I’m not sure. The method I used was ad libbed and a little unorthodox.

Meanwhile, an hour and 15 minutes ago I started the process of preparing the new video driver. For that entire time I have been watching text and random characters fly across the screen on Bullwinkle. There’s an admonition from the developer that this step would take a long time. That was an understatement.

Hopefully over the next few days I’ll get this puppy humming. Hopefully.

Computer Speed – No Big Deal

A friend, whose company was upgrading its laptops, got me an old PII 300 model. In this gigahertz era, that’s awfully slow. The street value is probably a few hundred bucks, if that much.

Because it was from his business, I agreed to wipe the hard drive clean and then reinstalled Windows 98, its original operating system. After plugging in a wireless network card and adding the drivers, it was time to go to Microsoft’s site to get all the updates and security fixes.

Whose kidding whom? There’s no possible way dial-up users are keeping their software up-to-date. And, the vast majority of high speed at home users are there too.

I downloaded all the Microsoft stuff, Real player, OpenOffice, Spybot Search and Destroy, Dimension4 to keep the clock on time, favoritesync to keep my bookmarks aligned between computers, iespell and pokerstars.com’s client.

They’re all free… though pokerstars can cost you in the long run.

Then I went to the Navas Cable Modem/DSL Tuning Guide and got the registry hack to speed up my broadband access. Finally, I moved the virtual memory to a small disk partition and specified the exact size, which keeps it from fragmenting.

The computer is a champ. There’s little it’s doing that’s not fast enough. I suspect an upgrade from 64 to 128mb of memory will make a some difference, and I have ordered a stick for under $30.

I can’t begin to tell you how often a friend or co-worker will come to me (because I seem to be tech support for most of my friends – except those who are tech support to me) and ask for advice because their computer isn’t fast enough.

Usually, it is fast enough and they’re about to piss away money.

The CPU speed is certainly important, but nowhere as important as most people think. Most Pentium class PCs are totally usable, if you have enough memory (usually very cheap), the right video driver (crucial – and free) and get rid of spyware, malware and the other junk that’s leeching off your limited resources.

So, as I type this up on the ‘big machine’, I’m playing poker on the laptop. Life is good.