drbyte's Journal: Time and tide....

Well, what have I been doing...

• Been really slack. Wanz's birthday was on Saturday night (okay, Sunday), and I've still not edited and uploaded the pictures for general web viewing. Its so unlike me.
• Fixed a sound card driver on a Windows 95 box, that was more or less built-into the motherboard by AST computers. Boy, Google really does help - this involved opening up the ancient AST casing (its a Pentium 120!) and reading out the markings on the sound chip. Productive.
• Tuteman, software written by some Business/Economic folk at Monash is a bitch to work under Windows 2000. Read the documentation, and realised that it required Service Pack 2.

  Whats worse is that when the software decided to crash because SP2 wasn't installed, it didn't even prompt with an error message. It just halted and the window closed. Where's the error handling in that? I promise to write better software.

  Well, after applying the "Critical Updates" and then getting the actual SP2 for Terrie, she was up and running by about half past midnight. Not bad :)

• And today... Woohoo. Came home after a haircut. Seemingly, Carrie got a box for FREE from some rich kid that doesn't know much about money and economics. Was a PIII 866, with a 14GB hard disk, and 128MB RAM (with monitor and stuff) all for free... Gosh. Anyways, the hard disk was supposedly problematic, and the OS failed, so thats why it was thrown out.

  No worries, byte to the rescue. Formatted, did a scan for bad clusters, marked stuff bad, and proceeded to install Windows 98. And here again we face soundcard problems. Gosh. Why can't people just have their driver disks handy? Well can't blame Carrie, it was the dodo that threw the machine out.

  Fixed everything up, installed Office too. And guess what? The network card drivers were missing. And there was no box/manual/etc... Under Linux, this would have been a breeze (it's a standard PCI ne2k card). But under Windows, it meant painful searching for a network driver. It was finally found, and all was well.

  Registered the card on the network, and within minutes, Windows was up and running, surfing the web. Excellent. Now to fix the dratted sound. The PC Chips motherboard had a built in sound card, that had no drivers for it (tried using standard AC 97 ones, and it was a no go). Having a manual or CDROM around would have been handy, but that was not an option. The ex-owner also had a Sound Blaster Value card or something lying around, popped that in and tried to install the drivers. Conflicts, etc... and guess what? The integrated sound worked.

  'Twas already 1am, and Carrie isn't much into great sound. So left it at that, assembled up the casing, and boy golly, we have a working PC, that arrived basically as junk. Oh, did I mention the dust that was on the disk, and the video card? Initially, the video card would go all quirky because the dust was interrupting the contact pins... A quick blow did the trick.

Think that's about the adventures I should pen down. Boy, if I actually penned down all the PC's I fixed around the halls, I think the next computer advisor here'd be me. :)

In no way a threat to the current RA :)