From: Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
Date: Wed Jan 03 2001 - 14:16:41 PST
cdale@silly.techmonkeys.net wrote:
> The date at the bottom of the article is Dec. 29, 2000. I just noticed
> the last line of it. We're entering a depression? heh.
Rather ironic, an attempted technical criticism by a Mac user. Of course,
the irony is utterly lost on the author.
But things are not well in Windersland. My next-door neighbour broke
the (progeria-riddled) Windows install on Compaq Presario (Athlon 900,
256 MBytes PC133 memory (the *second* memory, since the first one
was way out of specs, and had garbage in EEPROM), ATI Rage Maxx Fury)
in an attempt to use the repair CD it shipped with.
So (the more the fool) I went, and used said disk. Four repair options,
from "apply mild abrasive to platter surface" to "nuke not under 20 megatons,
then install over radioactive glass of ground zero while still hot". Tried
all four, result: system still badly b0rken. Called tech support, gave ser#
and hardware list. "Oh yeah, known problem. Gimme your fax number". So they
ship broken wares, and expect the customer to figure it out all by themselves.
Great. Fax says essentially "boot up protected mode, switch off display
driver acceleration, purge system control panel off all "Monitor"
entries but one, reboot, go into BIOS and switch off AGP 4x". Just the right
list to give your typical grandmother. Wonderful, so their motherboard is trash,
too, and so are the drivers. Done everything required, system still locks
up/crashes umotivatedly. Ran x86 memcheck, came up fine. Gotten the latest ATI
driver and DirectX 8.0, both >10 MByte downloads. One timed out three times.
On a pay-per-minute dialup, 33 kBps. Same thing, BSODs at will.
So I've repartitioned thing into a ghost partition, where I will dd stuff
from the work partition by booting with a mini Linux distro. I will install
Winders incrementally, saving each step to ghost partition, until system
will break, then I'll write it back. And have a lot fun in the process, (but
the neighbour is supplying the beers, and I hope he has enough).
The point of above boring, ugly narrative? Something is foul in state UserLand.
The creeping braindamage is not limited to Compaq nor Redmond as major tech mags
report, major brokenness is afoot, and even OpenSource is not entirely exempt
(witness the bad symlinks of Mandrake 7.1. which break postfix install as out
of the box. Time to go Debian, obviously).
Time has come to retreat and regroup back to sanity. And set up a good
perimeter guard, to keep the idiots out, this time for good.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Jan 03 2001 - 14:23:32 PST