Upgrading into 1999 or so!

[pseydtonne]

chaggalagirl and I got back from Rochester last night. It's strange that Rochester could have higher quality and more competitive pricing for computer parts than metro Boston, which has eight times the population.

I've been looking for an IDE hard drive between 6 and 12 gig, a Slot 1 Pentium 3 CPU, and a northbridge cooler for a while. I got the first two for free from Maggie's parents -- they'd just bought a new computer and graciously gave me their old one. The chip says right on the top that it's a 450 MHz with a 512kB L2 cache. This makes it the slowest P3, but it also makes it an SSE-equiped pup ready for streaming action. It also came with a 10 GB, 5400 rpm hard drive (and a 424 kB cache; I'd forgotten what kind of bottleneck that can be) that somebody formatted with a hammer. It won't matter after I turn it into a Slackware drive.

So I got it home and began testing it. I wanted to copy the old data onto CD-ROM in case they wanted some files they'd had. I'd really wanted to copy that data directly to their WinXP drive, but I'd worried Microsoft would try to charge them for adding hardware so I'll handle the task from here. The simple task of defragging the drive is taking an immense amount of time: I'm over an hour in and it's only at 43%. Of course the version of Defrag that comes with Win98 is severely slow, but this is slow even for that software.

This computer was made by the same Rochester outfit that made Maggie's machine (the one in need of a northbridge cooler), but the case is not as roomy. It has a giant support truss that holds the sideways power supply in place and makes mods very difficult. I found that the hard drive had been seated in the back of the tower, above the motherboard and next to the power supply. Oh, electromagnetic field issues!

By the way, the defrag is now at 64%. It snagged around 61% for a good while.

The is this first time in a while that I'd seen Windows 98 running on a computer without it running as Second Edition. It thinks the P3 is a P2 (there is a 450 MHz P2 as well as a 450 MHz P3, but the BIOS, chip carvings and independent software checks verify that the chip is indeed a P3).

The montagnard army is growing. I'm running out of places to put its members, but I can always do some workarounds.

By the way, is anyone else annoyed by the mom in that Tylenol Cold for Children commercial? Maggie pointed this out, and now it galls me just to hear the commercial. If you haven't had this inflicted on you, the commercial is mostly told by the older sister of the fever victim. She's happy her little brother has a cold, because this means she'll get some quiet time with her other snotty friends. Suddenly the little brother bursts into her room with a super-soaker, firing away. The gaggle of girls scream and run.

This is where I get annoyed. The sister goes to her mother to complain. She doesn't have to say a word -- she's soaked and sneering. The mother is laughing (which is fine -- her brats, her problem) but she then says "I had to give it to him."

She could have also said to the boy: "I am your mother and your healer. I gave you life and cold medicine that tastes grape-like. You shall fire no water cannons in my house." I suppose this woman had kids by accident. Perhaps she's an opium addict. Either way, she doesn't know how to take care of any emotional situations. This is very pro-Yuppie and anti-responsibility advertising. I shouldn't be shocked, since this is the land of the jaded and willfully ignorant.

-defrag 100% complete, Ps/d