{"id":191541,"date":"2009-08-05T08:49:00","date_gmt":"2009-08-05T13:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/08\/05\/of-flop-sweats-and-vista\/"},"modified":"2009-08-05T08:49:00","modified_gmt":"2009-08-05T13:49:00","slug":"of-flop-sweats-and-vista","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/08\/05\/of-flop-sweats-and-vista\/","title":{"rendered":"Of Flop Sweats and Vista"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, I&#8217;ve been off for a few days.  I got a cheap HP tower at a computer show, and I&#8217;ve been making it work.<\/p>\n<p>OK, so I got myself a brand new HP\/COMPAQ DC7900 tower.<\/p>\n<p>Intel<sup>\u00ae<\/sup> Core2<sup>\u00ae<\/sup> Duo<sup>\u00ae<\/sup> CPU E6550 at 2.33 Ghz, 4 g RAM, one 80 &amp; one 500 G hd, and an integral video on the mb.<\/p>\n<p>On the physical level everything went together with an ease unimaginable a few years ago, without the level of tools, PITA and knuckle scraping that would have been required.<\/p>\n<p>I added the 200 G HD and modem from the old machine, and added a floppy drive, and copied the files off the old 5 G HD.<\/p>\n<p>This required an IDE to SATA adaptor for the HD, a floppy cable (witg a twist), and power adaptors from SATA to IDE and floppy, found local at <a href=\"http:\/\/cyberguys.biz\/\">CyberGuys.biz<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I can do this, but I <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">really<\/span> hate it. As soon as I crack the case, I start to sweat profusely&#8230;.and stink.<\/p>\n<p>The machine has 3 (whisper quiet) fans (!), one on the power supply, one exhaust for the case, and an inlet fan blowing over the plumbing (!) of the heat sink.<\/p>\n<p>It appears very solidly built.<\/p>\n<p>The big winner in this process is <a href=\"http:\/\/portableapps.com\/\">Firefox Portable<\/a>.  No backup, no reinstall, just copy over the directory, like in the good old DOS.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s designed to run off a memory stick, which I don&#8217;t generally do, because there is a performance hit doing that.<\/p>\n<p>Running it on a hard drive, there is no performance hit once running, though it loads about 5 second slower.<\/p>\n<p>Honorable mention here goes to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.feedreader.com\/\">Feedreader 3<\/a>, which can be <a href=\"http:\/\/www.feedreader.com\/node\/16\">setup to do the same thing<\/a>, but  the folks at PortableApps.com get the gold medal because they have made this work for <a href=\"http:\/\/portableapps.com\/apps\">a number of other people&#8217;s software<\/a>, including OpenOffice.<\/p>\n<p>The big loser, the 10 yr old HP 6200C scanner. It died over the past few months, confirmed through 2 computers, operating systems, and USB cables, in all combinations, and nothing recognized it.<\/p>\n<p>As to Vista, the machine is blisteringly fast compared to my older machine, so I can&#8217;t compare performance, though it seems stable on new and powerful equipment.<\/p>\n<p>Vista dislikes: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Downgrading to XP appears to be a labor of Hercules.<\/li>\n<li>Too much nannying&#8230;.I have to tell the computer that I REALLY want to do this a lot.<\/li>\n<li>Can&#8217;t figure out how to turn off wallpaper,  so I used a solid color to approximate it.<\/li>\n<li>Had to JFGI<sup>*<\/sup> to figure out how a DOS path is set up (setx).  I miss autoexec.bat.<\/li>\n<li>Still can&#8217;t figure out how to share the data drive on the network..<\/li>\n<li>It puts up a security warning for F-Prot anti-virus, because it does not like how it talks to the OS.  It still works, but it needs to change how it reports that it is running to the OS<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In any case, this is the first thing that I&#8217;ve posted in about 4 days as a result.<\/p>\n<p>So over the past 4 days, volume was down, but the quality of the writing probably increased.<\/p>\n<p><sup>*<\/sup><span style=\"font-size:78%;\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">J<\/span>ust <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">F<\/span>%$#ing <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">G<\/span>oogle <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">I<\/span>t.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, I&#8217;ve been off for a few days. I got a cheap HP tower at a computer show, and I&#8217;ve been making it work. OK, so I got myself a brand new HP\/COMPAQ DC7900 tower. Intel\u00ae Core2\u00ae Duo\u00ae CPU E6550 at 2.33 Ghz, 4 g RAM, one 80 &amp; one 500 G hd, and an &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[962,1060],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-191541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-40yrs","category-computer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191541"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191541\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}