Having just worked with a Compaq Presario that is about 4 years old, it can be said that if you buy one, you deserve it.
The Compaq machines are the most user-hostile I have had to deal with.
The fundamental problem is that the manufacturer does not want to have the user tweak the machine into something that the user wants. This is enforced by the fact that entrance into the BIOS is not possible. Thus when the hardware has Win98 reinstalled onto the HDD, the resulting setup does not have a proper driver for the on-board video card resulting in poor video. The product was sold with a RESTORE CD but the CD was not available.
This means that if the restore CD is lost, one cannot restore the video driver as the characteristics are not read at all by any diagnostic program. With no access to the BIOS, the machine cannot be restored. Don't buy the big three machines - they cannot be maintained.
At a seminar on Network Intrusion and Detection, it was stressed that the battle against the hackers and crackers that want to just play, is still an on-going war. At the server levels (machines costing $70,000 and over), there are some programs that might help the end user but they are still in development.
What is critical in the whole of the field is that there does not seem to be any real end to SPAM and that it will be coming for a very long time. A much smaller and less expensive unit is on the horizon aimed at small companies and large homes.
Possibly we could all require that we will listen to and respond to users and servers that are registered with a central agency and whose servers are compatible only with the subnet so that we all would be linked by services and people that are willing to be identified in some central way. Thus if someone started to Spam, they could be locked out immediately. This would mean a fundamental change in the structure of the Internet.
Actually this is not so far-fetched as you might believe. There is now in existence a mode that essentially allows known persons to create a tunnel between two points; it is called VPN (Virtual Private Network) and possibly could be modified to allow control of the environment in which we choose to exist.
LINUX is on the horizon again. Specifically, SPAUG is planning to have a Wednesday evening class or two that will explore and import knowledge about this inexpensive but quite effective product that looks and feels like Microsoft Windows and, indeed, has been mandated by several entire countries. I'm sure this new activity has Microsoft's attention.
In order to get the costs of computing away from the Microsoft monopoly, many organizations have been working in the Linux realm to learn and improve the product. Already, the Linux product can read and write the Microsoft document formats and the programs themselves appear so similar that often it takes a while for new users to realize that they are dealing in the Linux world and not the Microsoft. And the price is about 1/5 that of Microsoft. So far, the market leader seems to be Red Hat 8.1.
Over the years, I have attempted to install Linux about 6 times. Each time was a failure because the install would get to some point and ask for an action I didn't know or just crash.
The latest Linux installed (with help) just fine onto my home computer. We did attempt to install Linux in Connectix multi-program support, but Linux did not install fully there, so I just installed it onto a separate HDD at the basic hardware level.
The Connectix product that I won at SPAUG is an interesting way to permit me to attempt to support persons that call me for support or to ask a question. Windows 2000 is the base upon which the Connectix product is supported. Upon that, Windows 98 has been installed. In addition, Windows XP will soon be added. When all of the layering of the operating systems is completed, I will be able, at the stroke of the keyboard, to switch from Win2K to Win 98 to Win XP in about half a second. In this manner I have the best of all worlds. Whenever an Operating System is in emulation mode and actual useful computer work is being accomplished, the Operating System being emulated is running about 1/8 of the normal speed. Normally this might be a problem to turn your 2.0 GHz machine into a 233, but functionally this is just fine for writing memos and for answering questions. The underlying Win2k, however, is running at full speed. Thus my new main Operating System is really Windows 2000 and I have the ability to quickly switch to other Operating Systems at will. You might consider this approach rather than having lots and lots of HDDs, each with its own Operating System.
USB devices are currently the rage. They are reasonably fast and, generally, mean less installation hassle. All of this is OK unless you need to have the USB device available at all times during the booting process. That is the advantage of the lowly old floppy - it is locked into the booting operating system all the time. Most often, USB devices are available only at boot time and when the operating system drivers are loaded by the main program. This means that there is usually a dead period in the booting process and you had better not need the connection continuously in the booting process. New motherboards are addressing the problem, but they are still not pervasive at this time.
BAD CAPACITORS bit me twice in the last month. About a year and a half ago a lot of bad capacitors were manufactured and those capacitors were sold throughout the electronics industry. The capacitors are in everything and are failing about now. Two computers that were bought locally about a year and a half ago showed the unmistakable bulging and leaking characteristic of this style capacitor. Datawise made good on the motherboard replacement under their 2-year warranty. HP, Dell, and Abit with their one-year warranty have all told the market place: tough. Moral: Buy locally. You get support far above the level of the big guys. Bring your computer into the Clinic on Saturday morning if you feel you computer could have the problem. Prevention is a lot less hassle than replacement.
Spybot is my new means of ejecting advertising and other worms from the computers with which I come into contact. While most of them are benign, it turns out that their sheer numbers can cripple a computer. On a recent computer where the mouse cursor was jittery, absent about 80% of the time, and extremely difficult to control, the removal of about 95 bots (robots) from the computer using Spybot. fixed the problem. There were so many bots in the computer's internal chain of programs requesting services, that the computer could not service them all and still display the cursor. The record I have seen is 561 bots - the computer complaint was slowness. You are urged to go to Google, use the three words: SPYBOT DOWNLOAD FREE, and obtain your own copy to remove and keep removed the bots from your computer.
Getting rid of MSN becomes critical when you buy a new computer and the MSN sign-on procedure keeps coming back time after time. To get MSN (or any other annoyance) out of you life, first delete the icon for MSN. Then right-click the Internet Explorer icon and get rid of all references to MSN therein. Feel good about getting rid of one more piece of Microsoft.
Hank Skawinski, president of Datawise, was our presenter, and as usual he gave us an earful of what's going on in the industry, as well as donating some really good stuff for the raffle. Some of his observations and advice:
If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
and the bus is interrupted at a very last resort,
and the access of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
then the socket packet pocket has an error to report.
If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash,
and the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash,
and your data is corrupted cause the index doesn't hash,
then your situation's hopeless and your system's gonna crash!
If the label on the cable on the table at your house,
says the network is connected to the button on your mouse,
but your packets want to tunnel to another protocol,
that's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall.
And your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss,
so your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse;
then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang,
'cuz sure as I'm a poet, the sucker's gonna hang.
When the copy on your floppy's getting sloppy in the disk,
and the macro code instructions is causing unnecessary risk,
the you'll have to flash the memory and you'll want to RAM your ROM,
and then quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your Mom!
It is best that you be informed about a problem in the electronics industry - the fact that there many electronic items that have bad capacitors in them. I have just had one computer where I consult, crash, and another be caught just before there were severe problems.
Both of them have new motherboards, or more correctly, boards that have had all of the offending capacitors replaced.
The problem is in ALL electronics throughout the world. Equipment such as telephone answering devices, computers, telephones, toys, VCRs, etc. The problem is everywhere.
How do you recognize the problem? Just look at the capacitors that are on the motherboard and look for capacitors about 1" high by about 3/8" and observe if the top is rounded where all of the others are flat. The roundness is caused by internal pressure getting ready to either pop or ooze. The mode of failure is essentially to become a short.
So there you have it. Review your capacitors and if you have any doubts, run the board by the Clinic on a Saturday morning.