Posted by medlib on May 7, 2000, at 21:00:04
In reply to I've always wanted to be shocking, posted by bob on May 7, 2000, at 13:46:59
bob
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>My computer's ... been suffering from a severe case of CUF (cascading upgrade failure ... I've been trying to find some way to change the name of that syndrome so I can reverse the acronym).
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> [for those technically minded and interested, I'm starting off with a Mac-clone that is basically a Performa 6400/200MHz, 48MB RAM, 4gig internal SCSI and 2gig internal IDE hard drives.]
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> First I get a cable modem. Then I need an ethernet card to deal with it. Then my CPU starts choking on the 2MB downstream bandwidth, so I go for a processor upgrade (a Sonnet Tech G3/L2 at 250MHz + 512k backside cache). Then, the whole thing's as stable as a house of cards in a tornado, so I install MacOS 9 over 8.1. During the installation process, it crashes and takes out my 4gig internal HD ... which subsequently interferes with any attempt to start-up from the OS9 or my Norton CD ... it would prevent the desktop from loading. At this point, I thought I had lost the patient and was ready to head to the store, Amex in hand, dreams of a G4 in mind, when I came up with an open case surgery procedure -- unplugging the drive's power cable until after the whole system had booted, pluging it back in, then formatting the drive. The procedure was a success, but now the long, slow healing (reloading of all my software) process has begun. To top that off, OS9 has only marginally improved the stability, so I'm pumping up the RAM as high as it'll go (being a Umax C600 and how f*ck*d it's motherboard design is, that's 80MB tops ... *if* I'm lucky and these DIMMs actually work) and considering a PCI video card. Not that I have the time (or reflexes or purchasing power after all of this hardware expense) to play any of these new 3D-enhanced games, but it'd sure help my graphics design work plus I'm hoping it'll take some of the processing heat off the built-in video support (which s*cks) as well as the new CPU and RAM.
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> The house of cards keeps growing .... ;^)
---------------------------Bob---Just bemused by your struggles to resuscitate your moribund Mac--mania or masochism?
Curious about why you installed OS9 on top of 8.1, or is that the Mac way? Life-threatening functions were "locked out" on the 20-some-odd networked Macs I helped keep running at work, so I never upgraded a Mac OS, just updated browsers and installed new software and external hardware. On PCs, I *always* removed the old version before installing an upgrade of *anything*--to forestall instability. Whenever I'm hit by the computer "remodeling" bug, I try to keep in mind that each new hardware component added/replaced increases compatibility problems--geometrically, if not exponentially!
Are you going to be working on your/Dr. Bob's project from your home computer this summer? I'm trying to visualize you copying and pasting from Babble archives on IE to your database in atlas.ti running through Virtual PC on an unstable OS--except I keep getting the giggles. Oh, but maybe there's an html version out by now; the only one I've seen was DOS-based, I think. Are you sure you don't want to pony up for a G4? Lots o' luck! (Is that what LOL means?--I'M not really up on all the chat acronyms.)Anyway, hope both your "surgery" and desip. increase are successful; let us know if the patient(s) lived. Happy coding and annotating!
Best wishes--medlib
(BTW,I've always considered IE for Macs to be Bill Gates' vengance against Steve Jobs--bet B. gets a charge out of every embedded bug.) Speaking of bugs, this is my first post post registration--guess I'm about to find out the current status of Dr. Bob's remodeling. I wonder if it will double post?
poster:medlib
thread:32557
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000429/msgs/32691.html