(last updated 2005/06/05)
Descent to the Dark Side
 
   It starts out innocently. Just a little bit; I can stop whenever I want. You've heard the story before. And you know where it leads...

   With me, it started with a weather station. Nice -- fairly accurate. I had an earlier version for many years, but that one died (as did the Heathkit before it). The old one had (unsupported) software for the Mac that let me download weather data, so I could look for highs, lows, that kind of thing. (Okay, yes, it does take a certain mindset to be interested in that kind of thing. You probably won't be surprised to know I record the details on my vehicle every time I fill it up with gas or get service work done.)

   The new weather station has essentially no Mac support. But it does have really slick support for that other platform -- you know, Windoze. Supported, updated, flexible. And, a colleague of mine runs it with his weather box. Minimal computational requirements, other than needing Windoze.

   Do I really want to invite one of those things into the house? I know, I have to use one at work, but that's not my choice. I still use Macs at home, and do a lot of writing for work on my Mac (dual 1.4 GHz G4). Any Mathematica modeling I need to do, I do on the Mac at home, as it's a lot faster than the thing I have at work.

   You know how it goes -- the pusher appears at just the right time and offers you a free sample... I'm talking about running this software one day at lunch, and my colleague Ian tells me he has an old Pentium II box sitting in his garage harboring spiders -- it's mine if I'd like it.

   I know, I could have said, "No." I could have saved myself for marriage. But I said, "Yes," and he even delivered it to my door (glad to be rid of it, but not as glad to be rid of it as his partner was, I think).

   An ugly beige box, but it sat under the desk, behind a closed door. One of those things the family never talks about. Pentium II, 400 MHz (wow!), 512mb of RAM, Win2k, and a whopping 12Gb hard disk!

   Pleasant aside -- in a search for how to talk to the thing, I tried a KVM switch so I could use the LCD and (USB) keyboard on the desk for the Mac as well as for the, well, the other thing. Worked, but only sort of.

   Somehow, I found VNC. Very slick -- install the server client on the Windoze box, and on the server in the closet (a Power PC 8500 with a 400 MHz G3, running 10.2.8). Running the Chicken of the VNC client on my Mac lets me run the server from where I'm sitting, or run the weather box. Big hint: if you think you need a KVM, look at VNC first. Free. Supported. Works.

   I treat the weatherbox as a production system. If you're not familiar with the concept, production systems are what you run your meat-and-potatoes software on. You don't screw around with production systems. No debugging, no fancy stuff. Leave it alone. Well, back it up regularly, but other than regular backup and maintenance, leave it alone.

   Oh, all our systems sit behind a router, a little Linksys box, which helps protect us from ghoulies, ghosties, and things that overrun buffers in the night. I couldn't find a Mac client for the router logs, so I installed WallWatcher on the weatherbox. Another very nice, and free, piece of software. I run some home-rolled Python code to produce reports, turn addresses to countries, that kind of thing. Oh, if you know a good monitoring client for the Mac, please let me know!

   The weatherbox is still a production system. WallWatcher and Weather Display, the VNC server, that's it. Well, new stuff (patches) on wild Tuesdays thanks to Bill...

   I could have stopped there... But I didn't. The weatherbox ran, but it ran damn slow. VNC was sluggish, and when I did transfers between the machines, it got slower. Backups were a pain.

   I should have realized I was hooked. I needed more. I looked at swapping out the 12Gb 5400 rpm drive for a 20 Gb 7200 I had sitting around. No, that won't improve performance, as I'm not writing to disk very often.

   I know the feeling -- I've been there before. It's what drove me to upgrade my old Mac II to the "wicked fast" IIfx -- that need for speed.

   Off-the-shelf was out of the question, at least a "new" box. I don't need that much speed. Won't/can't spend the money. A PIII would do it. I've got disk drives, other cards. Why not roll my own? Well, for many of the same reasons I no longer change the oil in my car myself -- being busy, the value of my time, being able to point the finger at someone else if it gets screwed up, that kind of thing. I've built my own computers in the past (from 7400 TTL parts as an example). I can do it if I want to, but do I want to?

   Looked around at the local Fry's. Lots of motherboards, lots of processors, lots of choices. Too many choices. Talked to my colleague Ian some more. I could do the whole nine yards -- get the processor, board, memory, put it together and test it, hope it flies. Ian suggested going mail-order (on the web) and suggested places that would load the motherboard with processor and memory, and test it out for you. That's what he'd done for his latest speed demon.

   That sounds like a good approach. A cheepie mobo, inexpensive processor, good heat sink and fan, and 512Mb of RAM.  AMD Sempron looks encouraging -- a Socket A part such as the 2400+, a mobo with built-in video (I know it's a performance hit, but I'm not going to be doing hard core gaming on this thing), 512Mb of RAM, assembled, tested, and delivered for around $200.

   I'm also trawling the usual surplus places in the Valley, on the lookout for a good used machine. The trouble is, the cheepies I see are all dead-end machines -- with limitations like 128mb of RAM max. And most are without an OS. I realize I'm going to do something to upgrade, so I order a copy of XP Home, and on Marc's recommendation, Ghost for backups.

   Talking to colleagues at work about which of a number of mobo/processor combinations to go with when Ian mentions that Fry's is having a special -- mobo plus AMD Sempron 2800+ for $88! The processor is an AMD processor-in-a-box deal, complete with AMD heatsink/fan. The mobo has SATA as well as Ultra 133, two serial ports, lots of USB 2 ports, but no video. That's okay -- Ian has some old AGP video boards. He has piles of old Windoze parts, similar to my pile of old Mac parts. What the hell -- I get the special deal, and a stick of RAM (DDR400) on special , and including XP and Ghost (which hadn't arrived yet), I'm still well under what I'd been looking at for a slower processor!

   What to do... Well, I've got a Win 98SE CD and the requisite incantation (product code). I could put it together and bring up 98 to see if things fly. Okay, scrounge an old chassis and power supply, something that followed my son home from school and was waiting to be tossed out. Processor, heat sink/fan, memory all go in easily. Mount the board in the box, put in the video card, cable things up and we're ready to go. Managed to find a PS/2 keyboard; once I get past the initial BIOS configuration I can tell it to use USB mice and keyboards.

   I know why it's called 98 -- that's the number of times you have to reboot if you're doing a clean install!

   The other problem -- I don't have any CRTs around anymore! The only two CRTs in the house are the kid's iMac, and the TV in the office. Everything else is LCD. (Well, there's the Tektronix 'scope, but that doesn't really count.) I grabbed the LCD from the server in the closet and hooked that up to the "new" box.

   Things powered up just fine. Well, except for Windoze bringing the LCD up in brain-damaged mode with the image shifted left so you can't read the first n characters of each line! I'm good at guessing, though, and after some poking around, got it to reformat my drive and install Win 98. Install, update, reboot. Update, reboot. Oh! Found something new! Reboot. Install the updates that came with the mobo -- reboot n more times! Connect to the internet (after figuring out I needed one more update and reboot to bring the on-board ethernet port up), and do the update/reboot dance a few more times.

   But through this dance, the board seems to be doing fine. The heat sink is reasonably cool. Even running 98, it feels a whole lot faster than Win2k on the 400 MHz PII. Load up  VNC, and Wall Watcher. Found a nice freeware utility, Speedfan, which shows temperatures and other info about what's happening. Not as nice as Temperature Monitor or Menu Meters on the Mac, but it does the job, and the price is right.

  Tidied things up a bit, and slid the "new" box in between the Mac and the old weatherbox (Photo 1). Yeah, it gets warmer in there, but it runs. Let it run overnight and we'll see how things go.

  My copies of Ghost and XP Home arrived in the next day's post! Okay, nothing sacred on the hard disk -- let's wipe it out and go!

  Surely, in the years between 98SE and XP Home Microsoft have managed to fix the LCD problem...

  Hell no! And it took me a while to figure out what was going on and when to hit what key to get it to do what I needed it to do!  Rather than trying to boot directly from the (XP Home) CD, booted up 98 and let the installer on the CD auto-run, which used better video drivers and got the ball rolling (slowly).

  It only took XP Home about an hour to install! I did a clean install of OSX 10.4 (Tiger) in about 20 minutes! At least the (OEM) copy of XP Home I got had SP2 already installed -- that saved me one reboot (at least)... Still, a lot of updates and reboots to bring the thing up to ground zero.

  It took me a while to find the right place to poke things such as the firewall so VNC would work, and so I could exchange files with the Mac. VNC, Wall Watcher, SpeedFan, Python, and of course Firefox with Adblocker and ShowIP. Delete Outlook Express -- no e-mail on this box! It's going to be a production system! Pulled the CDR/DVD drive I'd added to the weatherbox and put it in the "new" one, returning the old CD reader to the weatherbox. Oh, during one of the power cycle trips, put my Kill A Watt power meter on the thing. 120 watts, plus or minus a bit depending on what it's doing.

  So the thing works, and it's much faster than the old PII! But the box it's in won't win any contests (Photo 2). It's missing the front bezel, and a side panel, one of the feet, most of the mobo standoffs. I can do better. And I did, for $25, at another of the Valley's surplus places, thanks to another suggestion from Ian.

    Aside -- $25 for a box with power supply...  The next day when we're visiting Fry's, they have a slightly smaller box, with power supply on sale for $22.95, before a $20 mail in rebate!  No front USB ports, though, and I don't like layout.  How can anyone make money in that business?

    Move-in went easy; I took my time, not wanting/expecting to be inside this box for a while (Photo 3). Up and running, cool, lower power (around 95 watts, a newer power supply, but I may replace it, as I don't like what I see when I look inside past the fan blades). Well, I might put in another fan, and I'll look for specials on memory. With Wall Watcher, SpeedFan, and VNC server running on XP Home, I'm using up 35% of my memory! I should probably add a floppy -- I'm running an old BIOS in this thing. and an old (nVidia) AGP video card (a freebie though). Turned around, looks better already! Glad I got a case with front USB ports (Photo 4).

    Sunday -- added another fan, replaced the internal squeaker with an internal speaker, and moved Weather Display Sunday night. Got that running with only a few twitches, mostly due to settings not propagating to the new machine (even though I copied the whole damn directory and the registry entries). Still not sure how it will behave on reboots/power failures, if things will restart automagically, or if someone has to log in for that to happen. Moved the old beige box to the closet for storage! Down to two again (Photo 5).

    Installed Ghost 9 (OEM, "For sale in the Middle East and Africa"), and backed up over the network to the (Mac OS X based) server in the closet.  The higher the compression level, the less time it takes -- most of the time seems to be shuffling data over the wire.

    Still having problems getting Weather Display to start up automagically when the new box powers up -- interactions between XP Home and Weather Display. Found the latest TweekUI to at least let me set it to log in as the weather user (non-admin) when the box powers up.

    Marc suggested the simple approach -- dropping shortcuts into the startup folder, not using any of the options in Weather Display.  So, TweekUI logs in a user on startup, and things take off from there.

    Get it running, get it stable, back it up, and leave it alone!

  Look at the Pictures.

    A week later -- Ghost automagically backs things up to the server.  Weather Display and Wall Watcher seem to work just fine, and the thing recovers on restarts.

    So, of course, I start screwing around...  The great thing about Macs is that they just work.   I tried for an hour or two to get a PCI video card working.  No dice. Managed to get back to ground zero, things working the way they were before I started.

    Except!  I restart the pig (for the nth time), and the XP firewall pops up with, "You want to let this thing phone home?" Say what?!! Hell no!  Oh, and where the hell did that come from?

    Haven't figured out where I got it.  Made the acquaintance of the Bleeping Computer Startup Database - a great site, and Autoruns, another great (freeware) tool.

    Some may not be sure if the thing I had is spyware or not, but when something installs itself in a misnamed folder, nested in more folders, all of them made read-only, and with a slew of registry entries, it smells bad to me!  Thanks to some other websites (who consider it spyware/adware), I think I got it evicted.

    How the hell are normal (random) people supposed to use/maintain these things?

 Namaste--

 Bob