Just recently replaced mine and my daughter's machines. Since I was using a Pentium 3 500 Mhz, with slow hard drive, and a copy of Windoze98 that'd been running so long and tweaked so many times its registry had ballooned to about 5 meg when saved as a text file, I figured the new machines would be pretty cool.
Got myself a 1.9 GHz P4 with 768 meg of ram and a 100-meg ATA100 hard drive. Mucho fast. And with XP on it and nothing else. Perfect. Just add my apps back in one at a time. Daughter got a 1.4 GHz machine. New XP on it, too.
So, we're both really digging XP. Nice, simple interface and the learning curve is more like a flat line. And on top of that, it's reliable as all get-out. The only time they get rebooted is if a software install requires it. Uptime on my daughter's machine is something like 2 weeks now. Mine was 8 days until I had to boot it for an install recently. We could never get 98 to run that long.
With everything humming along nicely, and the network working again, and ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) working beautifully, it was time to start finishing up the conversion.
Well, unable to get her machine to run Eudora off of mine. Complains about particular files being read-only, despite her having full permmissions on my machine from the root on down.
No biggie. I happened to pick up a copy of Eudora WorldMail Server when I bought these machines, as I needed a more elegant and robust way to handle the numerous inboxes we have for our many domain names.
Went to install it. Surprise. Won't run on XP. Bummer.
Decide I'm also going to get more active about developing my Talkzilla software, so I need to install SQL Server 7.0 and IIS. Hmmm.... There's no IIS in XP. Nothing even remotely like it. Not good. There are a few similar packages available for XP, but it's IIS I want to learn; not some other package.
Ordered DirecWay so I can get blazing 400kbps (yawn) bandwidth, but it beats heck out of my typical 46.6kbps (snore) and only costs $20 more per month than the very expensive phone line I'm using.
Guess what. Can be made to run on XP if you make XP act like Windoze2000, but that's apparently the only way.
Oh, got a really cool HP psc950 printer, too. It scans, copies, prints, faxes, and even reads from digital camera cards and moves the files to the computer. You guessed it. No XP support. And none expected until April. I can print, but that's about it. Can't scan or read flash memory. However, if I were running Windoze 2000....
See where all of this is headed? Got a lot of things that want 2000 Server or at least 2000. Some of them absolutely require 2000 Server, though.
I call my best friend, John, and we're discussion how to tweak XP to make certain little things work with it. Then he asks "What're you doing with your old machines?". "I dunno. Door stops?"
Well, he suggested that we take the best of the two old machines and make a decent new machine and put Win2k Server on it, and let it run IIS (comes with it), SQL Server, and anything else I've got that XP won't support.
Cool idea, dude!
So I combine the best of both machines and end up with an AMD Athlon 850, 70-gig ATA100 hard drive, and 390+ meg of RAM. Should be good enough.
First problem I encounter is that it just plain won't work if the hard drive is on the ATA100 controller. Win98 works fine there, but 2K won't. I download drivers from ASUS and try to use them, to no avail. <sigh> Guess I'll uses the ATA33 interface. When I do so, Win2K installs with nary a hitch.
So, I've got this box running (albeit not on the optimum hard drive interface) and install SQL Server on it. No problem. IIS. No problem. Do up a couple of webpages on it and access them from my machine. No problem. Working beautifully.
Time to start dinking with the rest of my hardware.
I grab the old Viking Intelliflash camera memory reader, plug it into the USB port, download the drivers and software from their website and it installs no problem. Of course, it was one of the things that wouldn't work with XP.
Next is the tape drive. OnStream DI-30. Really sweet drives. I can't believe everyone doesn't already have one. 15 gig per cartridge (30 gig compressed), pretty darned fast, and in Windoze98 it looks like just another hard drive. At a cost of about $249 for the drive and something like $25-30 per cartridge. Deal of the century in my honest opinion. No computer should be without one.
So, I check the website. Forget about XP. BWAHAHAHAAAA. I'll fix yer little red wagon. I've got 2K Server! <thumping chest and bellowing triumphantly> And the website says it's supported.
Oops. Wish I would've checked the website before trying to just install it with the original CD.
It blows away my hard drive controller.
Reboot. Try to remove the software. No good. Manually delete it. Still no good. Really puzzling because the hard drive works well enough to run, but if I ever click "My Computer" or try to explore the C drive, forget it. Freeze City.
So I unplug the tape drive and do a Win2K Repair. Working fine again.
John came over today and we spent half the day trying to get the hard drive to work on the ATA100 interface. Kept downloading different drivers and trying them, to no avail. Tried upgrading the BIOS on the machine. It took (whew!) but still no luck with the hard drive. Then we finally try a different floppy. Hey! The original floppy (brand new) must've had problems. If we install the drivers from this one, it works.
So now I've got the machine running Win2K (need to reinstall SQL, though) on the ATA100 controller, and we start to tackle the tape drive again.
Uh-oh. Yeah, it'll work in Win2K, but only if you install a new driver then use MSFT Backup, rather than the software that comes with the drive. Hmmm... That means my tapes of the last 4 years are unusable. Not good. Still, we try to install it according to the directions on the website and though Microsoft Backup sees the device, it doesn't like the tapes. Even brand new ones.
Really need that tape drive pretty badly, and I need it to run the software that came with it so I can use my old tapes. Besides, it's just so cool the way it mounts as drive volumes. You can explore a tape just like it's a hard drive.
So, though I'm leaving out some details of my upgrade to XP experience (each of which is equally annoying), I can sum up the above by saying that my daughter and I are each running XP boxes that absolutely SCREAM! Plus I've got another machine in my office running Win2k Server to handle things like SQL Server and to deal with other little things I really do need, but can't have with XP. Heck, it'll probably run my printer just fine, too, though I haven't tried yet.
The tape drive is a huge gap and I hate the solution I'm thinking of, but will probably go that way: Win98 Box to do nothing but run the tape drive. That one can live in the garage (I've got Cat5 buried underground from the house to the garage). No worries. Only need to replace tapes once every several months.
And while I'm at it, there're yet two more boxes I'll need/want. I've still got the 18-disk and 6-disk CD jukeboxes I used to use for my BBS. And this really cool (and expensive) software that mounts each jukebox as a volume, with each CD being a directory. Figure I can burn all of our converted MP3's (from our CD's) onto new CDs and load them in the jukeboxes and any machine on the network can access them for playing music. That'd be about 16-gig of music that's near-online enough for our purposes. Guessing that's well over a thousand songs. Call it 3000 if we convert to the Windoze format. Plenty of room.
Problem is, the software has to have a dedicated DOS machine connected to a Netware server. I still have my 3.11 (it works fine with it), so I'm thinking about building a Netware server (that'll do nothing but talk to the CD box) and a DOS box for the CD changers.
So, to get everything running that I need or want running, I need the following:
2 XP boxes (mine and my daughter's workstations)
1 Win2K Server box (for SQL Server and IIS and a few other odds and ends, likely including the printer and especially the DirecWay service)
1 Win98 box to do nothing but run the tape drive
1 Netware 3.11 server to do nothing but talk to the Windoze network
1 DOS box to run the CD changers
I really should downgrade the laptop from 98 to 95 just to add yet one more OS to this mess.
Now I have to wonder, given my problems with XP. I love it to pieces, but is most of the rest of the world having the same problem with it not supporting the hardware/software they've been using all along?
Oh, and Onstream's comment about why their software (Echo) won't work with Win2K Server goes something like: "We never intended it to work on a server. It's for standalone machines or network workstations. It's not industrial strength. We'll never upgrade it to run on Win2K Server." Which makes me wonder why on earth they were doing 30 and 50 gig and doing it FAST when the biggest hard drives hadn't reached 10 gig yet.
I had an especially nice sound card in my daughter's machine, and she misses it, but I haven't put it in the new machine for fear of encountering lack of XP support for it. Well, I always needed a box that'd just be used for MIDI and digital recording. Surely there's another OS I can put on that one. Got a copy of Linux here I haven't opened yet... <g>
Anyway, that's how my weekend has gone. On top of all of this, I'm trying to get my office cleaned and emptied for remodeling (new wallpaper, new carpet, new furniture) and expansion (by removing the closet). Hmmmm.... This'd probably go more quickly and be a lot more fun with the backhoe.
What's kinda cool, though, is I'm sitting at my machine but am writing this post from the Win2K box via Terminal Services. |
