Edition 1.4, 29th January 1999 do NT ? D*Cypher The year-end Christmas Holidays have traditionally been a time for rest, relaxation and consolidation. You might have spent this time at home with family, or on a glorious beach with only sunsets and sundowners for company. As for myself, it was supposed to be a holiday at home, where I would tackle the many chores that have awaited my attention the whole year.
#1 was setting up a decent workstation for my home-office. I have been a road-warrior for far too long, and my faithful Acer P133 Notebook has just become too small (in many ways) to store and run the apps I use nowadays.
So with what I would consider a kick-ass PCB Pentium II (350MHz, 64MB RAM, 6GB Hard Disk, ATI Expert AGP-bus video card ), I set out on the rigorous (and tortuous) ordeal of installing, loading, configuring, reinstalling, loading, etc, persevering, never leaving the keyboard until I had a working workstation.
The new millennia is just around the corner, and so is Windows 2000. Which means that Windows 95/98 has a death sentence hanging over their shrink-wraps. Windows 2000 is the successor of Windows NT Version 4. NT is similar to Windows 95/98 cosmetically, but underneath the hood, it is completely different.
Well it would be great if you could get under the hood to fix it: and that might have meant a bit more Xmas time around the pool for me. You see in all my wisdom, I decided it was time to install NT Workstation to start getting a feel for it prior to the inevitable market onslaught. Oh, I had some other reasons as well.
NT is supposed to be a multitasking operating system modelled on Unix..It has some quite advanced networking features, and could save me a ‘packet' by doing some network routing for me.
Part of my work-at-home master plan requires connectivity, both to the office IT system and to the Internet. After looking and weighing up all the options, I decided to give the classic Telkom analogue Leased Line a shot. This is like an ordinary telephone line, but is permanently up. Monthly costs are fixed, and are quite reasonable. With the right configuration and good modems, I should be able to raise over 100 Kbps through this line. That will do just fine for remote control of servers using PC Anywhere 32, up and downloading code and data sets, as well as cruising the net at gif-wrecking speeds I hope.
With NT acting as the router, I can even have my little private LAN @ home wired to the net. That's going to include a Linux box, and my notebook since I often work with two PC's: it's handy when Windows crashes to have some redundancy. You can almost be sure that the boot up / Chkdsk routine will be complete before the other crashes.
Fatal crashes should be a thing of the past with NT/2000, or so I thought. It's multitasking system is supposed to be able to dispense with any badly behaved application when it bombs: you should be able to Ctrl-Alt-Del and select End Task, with the rest of the system carrying on as though nothing was wrong. Fast track: My experience is otherwise: some crashed apps necessitate a perky punch of the Reset button as a last resort.
But back to the installation drill. I really thought this PC would fly. However, after I got NT Workstation loaded successfully, it had the same feel (in terms of speed that is) as my P133 notebook. NT isn't big, it's huge. It takes ages to load up, even with my 64MB RAM. Any operation gets the hard disk grinding, with virtual memory swapping I guess. I could top up to 128MB, but that would be excessive right now I feel. I am just going to have to live with those hour-glass blues (again), sigh.
It took me over a week to get it up & running to my vague satisfaction. The first two times I installed the OS and applications, I got to a point where I lost everything due to some quirk in the SoundBlaster Live ! Driver installation (supposedly NT 4 compatible). I mean everything ! After rebooting after the driver installation, the system would boot up past the blue screen of death into a sickly light blue screen of compos de-mentis. This was after hours of installing apps at the office.
It would be nice if a message flashed up and said "Beware the operation you are about to perform is going to destroy your entire system configuration", but no such luck. Searching the web sites of Microsoft and Creative Labs failed to produce any reprieve, let alone answers, and with it being holiday time, no response from e-mails sent to support people either .
But third time around I installed the SB Live! Drivers before anything else and this seemed to do the trick, that is getting the all the applications and drivers loaded.
I suspect it had something to do with corruption of the registry. That is the flat file database that stores all the configuration information in both Win 95/98 and NT. However, there must be differences in the structure or order or something that makes it bomb so drastically. And unless you have backed up the registry file, and know how to fiddle registry keys (highly cryptic), you are in for a complete reinstall of the OS and apps if you are cursed with such a crash.
It was the last day of ‘98 that saw me finally arrive home with a (working) PC. By this time, I had lost all enthusiasm for any R&R in front of this beast, and just as well my spirits were uplifted for ‘99 with a very successful New Years party on a mine dump. And therefore I didn't get around to setting up my very own home page at long last.
Now I am finally set up to get moving & cruising in cyberspace from home. Well almost, if only Telkom could get the line installation finished. It's only taken them 6 months so far ! Some say patience is a virtue, however, with Telkom the wait becomes virulent. But that's another story...
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