On 05/05/2017 02:16 PM, David B. wrote:
On 05/05/2017 18:13, philo wrote:
On 0e



snip
Some batteries weigh as much as 4000# and require an overhead crane to
handle them

I have never seen anything like them.

Thanks for sharing, Philo.




It was one ofthe largest installation we ever sold. Something like
$1,000,000.


There is another similar sized battery bank on the other side of the
room. Since a lot of the batteries were in the trucks, that photo
represents 1/4th of the batteries at that location

It was a grocery distribution center that moved into a new facility
which is now owned by Kroger.

I gave that customer good honest service for many years and they
rewarded us with the purchase.

My reward was that I kept my job.

On Fri, 5 May 2017 14:11:37 -0500, philo wrote:

On 05/05/2017 11:36 AM, wrote:
On Fri, 5 May 2017 05:12:49 -0500, philo wrote:

On 05/04/2017 07:40 PM, Diesel wrote:
philo news May 2017 20:38:50 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

Never once had a BSOD and when I'd import XP drivers into Win2k
never a BSOD their either, but occasionally I'd have one that did
not work either

Alas, our experience differs by a wide margin too. You seem to be a
bit of a hobbyist. When you've serviced thousands of 'modern'
machines, get back to me.

Even though my own machines are ancient, the ones I work on for friends
are typically new.
Some of the people I deal with are gamers and have to have the latest
and greatest.

I've looked at some of those games, and other than visual effects,
graphics and sound, seem to be little different from those old DOS
games. LOL


Until Win10 came out, most of my more recent jobs were on Win8 machines
and confused owners. Once I put on Classic Shell, the folks stopped
crying. (One woman literally came over in tears because she could not
use her new computer.)

I have probably repaired more machines that you have...I don't know...
but I literally have repaired or built thousands of machines.
I've been doing this for about 17 years and at one time had two or three
machines on the the bench at a time.

FWIW: Thanks to getting surplus equipment from work, I have all on one
of several UPS...industrial grade.

Here are the batteries from my main UPS

https://www.dropbox.com/s/p7n6ywpqi6...ttery.jpg?dl=0

Now for a UPS battery bank that is JUST PLAIN SCARY. Get some proper
connection cables on that thing!!! And ballance you banks, for crying
out loud!! Your series-parallel connections with an odd number of
mismatched batteries is ridiculous.



That's and old photo , so that particular setup was retired


however...it was a 12v system and all those batteries were in parallel.


In parallel the battery ampere-hours do not have to match but in this
case they did. That said, all the amp. hours of the batteries were the
same...just different manufacturers.

I probably had seven days of backup power there and if I ever would have
discharged them I would have had to use an auxiliary charger.


In my workshop I now have one, 48V UPS and a 24V UPS

The batteries even match. All in all I have a total of five UPS systems
installed.


Since I have some lights on the UPS too, most of the time we have a
power failure I never even notice .

It is very rare to have a power failure more than a few hours, but we
once had one 24 hours, I operated my computer as much as I wanted, but
did have to go out for coffee.



What are you charging it with? and what kind of UPS is it? How long
does it take to recover after a power outage? It appears to be a 24
volt system - my small one is 48 volts and the big one is 60 volts.
(Powerware Prestige EXT) Both are dual conversion.


The one in the photo was manufactured by Best, now out of business.

I have a Best on my network equipment and phone - but not a Ferro.
Those Ferros were pretty innefficient unless you were using them as a
space heater ---.Best Power had a great system called the UBS - ever
see one of those in opperation??

Best Power was swallowed up by Eaton, who also swallowed up Exide,
into the "powerware" brand. WAY better stuff than APC (A Piece of
Crap)

It used a ferroresonant transformer so even though it was a single
conversion there was not one instant of drop out.


The only dual conversion UPS Ihad bit the dust about a year ago....it
was quite ancient.
I have 3 Powerware Prestige units - one of them an EXT. At the office
where I spent the last 16 or more years of mornings we have 4 of the
newer Powerware dual conversions - one of them an EXT with the big
battery pack. The TV boxes are on simple SOLA boxes and my wife's is
an "interactive" Powerware.
I find the APC Back-Ups units pretty much useless - - We have about
20 of them still in use at the factory where I spend 2 afternoons a
week - battery life is about a year, no matter what brand battery we
use (due in large part to heat or overcharging - the batteries are
usually swollen or split when removed)

I have not had a split battery in any of the Powerware units so far -
and the oldest ones are pushing hard at 23 years old now (new
batteries, of course) 2 are 1000kva and one is 650. The line
interactive is a 600, as is the old Best. The solas are S2K industrial
units - I think they are 450s.

The little one on my wife's system is a 24, and the one backing up my
internet modem and VOIP is a 12. Each of my TV cable boxes/pvrs are on
their own UPS as well.

They are all good for about half an hour, but for long-term outages
the natural gas option on my generator provides for virtually
unlimited run-time.



No generator here, the one 24 hour failure we had was an very odd situation

We have had 2 longer than 24 hours since we moved in here 36 years
ago. One was 3 days. We have had several longer than 2 hours - and if
those are in the winter having power for the furnace makes life a lot
more bearable and prevents frozen pipes. I can run the Genny on
gasoline or propane at full rated power - on Gasoline 'till I run out
of gasoline, on propane untill I run all 3 tanks dry - then on Natural
Gass at about 70% rated output virtually for ever on Natural Gas. I
might get around to running a bigger gas line which should allow full
output on NG as well.

Ice storms are the biggest threat here, followed by Tornados or
massive grid failure - which caused the "big one" in 2003.(overheated
transmission lines in Ohio, due to extreme power requirements due to
prolonged high temperatures, made worse by a poer plant failure etc
etc).
The "Storm of '98" was the other biggie - and that was in January. A
lot of houses had split pipes - and a lot of others didn't only
because homeowners drained the pipes before they froze - - or left
water taps running.

On 05/05/2017 20:26, philo wrote:
On 05/05/2017 02:16 PM, David B. wrote:
On 05/05/2017 18:13, philo wrote:
On 0e



snip
Some batteries weigh as much as 4000# and require an overhead crane to
handle them

I have never seen anything like them.

Thanks for sharing, Philo.




It was one of the largest installation we ever sold. Something like
$1,000,000.

BIG business! :-)

There is another similar sized battery bank on the other side of the
room. Since a lot of the batteries were in the trucks, that photo
represents 1/4th of the batteries at that location

Amazing.

It was a grocery distribution center that moved into a new facility
which is now owned by Kroger.

I gave that customer good honest service for many years and they
rewarded us with the purchase.

My reward was that I kept my job.

You are the kind of guy that Dustin *should* have had as a dad!

--
"Do something wonderful, people may imitate it." (Albert Schweitzer)

On 05/05/2017 02:55 PM, wrote:

dual conversion.


The one in the photo was manufactured by Best, now out of business.

I have a Best on my network equipment and phone - but not a Ferro.
Those Ferros were pretty innefficient unless you were using them as a
space heater ---.Best Power had a great system called the UBS - ever
see one of those in opperation??

The company I worked for distributed Best (before we were absorbed by
Yuasa-Exide and later Enersys-Delaware) They were manufactured here in
Wisconsin and I even went to school at the factory.
To the best of my knowledge they only had Ferro transformers. That was
back around 1988 or so.

The one I have is physically huge and it's only 850 VA (I think)

Twice the size of a 1400 VA using I have on my shop.

The Ferro transformers are maybe 85% efficient . Just remembered however
that I took the one I had out of service as under a large inrush load,
the thing actually dropped out...(even though in my previous post I
mentioned that a Ferro would not drop out I guess that was "in theory"
only.)


BTW: With regard to charging, the Best UPS used hysteresis loop
techniquie. It worked very well and would often confuse people used to
"float" charging.


Please let me know about UBS I never heard of it.





Best Power was swallowed up by Eaton, who also swallowed up Exide,
into the "powerware" brand. WAY better stuff than APC (A Piece of
Crap)

It used a ferroresonant transformer so even though it was a single
conversion there was not one instant of drop out.


The only dual conversion UPS Ihad bit the dust about a year ago....it
was quite ancient.
I have 3 Powerware Prestige units - one of them an EXT. At the office
where I spent the last 16 or more years of mornings we have 4 of the
newer Powerware dual conversions - one of them an EXT with the big
battery pack. The TV boxes are on simple SOLA boxes and my wife's is
an "interactive" Powerware.
I find the APC Back-Ups units pretty much useless - - We have about
20 of them still in use at the factory where I spend 2 afternoons a
week - battery life is about a year, no matter what brand battery we
use (due in large part to heat or overcharging - the batteries are
usually swollen or split when removed)

I have not had a split battery in any of the Powerware units so far -
and the oldest ones are pushing hard at 23 years old now (new
batteries, of course) 2 are 1000kva and one is 650. The line
interactive is a 600, as is the old Best. The solas are S2K industrial
units - I think they are 450s.

The little one on my wife's system is a 24, and the one backing up my
internet modem and VOIP is a 12. Each of my TV cable boxes/pvrs are on
their own UPS as well.

They are all good for about half an hour, but for long-term outages
the natural gas option on my generator provides for virtually
unlimited run-time.



No generator here, the one 24 hour failure we had was an very odd situation

We have had 2 longer than 24 hours since we moved in here 36 years
ago. One was 3 days. We have had several longer than 2 hours - and if
those are in the winter having power for the furnace makes life a lot
more bearable and prevents frozen pipes. I can run the Genny on
gasoline or propane at full rated power - on Gasoline 'till I run out
of gasoline, on propane untill I run all 3 tanks dry - then on Natural
Gass at about 70% rated output virtually for ever on Natural Gas. I
might get around to running a bigger gas line which should allow full
output on NG as well.

Ice storms are the biggest threat here, followed by Tornados or
massive grid failure - which caused the "big one" in 2003.(overheated
transmission lines in Ohio, due to extreme power requirements due to
prolonged high temperatures, made worse by a poer plant failure etc
etc).
The "Storm of '98" was the other biggie - and that was in January. A
lot of houses had split pipes - and a lot of others didn't only
because homeowners drained the pipes before they froze - - or left
water taps running.



The 24 hour drop-out took place after a fire.
It was water damage from underground seepage.

BTW: I wrote a m=nice letter to Eagle Picher last year, in my shop I
have a 6v battery I use on my in-shop continuity test butter...the
battery was manufactured in 1992 and still has some capacity!

On 05/05/2017 03:54 PM, David B. wrote:
X

There is another similar sized battery bank on the other side of the
room. Since a lot of the batteries were in the trucks, that photo
represents 1/4th of the batteries at that location

Amazing.

It was a grocery distribution center that moved into a new facility
which is now owned by Kroger.

I gave that customer good honest service for many years and they
rewarded us with the purchase.

My reward was that I kept my job.

You are the kind of guy that Dustin *should* have had as a dad!




LOL.

I just got done repairing a machine for a 28 year old woman who is a
film maker. She said none of her tech friends could repair her machine
and she was right in the middle of a project.

It had a quad core CPU @ 3ghz and 32gigs of RAM plus two SSD drives.

The video card, I don't know what it was but it had two, 8 pin power
wires feeding it.

She had been using it for almost two years and recently put in the
better video card and a better PSU...soon after that the problem began
and the person who upgraded the thing for her was a bit stumped.


Ad it turned out the new PSU had such a massive set of cables, that they
were pressing on the end RAM stick and the machine would sometimes get
RAM errors or else HD errors due to the SATA connector at the HD having
a bit of pressure on it.

It was not immediately obvious but I eventually re-mounted the
hard-drive carriage so that there was no chance of the cables would be
pressing on anything.

Though I thought this was going to be any easy job and told her I'd fix
it free, it took a bit more time that I expected.

She told me she would refer all her paying friends to me however.


While I was working on the machine I entertained her with stories about
the punch card days, and how the consultant at my office had started at
Oscar Meyer in 1948 and he would transfer data from one office to the
next using a small pickup truck full of punch cards!


I don't know if she could comprehend

On 05/05/2017 22:42, philo wrote:
On 05/05/2017 03:54 PM, David B. wrote:
X

There is another similar sized battery bank on the other side of the
room. Since a lot of the batteries were in the trucks, that photo
represents 1/4th of the batteries at that location

Amazing.

It was a grocery distribution center that moved into a new facility
which is now owned by Kroger.

I gave that customer good honest service for many years and they
rewarded us with the purchase.

My reward was that I kept my job.

You are the kind of guy that Dustin *should* have had as a dad!




LOL.

I just got done repairing a machine for a 28 year old woman who is a
film maker. She said none of her tech friends could repair her machine
and she was right in the middle of a project.

It had a quad core CPU @ 3ghz and 32gigs of RAM plus two SSD drives.

The video card, I don't know what it was but it had two, 8 pin power
wires feeding it.

She had been using it for almost two years and recently put in the
better video card and a better PSU...soon after that the problem began
and the person who upgraded the thing for her was a bit stumped.


Ad it turned out the new PSU had such a massive set of cables, that they
were pressing on the end RAM stick and the machine would sometimes get
RAM errors or else HD errors due to the SATA connector at the HD having
a bit of pressure on it.

It was not immediately obvious but I eventually re-mounted the
hard-drive carriage so that there was no chance of the cables would be
pressing on anything.

Though I thought this was going to be any easy job and told her I'd fix
it free, it took a bit more time that I expected.

Great story! :-)

She told me she would refer all her paying friends to me however.

Great marketing, Philo! 10/10

While I was working on the machine I entertained her with stories about
the punch card days, and how the consultant at my office had started at
Oscar Meyer in 1948 and he would transfer data from one office to the
next using a small pickup truck full of punch cards!


I don't know if she could comprehend


Haha! ;-) Send her this link ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comput...nched_card_era

--
The only people who make a difference are the people who believe they can.

On 05/04/2017 12:39 PM, Diesel wrote:
T news 2017 16:38:15 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

Hi Philo,

M$ is a pain-in-the-ass over these matters. They should,
but they don't because they want you to buy their
latest garbage (Windows Nein, oops Ten).

You have to create a USB flash drive with the Windows 7
USB 3 drivers included.

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/dow...ws-7-USB-3-0-C
reator-Utility

That doesn't always work, either. The drivers have to support the
hardware, since, er, that's the point of the driver in the first place.



Oh ya, yo have to make sure you have the right drivers.
I only sell Intel chipsets, so it is the Intel one
I am concerned about.

philo news May 2017 10:12:49 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

Even though my own machines are ancient, the ones I work on for
friends are typically new.

Yep. I know what you mean.

Some of the people I deal with are gamers and have to have the
latest and greatest.

Have you got much experience with liquid cooled rigs yet? And, I
don't mean simple water recirculation via a tiny radiator, either.
Although, those can be fun too.

Now, if you want to get serious about a rig, try for one of the
digital coin miners with multiple video cards, etc. That's some
insane ****. They're using the GPU(s) on the graphics cards for
massive number crunching, not gaming.

I've looked at some of those games, and other than visual effects,
graphics and sound, seem to be little different from those old DOS
games. LOL

I feel the same way. The eye candy does impress me though. I get
myself killed on the new first person shooters because i'm so
interested in taking a look around the scenary. Waving blades of
grass, dew drops on the grass. ****ing cool. Distracts me.

I have probably repaired more machines that you have...I don't
know... but I literally have repaired or built thousands of
machines. I've been doing this for about 17 years and at one time
had two or three machines on the the bench at a time.

I doubt it. My first honorary masters (I actually have two of these)
in Computer science and program design is a little shy of 22 years
old. My Novell cert is a little over 24 years old, and, My Comptia
certs are seventeen years old this June. I've got copyrighted
published (on shareware cdroms, no less; long before people could
burn their own) software prior to VX that's in the mid twenties age
wise, now.
http://bughunter.it-mate.co.uk/core/

it's not a complete collection mind you... but, you get the point.

The last version of my last virus family known as Irok is seventeen
years old next month. So, no, you've got no where near the experience
as myself, and, you haven't been doing it professionally for nearly
as long, either.

Two or three on the bench at once would have been a slow day in most
of the places I've worked. And, that doesn't include new builds
for clients, either. We had a seperate area for those. Not trying to
be nitpicky, but, I doubt you've seen as many boxes as I have.
Despite the decades you have on me. [g] You took a rather long
'break', and, I didn't.

FWIW: Thanks to getting surplus equipment from work, I have all on
one of several UPS...industrial grade.

Same. [g] Some of them I have scrapped out though, couldn't justify
the expense of batteries or new transformers. *shrug* Don't really
need the 6+ hours of runtime, have generators for emergency power
here, so...It was either, dump cash into a UPS that can't run my
house AND my workshop, or, have a couple of BIG generators that can,
without even stressing themselves. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to
see which is more cost effective in the long run.

Military surplus generators is what I'm writing about. Big *******s.
Makes lots of amps. [g] They do like the Diesel though. Oh, yes they
do. But, they can run on almost anything fuel wise, as their military
generators and, well, you can't always find a supply of diesel
depending on where you are.

I like Linux and it sure performs better than Windows on my very
modest H/W.

I feel the same way. It ****ing flies compared to any version of
Windows on the same hardware. New or old for that matter.

No. I use Windows mainly so I can gain familiarity and therefore
intelligently help others.

That's the only reason I still keep various flavors of Windows
running, myself. All but one lives in a VM on my linux machines
though.

I keep a number of versions of Windows in Virtual machines so I
can give people step by step instructions over the phone.



Win8 for example, I have not bare hardware installation.

This XP box doesn't either. [g] It's the only one that runs ANY
flavor of Windows native. Has a pile of hardware and very custom
software too.


--
I would like to apologize for not having offended you yet.
Please be patient. I will get to you shortly.

On Friday, May 5, 2017 at 7:52:30 PM UTC-5, Diesel wrote:
philo news May 2017 10:12:49 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

Even though my own machines are ancient, the ones I work on for
friends are typically new.

Yep. I know what you mean.

Some of the people I deal with are gamers and have to have the
latest and greatest.

Have you got much experience with liquid cooled rigs yet? And, I
don't mean simple water recirculation via a tiny radiator, either.
Although, those can be fun too.

Now, if you want to get serious about a rig, try for one of the
digital coin miners with multiple video cards, etc. That's some
insane ****. They're using the GPU(s) on the graphics cards for
massive number crunching, not gaming.

I've looked at some of those games, and other than visual effects,
graphics and sound, seem to be little different from those old DOS
games. LOL

I feel the same way. The eye candy does impress me though. I get
myself killed on the new first person shooters because i'm so
interested in taking a look around the scenary. Waving blades of
grass, dew drops on the grass. ****ing cool. Distracts me.

I have probably repaired more machines that you have...I don't
know... but I literally have repaired or built thousands of
machines. I've been doing this for about 17 years and at one time
had two or three machines on the the bench at a time.

I doubt it. My first honorary masters (I actually have two of these)
in Computer science and program design is a little shy of 22 years
old. My Novell cert is a little over 24 years old, and, My Comptia
certs are seventeen years old this June. I've got copyrighted
published (on shareware cdroms, no less; long before people could
burn their own) software prior to VX that's in the mid twenties age
wise, now.
http://bughunter.it-mate.co.uk/core/

it's not a complete collection mind you... but, you get the point.

The last version of my last virus family known as Irok is seventeen
years old next month. So, no, you've got no where near the experience
as myself, and, you haven't been doing it professionally for nearly
as long, either.

Two or three on the bench at once would have been a slow day in most
of the places I've worked. And, that doesn't include new builds
for clients, either. We had a seperate area for those. Not trying to
be nitpicky, but, I doubt you've seen as many boxes as I have.
Despite the decades you have on me. [g] You took a rather long
'break', and, I didn't.

FWIW: Thanks to getting surplus equipment from work, I have all on
one of several UPS...industrial grade.

Same. [g] Some of them I have scrapped out though, couldn't justify
the expense of batteries or new transformers. *shrug* Don't really
need the 6+ hours of runtime, have generators for emergency power
here, so...It was either, dump cash into a UPS that can't run my
house AND my workshop, or, have a couple of BIG generators that can,
without even stressing themselves. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to
see which is more cost effective in the long run.

Military surplus generators is what I'm writing about. Big *******s.
Makes lots of amps. [g] They do like the Diesel though. Oh, yes they
do. But, they can run on almost anything fuel wise, as their military
generators and, well, you can't always find a supply of diesel
depending on where you are.

I like Linux and it sure performs better than Windows on my very
modest H/W.

I feel the same way. It ****ing flies compared to any version of
Windows on the same hardware. New or old for that matter.

No. I use Windows mainly so I can gain familiarity and therefore
intelligently help others.

That's the only reason I still keep various flavors of Windows
running, myself. All but one lives in a VM on my linux machines
though.

I keep a number of versions of Windows in Virtual machines so I
can give people step by step instructions over the phone.



Win8 for example, I have not bare hardware installation.

This XP box doesn't either. [g] It's the only one that runs ANY
flavor of Windows native. Has a pile of hardware and very custom
software too.
--


I'm glad you two aren't gynecologists! There's no telling how deep the conversation would get. ヽ(€¢€¿€¢)ノ

[8~{} Uncle Screwed Monster

On 05/05/2017 05:30 PM, David B. wrote:
OX



snip
ffice had
started at Oscar Meyer in 1948 and he would transfer data from one
office to the next using a small pickup truck full of punch cards!


I don't know if she could comprehend


Haha! ;-) Send her this link ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comput...nched_card_era




Thank you, I will send that to her right now!

On 05/05/2017 07:49 PM, Diesel wrote:
philo news May 2017 10:12:49 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

Even though my own machines are ancient, the ones I work on for
friends are typically new.

Yep. I know what you mean.

Some of the people I deal with are gamers and have to have the
latest and greatest.

Have you got much experience with liquid cooled rigs yet? And, I
don't mean simple water recirculation via a tiny radiator, either.
Although, those can be fun too.
No, I have zero experience with liquid cooling.

For the most part I try to get the most from low powered machines.
Probably a carry over from my Amateur radio days when I've use a low
powered transmitter to communicate world wide.

Since I'm a photographer and have a lot of friends in who are,
Basically if the machine can run Photoshop, that's all that's needed.



Now, if you want to get serious about a rig, try for one of the
digital coin miners with multiple video cards, etc. That's some
insane ****. They're using the GPU(s) on the graphics cards for
massive number crunching, not gaming.

I've looked at some of those games, and other than visual effects,
graphics and sound, seem to be little different from those old DOS
games. LOL

I feel the same way. The eye candy does impress me though. I get
myself killed on the new first person shooters because i'm so
interested in taking a look around the scenary. Waving blades of
grass, dew drops on the grass. ****ing cool. Distracts me.


The only gane I play is the Win3x version of Tetris.
Since it's 16 bit it will work with any 32bit OS but not a 64 bit
version of Windows. Works fine under Wine in 64 bit Linux though

I have probably repaired more machines that you have...I don't
know... but I literally have repaired or built thousands of
machines. I've been doing this for about 17 years and at one time
had two or three machines on the the bench at a time.

I doubt it. My first honorary masters (I actually have two of these)
in Computer science and program design is a little shy of 22 years
old. My Novell cert is a little over 24 years old, and, My Comptia
certs are seventeen years old this June. I've got copyrighted
published (on shareware cdroms, no less; long before people could
burn their own) software prior to VX that's in the mid twenties age
wise, now.
http://bughunter.it-mate.co.uk/core/

it's not a complete collection mind you... but, you get the point.

The last version of my last virus family known as Irok is seventeen
years old next month. So, no, you've got no where near the experience
as myself, and, you haven't been doing it professionally for nearly
as long, either.

Two or three on the bench at once would have been a slow day in most
of the places I've worked.

I'm talking about my /home/ workshop not an actual business.
I would work on machines before or after I'd go to my real job.

When I had a steady supply of computers coming in, I could live entirely
off that...and my work paychecks would just go right to the bank

And, that doesn't include new builds
for clients, either. We had a seperate area for those. Not trying to
be nitpicky, but, I doubt you've seen as many boxes as I have.
Despite the decades you have on me. [g] You took a rather long
'break', and, I didn't.

FWIW: Thanks to getting surplus equipment from work, I have all on
one of several UPS...industrial grade.

Same. [g] Some of them I have scrapped out though, couldn't justify
the expense of batteries or new transformers. *shrug* Don't really
need the 6+ hours of runtime, have generators for emergency power
here, so...It was either, dump cash into a UPS that can't run my
house AND my workshop, or, have a couple of BIG generators that can,
without even stressing themselves. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to
see which is more cost effective in the long run.


No need for a generator here...Only once did I experience a long power
failure.

I want to make sure though, if I have a machine on the bench I won't
lose power in the middle of something critical. Thus far only once was
there a power glitch during a critical operation and my UPS covered it

Military surplus generators is what I'm writing about. Big *******s.
Makes lots of amps. [g] They do like the Diesel though. Oh, yes they
do. But, they can run on almost anything fuel wise, as their military
generators and, well, you can't always find a supply of diesel
depending on where you are.

I like Linux and it sure performs better than Windows on my very
modest H/W.

I feel the same way. It ****ing flies compared to any version of
Windows on the same hardware. New or old for that matter.

No. I use Windows mainly so I can gain familiarity and therefore
intelligently help others.

That's the only reason I still keep various flavors of Windows
running, myself. All but one lives in a VM on my linux machines
though.

I keep a number of versions of Windows in Virtual machines so I
can give people step by step instructions over the phone.



Win8 for example, I have not bare hardware installation.

This XP box doesn't either. [g] It's the only one that runs ANY
flavor of Windows native. Has a pile of hardware and very custom
software too.




I still have an AMD-450 in my workshop with a removable drive kit and a
box with at least 20 HD's in caddy's,

Win95, OS/2 Win3x, Old versions of Linux and BSD and Plan9

Don't know if you've ever fooled with Plan 9, maybe you'd get a kick out
of it?

philo news May 2017 17:09:46 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

My boss's brother was one of the owners of the company and gave
him a gravy job. Once the moon launch was achieved, thousands of
engineers lost their jobs and he was just happy to be employed
again/

And so it goes. Waste of good talent. Get the job done, out the door
you go.


--
I would like to apologize for not having offended you yet.
Please be patient. I will get to you shortly.

philo news May 2017 17:54:14 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

Bought a few Macs for $60 each quite a while back.

I wanted to try a Lytro and OSX was the only supported OS at the
time

I think I would have checked into emulation before spending a dime on
an actual Mac. I wouldn't even take 'free' ones.

I mentioned that I have upgraded a number of Win7 machines to
Win10, but my wife's main machine which is used to to real work,
is staying with Win7.

So what are your plans when Windows 7 EOL comes and is no longer
supported?

At that time I may either upgrade the machine or have my wife not
use it on-line.

Not use it online? Do you think hacking is like what you see in the
movies or something?

I might even upgrade the thing when she is between projects or
perhaps pull the drive and perform a test install on a spare drive

Upgrade as in goto Windows 10, or?



--
I would like to apologize for not having offended you yet.
Please be patient. I will get to you shortly.

news Fri, 05 May 2017 17:17:32 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

On Fri, 5 May 2017 14:41:06 +0100, "David B."
wrote:

On 05/05/2017 11:12, philo wrote:
I have probably repaired more machines that you have...I don't
know... but I literally have repaired or built thousands of
machines. I've been doing this for about 17 years and at one
time had two or three machines on the the bench at a time.

Now you are just teasing the poor boy! ;-)
At one time I had upwards of 30 systems on my bench at one time.
We shipped sometimes 150 a week. Thankfully while I was with the
company we didn't have to repair too many (well, one is too many
when you put a 3 year warranty on the systems (we are talking 25
years ago) -
I used to do some "board level" repairs back in the day when it
actually made sense (and dollars) to do that.I wouldn't attempt it
today (for one thing my eyes are not up to it any more - and
second, I've likely forgotten more than a lot of guys today know.)

30 was average depending on how busy we were at one particular shop.
That doesn't include onsite service calls, custom boxes we built and
sold in house, etc. We had KVM switches so we could tie upto 10 into
the same mouse/keyboard and screen; reducing wasted space. The space
could then be used for more computers. The boss was about the money,
so, the more we worked on at once, the more money he could make...

I've done my share of board level repairs too. Everything from
providing a new ground plane for a DIN5 keyboard connector to cap
replacement, eeprom replacement, burned out diodes, etc. There's
just no money in that anymore, unless the machine is something really
special and you can't just replace the hardware and move on.





--
I would like to apologize for not having offended you yet.
Please be patient. I will get to you shortly.

T news 2017 00:18:23 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

On 05/04/2017 12:39 PM, Diesel wrote:
T news 2017 16:38:15 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

Hi Philo,

M$ is a pain-in-the-ass over these matters. They should,
but they don't because they want you to buy their
latest garbage (Windows Nein, oops Ten).

You have to create a USB flash drive with the Windows 7
USB 3 drivers included.

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/dow...dows-7-USB-3-0
-C reator-Utility

That doesn't always work, either. The drivers have to support
the hardware, since, er, that's the point of the driver in the
first place.



Oh ya, yo have to make sure you have the right drivers.
I only sell Intel chipsets, so it is the Intel one
I am concerned about.


I'm an Intel person myself. Mind, you, I do have a few AMD boxes..
but, I prefer Intel. I can torture them more. [g]


--
I would like to apologize for not having offended you yet.
Please be patient. I will get to you shortly.

Fri, 05 May 2017 19:55:04 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

Best Power was swallowed up by Eaton, who also swallowed up Exide,
into the "powerware" brand. WAY better stuff than APC (A Piece of
Crap)

It depends on which APC you have. Some did outright, suck.




--
I would like to apologize for not having offended you yet.
Please be patient. I will get to you shortly.

philo news May 2017 02:25:00 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

No, I have zero experience with liquid cooling.

Oh.. You're missing out. If you think gaming rigs are the bees knees,
you need to see a digital coin miner with five! video cards on her. [g]
Of course, you would notice the dent in your power bill. They typically
run multiple power supplies in the 1+kilowatt range.

For the most part I try to get the most from low powered machines.
Probably a carry over from my Amateur radio days when I've use a
low powered transmitter to communicate world wide.

I respect that. I had to run heat to get serious distance with some CB
rigs I had. The HAM rigs could travel the world on far less wattage.

Since I'm a photographer and have a lot of friends in who are,
Basically if the machine can run Photoshop, that's all that's
needed.

Hell, the machine I use for a file server here could do that without
breaking a sweat, under a Windows VM no less. [g] Since it's native
Linux. heh.

The only gane I play is the Win3x version of Tetris.
Since it's 16 bit it will work with any 32bit OS but not a 64 bit
version of Windows. Works fine under Wine in 64 bit Linux though

I play asteroids on occasion on this machine, and various nintendo
games on some of my linux laptops; via emulation. I've got every single
ROM ever released world wide for Atari, Nintendo and super Nintendo,
although.. I wasn't really a big fan of the Super Nintendo. Never
actually owned one of those. Didn't particularly care for the Sega
systems either.

I have probably repaired more machines that you have...I don't
know... but I literally have repaired or built thousands of
machines. I've been doing this for about 17 years and at one
time had two or three machines on the the bench at a time.

I doubt it. My first honorary masters (I actually have two of
these) in Computer science and program design is a little shy of
22 years old. My Novell cert is a little over 24 years old, and,
My Comptia certs are seventeen years old this June. I've got
copyrighted published (on shareware cdroms, no less; long before
people could burn their own) software prior to VX that's in the
mid twenties age wise, now.
http://bughunter.it-mate.co.uk/core/

it's not a complete collection mind you... but, you get the
point.

The last version of my last virus family known as Irok is
seventeen years old next month. So, no, you've got no where near
the experience as myself, and, you haven't been doing it
professionally for nearly as long, either.

Two or three on the bench at once would have been a slow day in
most of the places I've worked.

I'm talking about my /home/ workshop not an actual business.
I would work on machines before or after I'd go to my real job.

As I said, you don't have the experience I do. I've been employed as an
actual 'tech' since I was a teenager. I *never* left the field. Didn't
take a long vacation from IT as you did. My 'real' job is that of a
computer technician. It has been for a long long time. I've added
another skillset though. That of electrician. G I find they are very
complimentary skillsets. Not only can I wire your home/business, I can
provide your networking equipment, your computers, etc, too. Custom
software needed? I can write it for you, in house. I wouldn't mind
living long enough to become a master electrician, but, that requires
so many more years of doing it. heh. I don't think I've got that much
available time.

I work my ass off, if you haven't already noticed. It's nothing for me
to pull 80+ hours a week. Infact, I hope to die on my feet, doing what
I love, rather than die in my sleep or something. I'm known as a
workaholic. I'll have plenty of time for sleep, when I'm dead. I've
been this way since I was a kid though. My parents didn't instill it in
me, I just didn't like to sleep much. I wanted to learn how things
worked, all the damn time. And thought if I was sleeping, I was missing
out.. So...

When I had a steady supply of computers coming in, I could live
entirely off that...and my work paychecks would just go right to
the bank

The computer repair business isn't what it used to be. Electricians
OTH, well, that's a dependable source of income. You can't 'outsource'
that or make it 'disposable'

No need for a generator here...Only once did I experience a long
power failure.

Well, thanks to the area in which I chose to build, the power grid
isn't the most reliable...And, I've gotta have a stable power source,
at all times.

I want to make sure though, if I have a machine on the bench I
won't lose power in the middle of something critical. Thus far
only once was there a power glitch during a critical operation and
my UPS covered it

We think alike in some cases.

Don't know if you've ever fooled with Plan 9, maybe you'd get a
kick out of it?

I can't say as it rings a bell. I might. I'll have to check it out via
a search engine. Did you ever get to play with anything by Novell?

When I was in highschool, I converted the schools token ring
configuration to cat5. We had 386 boxes mostly that didn't actually
have a hard disk present. They booted from their network cards via the
Novell server. It provided everything from boot code to Windows 3.11
for workgroups. I really liked how it could support hundreds of
machines from a single dedicated machine.

--
I would like to apologize for not having offended you yet.
Please be patient. I will get to you shortly.

Fri, 05 May 2017 16:36:15 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

What are you charging it with? and what kind of UPS is it? How
long does it take to recover after a power outage? It appears to
be a 24 volt system - my small one is 48 volts and the big one is
60 volts. (Powerware Prestige EXT) Both are dual conversion.

The ones I actually have in service are 24 volt based. I don't have
them tied via data connection to any of the computers though

I just leave them plugged in and that's it. If the house loses power
for more for more than a few minutes, one of the generators will kick
on anyhow; so, I shouldn't have to worry about the UPS actually running
down far enough to go offline on me.

They are all good for about half an hour, but for long-term
outages the natural gas option on my generator provides for
virtually unlimited run-time.

My APC SmartUPS 700 is supposedly good for about 45 minutes, depending
on load. It's got brand new batteries in it too. I got them for $11 a
piece at walmart of all places! Heh. It's tied into the file server for
the LAN and this particular workstation. another UPS provides filtered
power for the switch gear, etc. I know many APC models sucked ass, but,
this happens to be one that isn't bad. It's reliable. Provides clean,
filtered current for my boxes at all times. I like that.



--
I would like to apologize for not having offended you yet.
Please be patient. I will get to you shortly.

philo news May 2017 09:55:36 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

On 05/04/2017 07:40 PM, Diesel wrote:
philo news May 2017 20:34:07 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

[snip]

I did not try that but to make things clear, the mobo I had
specifically did not have USB-2 or USB-3 drivers.

Which means likely didn't have hardware for those type of ports
present on it. Which means, no drivers. I use the word likely
intentionally, btw. I have seen boards that infact did have the
required hardware, but, at the time of shipment, didn't have
drivers for the newer stuff and resorted to older drivers,
instead. Better to have slower running ports than dead ones,
right?


Wrong

Ahh... Looking further down, you've acquired a windows 10 friendly
mainboard. And, you mentioned you couldn't get USB 2 running, but you
didn't explain the ports wouldn't run at all, nor did you mention the
board was expecting Windows 10 at the time...My mistake for assuming
you had USB v1 speed from them. Why did you think that Windows 7
drivers would have been available for everything on the board from the
manufacturer? That just doesn't make much sense to me...

There are not going to be drivers for Win7 for that board...at
least not from the mfg.

Why would you expect any? Windows 7/8.1 are on the way out.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...82E16813157729

My friend who used to write drivers for a living told me he could
do it....if he gets PAID

I don't have a problem with that. Writing drivers is a pain in the ass.
Why shouldn't he be paid for the work he'll have to do?

You might not actually have to go that far though. It may still be
possible to find compatible drivers for Windows 7 and that board...
They won't come from asus and they'd be generic in nature, but... It's
possible. Have you tried one of the gianormous driver collection
packages? I've got two of them. Driverpack and SDI. Credit to Shadow
for turning me onto the SDI collection.

I am very honest , to the point where most of the work I do , if I
get paid at all, I get grossly underpaid. Mostly I do it because I
like doing it.

I have no problems with that. I do all kinds of 'freebie' stuff too,
mostly for friends, family, and co-workers. I'm not out to become
filthy rich; I can't take it with me anyhow. Just finished switching a
nice HP laptop from 32bit Vista to 64bit Linux Mint KDE 17.3; it flies!
And, the owner is very happy with it, too. She's nearly 80 years old
and has no trouble using it. So, I think almost! anyone could use that
distro, especially if they were already familiar with Windows. I'm not
ready to go the 18.x route just yet...I'm still taking a wait and see
approach. They've changed a few things around, and, I don't like it.
Mostly, the lack of codecs already present with the iso.

Some of the people I deal with are pretty clueless...
They often doing even knwo what operating system they are using ,
when I ask them. If I'm lucky they will say "Windows."

Hey! Atleast you have *some idea* what OS might be on the machine.
I've had people bring me 'Windows' boxes that are actually running some
flavor of Linux. ROFL. How they get the two confused, I really don't
know. The distro's I've seen don't look THAT MUCH like Windows...But, I
haven't seen every distro out there either. so...

The speaker was one of those with a voice coil. It also had the
audio transformer attached, so I really needed to pull it out
rather than use a standard permanent magnet speaker.

Speaking of which, I need to find a shop that might be able to recone
an old tube VHF radio I've got. Some little miscreant knocked holes in
it and has essentially shredded the speaker at this point...Last time I
actually turned it on though, it did run. So, I'm a bit irked to find
it in it's present condition. It belonged to my grandmother.

If my buddy does not want it, I may sell the green, electric eye
tube on eBay and just toss it.

Seriously? Can't you find a museum with a radio collection or
something? they might want it. If you're going to toss it, atleast
collect all the viable parts first. And, sell those on ebay if you
must. Hate to see things goto a landfill if they can be repurposed.


--
I would like to apologize for not having offended you yet.
Please be patient. I will get to you shortly.

"David B."
Fri, 05 May 2017 13:41:06 GMT
in alt.home.repair, wrote:

On 05/05/2017 11:12, philo wrote:
I have probably repaired more machines that you have...I don't
know... but I literally have repaired or built thousands of
machines. I've been doing this for about 17 years and at one time
had two or three machines on the the bench at a time.

Now you are just teasing the poor boy! ;-)


ROFL. I don't think so David...

He hasn't got **** on me as far as experience in the world of I.T. is
concerned. Nor the certifications to back it up. Where as, I do.
I've written software that's older than his experience. *laugh*

MID:
http://al.howardknight.net/msgid.cgi?ID=149406593300
I'm talking about my /home/ workshop not an actual business.
I would work on machines before or after I'd go to my real job.

My 'real job' (one of them anyhow) was and still is that of a computer
technician, a multiple certifications technician. His, was not.

Looks like your back to square one, stalker. That one isn't my equal
either. BFG



--
I would like to apologize for not having offended you yet.
Please be patient. I will get to you shortly.

On 05/06/2017 05:19 AM, Diesel wrote:
philo news May 2017 17:09:46 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

My boss's brother was one of the owners of the company and gave
him a gravy job. Once the moon launch was achieved, thousands of
engineers lost their jobs and he was just happy to be employed
again/

And so it goes. Waste of good talent. Get the job done, out the door
you go.


It was a steady paycheck for 38 years with good benefits such as a
company car or van I could use personally.


What I liked about my job was there were occasional good challenges and
I had done enough things right that upper management liked me.

My home office was apoplectic when on occasion I'd go over everyone's
heads and go right to the CEO with problems.

Though I was thrilled to retire, I think my bosses were even more
thrilled to see me go!

At any rate, I left on good terms and a few years later quit my
volunteer work too. Finally doing what I like full time.

On 05/06/2017 05:19 AM, Diesel wrote:
philo news May 2017 09:55:36 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

On 05/04/2017 07:40 PM, Diesel wrote:
philo news May 2017 20:34:07 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

[snip]

I did not try that but to make things clear, the mobo I had
specifically did not have USB-2 or USB-3 drivers.

Which means likely didn't have hardware for those type of ports
present on it. Which means, no drivers. I use the word likely
intentionally, btw. I have seen boards that infact did have the
required hardware, but, at the time of shipment, didn't have
drivers for the newer stuff and resorted to older drivers,
instead. Better to have slower running ports than dead ones,
right?


Wrong

Ahh... Looking further down, you've acquired a windows 10 friendly
mainboard. And, you mentioned you couldn't get USB 2 running, but you
didn't explain the ports wouldn't run at all, nor did you mention the
board was expecting Windows 10 at the time...My mistake for assuming
you had USB v1 speed from them. Why did you think that Windows 7
drivers would have been available for everything on the board from the
manufacturer? That just doesn't make much sense to me...


The specs clearly said Win10 so I did not make the assumption older
operating systems were supported, but I thought for sure I could come up
with something.

There were Win7 drivers available for everything but the USB and an
add-on card was a whopping ten bucks so it could have been used with Win7.

I was going to use it for myself actually as my own Windows machine
supports a maximum of 8 gigs of RAM and I put 16 gigs in this new
machine...however I do not need 16 gigs...so now the machine is ready
for the next person who wants from me, something better than a used
machine.

It could be gone next week or it may sit in my shop for a year...so I
figured might as well put Win10 on the machine rather than give someone
a machine with a soon to be obsolete OS


There are not going to be drivers for Win7 for that board...at
least not from the mfg.

Why would you expect any? Windows 7/8.1 are on the way out.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...82E16813157729

My friend who used to write drivers for a living told me he could
do it....if he gets PAID

I don't have a problem with that. Writing drivers is a pain in the ass.
Why shouldn't he be paid for the work he'll have to do?


I was absolutely not expecting my buddy to write drivers for me.

You might not actually have to go that far though. It may still be
possible to find compatible drivers for Windows 7 and that board...
They won't come from asus and they'd be generic in nature, but... It's
possible. Have you tried one of the gianormous driver collection
packages? I've got two of them. Driverpack and SDI. Credit to Shadow
for turning me onto the SDI collection.

I was not aware of that driver pack at the time but I did try one of
those universal driver packs with no results

I am very honest , to the point where most of the work I do , if I
get paid at all, I get grossly underpaid. Mostly I do it because I
like doing it.

I have no problems with that. I do all kinds of 'freebie' stuff too,
mostly for friends, family, and co-workers. I'm not out to become
filthy rich; I can't take it with me anyhow. Just finished switching a
nice HP laptop from 32bit Vista to 64bit Linux Mint KDE 17.3; it flies!
And, the owner is very happy with it, too. She's nearly 80 years old
and has no trouble using it. So, I think almost! anyone could use that
distro, especially if they were already familiar with Windows. I'm not
ready to go the 18.x route just yet...I'm still taking a wait and see
approach. They've changed a few things around, and, I don't like it.
Mostly, the lack of codecs already present with the iso.


The NPO where I did the volunteer work wanted me to setup machines for
the members to use for web access and do their personal stuff.

I gave them all Linux machines, put a shortcut to Firefox on the desktop
and gave no one special instructions. Many of the members have cognitive
problems but they all were able to use the machine with no problem.

Unless something like a power supply blew, I did not maintenance work on
the machines and they'd go for years with no trouble.

Had they been Windows machines they would have ruined them.
The desktop was often filled with Windows .exe crapware

Some of the people I deal with are pretty clueless...
They often doing even knwo what operating system they are using ,
when I ask them. If I'm lucky they will say "Windows."

Hey! Atleast you have *some idea* what OS might be on the machine.
I've had people bring me 'Windows' boxes that are actually running some
flavor of Linux. ROFL. How they get the two confused, I really don't
know. The distro's I've seen don't look THAT MUCH like Windows...But, I
haven't seen every distro out there either. so...

The speaker was one of those with a voice coil. It also had the
audio transformer attached, so I really needed to pull it out
rather than use a standard permanent magnet speaker.

Speaking of which, I need to find a shop that might be able to recone
an old tube VHF radio I've got. Some little miscreant knocked holes in
it and has essentially shredded the speaker at this point...Last time I
actually turned it on though, it did run. So, I'm a bit irked to find
it in it's present condition. It belonged to my grandmother.


I normally would not spend the money to have a speaker re-coned but for
my grandmother's radio I sure would.

I have two of my grandmother's radios here, one is a console and the
other a nice wooden table top.

I am also leaving my grandmother's wiring modification in place.

She made the cord longer on one of the radios. She cut the cord
somewhere in the middle and spliced-in a section of extension cord that
the cut the ends off. The splices are wrapped in friction tape!

If my buddy does not want it, I may sell the green, electric eye
tube on eBay and just toss it.

Seriously? Can't you find a museum with a radio collection or
something? they might want it. If you're going to toss it, atleast
collect all the viable parts first. And, sell those on ebay if you
must. Hate to see things goto a landfill if they can be repurposed.




You are right, there is no way I can toss it. When I had the cabinet
disassembled it looked pretty hopeless but as of a few minutes ago it's
all back together. I will save it until I find a new home.

On 05/06/2017 05:19 AM, Diesel wrote:
philo news May 2017 17:54:14 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

Bought a few Macs for $60 each quite a while back.

I wanted to try a Lytro and OSX was the only supported OS at the
time

I think I would have checked into emulation before spending a dime on
an actual Mac. I wouldn't even take 'free' ones.


I tried everything I could think of, I did find a hacked version of OSX
that would run on a PC but it was not fully functional.

I needed a laptop anyway for when I;d go on vacation back in the days
before I had a smartphone so for $60 I figured I could not go too far wrong.

My second one was one of those all in-one pieces of **** that I swore
I'd never own, but I got one in pristine condition for $60.

It's handy when I want to give a slide show and just let it run...and
not have clutter in the living room.

I do in fact hate Macs, they are built for style and to look cool.

The old ones especially were almost impossible to work on.



I mentioned that I have upgraded a number of Win7 machines to
Win10, but my wife's main machine which is used to to real work,
is staying with Win7.

So what are your plans when Windows 7 EOL comes and is no longer
supported?

At that time I may either upgrade the machine or have my wife not
use it on-line.

Not use it online? Do you think hacking is like what you see in the
movies or something?


True, some of the most badly infected machines I've worked on had all
the updates. At any rate I am not worried about someone "hacking in" to
my wife's computer.

Just remembered that on my main machine which runs Linux, I still have
the XP drive in it and can dual boot. I did the registry hack to make it
look like XP- POS and am still getting updates for it

I might even upgrade the thing when she is between projects or
perhaps pull the drive and perform a test install on a spare drive

Upgrade as in goto Windows 10, or?





My wife told me she would accept Win10 as long as her Wacom fully
functions. I will put her Wacom on another Win10 machine and see if it
meets her approval.

On 05/06/2017 05:19 AM, Diesel wrote:


Seriously? Can't you find a museum with a radio collection or
something? they might want it. If you're going to toss it, atleast
collect all the viable parts first. And, sell those on ebay if you
must. Hate to see things goto a landfill if they can be repurposed.





While I was writing here, a friend on FB told me she would take it!

That was fast.

On 05/06/2017 05:19 AM, Diesel wrote:


snipped because I'm too lazy to reply to it all?
fore or after I'd go to my real job.

As I said, you don't have the experience I do. I've been employed as an
actual 'tech' since I was a teenager. I *never* left the field. Didn't
take a long vacation from IT as you did. My 'real' job is that of a
computer technician. It has been for a long long time. I've added
another skillset though. That of electrician. G I find they are very
complimentary skillsets. Not only can I wire your home/business, I can
provide your networking equipment, your computers, etc, too. Custom
software needed? I can write it for you, in house. I wouldn't mind
living long enough to become a master electrician, but, that requires
so many more years of doing it. heh. I don't think I've got that much
available time.

I work my ass off, if you haven't already noticed. It's nothing for me
to pull 80+ hours a week. Infact, I hope to die on my feet, doing what
I love, rather than die in my sleep or something. I'm known as a
workaholic. I'll have plenty of time for sleep, when I'm dead. I've
been this way since I was a kid though. My parents didn't instill it in
me, I just didn't like to sleep much. I wanted to learn how things
worked, all the damn time. And thought if I was sleeping, I was missing
out.. So...


My normal work-week on my "real" job was 40-45 hours but we did get a
contract in a nuclear power plant and for six weeks, I had 102 hour work
weeks! Not fun but I got a nice bonus.
When I had a steady supply of computers coming in, I could live
entirely off that...and my work paychecks would just go right to
the bank

The computer repair business isn't what it used to be. Electricians
OTH, well, that's a dependable source of income. You can't 'outsource'
that or make it 'disposable'

No need for a generator here...Only once did I experience a long
power failure.

Well, thanks to the area in which I chose to build, the power grid
isn't the most reliable...And, I've gotta have a stable power source,
at all times.

I want to make sure though, if I have a machine on the bench I
won't lose power in the middle of something critical. Thus far
only once was there a power glitch during a critical operation and
my UPS covered it

We think alike in some cases.

Don't know if you've ever fooled with Plan 9, maybe you'd get a
kick out of it?

I can't say as it rings a bell. I might. I'll have to check it out via
a search engine. Did you ever get to play with anything by Novell?


No Novell but at one time I did try to get a hold of every OS I could.

I even had a Solaris machine at one time

When I was in highschool, I converted the schools token ring
configuration to cat5. We had 386 boxes mostly that didn't actually
have a hard disk present. They booted from their network cards via the
Novell server. It provided everything from boot code to Windows 3.11
for workgroups. I really liked how it could support hundreds of
machines from a single dedicated machine.



During me long break from computers I did have some minor contact in
that I did have to log-in at work and do inventory.

My machine was a 286 used as a dumb terminal.

It was so slow I eventually just stopped doing my inventory and let the
boss yell.

Other departs were so much worse off than mine it did not much matter.

Eventually they fired a few guys for stealing. One was so bold as to
just have the parts shipped directly to his house.


One was eventually prosecuted and went to prison.

philo news May 2017 12:14:00 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

On 05/06/2017 05:19 AM, Diesel wrote:
philo news May 2017 17:54:14 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

Bought a few Macs for $60 each quite a while back.

I wanted to try a Lytro and OSX was the only supported OS at the
time

I think I would have checked into emulation before spending a
dime on an actual Mac. I wouldn't even take 'free' ones.


I tried everything I could think of, I did find a hacked version
of OSX that would run on a PC but it was not fully functional.

I might have to look into this more, at some point, mebbe.

I needed a laptop anyway for when I;d go on vacation back in the
days before I had a smartphone so for $60 I figured I could not go
too far wrong.

I suppose not, if that's how you look at it. Personally, I would have
spent the $60 on a new electrical tool or something. Perhaps another
external hard drive...Can never have too much free space, right?

I do in fact hate Macs, they are built for style and to look cool.

To a yuppie mebbe. G

The old ones especially were almost impossible to work on.

Agreed. They want to hold your hand far too much for my tastes.
I really can't stand something that wants to do everything for me, and
won't let me explore the control systems because it thinks I might do
something wrong.

Not use it online? Do you think hacking is like what you see in
the movies or something?


True, some of the most badly infected machines I've worked on had
all the updates. At any rate I am not worried about someone
"hacking in" to my wife's computer.

Infected with a virus, or some lame ass trojan that reconfigured
various settings? Updates can't always defend against that, because the
'malware' in question is acting like a normal program would.

Just remembered that on my main machine which runs Linux, I still
have the XP drive in it and can dual boot. I did the registry hack
to make it look like XP- POS and am still getting updates for it

Just be careful with that hack. I've seen a couple of boxes that didn't
have the 'right' dll file, and, because MS thought they were POS
machines, it patched it and BSOD'd the box as a result. There are some
differences (mostly with the GUI subroutines) between them.

Evidently, when someone found that registry key, they incorrectly
assumed that POS version of Windows (aka, windows embedded) was
basically the same OS as they had on their normal PC, and, it isn't.

My wife told me she would accept Win10 as long as her Wacom fully
functions. I will put her Wacom on another Win10 machine and see
if it meets her approval.

Do either of you fully understand that your local files aren't really
yours anymore if you do? MS can retain copies, at will. And, you're
agreeing to it if you elect to run Windows 10.


--
I would like to apologize for not having offended you yet.
Please be patient. I will get to you shortly.

philo news May 2017 12:28:36 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

[snip]


No Novell but at one time I did try to get a hold of every OS I
could.

Novell was an awesome! OS. Rock solid, dependable. Stable, I can't praise it enough, actually.

http://www.operating-system.org/betr...bs-netware.htm

I even had a Solaris machine at one time

I had access to several Sun Microsystems via a client. Damn thing
would crash X windows out on you at random times, taking whatever
you had entered for data right along with it. It really tested my
patience.

My machine was a 286 used as a dumb terminal.

It was so slow I eventually just stopped doing my inventory and
let the boss yell.

Did you know a 20mhz 286 actually existed? It beat the pants off my
Tandy 3000NL. It was a whopping 10megahertz 286. G



--
I would like to apologize for not having offended you yet.
Please be patient. I will get to you shortly.

On 05/08/2017 04:29 AM, Diesel wrote:


I tried everything I could think of, I did find a hacked version
of OSX that would run on a PC but it was not fully functional.

I might have to look into this more, at some point, mebbe.


If I made any changes to the system, it would no longer boot.
IIRC: something critical such as USB was lacking

I needed a laptop anyway for when I;d go on vacation back in the
days before I had a smartphone so for $60 I figured I could not go
too far wrong.

I suppose not, if that's how you look at it. Personally, I would have
spent the $60 on a new electrical tool or something. Perhaps another
external hard drive...Can never have too much free space, right?

I do in fact hate Macs, they are built for style and to look cool.

To a yuppie mebbe. G

The old ones especially were almost impossible to work on.

Agreed. They want to hold your hand far too much for my tastes.
I really can't stand something that wants to do everything for me, and
won't let me explore the control systems because it thinks I might do
something wrong.

Someone gave an an ancient macbook. It was not working and they just
wanted me to recover their data.

Normally removing a HD from a laptop is a two minute job. In this case I
basically had to destroy it to take it apart. Had I wanted to
re-assemble it I would have had to have been painstakingly careful and
it would have taken an hour or more.


snip


Just remembered that on my main machine which runs Linux, I still
have the XP drive in it and can dual boot. I did the registry hack
to make it look like XP- POS and am still getting updates for it

Just be careful with that hack. I've seen a couple of boxes that didn't
have the 'right' dll file, and, because MS thought they were POS
machines, it patched it and BSOD'd the box as a result. There are some
differences (mostly with the GUI subroutines) between them.

Evidently, when someone found that registry key, they incorrectly
assumed that POS version of Windows (aka, windows embedded) was
basically the same OS as they had on their normal PC, and, it isn't.

Thus fas nothing has been damaged and I have no reason to use XP anymore
other than to support one ancient slide scanner that I never use anyway.

My wife told me she would accept Win10 as long as her Wacom fully
functions. I will put her Wacom on another Win10 machine and see
if it meets her approval.

Do either of you fully understand that your local files aren't really
yours anymore if you do? MS can retain copies, at will. And, you're
agreeing to it if you elect to run Windows 10.




You mean our own personal data?

That would be stealing

On 05/08/2017 04:29 AM, Diesel wrote:
philo news May 2017 12:28:36 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

[snip]


No Novell but at one time I did try to get a hold of every OS I
could.

Novell was an awesome! OS. Rock solid, dependable. Stable, I can't praise it enough, actually.

http://www.operating-system.org/betr...bs-netware.htm

I even had a Solaris machine at one time

I had access to several Sun Microsystems via a client. Damn thing
would crash X windows out on you at random times, taking whatever
you had entered for data right along with it. It really tested my
patience.

Mine did not crash but I only used if for fooling around and I
eventually gave it away

My machine was a 286 used as a dumb terminal.

It was so slow I eventually just stopped doing my inventory and
let the boss yell.

Did you know a 20mhz 286 actually existed? It beat the pants off my
Tandy 3000NL. It was a whopping 10megahertz 286. G






I have a Zenith Data Systems 286 that I modified a bit.

I was once given an ISA RAM card probably intended for use on a 386.

At any rate, I got it working on that 286 and was able to add, 16 megs
of RAM...the maximum amount a 286 can address.

Had I had 16 megs of RAM at the time a 286 was built, it would have been
worth more than my house!

philo news May 2017 13:59:37 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

My machine was a 286 used as a dumb terminal.

It was so slow I eventually just stopped doing my inventory and
let the boss yell.

Did you know a 20mhz 286 actually existed? It beat the pants off
my Tandy 3000NL. It was a whopping 10megahertz 286. G






I have a Zenith Data Systems 286 that I modified a bit.

I was once given an ISA RAM card probably intended for use on a
386.

At any rate, I got it working on that 286 and was able to add, 16
megs of RAM...the maximum amount a 286 can address.

The 386SX had the same limitation. OTH, the 386DX could access
4gigabytes of ram.

Had I had 16 megs of RAM at the time a 286 was built, it would
have been worth more than my house!




--
I would like to apologize for not having offended you yet.
Please be patient. I will get to you shortly.

philo news May 2017 13:56:25 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

On 05/08/2017 04:29 AM, Diesel wrote:


I tried everything I could think of, I did find a hacked version
of OSX that would run on a PC but it was not fully functional.

I might have to look into this more, at some point, mebbe.


If I made any changes to the system, it would no longer boot.
IIRC: something critical such as USB was lacking

What did you do prior to USB?

Agreed. They want to hold your hand far too much for my tastes.
I really can't stand something that wants to do everything for
me, and won't let me explore the control systems because it
thinks I might do something wrong.

Someone gave an an ancient macbook. It was not working and they
just wanted me to recover their data.

Normally removing a HD from a laptop is a two minute job. In this
case I basically had to destroy it to take it apart. Had I wanted
to re-assemble it I would have had to have been painstakingly
careful and it would have taken an hour or more.

I suspect your hands on experience with laptops is that of a hobbyist
or end user as well, then. It's not uncommon these days to find the
laptop requires a teardown to gain access to the hard drive.
It's a shame. I suspect it's because they don't want you repairing
it, they want you to replace it; the laptop, not the HD.

When recommending one for a client, I try to factor that into my
recommendation whenever possible. For future repairs, upgrades, etc.

[snip]

Thus fas nothing has been damaged and I have no reason to use XP
anymore other than to support one ancient slide scanner that I
never use anyway.

I like your attitude. it reminds me of some service calls where by
the time they called me, it was a bit more than changing out a
breaker or running a new feed. I made a ****load more money than I
otherwise would have.

Same with many IT service calls. They'd wait until the system didn't
boot at all. Heh. Not that I'm complaining mind you, I'm used to
people making my job a little harder and/or more interesting. I just
bill accordingly.

My wife told me she would accept Win10 as long as her Wacom
fully functions. I will put her Wacom on another Win10 machine
and see if it meets her approval.

Do either of you fully understand that your local files aren't
really yours anymore if you do? MS can retain copies, at will.
And, you're agreeing to it if you elect to run Windows 10.




You mean our own personal data?

That would be stealing

You might want to re-read the agreement that you accepted when you
loaded Windows 10. And, no, it wouldn't be stealing, either. As, that
deprives you of the material; since you no longer have it. At best,
you're looking at copyright infringement, if the material is infact,
copyrighted.



--
I would like to apologize for not having offended you yet.
Please be patient. I will get to you shortly.

On 05/08/2017 07:43 PM, Diesel wrote:
ph
Agreed. They want to hold your hand far too much for my tastes.
I really can't stand something that wants to do everything for
me, and won't let me explore the control systems because it
thinks I might do something wrong.

Someone gave an an ancient macbook. It was not working and they
just wanted me to recover their data.

Normally removing a HD from a laptop is a two minute job. In this
case I basically had to destroy it to take it apart. Had I wanted
to re-assemble it I would have had to have been painstakingly
careful and it would have taken an hour or more.

I suspect your hands on experience with laptops is that of a hobbyist
or end user as well, then. It's not uncommon these days to find the
laptop requires a teardown to gain access to the hard drive.
It's a shame. I suspect it's because they don't want you repairing
it, they want you to replace it; the laptop, not the HD.



Obviously you have never worked on the old PPC macbooks.

they require a tremendous amount of work just to remove the HD.






as to a normal laptop I am quite capable of taking one completey apart
and re-assembling. I've often had to do so to re-solder the power connector.

On Tuesday, May 9, 2017 at 6:50:19 AM UTC-4, Diesel wrote:
philo news 2017 01:30:27 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

On 05/08/2017 07:43 PM, Diesel wrote:
ph
Agreed. They want to hold your hand far too much for my tastes.
I really can't stand something that wants to do everything for
me, and won't let me explore the control systems because it
thinks I might do something wrong.

Someone gave an an ancient macbook. It was not working and they
just wanted me to recover their data.

Normally removing a HD from a laptop is a two minute job. In
this case I basically had to destroy it to take it apart. Had I
wanted to re-assemble it I would have had to have been
painstakingly careful and it would have taken an hour or more.

I suspect your hands on experience with laptops is that of a
hobbyist or end user as well, then. It's not uncommon these days
to find the laptop requires a teardown to gain access to the hard
drive. It's a shame. I suspect it's because they don't want
you repairing it, they want you to replace it; the laptop, not
the HD.



Obviously you have never worked on the old PPC macbooks.

You really should have learned by now to quit making assumptions
about what I have/haven't worked on. I find your erroneous comments
to be very amusing, but, alas, this seems to be rather typical of
you. You've repaired machines as a hobby for the most part, I've been
doing it professionally for a bit longer than seventeen years. To
have three machines on a bench would be a blessing. It would be a
slow day. I'd have time to do other stuff that needed to be done.

I don't know if it's because I remind you how different we actually
are in terms of service work history, or, because BD propped you up
on a pedestal and I've smashed it. Hard to know for sure. He led me
to believe that you were my equal, if not outright exceeding my
knowledge and expertise. I've discovered from chatting with you,
that's simply, not the case. I've got certs older than your 'career'
in IT, as well as copyrighted software written by myself, entirely
from scratch. Ah well. For that matter, I've got virus families older
than your seventeen years in IT. heh...Not that I'm proud of that
aspect of my own career, but, it is what it is.



I see you've made another friend in the newsgroup.

On Monday, May 8, 2017 at 8:47:07 PM UTC-4, Diesel wrote:
philo news May 2017 13:59:37 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

My machine was a 286 used as a dumb terminal.

It was so slow I eventually just stopped doing my inventory and
let the boss yell.

Did you know a 20mhz 286 actually existed? It beat the pants off
my Tandy 3000NL. It was a whopping 10megahertz 286. G






I have a Zenith Data Systems 286 that I modified a bit.

I was once given an ISA RAM card probably intended for use on a
386.

At any rate, I got it working on that 286 and was able to add, 16
megs of RAM...the maximum amount a 286 can address.

The 386SX had the same limitation. OTH, the 386DX could access
4gigabytes of ram.


That's not exactly true. While the 386SX can access only 16MB of
physical memory, it has the full memory management, protection
and paging system of all 386 chips, so programs can make use of a
full 32 bit, 4GB address space, just like in the 386DX.
And 16MB of physical memory was plenty for the era of the 386,
given what typical systems were shipping with. The real limitation
of the SX that was of consequence was that it had a 16 bit data bus
instead of the 32 bit bus of the DX version.

On 05/09/2017 05:46 AM, Diesel wrote:
philo news 2017 01:30:27 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

On 05/08/2017 07:43 PM, Diesel wrote:
ph
Agreed. They want to hold your hand far too much for my tastes.
I really can't stand something that wants to do everything for
me, and won't let me explore the control systems because it
thinks I might do something wrong.

Someone gave an an ancient macbook. It was not working and they
just wanted me to recover their data.

Normally removing a HD from a laptop is a two minute job. In
this case I basically had to destroy it to take it apart. Had I
wanted to re-assemble it I would have had to have been
painstakingly careful and it would have taken an hour or more.

I suspect your hands on experience with laptops is that of a
hobbyist or end user as well, then. It's not uncommon these days
to find the laptop requires a teardown to gain access to the hard
drive. It's a shame. I suspect it's because they don't want
you repairing it, they want you to replace it; the laptop, not
the HD.



Obviously you have never worked on the old PPC macbooks.

You really should have learned by now to quit making assumptions
about what I have/haven't worked on. I find your erroneous comments
to be very amusing, but, alas, this seems to be rather typical of
you. You've repaired machines as a hobby for the most part,



You are the one making assumptions here.

I told you I had my own business repairing computers .

Because it was my secondary occupation does not mean I did it as a hobby.

I stand by what I said, on any PC laptop or any Intel Mac laptop
removing a hard drive is a two minute job.

On those old macbooks the entire dang thing has to be dis-assembled.

In the situation I had mentioned the person only wanted their data back,
they had not use for their non-working computer.


Another one is a tower type G5. Takes all day to replace a mobo on one
of those. On a PC it's a 15 minute job.

On 05/09/2017 09:55 AM, trader_4 wrote:
On Tuesday, May 9, 2017 at 6:50:19 AM UTC-4, Diesel wrote:
philo news 2017 01:30:27 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

On 05/08/2017 07:43 PM, Diesel wrote:
X
I don't know if it's because I remind you how different we actually
are in terms of service work history, or, because BD propped you up
on a pedestal and I've smashed it. Hard to know for sure. He led me
to believe that you were my equal, if not outright exceeding my
knowledge and expertise. I've discovered from chatting with you,
that's simply, not the case. I've got certs older than your 'career'
in IT, as well as copyrighted software written by myself, entirely
from scratch. Ah well. For that matter, I've got virus families older
than your seventeen years in IT. heh...Not that I'm proud of that
aspect of my own career, but, it is what it is.



I see you've made another friend in the newsgroup.




Diesel is the most insecure people I've seen posting on Usenet.

If he is capable of repairing computers I don't see why my ability to do
so should be a threat to him. Perhaps he's more proficient , who cares?

On Tue, 9 May 2017 10:46:58 -0000 (UTC)
Diesel wrote:

I've been
doing it professionally for a bit longer than seventeen years. To
have three machines on a bench would be a blessing. It would be a
slow day. I'd have time to do other stuff that needed to be done.

Typical bull**** one upmanship claim.

If you really had computer work you
would not need your day job of wire
puller and fetcher.
You are a FRAUD!

On Tue, 9 May 2017 11:07:32 -0500
philo wrote:

On 05/09/2017 09:55 AM, trader_4 wrote:
On Tuesday, May 9, 2017 at 6:50:19 AM UTC-4, Diesel wrote:
philo news May 2017 01:30:27 GMT in alt.home.repair, wrote:

On 05/08/2017 07:43 PM, Diesel wrote:
X
I don't know if it's because I remind you how different we actually
are in terms of service work history, or, because BD propped you up
on a pedestal and I've smashed it. Hard to know for sure. He led me
to believe that you were my equal, if not outright exceeding my
knowledge and expertise. I've discovered from chatting with you,
that's simply, not the case. I've got certs older than your
'career' in IT, as well as copyrighted software written by myself,
entirely from scratch. Ah well. For that matter, I've got virus
families older than your seventeen years in IT. heh...Not that I'm
proud of that aspect of my own career, but, it is what it is.



I see you've made another friend in the newsgroup.




Diesel is the most insecure people I've seen posting on Usenet.

If he is capable of repairing computers I don't see why my ability to
do so should be a threat to him. Perhaps he's more proficient , who
cares?


You care, cause you keep replying trying to one up him.

On 09/05/2017 23:15, philo wrote:
On 05/09/2017 05:12 PM, David B. wrote:

What is a "homie", Philo?




Who knows what he's talking about. The more clever he tries to be, the
worse it gets

I'll send you a link to view his 'ripping' 'Lab' and confirmation of his
address too.

--
David B.

On Wednesday, May 3, 2017 at 10:54:11 PM UTC-5, Diesel wrote:
http://www.computerworld.com/article...ned-patch.html

Just another way MS is ****ing you over. For those of you drinking
the Windows 10 koolaid... What flavor is it supposed to be? And,
does it taste like it?

Do be careful what you run on Windows 10, as, Edge isn't really
'disabled' as some of you previously thought. I'd hate to see some
new malware take advantage of the POS and cause you unwanted grief.



--
I would like to apologize for not having offended you yet.
Please be patient. I will get to you shortly.

Go with Linux.

It's free and never gets malware.

And they do not sneak around your back installing so called fixes.

Andy