Tuesday 22 January 2002

Pic of the day: Yes, I have this stuff standing around in my apartment. And you haven't seen the half of it yet.

Computer junkyard

It all started with the electronic horse allergy, and eventually I found that the last computer that worked properly ran Windows 3.11. (Except for Cassie the Pocket PC, of course. Long may she live!)

Electronic what? Well, like most things in my life these weeks, it’s about Dark Age of Camelot. The game is awfully big, so people need a quicker way to get from one city to another. Rather than breaking continuity with a teleport service, they have set up horse routes. These consist of trained horses that can take people without riding skills from one city to another for a few silver pieces. It still takes a little time, but it is much faster than walking. It is also a great way for young players to get an idea of the land, where the different villages are and such.

It seems I am the only player who cannot use this facility. Whenever I ride, the computer locks up before I reach my goal, though not at the same point each time. At first I did not think twice about it: The game locks up the computer randomly every hour or two anyway. I just supposed this was the way it was with a cutting edge graphics and sound program trying to run under Microsoft Windows. But repeated experiments show that always and without exception the computer locks up during riding, in addition to the other random crashes. If I try again as soon as I log back on, the same happens again, only at a random point of the journey.

I suppose it is yet another side effect of the S3 SavagePro graphics chip set, one of the very few in the world that is incompatible with EverQuest and which therefore was used in the computer I explicitly ordered to play EverQuest. Which once again shows why I refer to that electro-shop as the "shop of angels". Evidently God has decided that I must at all cost not ever play EverQuest, or something horrible will befall me. Or it could just be that I have spectacularly bad luck with computers. Or perhaps the market is simply flooded with junk and I happen to buy it every time.

***

As I thought back, I realized that I only vaguely remember the last PC that I had that actually worked according to specifications. I can’t even say for sure whether it ran Windows 95 or Windows 3.11, but I think it was 3.11. Here is why.

The latest computer I bought, in December, is one of the better so far. It has an untraditional graphics chip set (a kind of built-in graphics card) but it seems to work well enough for anything less demanding than games using DirectX.

The previous computer (which I still have) was not quite so good. It would log off from Internet randomly, but always if I tried to run games while online. The DVD is a bit choppy. And the fan is also very loud and a bit unstable. Then again, fans often are, right? ^_^

Before that was the infamous Toshiba, which started to break down within days. It was such small things that I did not bother to return it. I had already packed the previous one and sent it to my best friend (whose father unceremoniously dumped it on a landfill in Germany when he helped her move and did not have room for it in the car). The parallel cable connector did not work with Zip drives, but a new zip drive was due anyway, and I bought one with USB port. The machine lost the ability to play audio CDs after mere weeks. The slot for memory expansion was faulty so I could not upgrade it to play new games or multitask large programs.

The computer before that was pretty much ideal for playing Daggerfall. I was willing to ignore the fact that the floppy drive did not work; I still had the zip drive. The computer before that was a Compaq. It did not have room for normal size expansion cards, some of which I had left over from the computer before that, such as a really good sound card. There simply wasn’t room for them, they were too long. I suppose Compaq made its own line of smaller add-in cards, though I have never seen them.

The computer before that was pretty much ideal for its time. It was a 90 MHz 486, and worked flawlessly until the warranty ran out. Then the power supply broke down. And I can certainly understand that; for the machine was stuffed with extra cards: 2 sound cards, an extra I/O card for the modem, a SCSI card, and a SyQuest drive for removable hard disks. (A competitor to the now so popular zip drives.) There may have been more, I cannot remember exactly. An extra memory card probably?

I think that machine ran Windows 3.11, because I doubt Windows 95 had arrived yet. I see in some of my earliest archived diaries that I paid the last of the payments to Thorn for the Compaq machine late in 1998. There was still a little bit left on it, but not much, and originally the payment plan was over 3 years. That would place the Compaq in early 1996 and the 486 at least a couple years earlier. Unless Windows 95 was released early in 1994 or before, I’d say Win3.11, yes.

Before that I had the computer that wouldn’t die, a Goldstar 80286, 8 MHz with a 10MHz turbo mode and 640 KB RAM which I step by step upgraded to ca 2.5 MB, some of it extended and some of it expanded. (I had different computer games that required one or the other. This was the height of my computer game buying craze, culminating with Darklands, the ultimate role-playing game.) I still have the computer at work, though I rarely use it anymore. The Plus Hardcard extra hard disk has given up the ghost (or rather it is now read-only) but the original 20MB hard disk still runs without a bad sector. I have to tell the computer each time I turn it on what day it is and what type of disks it has, but once that is done it hums away flawlessly. And a good thing too, but it is the only computer I know about that has both a 5.25" floppy and a 3.5" stiff diskette. I still have quite a number of unfinished novels on 5.25" floppies, though I have no idea any longer where those floppies are. Presumably they will resurface when I move, or my heirs will find them when carting off all the junk I have accumulated.

***

I have not thrown away any of the computers, they are still standing around my apartment in various states of disrepair and undress. Along with them stand an Easyuse 80MB network server which doesn’t work anymore and an 80MB backup tape station that doesn’t work either, and an unfinished "too much assembly required" maxi-tower 100MHz 486 machine.

"Chaos Node - where computers go to die."