Linux Format forums

[nordle]

Who'd like another long waffly story from the tales of nordle's boundless stupidity?
No one? Well, that's not going to stop me

The old man has a XP1900 (single core 1.6GHZ) 512MB RAM 40GB PC running Windows XP.
Well, I say running, that's a slightly ironic term given that, yes it works, but its a complete dog, crawling would be a more accurate description. You don't count the boot time in seconds, or even minutes, but by cups of tea!

It was put together by yours truly back during the heady summer of 2002. We now know that China produced tons of dodgy capacitors around this time, which meant a shed load of mobo's suffered from leakage (nothing a Doctor could sort). So after a couple of years it developed this annoying problem of not turning on, power but no BIOS. Turning the PC off and on again fired up BIOS screen complaining about incorrect CPU speed, which was rubbish.

It soldiered on, but recently I was getting several phone calls about crashing, hard disk noise, slowness and then the iceing on the cake, fraud, twice!

The system was running XP Pro SP2, had automatic updates, using Firefox, had Norton Firewall + AntiVirus 2003 and Spybot S&D.
The old man doesn't install dodgy software, doesn't click on links in emails and a trawl through the browser and router logs revealed no websites more sinister than Gardeners World.
Yet somehow a particularly nasty Trojan had installed itself and was transmitting keystrokes back to some IP in Spain. But he knew nothing of it until a phone call from Lloyds TSB fraud prevention department had spotted some strange buying behavior to the tune of £800 in 2 days! A second credit card was also hit, different bank.
We tried to figure out where the card details had been obtained from and the trojan was only discovered after downloading, installing and running AVG (free version from Grisoft).

It was then I suggested perhaps he would consider getting a new PC and trying some different software which may improve his user experience as well as helping to decrease his chances of suffering from this again.
I could see from the raised eyebrows and slow nod what was going through his mind.....AGGGHHH CHANGE, AGGGGGH EXPENSE.....
Now, just to explain if you haven't already guessed, he's not exactly techy minded. He's an Accountant who keeps paper on everything, receipts going back to 1980's, doesn't have a flat screen TV, is aware of HD or "Blue something", "i want to pod what", doesn't mind his Skoda having a tape player only as he "doesn't have an mp3".

But, he's an Accountant at heart, not stupid. So when I put together the spec of the PC and the MS solution had the cost of software nearly matching the cost of the machine, he suddenly warmed to the idea of trying this alternative "free Windows".
Now, of course I filtered the information I gave to help massage the situation, I had a vested interest in the outcome too. Trying to cut down the amount of "tech support" phone calls and grief from the old dear on the fraud issues.
So I gave him the Cost of Windows Vista Home Premium OEM, Office Small Business 2007 OEM, Kasperksy Internet Security (no more Symantec!) and Corel Photo X2 (to replace Paintshop Pro). I deliberately didn't mention that OOo, AVG and Gimp would cost nothing on a Vista based PC. Hopefully this doesn't qualify me under the burn in hell category for deceit.

I did some searching, looking from a mobo which would work out the box, have a reasonably long track record, be low on power and cost, not fussed about overclocking.
Processor and RAM choice was a little tricky because I knew that Linux would fly on any vaguely modern hardware, however, if he didn't like it, couldn't use it etc then the new machine needed to be able to handle Vista.
That was basically the deal, try Linux, if you don't like it, we'll get Vista and all the other gubbins.

So here is the spec:



£340 including delivery. Didn't take too long to put together as there weren't that many bits.

Stuck in Ubuntu 7.10 install disc, which completed in 25mins and had 1 re-boot. That was it.
I don't know what I was expecting, but I think I was in shock. The system booted in sub 15 seconds to a crystal clear LCD desktop, everything worked, the Network, the Fax, the Printer, the Scanner, the Audio, the DVDRW, everything. Even the Windows were full of wobbly goodness! (I quickly turned off that 'feature' as it made me feel ill).
Usually I can spend a solid day doing a Windows install, with at least 16 reboots, and usually at some point something goes wrong. Where's the catch?

Now, of course, I had to make a mess eventually, but for now, the shiny beast with obligatory blue LED:



The CPU spends most of its time at 23C, under heavy load it will nudge 37C. The mobo is passively cooled to 30C.
There are 3 fans, one CPU, one 120mm exhaust and one 80mm PSU, meaning its all pretty quiet.

So, the litmus test, the old man. Amazingly, he sat down and just started using the system. Microsoft spends millions on usability studies and I still get questions on how to achieve basic things, yet here was a man allergic to change and technology using the system on day 1 with virtually no instruction. I even learnt something. He was moving some files about in Nautilus in list view, clicking a file and dragging it upwards, and I'm thinking "mmm he's going to have to dump that in the top foler, then click into the top folder to continue this move". But he didn't, it automatically expanded the tree as he went. The software was allowing him to use the system in a way that seemed like second nature to him.

Result! What could possibly go wrong. Me and my deep rooted desire to mess things up.
I was looking into getting Suspend to Ram working and found that a new BIOS was available which fixed this and a fair amount of other issues too, not that I'd noticed any of them. You can see where this is going......I've also been here before and should have known better.

So, downloaded the BIOS update and the DOS based updater. But this PC has no Windows install, no DOS install, no floppy drive. OK, so how hard can it be to transfer a dos/windows boot disk to USB stick, after all, I'd created a bootable Linux USB stick without too much bother. Perhaps not surprisingly I struggled with this, I googled for hours trying loads of examples, but they are either incomplete of someone simply saying "yay I got it to work" without the detail, or no reply, or it didn't work. In the end, I gave up on the idea of transfering an image and instead used dosemu alongside a bunch of commands to make this thing work.

Stuck the stick in and booted from USB, and FreeDos loaded the stick with the BIOS update on it.
Now, having flashed a mobo to death in the past, I knew I was playing with fire, so thought I'd better proceed with caution, namely is there a way to test that freedos will allow the bios dos based app to work correctly without hosing the PC.
A quick afudos.exe --help revealed many options, one being "/U Display BIOS ROM ID".
Ahh, here we have an option, if run will read the BIOS and show me the version, if it does that then surely there is more of a chance that it would be ok to proceed and flash the BIOS. If /U had failed to read the BIOS it would highlight that the flash is highly likely to fail without having actually caused any damage. Seem reasonable so far? Well it did to me, so I ran it with the /U switch.
mmmm Why are there numbers flashing up, why does it say "erasing NVRAM", now it says "flashing NVRAM", the screen has just gone blank, oh feck!!!!!!!!!

I waited 2 mins, there was no activity, so re-booted. 2 short beeps, pause, followed by 8 short beeps and nothing. feck!
Case open, Clear CMOS jumper shorted, secretly I knew this was as much use as a chocolate teapot at that stage. Booted to beeps again, cheap mobo doesn't have second bios chip as backup, FECK!!!!!!!!!!

Google the beep codes. "Display memory read/write error. The system video adapter is missing or defective". I don't believe it, the /U switch was not about reading the rom and displaying the id, it was flashing the display rom. If I hadn't bothered trying to be safe this wouldn't have happened! (ok, I should not have tried at all).

Resigned to the fact that another £45 is required, I thought I'd just waste more time googling to see if there is a way round this. Searched for the mobo, flash failures, display flashing etc nada. Eventually I checked out American Megatrends website and found this explaining that its possible to flash the bios automatically. Copy the Bios ROM to floppy as AMIBOOT.ROM, boot the system and hold down ctrl+home and it will force it to update. So, the olds machine is butchered for its floppy drive, when will these things just frickin die!! It did just as it said, but after a re-boot, no screen and just two beeps.
Its 2am, but I'm determined, back to base and extract my £300 PCI-X card, I'm back to the Olds and installed the card by 2:30.
The machine boots and we have a screen! yay! "Checksum failed". So I figured I might get away with simply buying a crappy £20 nvidia 7300. Nothing to lose (I hoped), I'd try the flash again, but this time no switches. Booted the USB stick, the Keyboard shortcuts to change the boot target had changed because of the previous flash which I'd never had realised if attempting a blind install. And this time it completed as expected, booted the machine and it was working again, this time with the latest bios rom. YAY and PHEW!!!! The suspend to RAM works perfectly now, the BIOS update did the trick, in the end

Sure, he probably could not have installed Linux, would not have even known about it had I not. But, if my slightly technophobic aging Accountant of a father can ditch 20 years of Microsoft in 1 day, surely that says something about where Linux is and where Microsoft are at...


In reality, given that Linux was a success and we didn't have to downgrade to Vista, the system was overpriced.
We're only using 250-300MB RAM, 2GB was excessive. Coupled with the sipping of electricity, only between 48-60 watts depending on load, the 430watt Antec was overkill.
Again the 6MB cache 8200 Wolfdale was also overpowered, the 2.2GHZ E2200 would have been more than adequte.
Including delivery, this would have brought the cost down to £240, which is great value IMHO.


_________________
I think, therefore I compile

[Rhakios]

This is the main reason why I left Vista on my test box when I bought it, not to use, it has hardly any disk space allocated, but just to install things like BIOS updates which won't work without Windows. Of course, it was a basic HP/Compaq box that came with Vista, whether I wanted it or not, but at least Vista has proved useful in at least one respect.
_________________
Bye, Rhakios

[linuxgirlie]

Just converted two friends of ours, both to pclinuxos, both with the promise that if they didn't like it they could get xp/vista. So far so good, and built them a kick-ass pc for £500 without any software so pretty decent spec.
_________________
My knowledge comes with no warranty...........

Server operating system designed for schools:www.linuxschools.com

[nordle]

In case anyone is interested, this is how flashing the BIOS actually worked.

Obviously this can be bad, VERY VERY bad, so I'm just including it here for purely interest reasons:

# /dev/sdc is my 1GB USB stick

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=512 count=1

install-mbr /dev/sdc --force

# Create F16 (type 06) and tag as bootable
cfdisk /dev/sdc

mkdosfs -F16 -I -cv /dev/sdc1

# create this file and add the line below
~/.dosemurc
$_hdimage = "drives/* /tmp /dev/sdc1"

# Run dosemu and type the other items below
dosemu
Z:
sys F:

# Close dosemu and mount usb stick
mount -v /dev/sdc1 /mnt/usb

# Add DOS based BIOS ROM + app
cp -r /usr/local/src/boot/G3M2131A/* /mnt/usb/

umount /mnt/usb

# Reboot PC using USB stick and flash ROM
_________________
I think, therefore I compile

[nordle]

[jjmac]

Howdy,


800 pounds (no pound key), total ouch ... I don't suppose it was one of those systems that is always online. That is, the phone account and isp come together, so when people turn on their box, they also go auto online. Which is how it is often setup over here.


I can't but help noticing, too, how hw prices over your wayare always much better than they are here (oh well .


>>
In case anyone is interested
>>

Always, i don't understand why you would need to zero out the boot sector to flash a bios though. But i will dwell on it .

As for dodgy hw, mobos etc ... i _am_ the possessor of the infamous 'Intel Titan Chipset', circa 1997, (grin) ... now, try and beat that one


jm
_________________
http://counter.li.org
#313537

The FVWM wm -=- www.fvwm.org -=-

Somebody stole my air guitar, It happened just the other day,
But it's ok, 'cause i've got a spare ...

[davecs]

Funny I had a panicky phone call this morning from my Sister-in-Law that she is getting a message informing her of a Trojan, and asking her to click a dialog box to sort it out. Problem is that the dialog box itself may be the problem, and a simple scan using AVG shows two problems but does not offer to clean them, she says. Looks like I'll have to take a look at the weekend!
_________________

Asus Asus M2N32 WS Pro+Athlon AM2/4200+ — GeForce 7600GT — 2Gb Cosair VS RAM — 500Gb WD5000AAKS SATA Drive — PCLinuxOS

[nordle]

jjmac, I googled "infamous Intel Titan Chipset" and the first hit was yours!

Other than that, I couldn't find much, what makes them infamous?

I have no idea why I zeroed out the boot sector, as I'm sure sys F: is all thats needed. I guess its just starting from the very begining and making sure the usb stick is "clean".

I cobbled that lot together after hours and hours of googling and trying loads of examples, hence a few questionable steps in the process.

davecs, there were a lot of spyware apps that would install themselves, just to pop up with a message to say "click here and pay £10 to download this super deluxe spyware removal app" which basically just put a 90day hold on the piece of junk spyware. But once a system has been that compromised...
_________________
I think, therefore I compile

[jjmac]

Howdy,


Yes, zeroing makes a lot of sense. It didn't click that you were going to boot from the usb stick at first. My mistake ...


>>
jjmac, I googled "infamous Intel Titan Chipset" and the first hit was yours!

Other than that, I couldn't find much, what makes them infamous?
>>

The reason would most likely be that, the Titan doesn't exist.Yep, my mistake again ( ...Crucifixion, first offence ... ) , well, maybe not exactly first ...

I should have said the 'Titanium chipset'. It's a series of types, the 430TX released in early 1997 being the particular one i was blessed with.

The pdf errata file is very large. The main thing that got me about it was that even though there was 1Mb of L2 cache on the board, good for 1997, it only cached the first 64 Mbs of ram, from the top down. Which kind of mucks up any idea of having more than 64 Mbs of ram in a way. A brain dead idea in my book, i reckon . I'm not aware if later versions continued with that though.

I think it was released as an experiment, mainly to test usb usability. That is, the customer was being used to test, just what they were prepared to put up with in board design, along with the state of usb usability. Quite arrogant on Intels part in that respect.

>>
I cobbled that lot together after hours and hours of googling and trying loads of examples,
>>

But it's a very informative cobble, as usual, and the pdf white paper is also good.



davecs wrote:
>>
she is getting a message informing her of a Trojan, and asking her to click a dialog box to sort it out.
>>

They have such a 'hide' really, don't they. It reminds me of once when i had OSR2 running in pre-Linux days, in IE something or other ... when all of a sudden ...

Up poped a dialog with big upper case red fonts from a company calling it self 'Red Sheriff'. They in formed me that it has detected a trogen on my machine (ha) but not to worry. Luckily for me all i had to do was click on the link provided and i could get a hold of software from them to get rid of it.

Wtf !

Every time i killed the popup it would reappear. Eventually i had to reboot which got rid of it. (grin).

Sorry about the name mistake ...


jm
_________________
http://counter.li.org
#313537

The FVWM wm -=- www.fvwm.org -=-

Somebody stole my air guitar, It happened just the other day,
But it's ok, 'cause i've got a spare ...

[nordle]

I think I built my first Pc around that time,using a BX based chipset, thankfully it didn't any grief like your titanium.

Reminds me of Itanium.
_________________
I think, therefore I compile

[jjmac]

>>
Reminds me of Itanium.
>>

That's what google said too

I think BX may have followed TX, with the caching quirk fixed.
The ata controller was also a shared controller, between both channels. Rather than each having its' own. 200Mhz was considered really fast at the time (grin).

It didn't really caurse me any problems, but only because i was too 'not knowing' to know any better. I did anger me though, when i finally figured out where it was coming from. I don't like it when companies treat a person like some sought of patsy. And why we _need_ open systems too really. Across all issues.

I think that may have been the year too, when processors really started to take off.

I decided to keep the board as a kind of ... well ,, hoping it might turn into a kind of collectors item one day. And be worth a lot of money .



That first png. For the Intel Core Duo E8200 ... Does that FSB translate to 166Mhz !

Sounds a bit strange if so ... I must be mis-reading that.


jm
_________________
http://counter.li.org
#313537

The FVWM wm -=- www.fvwm.org -=-

Somebody stole my air guitar, It happened just the other day,
But it's ok, 'cause i've got a spare ...

[nordle]

The FSB is 333mhz.

I've seen a few reports of 3.6GHZ achieved on air cooling alone. So I could simply bump the FSB to 400, the RAM multiple to 2.0 and get an instant 600MHZ boost.
But I'm not going to because its already far quicker than the use its gettting and overclocking would just drain more juice with no benefit for this particular user. hence the reason I went with a mobo which was very cheap but also had a great track record and low power usage but limited overclocking potential.
_________________
I think, therefore I compile

[nordle]

Just to add to the list of stupidity. I'm updating the mythtv box, so new kernel, new libs and new mythtv version. Well, last night, during the kernel compile, the CPU temp hit 77C and the PC shutdown.

I had a look today to see if a fan had broke, and after clearing all the dust out, I noticed the CPU fan was on the wrong way round! And had been since Sep '06 when I put it together......ooops


_________________
I think, therefore I compile

[Pingus]

I must add to this list of stupidity.
I was trying to speed up Ubuntu recently so I deleted many unimportant startup entries and services. Soon my pc would freeze whenever I would try to shut it down and I was puzzled as to what happened... As it turns out I had deleted Gnome Power Manager which was why I couldn't shut down my pc. I had only deleted everything not important but I soon found out that wasn't the case.

[ollie]

nelz's old tag line immediately springs to mind - "Confucius say: He who play in root, eventually kill tree."

Although I did have one friend who, back in the Windows 95 days, deleted all of the useless .dll files to make room for more more applications and then found that Windows wouldn't start after the required reboot.