Hi Butch,
Sure good to hear from you, and for the sake of others who might be
interested in this, I'm taking a chance and making it a public message.
I will tell you what I did to make a network card on an old dell work
when I recently restored two older dell machines.
I went through a whole bunch of these silly driver finder packages,
many weren't accessible like driver detective, and driver robot.
I had driver genius laying around here and I tried it, but it
couldn't find it either.
Dell's site didn't help at all, and wouldn't budge unless I had a
service tag, which of course I didn't have for that old machine, no joy.
So what I did was to pull the network card out of the dell, and put
it in another machine running xp.
I happened to have 2k on the machine I was working on.
I used driver genius to rip the driver out of the xp machine, since
xp actually knew about that network card, then I put the card back in
to the 2k machine, and hurray, the xp driver actually worked with the
2k installation.
So driver genius is good for some things and is accessible enough if
you already have drivers and I guess it finds some drivers remotely,
but it sure couldn't find this network card.
But xp knew about it so I just ripped off it's driver for the 2k install.
This was an older dell, an old 450 p2 so a bit slow for xp.
But it runs nicely with 2k.
It'll be good for some things, you can't have enough old machines
around to canabalize for parts, or for the odd task, file server,
listening machine, scanacan, what ever.
That old memory is expensive anyway, and these old machines are worth
having just for that.
What ever technician who worked on that old machine had the drive all
buggered up too, didn't have the drive seated right in the little
junky cage dell has, and the ide cable wouldn't reach.
I fixed that, and re-formated the drive.
It had a bad sector, but dos marked it, and now both drives work
fine, and 2k runs like a top on a 450 machine especially after I
upped the memory in it.
Ok, what machines are the best?
Well, xp can't really take advantage of more than 2 cores from what I
understand.
On my audio machine, since I'm running both old and new software, I
split the difference and kept the speed up and went for a 3 gig dual
core machine.
Mind you, this was over a year ago, prices have come down some, and
on the amd side of the fence things are cheaper, but I favor intel
for a number of reasons, namely chipset and motherboards tend to be
better for intels, gamers seem to like those decked out amd machines,
but pro audio folks like intel.
I favor gigabyte motherboards too.
And the motherboard I picked out at the time handled all the intel
processors and went up to 1600 fsb.
Many of these motherboards don't come with legacy ports on them
anymore, but if you look around you can still find some, what's more
likely is you'll find pin-outs, or headers on the mobo for a ribbon
cable which you can put in a bracket to go to the outside of your
machine and that'll get you serial ports and or paralel ports.
Another option is to use a pci card for one, but be careful, all
those aren't c reated equal and what with irq issues and such, they
may not work with our old dos stuff because unless the card really
and truly immulates the old environment settings, the right irq etc,
those old drivers won't see it, so some of these cheap cards don't
have an onboard bios and such and so your better off finding a mobo
that really has the stuff on it, and doing the pin-out.
But be ware, there are two different wirings for com ports, the intel
cross wiring and the ati straight wiring, they had a fancy name for
it, but this is what I remember, and I pulled my hair out on my new
machine till I figured it out, I had to do this on my own, because
even though the fine folks at sonica labs built me a bang up machine,
the first machine they sent me was an asus and they just put the
straight wired bracket in that machine in to the gagabyte machine
when they replaced it.
Dhl mangled that first machine and I had to send it back.
Well, they said the mouse worked and such in the machine, but
doubletalk or tripple talk just squeaked un-happily and refused to fire up.
So nobody could tell me anything, so I researched it and found out
that two different wirings for headers off the motherboard for com
ports was what I was dealing with.
So I got the right one, and she works just fine now.
Forget about usb serial adapters unless your just going to work in
windows, it ain't happenin' down in dos.
Ok, this is my take on dual core or quad core.
The faster quad core processors 3 gig are still pretty expensive, and
if your using a 32 bit os especially xp, it's pretty much a waste of time.
YOur best bang for the buck will be a 3 gig dual core machine, those
are pretty cheap now.
Also many programs that are older can't take advantage of multiple
cores, so at that point, the faster speed will help you more than the
multiple cores.
So me, running xp and still 32 bit, a dual core machine is really
sweet, sonar runs like a bat out of hell with lots of plug-ins, and I
get lots of work done.
Now I'm lusting after a fast 64 bit system with lots of memory but
I'm waiting for the plug-ins to all grow up, and also with jaws, the
control surface plug-ins Vic wrote for jsonar hasn't been done yet.
But when I get around to ordering my we 7.1 cd, I might slap a 64 bit
version of vista on this fine machine and install sonar just to see
how she runs.
But I've only got 2 gigs on this machine, and of course vista will
hog most of it so I'll need to double or tripple the memory.
I don't know how much ram this machine is rated for off hand, though
I do have some free slots in here, I'll have to go look it up.
But with the i7 being out, and everything changing so fast, the 3 gig
dual core is as bargain in both amd and intel camps now.
If you like xp, you can look all over tiger direct and such and find
xp machines and if you look around you can still find xp, and like
Mike said, for most folks, 32 bit is fine, but for people doing
graphics and studio stuff, the 64 bit is gonna be freedom and much better.
Those huge sample libraries you know being able to load lots of stuff
in to memory, etc.
Now pci slots are going away too, just like the isa ones did, and
we're getting more pci express slots and fewer regular pci slots, but
again, if you look around and do a custom machine, your more likely
to find what you want.
the first machines to bump the old goodies we like are these junky
dells and gateways and cookie cutter machines.
I don't know if this mobo is still made but here's the model of it.
GA-EP35-DS3P (rev. 2.1)
And it's a gigabyte.
It had a pin-out for a com port, and I believe a paralel port too.
It's loaded for bear with like 10 sata connectors and texas
instruments firewire chipset and 10 usb ports, and native floppy controler.
Same deal on fd comtrolers, go custom and if you can find a shop that
can actually look this stuff up for you and catalogues this stuff,
you'd be better off.
Better yet, if your good at building stuff, get the shop to varify
certain things for you and then buy it on line.
I' soft hearted though, if I find a local merchant who takes the time
to find out these kinds of particulars for me, I'll usually buy from
them unless they're prices are out-rageous.
But there are a ton of places to get machines, good ones.
I will tell you a problem I've been having though.
These sata drives the great big ones 500 gigs 300 gigs, 1 tb, dos has
a hard time seeing all the files on them.
This is only on a fat32 drive, if you run ntfspro on a ntfs drive,
there seems to be no problem, but because of the dos limitations,
when a drive starts filling up on a fat32 drive, then you start
getting jibberish when doing directory listings on some folders, and
files just won't read correctly, you get upper ascii characters, and
all kinds of interesting junk when trying to read them.
So best to keep your images on a drive you don't have lots of stuff
on, an external maybe, or run ntfs pro, but here's the rub there.
Image for dos, the older version anyway, will scream about being out
of memory when you run ntfspro to access a ntfs partition.
So I've switched to using drive snapshot, a more expensive package,
but very slick in how it works.
It doesn't have the nice gui in dos to work with ve like image for
dos does, but with snapshot one executable works in dos and windows,
nothing really to install,,
no file locking separate program, it just works.
I'll have to try the newer image for dos and report back on how well
it works with ntfspro.
So with these huge drives and complex drive geometries, I think our
dos days are numbered.
So if they're not going to give us talking installs like the mac
folks have, and we have to limp along with this stupid bios based
stuff and not have efi and room to do custom stuff that might talk
for us, then our only other option is linux, but we might have to
roll our own maybe there's something on linux-speakup-org or
something I know there's some talking distro's around not sure how
far they've come with sapi speech or if we still have to have a
hardware synth, but atleast image for windows has a linux version
that could serve us well.
I think someone posted something here a while back about ssh using
networking to get in to his machine and using the linux version.
But I think doing it directly would be so much nicer.
Well, something else to learn.
Ok, this is getting really long, but hope there's a little useful
information here.
Good to hear from you.
C
At 11:10 PM 8/1/2009, you wrote:
I agree with you on Dells. Really junk and so damn proprietary. I
spend 3 days a while back trying to find the right driver on a
system for their on board network card. I tried using my own
machine, but Dell kept wanting to install their own stuff just to
download the driver. I finally put a usb wireless on that Dell so I
could get on line and finally found the proper driver. What a pain!!!
I really need to upgrade, running a 1.3 mhz machine. I have so much
stuff on here I'll have to reinstall, that if I build a new machine,
I want it to last a while. I guess what I'm asking iswhat you think
is the best bang for the buck in processors? I haven't kept up and
don't know what the new numbers meanIs everything these days dual
core or better? I may not be able to find what I need as far as
mother boards, I need two serial ports, paralel port, 3 or 4 pci
clots, and usb ports. Also a floppy as like you I boot to dos to
restore images when needed and also to do the initial install of
xp. I just don't know what is out there for mother boards these days.
Thanks for your time, and your comments are welcome and appreciated.
Butch
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