Sorry for asking, but how does this thread relate to Window-Eyes?
Ralf Kefferpuetz Germany MSN/Live: [email protected] Aim: RalfKatEMC Skype/Yahoo: rkefferpuetz7747 -----Original Message----- From: Chris Belle [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, August 02, 2009 8:16 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Dell systems and such Unless you'd rather I didn't, I'll go public with this so others might benefit since I think it's very relevant for people like ;us who aren't happy with just a top level access and who use older stuff as well as newer stuff to give us greater independance. I really appreciate your encouragement and the conversations we've had through the years keeping some of this stuff going and comparing notes. We've been able to avoid lots of problems using imaging problems, it's saved your bacon numbers of times, just like it has mine. I have a good teching buddy up in Ok who believes strongly in it, and uses dos still to tech with, and he builds machines and everytime, hands down, even though it's got it's limitations, I think it gains up a lot of control that blind people in windows only don't get. They'd rather spend hours playing with registry cleaners, and spyware tools that don't really work, when it's so wonderful to hit the bitton, walk away and go get a coke, and come back to a system fresh as the day you bought it with all your favorite stuff installed the way you like. Ok enough evangilizing, I just want people to know that old technology can be great and is worth preserving and using when you can, I like what that other cat said about something not being obsolete because the computing world says it is but only when it quits serving your purpose. Drive snapshot is a german made software which makes images to another drive, much like image for windows dos and linux does. YOu don't have the gui in dos, but you can use batch files, and it does text writes so you can see progress and all. In windows, you get a nice gui. One executable works in dos and windows, and also opens up image files for you to look inside. It doesn't have the extra drivers like image for dos for cd and usb access and such, but you can install those yourself. It's a great tool, and I've starting using it because it allows me to get to my ntfs drives without that memory limit that ntfspro has with image.exe. 1600 fsb is 1600 front side bus. That's the fastest processors supported at that time. Driver genius is a program that can save out drivers for all your devices, and also find them on the net for you. It doesn't do as well on the later part, but if you want to restore a system and don't have driver disks handy, and you need to grab your drivers out of an existing install, driver genius is great, and it works with we. I had an older version around here, so that might have been the problem with not finding the netcard drivers, but still, I made it work. Yeh, well, the only way you could get around having integrated paripherals is to install xp on that machine, run driver genius and then re-install 2k. And then use the drivers you got out of xp. For an older machine 2k is still a better option since it doesn't hog as much as xp, so great for anything like a p2 anything less than a 700 or 256 megs of memory, I say put 2k on it or w98. Well, if you do it all yourself, and really go budget and get your own parts, you could do a 3gig 2 core machine for probably 5 bills. But this machine here was built by sonica labs, and it's decked out with all the finest stuff from that time, passive cooled video, big quiet power supply, it was when the first run of 45 nm stuff first came out, and I got it loaded with 3 big sata drives and 2 good burners and 2 gigs of ddr2 memory. Sonica labs replaced a machine no questions asked when dhl mangles the first one, which had an asus mobo, and they gave me a better machine to replace it, better mobo I think gigabyte mobos are better than asus. This board has 2 pci slots, 2 pci express 16 slots, and I forget how many pci express one slots, but it's got all the other stuff I mentioned in the other email. What's good about this motherboard is that it does ide immulation very well, even to the point of being able to load a dos cdrom driver to access the burners. Some of the lesser motherboards won't do that, ide immulation from the bios isn't all created equal. Also for a music machine, sonica labs disabble ahci mode, which makes it better for us doing installs and such, and also apparently timing issues and such in windows is better when the hardware controls things. This makes sense, as we used to disabble pci steering and do dedicated physical irqs to a slot for our audio interfaces back before things got robust enough in windows to handle it. Now we don't do that so much. But apparently, even though ahci mode offers hot swapping and other cool stuff, the experts say let the bios handle it. Which while we're running these hybrid systems, is the best thing right now for people using their computers for the stuff I do. Because if you enable ahci mode, you'd have to have text mode drivers, and unless your using nlite which isn't perfect, you'd have a bitch of a time with unattended installs, those text mode drivers can be tricky, and you couldn't get past the part when xp asks for a disk. there are some voodoo you can use with the unatend.txt file, but safe to say text mode drivers are harder to deal with. Ok, I don't know everything, and I'll probably get some rocks thrown at me by people who haven't got anything better to do than to be jerks but here's my understanding of why we don't have safe mode or talking installs. The same bios which helps us out and makes windows and the whole pc work better in one situation also has boxed us in. That's why you need a bios upgrade everything they add a new bus or change drive geometries, this is old 80s technology, very limited memory, and legacy dos level stuff, and there's no memory to load drivers and software to make things talk. Intel around 98 I believe it was if I remember the white paper I read released efi I believe it stands for extended firmware implementation or interface, some such, and this basically does away with the bios and allows the computer operating system to talk to the hardware directly from the get go, this is what apple uses, and the reason it can run windows natively is that it immulates the old pc bios, but because other operating systems have left the bios behind, there's much more memory and resources to do stuff like what we want. They don't have the real mode limitations, so if we want voiceover to talk me through an install, no problem. But with the old bios stuff, when you barely got enough memory to do these big drive geometries, and even start to talk to all the stuff we've crammed in to a modern pc, you can just forget about loading software for a talking install. I'm sire I don't have it 100 percent right in all the particulars, but that's my layman's understanding of things. When we get efi based systems, then a lot more stuff will be possible, and hardware upgrades will be much simpler, I believe the one good thing about vista I saw was that efi implementation has started. I don't know much beyond that, only that with all the hasles we have with the bios, and the translation that has to happen, and the handing off to windows and such, that efi will speed things up a lot and make compatibility easier. This will happen in time, but microsoft is dragging it's heels behind everybody else as usual. Well, atleast we have imaging down, which get's us out of having to use safe mode to fix a hosed system, botched driver install, etc. It's not the best solution, but it works every time, pc acts up, if you can't fix it reasonably quick, just image your system drive, and your back in business. Keep email and other junk off on other partitions, and nothing get's hosed. YOu know, that 137 gig limit might be the key thing here, I should try and re-size that partition and see if it fixes my issue. I used to think it was the 4k line thing, I had the same problem with fat32 when I first got these drives, and then I re-formated fat32 4k line, and it seemed to fix some things, but the problem is back. So maybe 4k line fat32 is some of it but not all the problem. At 10:26 AM 8/2/2009, you wrote: >I've never tried drive snapshot. Does it make an image or just keep a >mirror image on another drive? I use fat 32 on all my stuff. makes >life simpler. I had the same problem with sata drives on dos, I think >there is some doundary around 137 gig that dos won't see. I generally >partition all my stuff on larger drives. I guess sata is faster, but >I've had less problems with ide drives. I also use western digital my >book and image for dos sees those fine and ai can restore from those. > >What is 1600 fsb? > >Never heard of driver genius. What does this do? UI couldn't use your >trick on that dell as it was an on board card, sound and all on >the mother board. When you say cheap, any guess on how cheap for >a 3 gig dual core machine? > >It really ticks me off we don't have speech in safe mode or talking >installs. We should have had this stuff years ago!!! > >Later. >Butch If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. All GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo, and can be searched through and sorted using the search form at the bottom of the page. If you wish to unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [email protected] and include leave gw-info in the body of the message. If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. All GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo, and can be searched through and sorted using the search form at the bottom of the page. If you wish to unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [email protected] and include leave gw-info in the body of the message.
