OK here's the situation:
-The HVAC system in our building is monitored by a PC and some software.
-The software is about ten years old, and can be installed from the original floppy disks, about ten of them.
-Yes, I said floppy disks.
-No the building owner doesn't want to upgrade to the latest software, that would be a lot more than they want to pay.
-No they weren't on maintenance.
-Upgrade Path? No, no upgrade path.
-Did I mention the software only runs on Windows 98?
So the original pc died a couple years back and they bought a compusa-cheapest-pc-possible-to-buy and put the original 4gb HDD in it.
-Yes, I said 4GB.
-You can stop laughing now.
-No I am not going to try to reinstall this POS software on another copy of windows 98. If worst comes to worst, I have a ghost image of the hdd that I will blast onto a new hdd.
-So then I taught the building super how to boot back and forth between the two hdd's by switching the boot order in the BIOS. The newer Hdd is used for email and internet, the older one for the aforementioned hvac system.
-So just last week the cheap POS dies on us. Now what? After ruling out the Power supply we figure the motherboard is fried since we get no power whatsoever.
-This is one of these cheap mobo's where the CPU is actuall soldered on. (AMD of course), so it's all or nothing.
-Well I took one an old busted box with a broke power supply, upgraded to the new power supply and threw the two hdd's in it, the original one ~1996 and the newer one.
-Only this pc has a problem in that you can't choose which hdd to boot from in the bios. It always boots off the first one in the chain.
-So now I am contemplating showing the building super how to change ribbon cables. That's not going to work.
And that's where this sweet little utility I found today comes in:
GAG, the Graphical Boot Manager
Download it and they have both an iso and a floppy disk image. boot from it and it will…
1. let you custom build a boot loader
2. create a menu to boot off of any disk and partition in your system.
3. Then write that menu to the mbr on the first hdd.
All done! And now the building super simply restarts and selects whatever OS he wants to boot from.
[tag]Gag[/tag] [tag]Graphical Boot Manager[/tag]
Written by CmdrChalupa on May 11th, 2006 with no comments.
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I, Cringely:
…I also believe that Apple will offer in OS X 10.5 the ability to run native Windows XP applications with no copy of XP installed on the machine at all. This will be accomplished not by using compatibility middleware like Wine, but rather by Apple implementing the Windows API directly in OS X 10.5….I'm told Apple has long had this running in the Cupertino lab — Intel Macs running OS X while mixing Apple and XP applications. This is not a guess or a rumor, this something that has been demonstrated and observed by people who have since reported to me.
Think of the implications. A souped-up OS X kernel with native Windows API support and the prospect of mixing and matching Windows and Mac applications would be, for many users, the best of both worlds. There would be no copy of Windows XP to buy, no large overhead of emulation or compatibility middleware, no chance for Microsoft to accidentally screw things up, substantially better security, and no need to even take a chance on Windows Vista.
Wow, that would really upset the apple cart with Apple-Microsoft relations.
Written by CmdrChalupa on April 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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Best one I've found so far is netvibes.com. Google is pretty good, but stupidly, you can have only one google mailbox area per personalized home page on the Google site. This is highly annoying.
Netvibes fixes this and you can add as many google and yahoo mailboxes as you like, and even a pop3 mail area. The yahoo widget doesn't work for my address but Your Mileage May Vary.
Then there's the usual extras like weather, sports, etc. But the real area where netvibes shines is their rss reader. import/export OPML files, browse the feeds at the netvibes site, add feeds easily, leave them on the content sidebar or add a custom feed to the front page.
It's good stuff Maynard.
Written by CmdrChalupa on April 5th, 2006 with no comments.
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Google Finance is the coolest thing I’ve seen since frosted pop-tarts.
And definitely best Google app we’ve seen in a while (we will not speak of google chat/talk/half-baked jabber implementation)
ARS headline says “mixed reviews”. I’m sure you could pay for high grade enterprise analysis software, but what Google gives out for free is better than my etrade account tools. Consider these features
- Highly interactive graph of the price
- graph is tagged with news articles
- so you can correspond spikes and dips with news
- and zoom in or out on any date range
This is almost like a challenge, as in a “can Microsoft top this?”.
And so far, no, no they can’t.
Written by CmdrChalupa on March 22nd, 2006 with no comments.
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If you didn’t know, Microsoft gives you a free windows virtual desktop manager for XP. All you have to do is go looking for it and download it. It’s part of the PowerToys for Windows XP package availble here.
Once installed you’ll get a nice little toolbar added to your Windows Taskbar:
From which you can manage your (4) new virtual desktops. What could be easier?
The menu is simple, turn it on, turn it off, show animations, etc.
I find this extrememly useful for keeping things organized. Email in one desktop, browsing in another. Process that will take a while to run in another. Things that tend to distract me in another Virtual Desktop.
It’s not 100% foolproof since your process bar is the same in all of them. Things are not locked into the desktop you started them in. In typical *nux VMD’s they are and you need to send them to another window or desktop. Not so here. Still it’s useful and FREE.
No ill effects as of yet. YMMV.
Written by datapoohbah on February 6th, 2006 with no comments.
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AjaxWhois v1.0
I know, it isn’t any more functional than a regular whois search, but Ajax == cool so get with the program!
Written by CmdrChalupa on January 4th, 2006 with no comments.
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