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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 269 responses total. |
gull
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response 150 of 269:
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May 14 13:17 UTC 2002 |
"The expensive part." ;)
(Hmm...no, that no longer works either. My monitor cost more than the rest
of my system.)
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jazz
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response 151 of 269:
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May 14 22:42 UTC 2002 |
A friend of mine recently asked me if I had a spare "CPU", to which
I asked him what kind of socket or slot he was working with right now. To
him "CPU" meant the "box" - as I call it - and to me it meant the processor
chip.
There is, oddly enough, no really good universally accepted convention
for discussing that part of the computer.
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gelinas
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response 152 of 269:
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May 15 01:00 UTC 2002 |
In general, though, it is called the Central Processing Unit, with the
keyboard, mouse, monitor and printer being known as "peripherals".
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keesan
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response 153 of 269:
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May 15 02:29 UTC 2002 |
So what is the chip (IC) called which is the 'brain' of this thing and is
measured in MHz (or GHz)?
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gelinas
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response 154 of 269:
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May 15 03:03 UTC 2002 |
also called the Central Processing Unit, but at a different level.
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mdw
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response 155 of 269:
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May 15 05:48 UTC 2002 |
The chip? It's a microprocessor. The box? That's the system unit.
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keesan
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response 156 of 269:
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May 15 12:35 UTC 2002 |
So I should tell my neighbor to call it the 'system unit'? Will anybody but
Marcus understand this? Someone else said it is commonly mis-termed the 'hard
drive'. I will call it the 'box' as that is relatively unambiguous except
for someone confusing it with the cardboard container it arrived in.
Yesterday Jim's housemate said he got a confused message in his mailbox
section of our answering machine which might be for us, and I got one on my
machine that consisted of the second half of Jim's number, so I called our
retired math professor friend with the pentium. He thinks he 'might have
called'. He succeeded once in getting online with his Pentium. Now
everything is wider and he can't make it go away. Judicious questioning
reveals that there is some sort of error message on screen when he boots Win98
and he conjectures it may be related to his not having turned the thing off
properly, despite trying to follow our instructions to hang up first by
clickingon the picture of two screens, and then doing START Shutoff and
waiting. What does he do to fix this problem other than have us stop by?
And someone notified him (probably by grex e-mail) that their email to him
came back and notified him they were sending another e-mail. I suggested he
tell them he could not receive e-mails over 70K at his usual address and that
this was a totally unrelated problem.
We may stop by and fix his error message, if we can, and try to automate at
least the dialing by putting that in a Startup Folder. I am told you can get
rid of the request for Network Password by editing the registry but I don't
know where to find that and was warned it could cause problems. Would
automating the dialing get rid of Network Password request? The simpler we
can make this for our friend, obviously the better. Is there some way we
can create a shortcut to 'shut down the computer' to bypass START? Will one
of those automatic shutdowns (where you do not touch the power switch) hang
up the modem so we can bypass that step? On the Win31 computer he never did
get the hang of hanging up and always dialed again during hangup. He said
it worked and not to worry about it. Dialing brought up that little screen
that said Disconnect.
He will first ask for help from the neighbor (the one who changed the Windows
31 color scheme for him and got the new computer plugged in).
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gull
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response 157 of 269:
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May 15 12:55 UTC 2002 |
Shutting down Windows should hang up the modem. If not, powering off the
computer probably will.
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keesan
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response 158 of 269:
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May 15 12:59 UTC 2002 |
But does 'shutdown' which makes the screen go blank actually turn the computer
off if you do not touch the power button?
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keesan
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response 159 of 269:
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May 15 14:04 UTC 2002 |
Addresses in .forward must be separated by a , not a space.
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gull
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response 160 of 269:
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May 15 14:06 UTC 2002 |
It depends on the system. Machines that have APM (automatic power
management) capabilities will turn off. Older machines will not.
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keesan
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response 161 of 269:
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May 15 14:06 UTC 2002 |
We will try it and see if there is a dialtone afterwards, thanks.
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jazz
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response 162 of 269:
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May 15 15:12 UTC 2002 |
"System unit" is fairly vague, though. Depending on the context, that
might include the entire computer as a unit.
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keesan
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response 163 of 269:
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May 15 15:40 UTC 2002 |
I think the friend's email problem was caused by my not putting a comma in
the .forward file. When I tested without, I got back a bounced mail to an
address consisting of both addressed linked by a .. Oops!
I will try describing the 'big metal box' versus the 'little metal hard drive'
inside it. Except some of the boxes nowadays seem to be mostly plastic, like
cheap VCRs and tape decks have become. How small do these boxes now come?
The monitor seems to be more widely known as the 'screen', as in TV screen.
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keesan
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response 164 of 269:
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May 15 15:45 UTC 2002 |
A translation agency which has been having trouble to convince a particular
client to learn to send faxes on the fine setting finally managed to convince
them to send scanned pdf files instead. Only problem is that they sent
several translations as all ONE pdf file (scanned them ALL in at once and then
converted). Is there some way to split this up into several smaller pdf
files? In the meantime to poor translation company is having to print
everything out (nicely scanned, at 300x300 or more) and then fax it (on the
fine setting, of course). I am still waiting (30 min now) for them to print
and fax - maybe they are trying to decompose the file instead?
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jazz
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response 165 of 269:
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May 15 17:54 UTC 2002 |
There are some pretty small "boxes" - one form factor is about the size
of a conventional day planner or a thick book.
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keesan
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response 166 of 269:
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May 15 18:58 UTC 2002 |
Is this something into which you plug a monitor and keyboard?
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jazz
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response 167 of 269:
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May 15 22:18 UTC 2002 |
Yep.
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mdw
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response 168 of 269:
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May 16 06:41 UTC 2002 |
"Unit" in such a context normally means "one piece". Including other
pieces of the system such as a detachable keyboard or monitor as part of
"the system unit" in a discussion of the separate parts of one computer
system would be wrong. If you wanted to use unit in that context, you
might instead use the phrase "unit system", although unless you have
more than one it's kinda silly, and most people would say "computer
system" in any case. IBM uses the term "system unit" in their printed
documentation, so the small fraction of people who can be bothered to
read their documentation should understand it. Here is your chance to
educate them, and give them vocabulary that will be useful in any future
dealings with modular computer components.
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keesan
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response 169 of 269:
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May 16 13:58 UTC 2002 |
But probably not in future dealings with other neighbors, who will have little
idea what they are talking about. The 'box' continues to sit on a table at
the building site, and I saw an orphan monitor around the corner that we may
be able to test it out with. What does 'overdrive' usually mean, as that is
checked off in the documentation, with 3.3 volts. A pentium-equivalent?
Yesterday we biked over (on Jim's sporty new green and purple model) to fix
whatever our retired math professor friend did to his computer(s). I showed
him how to read webmail. Somehow he managed to delete the bodies of his five
messages while retaining the rest of them, but they went away when we logged
out. (He kept clicking 5-6 times). He had also changed the network login
name to his own, from his son's, and then the computer refused to accept his
ISP password as network password. I instructed him on the use of the ESC key,
also the Enter key instead of the mouse (when possible) and said to single
click and if that does not work, then double click. Tab to the address box
in Netscape instead of double clicking, since he cannot get the hang of that.
We got Netscape to stay full-screen, and can indeed shut down and have the
modem automatically get turned off. But it still asks for both Network and
ISP password, which is rather confusing.
Jim fixed the non-working telephone there by plugging it in. It only looks
like a cell phone. They are superb gardeners and sent us back with bulbs.
What might we have to do so that the sound works? There is a sound card with
speakers plugged into it, and the speakers are turned on, and the computer
has a folder 'my music' and CD player and Realplayer and Windows Media Player.
We watched (but did not hear) it play a sample tune.
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gull
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response 170 of 269:
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May 16 17:55 UTC 2002 |
The 'Overdrive' processors were plug-in upgrades for 486 systems, if I
remember right. They fit into a seperate processor socket (much like the
coprocessor socket on 386 and 486SX systems) and take over for the main
processor.
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scott
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response 171 of 269:
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May 16 18:45 UTC 2002 |
Usually the Overdrive processors were just faster (or clock-doubled), and
would either replace the existing chip in the same socket, or a different
socket if the existing chip was soldered down.
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keesan
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response 172 of 269:
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May 16 19:06 UTC 2002 |
So we would expect this to act like a DX4 now instead of a DX2-66MHz?
We will know for sure after Jim gets here (scheduled to be a few minutes after
8:30 a.m. as soon as he plants the bulbs that we got yesterday).
Maybe we can both have a DX4-100 as our second computer and save the pentiums
to use as radios. Jim has a computer with a Pentium 133 cpu in a 486-type
board that tests out the equivalent of a Pentium 75 (AMD 5x86) - is that
overdrive? Fast processor in a slow board.
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keesan
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response 173 of 269:
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May 18 02:44 UTC 2002 |
The 'hard drive' we were recently given contains a 1.2M hard drive with Win95,
Netscape, CuteFTPPro, Telnet, etc. Jim tried to run defrag and was told to
run scandisk. Scandisk found a few minor problems, which I deleted. Defrag
said to run scandisk (at 12% completion). What next? The drive is 75% full
or more. The few problems found by scandisk were in Windows/tempor~1 - can
I just delete everything in there? We are thinking of moving this drive,
along with the video card, sound card, and CD-ROM drive (our fastest yet, 8X
with volume control!) to the pentium which Tim Ryan gave us, that we upgraded
to P133 with a 'cpu'. We already added 32M RAM to it.
Jim also tried DOS scandisk. I cannot find a way to delete cache in Netscape
(don't know the version, Communicator so probably 4.08). Managed in IE 5.5.
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keesan
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response 174 of 269:
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May 18 12:00 UTC 2002 |
We are told the file structure is corrupt, but Jim thinks maybe it is just
a bad file somewhere and wants to delete as many as possible instead of
reformatting the disk and losing the software on it.
Tim's Pentium was just a case and motherboard with 90MHz cpu, no RAM or cards
or drives, so these would be a perfect match. Why would scandisk not notice
a corrupt file structure?
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