| Grex > Agora41 > #39: Computer hardware questions |
| response 50 of 205: | 
Apr 3 18:51 UTC 2002 |
DRDOS from Corelle is freeware. We paid for the previous version. The video card problem is solved. One (Tseng ET3000) appears to be broken and will show only 16 colors at 640 tho it should go to 256 colors. We have run into this problem before - one chip seems to go bad. The other is an Oak 87 which, contrary to the documentation for univesa.exe, is not compatible with it (it does not work with it) and requires its own OTIVBE VESA driver to show 640x480 256 colors. I was trying to use it with UNIVESA. THe Oak 67 works with UNIVESA (but does not work with Newdeal at more than 16 colors). Nothing seems to be very standardized. We have not paid for MD-DOS but it comes with all the hard drives which are given to us so we figure we are getting it used, for free. The 386 board in the previous computer that we set up for Jim's sister no longer appears to work (won't boot). No great loss. She did not notice as she did not turn on the computer for the past year. The problem with not being able to sign up Jim's cousin on mnet is solved. It was not an April Fool's joke, it was a bug in the newuser program that prevented new users with recycled logins from sending mail or entering responses. T. Rex kindly fixed her account and says she can use it now. Unfortunately we set her up with PCPlus to dial my account instead and will have to try to explain (by email?) how to change the relevant file, with Jim's text editor which she has never used. Mnet newuser is temporarily disabled while they go bug-hunting. We got two very prompt responses to our help request that unfortunately arrived after we had left. We will visit this cousin again in a year or so. She was quite happy with mnet email and will just explain to her friends why her login is Sindi. ' Did grex do an April fool's joke other than the babies?
| response 51 of 205: |
Apr 3 19:34 UTC 2002 |
The 386 board has a very fuzzy battery, and is being recycled along with its MFM 40M (20M?) hard drive and MFM controller card and the special cable for it, unless anyone reading this wants either of them. Now Jim is trying to figure out why neither drives A: nor B: read any floppy disks (even after changing the floppy drive for A:, trying various disks, a new cable, and a different controller card) in a previous computer (the one that only works with PCPlus and Kermit but won't dial Lynx or Arachne. We may try substituting a different computer as we have 20 or so spares. This is a major advantage of using old technology, it is easily replaced.
| response 52 of 205: |
Apr 3 19:44 UTC 2002 |
Easily replaced as long as you have other examples to cannibalize for parts. Just try to buy 30-pin SIMMs these days, though.
| response 53 of 205: |
Apr 3 19:45 UTC 2002 |
Does anyone have a laptop-sized IDE hard drive for sale?
| response 54 of 205: |
Apr 3 19:50 UTC 2002 |
We have one but are keeping it. We are about to recycle 8 1M 30-pin SIMMS and have lots more. Want them?
| response 55 of 205: |
Apr 3 20:29 UTC 2002 |
Re #53: I've got a 120 meg one, and a couple 40 meggers, I think. ;)
| response 56 of 205: |
Apr 3 20:56 UTC 2002 |
The existing one is a Quantum Daytona ~512m. I'm looking for larger
drives. But that's OK; it's just for the spare room terminal.
| response 57 of 205: |
Apr 3 21:36 UTC 2002 |
We deleted all the jpgs that we had transferred which turned out as WORD files, and transferred them again and got the same thing. Then Jim switched Master and Slave and it worked. Very strange. We still don't know where the WORD files came from as he thinks he did an unconditional format on the hard drive in the newly assembled computer. So MSDOS intersrv only works in one direction but DRDOS file link works in either direction? Jim recycled the computer which could not access its floppy drives - it also would not dial with epppd (for lynx or Arachne), which has never happened on another computer. And it would not recognize more than 4M RAM despite having 2 slots. I could put in 2x1 and get 2, or 4 + 1 and get 1, or 4 and get 4. Is there something on the motherboard that is needed to access floppy drives? Part of whatever controls floppy drives and serial ports? We will decide whether to keep the cases - anyone need a case? They will hold many of the Pentium boards as long as you do not need a very powerful power supply.
| response 58 of 205: |
Apr 4 00:41 UTC 2002 |
I downloaded the mini version of PTS-DOS, about 430K, and unzipped and went into the directory with the files, put a blank disk (720K) in A:, typed install, and it copied all the needed files. Booted from A: and was asked whether to run it in English, Russian, or German, with or without extended memory, floppy or hard drive boot. It installs itself complete with memory manager (no need to put those lines in autoexec.bat) and loads DOS high and leaves 625K free conventional RAM (about 10K more than MS-DOS). Runs Kermit fine. Runs Lynx (offline) fine, and Display fine. No bugs noted yet. Very easy to install. The larger version has more utilities. $15 shareware if you want not to wait 60 sec to boot. (Win95 is much slower than that). You can boot in Russian or German. The full version claims to allow you to switch between 10 operating systems on one computer. Thanks for the info!
| response 59 of 205: |
Apr 4 02:02 UTC 2002 |
Where all the serial & floppy drive logic is depends very much on the
computer. There is generally at least some on the motherboard no matter
what; on many recent machines, it's all on the motherboard. For the
serial port, the logic is pretty simple:
cpu - interrupt & device select logic - bus controller - usart
On the original pc, the "bus controller" was mostly buffer chips. On
many recent boards, there may be pci bus adapter logic followed by isa
bus adapter logic. There are a whole lot of ways for serial ports to go
bad. The buffer chips going into the usart are often socketed because
they are most vulnerable, but it's also possible to lose an interrupt
line and that's pretty far into the machine's logic. It's also
incredibly easy to misconfigure things such that the serial port
conflicts with some other I/O device, this can easily result in trouble
even though the hardware isn't damaged.
On the original PC & XT, the flopy was a separate controller card all
its own. This wasn't all, though; the floppy card used the DMA
controller on the motherboard instead of rolling its own, and the timer
chip on the motherboard is used for certain functions as well. With the
AT, the floppy disk controler was integrated into the hard disk
controller; more compact logic, with slightly different functionality,
but essentially the same structure. As time went on, the full-length
controller of the original AT became more compact, and with IDE,
basically disappeared; the floppy disk logic was then generally
implemented on the motherboard.
With both floppy & serial ports, the easiest way to figure out where it
all goes is to trace the cables. Even if the serial ports are built
into the motherboard, one of the slots may still be blocked with a
filler panel holding the serial ports. On tower machines, it's more
usual to have the serial ports as a separte bulkhead connector distinct
from and above the I/O slots. The original floppy controller could
control external external drives, but this was never really popular, and
disappeared with the AT. On most newer machines, the floppy cable just
goes to a 34 pin connector on the motherboard. The cable can generally
be recognized by having an internal segment twisted between the ``A''
and ``B'' connectors. This segment implements drive select. Older
floppy drives have their own drive select logic, but for the PC, are
always set to be the "first" drive even if they aren't.
| response 60 of 205: |
Apr 4 04:42 UTC 2002 |
(When did Microsoft stop taxing every Intel-based box shipped? After '95, wasn't it?)
| response 61 of 205: |
Apr 4 09:44 UTC 2002 |
Re 68: No thanks. I know that, & I steel beleve in power of PTSDOS:) PTSDOS the best Russian DOS!!!
| response 62 of 205: |
Apr 4 14:57 UTC 2002 |
I think PTSDOS may be the ONLY Russian DOS. Jim checked it out ans says it occupies slightly less conventional memory than does DR-DOS and significantly less than MS-DOS, which is not terribly efficient. I got it working in Russian by typing 2 instead of 2 on bootup and it loaded Cyrillic CP866 character set (Russian as upper ascii instead of CP437) and I was able to set Lynx options to CP866 and read Russian at websites. Normally I use a font loader to load any of the Cyrillic fonts. Is the CP866 font found in the video hardware, or in PTS-DOS itself? PTS-DOS uses Country.sys to load the font somehow- a method that I never figured out how to use, which has the advantage when using lynx that if you view an image it does not unload the font, which you then have to reload. It has the disadvantage of only working for CP866 (though there is supposedly a way to load other char sets such as 852 for E. Europe) and when people send Cyrillic email they tend to use Windows fonts, so that I had to set up our Russian friends with CP1251 instead.
| response 63 of 205: |
Apr 4 17:24 UTC 2002 |
Have you considered scouring the library for printed resources with the answers to your questions?
| response 64 of 205: |
Apr 4 19:30 UTC 2002 |
Why do that when Marcus knows everything? Jim is going to try using PTS-DOS instead of DR-DOS since DR-DOS and MS-DOS do not seem to get along too well (jpegs turn into WORD files when you transfer from MS to DR computer, DR computer formatted with MS won't boot, etc.). PT and DR both leave more free RAM than MS.
| response 65 of 205: |
Apr 4 23:11 UTC 2002 |
Does Marcus or someone else happen to have any ideas why, when dialing with DOSPPP (which has something to do with packet drivers), 2 times out of 3 it says 'PPP link is down, cannot load packet driver' or some such thing. Is this a matter of timing and should we change settings such as mru, mtu, or mss? On the computer that we just recycled, it only connected one time out of about 30 tries, but on the others it sometimes connects on the first try (during non-peak hours), sometimes on the 2nd 3rd or 4th.
| response 66 of 205: |
Apr 5 04:09 UTC 2002 |
I definitely don't know everything.
| response 67 of 205: |
Apr 5 06:40 UTC 2002 |
> Why do that when Marcus knows everything? Because Marcus does not exist solely to answer your questions. Because reading the answers you seek would be more likely to result in you actually learning the reasoning behind the answers and developing the ability to generalize those answers appropriately to other problems and questions you come up with. Because by finding the right books you can get the answers much more quickly than you might by posting them and waiting until someone gets around to answering them. I could go on but I think the point is made.
| response 68 of 205: |
Apr 5 14:16 UTC 2002 |
What sort of book would explain how DOSPPP works? Or why when you move files from an MS-DOS computer to a DR-DOS computer with an MS-DOS file transfer program the jpegs turn into WORD files that we did not think were ever on either computer? Why post anything on grex at all since the answers must be in some book somewhere? I do look online for many things.
| response 69 of 205: |
Apr 5 21:39 UTC 2002 |
jeezus.
| response 70 of 205: |
Apr 6 02:36 UTC 2002 |
After a day's worth of experimenting, we got PTS-DOS running with 631K free conventional RAM and caching (program in UMB) and it runs all of our programs. Had to borrow emm386.exe from MS-DOS as the emmpts.com that came with it did not seem to do anything. Help files need some help and some language editing. An occasional crash if we try to mix utilities from other DOSes. But it is 6 years newer than MS-DOS and leaves about 20K more free conventional RAM. Works with Lynx and Skipper (Newdeal). We have not tried it yet on file transfer to see if jpegs turn into WORD files, or tried formatting a hard drive to see if it will reboot. Jim formatted his boot partition with it, he says. Have not tried the boot manager for switching between OS,s but PTS-DOS boots okay from HD or floppy disk. In English or Russian.
| response 71 of 205: |
Apr 6 04:32 UTC 2002 |
Well, Dvorak wrote a fairly useful book on telecommunications and computers; it's somewhat dated now, but so are the computers you are dealing with. _Mastering the Internet_, by Glee <can't think of her last name> and Pat McGregor has a good chapter on PPP.
| response 72 of 205: |
Apr 6 16:35 UTC 2002 |
Do they talk about non-Windows and non-UNIX software for the internet? Our computers may be dated but our software is not.
| response 73 of 205: |
Apr 7 06:27 UTC 2002 |
Yup, they do.
| response 74 of 205: |
Apr 7 16:09 UTC 2002 |
Jim is testing file transfer between DR-DOS and PT-DOS. The MS-DOS interlink program (which turned jpegs into WORD files) does not work at all. The DR-DOS Filelink program (which worked for a while between DR-DOS and MS-DOS but always stopped partway through) seems to be working on a few very large files. We should test it on a large number of small files. I will check the library catalog for the recommended books.