Some of you might remember that I was asking not too long ago about making a "null modem" with 4-cond.+drain cable. So I did 1&6 -> 4 and looped back 7 & 8. Tried everything, and still haven't got a serial link going. But I do have two operational computers. Now here's the scary part. It took me two weeks of dicking around with the vendor until I finally demanded my money back. I'm a hacker, and a consultant, and have been poking around with computers and stuff since the days when you could actually SEE the components you were working with. So I like to know what's going on in my computer, configure it, and so on. So, I'm poking around with settings and rebooting and stuff, and it locks up while booting. I go back to the store for my money back - the second time this happened I was ready to grab that store boy by his scrawny neck and pinch his head off. I said, "If I have to come back again, I'm bringing the sherriff! This is fraud, extortion, theft, ..." and just went on and on. The storedrone says, "Just let me show you something." I grumbled and seethed, but there wasn't much I could do - this weenie starts the computer, and goes into CMOS setup, and I say, "Yeah, I know how to do that. Oddly, it doesn't have a "factory defaults" setting, just "Optimum performance" and "Best Performance" or some such. So this guy is showing me the BIOS, and goes down into the deepest menus and actually changes the processor clock! He says, Oh, yeah - factory default is 100/100, but you have to set it to 133/133 or it won't boot. I blew up. I said, "If you'd told me that two fucking weeks ago, I'd have had a fucking computer already!!!!!' He says, "Oh, we're not supposed to tell you that...." muttering sometning about 'knowledge base'... So these motherfuckers are selling a computer and operating system combinatiopn where the computer has to be broken to work! And it's SUPPOSED TO BE KEPT SECRET!!!! Well, I got that little tidbit for my shit bag; hope I don't need to use it. During all this, I tried my old OEM W95 in the new comp (to see if I could get it to boot), and the new comp. won't even boot that! It says, "Windows Protection Error. Please restart your computer." **** you, I just did! So I gave up on that, and finally got a W2k that's apparently stable enough to use. BUT THAT'S NOT ALL!!!!! Finally, with two computers, I decided, "Ah, hell, it's turning out to be less work to swap the drive." Actually, just slap it into the new computer, it's got a spare slot. One screw, one jumper, and I've got another drive on the new computer. I dragged and dropped the whole 4GB onto a subdir. on the new computer, and had the old drive back in the old comp. in a matter of minutes. So, that's done, and I put the original drive back into the original confuser, and when I start it, "Windows Protection Error - Please Restart Your Computer." Just BEING IN THE PRESENSE of W2K fucked up my hard drive. (well, I might have inadvertently sent a file to the recycle bin on the old drive while it was in the new computer, and got an error message, so W2k probably tried to "fix" something.) Luckily, I was able to get the original computer running again, but what an adventure! I'll probably be messing with the serial link in the future - I do want to connect them together - the old one has the scanner, and Linux with Apache and everything, and the modem. It'd probably make an excellent firewall, and I do want to keep the ability to run real DOS, so I can play MAME games. Thanks for letting me share. Rich [to email, elide 'ard.']
(Rich Grise) wrote in message Did you check that the hard disk settings were the same ? Sometimes some machines do not set the drives up consistently , and Windows blows up if it sees that files aren't where they should be .
