Saturday in Scumland

11:51.27 - Saturday 26th April 2003   (Link to This Entry)

More fun with the Scumputer this morning - after removing the 3GB from the desktop and rejigging the 10GB in there so that everything's back where it was, I've now got 4GB total space in the new machine, one plus three.

This morning I installed the 3GB and formatted it, instantly running into the old "Win98 won't see NTFS drives" problem. Worse still, the 98SE startup disk won't format it wither, instead it just formatted the 4MB of slack space I had on the drive, and of course, I read it as 4GB, which kept me messing about for another 5 minutes while I tried to discover why Windows was formatting 4 GIGs of space so damned quickly. D'oh.

Amazingly, neither the 1GB of the 3GB has errors on it. I realise Quantum was a pretty damned good make around that time but given the age of the drives this is surely some kind of minor miracle. I am... mildly impressed. Mind you, this is Scabdick Scandisk reporting no errors, so.. uh.

There's still a strange problem on startup - the CPU comes up as 208Mhz from a cold boot but then 333Mhz when restarting. I don't know if the CPU is actually running at 208 and I suppose I ought to find out. WinCPUID, where are you? Just one more problem to look at. Actually, I ought to check the BIOS version, as I downloaded the latest when I was on a driver hunt.

The fun, no doubt, will continue.

Whoops... again.

14:26.29 - Saturday 26th April 2003   (Link to This Entry)

Had fun with the router this morning. I'm playing about trying to get Trillian file transfer working through the router and having absolutely no joy whatsoever, so I decided to update the firmware and see if that gave me any more options. Downloaded the firmware OK, installed it OK, network popped back up, no problem.

Then I notice on the support page that you really really shouldn't do this over a wireless link as if can kill your router. "Too late" I figure, and for some reason I proceeded to type the wrong password into the admin area of the router, changing it to 'admin' (whereas I thought it was something else) and then having a mild heart attack when I couldn't log in using the password I'd always used and that I thought I had just entered.

Out comes the bent paperclip to reset the router.

It probably wasn't a brilliant idea to update the driver for the PCMCIA card at the same time - seeing as updating the router firmware loses all of the settings (no, I didn't back 'em up) which includes the WEP key I was using, so for ten minutes the WLAN mointor util was crashing and insisting there was no connection, I couldn't access the router over the wireless and had to resort to a cable, and for the love of God why are these things so tricky?

I did, eventually, get it all sorted out, however, and found that I could block access to the Internet by only allowing certain network MAC addresses. Great! I added both MACs from the laptop and the one from the desktop and.. it works! Now only my machines can access the internet through my router, removing one of the worries I had about the neighbours getting hold of a wireless card and sending my careering over the 1GB download limit. Doubtful, but you never know.

Obviously I'll have to add the MAC of the Scumputer in order to get in online while it's here, but as I may be keeping the ISA NIC from that machine (haven't decided yet), that's not necessarily a bad idea. Hey ho!