Yeh, I’m blowin’ ’em at Windows right now.
*sigh*
So, I wanna have SATA on an old (no, really: OLD) Win2K machine. So what do I do? Easy: buy a PCI SATA controller card and install the thing. But since I only want to add another drive, not replace the ones I have, I bought a controller card that would not interfere, as some unfortunately still do, with my primary IDE channels on on that machine.
Install (after checking the jumpers to make SURE it installs correctly) and sure enough, the hardware recognizes it. Windows notices a new piece of hardware and prompts me for the driver, which I have already plopped into the floppy drive. Everything installs as smoothely as can be. Reboot and… man the boot process is taking a looooonnnng time!
Hmmm… 15 minutes to boot. (I know, cos I just let it sit until it booted on through. No problem; I had another machine to work on.)
Checked for the drive I have attached. No drive found. Hmmm… Checked in device manager. Yep. The SATA/Ultra IDE card is there, listed as working, no problems. Update the driver anyway.
Reboot. Loooooonnnnng boot time.
This is crap.
Bag that. Pop a Puppy Linux live CD in. Boot. Hmmm… Normal boot time for a Puppy Live CD. Sees the card just fine. Open a Media Manager window and there’s the drive. Mount it. Browse around, make directories, transfer files, etc., just fine.
Was, naturally, a Win2K problem. Now I need to attempt installing the card/drive on a newer machine with WinZP [*heh* just noticed the”WinZP” typo. You know what I meant]. Probably will be fine, but man… *sigh* I guess I need to dual boot the old Win2K machine in Win2K and Puppy for a while.
Thing is, Puppy’s running from a 68MB CD, loading in RAM and then using another 500MB of disk space (plus 1GB for programs I install) as a swap file.
And running just fine. And using the extra drive on the SATA card. Lil down under Linux “hobby” distro blowing by Win2K Pro.
Not all that surprising, really. Can’t expect a bloated giant to be nimble enough to both watch out for newer tech and be backward compatible at the same time.
I guess.
*heh*
(Yeh, OK, one gripe: for some reason I’m not getting Opera browser to load in this session of Puppy. I think maybe I didn’t install it on this machine the last time I had a Puppy Live CD in it. So, I’m having to use the crappy Seamonkey 1.0.4 Mozilla browser. *yech* Oh. Well. At least even it is better than Internet Exploder. Speaking of which–ya seen the crappy tabbed browsing implementation in IE7? What a joke. Enough rants. Outa here.)
In my mind the chief advantage of Firefox has been both the quantity and the quality of the third party add-ons they’ve made available. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft will support the developer community.
I just found this cool application on their new IE7 AddOn site.
http://www.ieaddons.com/SearchResults.aspx?keywords=trailfire
It will be interesting to see how this site grows.
Interesting. One of the things I appreciate about the Opera browser is that I don’t need extensions to do things a browser should do, like mouse gestures and saving (multiple) sessions. With Opera, I don’t have to depend upon ticking through multiple competing extensions (and having a good chance of selecting a buggy one or one that works poorly–none of the mouse gestures extensions worked as well as the built-in gestures in Opera). All I have to do is simply use the browser.