Two weeks ago, I picked up a “grab bag” of computer parts from a guy on Craig’s List.  It contained two PC’s and a box of miscellaneous stuff.  I also picked up a computer from  beside the dumpster on my way to work.  It appears to be a Pentium 3.  There was no hard drive in it, but it does have a DVD-Rom drive and a cdrw drive in it, so that’s a big plus, not to mention 384 megs of ram.

I haven’t been this excited about a video game system since the Super Nintendo. Not to mention, this will be the first video game system that I will buy new. With the exception of my family’s Original NES, every video game system that I have ever owned has been used.

http://wii.nintendo.com/home.html

Technorati Tags: wii

So, I upgraded the memory in my laptop and decided to try something crazy. I installed Windows 98 on it.

Win98, required a lot of work to gather up drivers for my ancient hardware, but it does handle the hardware, namely my wifi card, better than Linux. However, there is a really big problem. It is nearly too slow to be useful. I’ve installed Firefox, Opera, K-Meleon, and the usual I.E., of all of them, Opera is the fastest, but it still sucks badly. Reading websites is painful. I’ve considered even installing Netscape 4.7, and even though that would be a faster browser, it lacks CSS capabilities. DSL Linux is just all around faster. One kudo for Windows is all of the software out there for it. I found a couple of programs that I am really enjoying. They are yBook and yWriter. yBook is a “paperback emulator” (LOL!) it can open txt, rtf, html, and pdb ebooks and display them as if you were reading them in a book. It’s a little slow, but quite usable. yWriter is a “novel builder”. I’m working on some fiction and this little program is very handy. If this software were made available for Linux, I would go back to Linux and never look back. So, I think I will keep a dual boot between Win98 and DSL for the time being. It’s sad that Microsoft doesn’t put more thought into being backwards compatible whith their operating systems, but that wouldn’t make them as much money.

This article details the requirements for the new Windows Vista OS.

Minimum Requirements (Vista-Capable PCs): * 800 MHz Intel-compatible processor * 512MB of RAM * DirectX 9.0-Capable Graphics Processor * 20GB HDRecommended Requirements

(Premium-Ready PCs): * 1 GHz Intel-compatible processor * 1GB RAM * DirectX 9.0-Capable Graphics Processor, with 128MB graphics memory. (64MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor less than 1,310,720 pixels [no more than 1440x900]; 128MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor at resolutions from 1,310,720 to 2,304,000 pixels [no more than 1920x1200]; 256MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor at resolutions higher than 2,304,000 pixels [more than 1920x1200]). * 40GB HD with at least 15GB “free space”

Well, I’ve successfully installed DamnSmallLinux, and I like it. 50 Megs, and I have everything that I want. Right now, I am writing this using Flock, which does not come with D.S.L. It is being processed by my main pc and is being displayed on my laptop though something called X11 Forwarding. I’m just thrilled. This kicks some real butt!

technorati tags: damn-small-linux, linux

There’s been a lot of talk going on in the news about identity theft. I understand that this is a terrible crime that can leave a person penniless and in dire financial straits. The main culprit, of course, is the internet. The news reports are full of “Beware of this” and “Beware of that”. My beef, and this is probably something inherent in TV that I have long been immune to is that important information like this is given 30 seconds to 2 minutes on the nightly news. That is not enough time to educate anyone about the dangers of almost anything. The only thing it can do is spread fear, and that is no way to combat a problem.