By Ron Stoloff
The “95” in the title is not I-95, and was not caused by some mad pyro setting a fire that engulfed a section of one of the busiest highways in the Philadelphia region. Nope, this disaster engulfed my poor, besotted PC. You have already read about this one: it started life as a 20 MHZ 386sx with an 80 meg drive. My desire for power and speed forced me to reach for the stars – a cd-rom, more drive space and a sound card. The lust was unquenchable until the CPU could satisfy me no longer: I had to have more! More speed! More memory! More power! Just More!!
It turned out to be really a bit much.
Last year I took the plunge at the Trenton Computer Show and with the help of a techy friend popped for a new DX4-100 CPU, motherboard, controller card and video and sound card. It promised to be wonderful!
Two weeks later, it was finally ready. I remarked at the time that next time I upgrade it will be the “Just Plunk Down The Money And Take The assembled and tested mode.” This would come to mind again.
Shortly after, I decided to jump from Windows 3.11 to 95. I’d seen the demos at PACS, and attended Bill Wolf’s sessions. I was ready and I had the horsepower. Surprisingly, it was relatively painless and I just loved the beautiful clouds on my screen. I was even able to make the screen look pretty much like my wife’s Mac desktop – with more, color, of course. I even moved the trashcan to the lower right-hand corner with the icon for My Computer” in the upper right. I had upgraded my machine so there was only the step of loading ’95. It went fairly smoothly and I was impressed with the ease of use and the look of the system.
It’s the next Trenton show and it was now time to buy the Plus Pac – not just to get the pretty backgrounds but because I was running out of space on my 540 meg drive. This was particularly because of the CD’s I’d been buying – each soaked up several megs with its setup and if I didn’t get a disk doubler on soon there would be too much to compress.
Oh, if I had just waited.
Along with the Plus Pac, I bought Norton for Windows 95 – I had seen the demo at PACS, had always been satisfied with Norton since my Tandy 1000 days and wanted to regain the security I had before moving to ’95. I installed both the Plus Pac and Norton the same afternoon and immediately began to see problems – very odd problems. When I tried to shut down, the system would reboot. I would get illegal operation errors. This happened when I tried to unerase some files on a floppy and I just said, “There is something wrong, I’d better contact Norton.” After a toll call to Norton in Washington State, I was told of a conflict with a ’95 feature called SAGE and was advised to turn it off. I did and then even more odd things began to occur. I remember hearing the Norton Techy saying, when I got a “Fatal Error” under Safe Mode say, “Oh, that’s not supposed to happen.” I managed to restore SAGE – I think. The errors continued and I reinstalled ’95. No change. Time to bite the bullet. It must be Norton. So I decided to remove it. I saw Norton’s Uninstall, double clicked and much of my computing life came to an end.
The reboots were odd, the restarts were filled with warnings. Many of them filled with sinister portent. Finally, every time I moved the mouse or tried to used the machine under Normal Mode I got a Fatal Error. “This is all Norton’s fault!” I told myself so I called Norton, again. After an hour and a half, they gave up saying it was probably MicroSoft’s problem since they built the mouse – despite my vociferous claims that all was well until I tried to use their uninstall utility.
The MicroSoft call did not start very auspiciously as the techy who first talked to me had never even heard of Norton. I was about to ask for someone who really knew something when he passed me on to another techy called Steve.” In the next four and one half hours we became close friends – I learned of Steve’s background, the fact that he and his wife made a conscious decision for her to be a housewife to raise their kids despite the sacrifices it entailed, how he got the job at MicroSoft. All this was possible as the various attempts at fixing my machine were tried and failed. He was able to actually sound sad and surprised as all this floundered. Finally, after over two hours on my nickel, he asked me what time I’d be back the next day and that he would call with a solution at hand.
I was hopeful.
He called back on the button and we tried again. He got me started, told me he would call back in a half hour and did. Only problem was it didn’t solve the problem – I was still getting Fatal Errors. He gave up and said that I had a hardware problem and suggested I get myself to a repair shop. Before I would lay my friend, naked, before some sawbones, I decided to try something on my own. I borrowed a disk controller from a friend but it didn’t solve the problem. So it was off to a repair shop recommended by a colleague/[and now, former] friend.
They were very hopeful and expected to fix my toy by the next day but, true to form, nothing ever goes easily for me, but the next day they told me that the difficulty was my 540meg Caviar drive. They told me that they tried to reformat it several times “but it wouldn’t hold the formatting.” This meant a new drive so I popped for a 1.2gig for $300 installed.
When I picked it up I was hopeful but those aspirations were soon dashed as that old Devil on a Blue Screen came up again with the Fatal Errors. Back to the shop.
This time they concluded that it was the sound card. I was willing to accept this as the card was always a little flaky – even under Windows 3.11. They pulled the card and they said all was well. However, when I picked up the machine they remarked that there “might” be something wrong with the memory. When they pulled my memory and place their’s in, there was no problem but with mine, there were failures. They also remarked that one of the SIMMS had an X on it indicating some problem – perhaps. On the way home I wondered, “If they thought there was a problem, why didn’t they just change the memory?” When I returned to my abode I took their advice about slowly adding software, seeing if there were problems, then install the next piece.
It didn’t work and as time went on, the problems increased, even when I didn’t add software for a week. Back to the shop.
They were not happy to see me and, to tell the truth, I wasn’t so happy to see them for the third time, either.
The next day I called and the diagnosis, this time, was a bad motherboard. This would cost me $100 plus $65 for installation. I briefly flirted with the idea of bumping up to a Pentium but the near-$500 cost put me off so I gave the OK to go for just the board.
I picked up the machine and when they presented the bill with the labor charge I was a tad bitter. I told them that I had already paid for the labor – twice – not counting the inconvenience of driving from Blue Bell to City Line 10,000 times. At first they asked $20 bucks but when I pushed they dropped the labor altogether.
When I got the machine home, surprise, surprise – It worked! This trial had taken me from mid April to late June and $450. When I think back to the approximately $750 I spent upgrading, the cost now and the untold aggravation I suffered through, I can assuredly say that upgrading my machine was a terrible mistake. For the $1200 I could have just bought a machine and been done with it. Especially since I could have sold the old machine or donated it to my school for a tax write-off.
It seems that the hours – and phone bills – spent with the folks from Norton and MicroSoft were all for naught and that the loading of the Plus Pac, while it may have taxed the system was not the root cause of the Disaster. This means, importantly, that the problems I had with Norton were coincidental and not causal. Hey, guys, what were the odds?
But look at all the adventure I would have missed.
Sidelight:
There was an additional calamity that occurred as part of this: I had several databases, created under R:Base, and to ease their access I had dragged the folder onto the Desktop of ’95. When the technician from MicroSoft told me to completely remove Windows by “chopping its head off,” we removed the entire Windows directory as well as all the subdirectories. Unfortunately, this takes all the folders/files on the Desktop and took all my databases. This would not have been as bad as it sounds – if I had backed up my files but for some reason, I can’t find them. Another reason to back up you drive regularly. So my next purchase is a backup drive with my question being tape or Zip.
Lest our Mac Brethren get too cocky, I’ve had fun with my Mac PowerBook 190cs. Toward the end of the school year I opened the top to get some work done and it sounded like Kellogg’s Rice Crispies: Snap! Crackle! Pop! Only instead of being part of a nourishing breakfast out came little pieces of black plastic. The hinge was destroyed. Apple is great on product support, however, they sent me a box to mail them back the machine via next day air and promised me the machine by the next week.
“Promised me,” is the operating phrase. They called me to let me know that they needed additional time to get the parts. It took 3 weeks. Yikes. Later I read that Apple was in terrible condition as far as their PowerBooks were concerned and in spite of the great play they were getting in the film “Independence Day,” they had no PowerBooks to sell. Wow!
So, this is the story: I’ve had 6 complete machines – actually, if you count the upgrades and exchanges, more like 7 – and this was the first time since I started with my TRS-80 Model III in 1980 that I had to have a machine fixed and I had 2 down at the same time.
Ain’t technology wonderful?
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