As Byte is now a subscription service I thought some people might enjoy reading some extracts.
Installing Serial ATA
When I built the D865 Pentium 4 system I had a good Seagate 7500 RPM 120 Gigabyte Serial ATA drive, and a data cable, but no way to connect the drive power. Serial ATA drives use a different power input connector from ordinary drives. The S ATA power connector is designed to facilitate hot plugging, which is nearly impossible with the standard Molex drive power connector. Some S ATA drives including Maxtor include both the S ATA power connector and a standard Molex power connector, but the Seagate models include only the S ATA power connector. At the moment very few power supplies include S ATA power connectors but that will change as manufacturers phase in new models, and most power supplies manufactured after September, 2003 will include S ATA power. Of course the old ones will remain in stock for some time.
Lassie: the Intel D865 system in an Antec Sonata case, on the workbench.
Just now, though, neither Fry's nor COMPUSA nor any other store I could find in Los Angeles has the Molex to S ATA converters. Telephoning Fry's to find out if they have anything like that is generally useless because there are only two people in the computer components department who would know what you are talking about, and it's usually difficult to impossible to get one of them on the phone. The others will cheerfully tell you they have left handed smoke shifters, come out to the store. It's not malice; they just don't know anything about the products they sell.
Anyway, I did a rapid tour of all the stores I could think of, and while I found some of the devices for converting Parallel ATA to Serial ATA, and plenty of Serial ATA data cables, there were no power cable adapters. Eventually I did find them for sale on line at New Egg, which is where I generally go when I want to order components including CPUs and heatsinks and the like. I expect I could find slightly lower prices by shopping around, but they wouldn't be much lower, and New Egg generally has everything I want. It turned out that the shipping was going to be more than the adapters, so I ordered half a dozen.
Maxtor Serial ATA drives have both the special serial power connector and a regular old Molex power connector, so you can use either as you wish; but when I built the system I only had a Seagate Serial ATA, so I installed the (unconnected) drive in the neat bay that's a feature of Antec cases. Once I got the adaptor from New Egg all I had to do was connect power and a data cable.
When I turned it on, the BIOS saw this just fine, but Windows XP didn't. No new hardware detected; nothing. Windows XP Help was as useless as Windows Help usually is, but eventually I found it. To add a disk drive, you go to Administrative Tools >Computer Management >Disk Management. Of course first you must find Administrative Tools: by default that doesn't appear on your Start menu. It is in the Control Panel, if you switch to Classic View. To get it on the Start Menu, right click on the START button. Get Properties >Start Menu >Customize >Advanced and you'll see a long list of items that can be added to the START menu. One of them will be Administrative Tools. There are also My Computer and Network Neighborhood.
Under Disk Management you'll see the new disk. Enable it and tell it to format, and Bob's your uncle.
One reason I liked Serial ATA drives is that when I installed Windows XP for the first time, formatting a 120 GB Serial ATA drive took about 4 minutes as opposed to the hour or so the same size Parallel ATA drive takes. I am beginning to suspect that the manufacturer had sent me a previously formatted drive, because that was the only time that happened; every other time it has taken an hour or so to format a big drive like that.
While I was in Disk Management, I designated the Iomega Zip Drive as the Z: drive. The new Serial ATA drive became the I: Drive, and the "extra" Parallel ATA drive the H: drive, leaving the Sony DVD + RW drive as D: because many programs really want to see the DVD/CDROM drive as the D: drive, and besides I had already installed POWER DVD with it as D: and DVD player software can never find a DVD in any drive other than the one you told it to look at on installation. There may be ways to change that, but I don't know them, and it's easier to leave the DVD/CDROM drive as D: anyway. Disk Management does all that well and intuitively.
Microsoft Help
Back in the old days when memory was expensive and disk space was precious, it made sense to keep help files terse; but that hasn't been the case for a long time now, and I wish Microsoft would learn that.
Microsoft Help seems to have been assigned to people who never heard of synonyms, nor have they ever tried getting users of various degrees of sophistication as beta testers. I wish they would. It would make life a lot easier for me if they'd study how normal users go about looking for help, then put in synonyms and pointers and indexing to accommodate them. As it is, you generally must already know how to do something before you can find instructions on how to find the commands. That's absurd, and it really wouldn't take much to fix it either.
I particularly hate it when Microsoft Help directs you to a screen that existed in a previous edition of Windows or Office but has now been moved to another place. Many companies look for the MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) certificate for prospective Information Systems employees. I suspect they'd to better to ask for a Microsoft Certified Help User expert.
Please, Microsoft: Assign someone intelligent to redesign HELP testing.
Laptops and Tablets
I am told that Tablet PCs are not selling well at all. I love my Tablet PC, but I think I understand some of the problems. David Em has more to say in his reports; here's my experience.
A Tablet PC can serve as your only traveling computer, but only if you have some patience and don't play online games. In order to get the form factor down and battery life up, Tablet PCs are underpowered compared to the average laptop.
The patience chiefly comes in if you use Microsoft Office Outlook. When Outlook goes out looking for incoming mail, it pretty well locks up the machine. You won't be doing much else, including reading other mail, while that's happening. Much of this has been fixed in Outlook 2003 (sometimes called Outlook for Office 11), but not only is that not out yet, but it's a one way street: There's still a huge and unparsable PST file, and that file isn't backward compatible. Office Outlook XP and Office 2000 XP use exactly the same format (and have exactly the same problem with Outlook hogging resources); but the Office Outlook 2003 PST file isn't readable by either.
Thus most Tablet PC users will have the "Outlook experience": waiting for from tens of seconds to several minutes while Outlook brings in all the mail, much of which will be spam. Now understand that my Compaq Tablet PC isn't really any slower than the Compaq Armada E500 I carried for years, and if my choices for my only travel computer were the Tablet and the older Armada, I'd take the Tablet every time. I have found I can write on the Tablet despite the small keyboard.
Of course small computers have the defects of their virtues: because they are small and lightweight, they are subject to vibration and jiggling in ways that larger and heavier units are not. I found this quite noticeable when I took the train from San Diego back up to Los Angeles: Even with a table in Business Class I found it hard to write with the laptop, and I'd had no such difficulties previously when I was using the E500.
Of course there are other choices. One is the Apple PowerBook, either 12" or 15". Peter Glaskowsky has been urging me to get the 15" for at least a year, and Chaos Manor Associate Dan Spisak has taken to using his 12" PowerBook for everything except games. He's really happy with it. PowerBooks are fast, rugged, and gorgeous.
On the other hand they don't have that many advantages over a Tablet. They do wireless networking with ease as Glaskowsky says, with Apple everything is either very easy or it's impossible (though with Apple OS X, now based on FreeBSD UNIX and with all the open source software available via the Fink, I'm not entirely sure about the second part) but I found at SIGGRAPH that connecting the Compaq Tablet PC to the conference network was very easy. It Just Worked, which indicates that while it took Windows wireless people a bit longer to get things right, they're doing it now.
There aren't as many games for Apple machines as for PCs of course though more and more are being ported, and the ones that are available look truly gorgeous. Of course, according to how much time you have, not being able to play online games may be a feature. Recently Sony came out with a version of EverQuest for Mac users, but they're all segregated onto one server, and you can't bring your PC characters over to the Mac Bantustan.
Another alternative is a new full featured PC laptop. That will be fast, and plays online games, and can even serve as a substitute for a desktop machine. I also find those too heavy to carry to meetings, although some people manage it.
I do wish the Tablet PC were faster, but in fact the main frustrations I have are from Outlook, and most of those go away if you have a high speed Internet connection so that Outlook gets to do its thing quickly and get it over with. And I carried the Tablet PC through SIGGRAPH and I loved being able to make notes with the pen while in meetings, and dictate other notes into the built in recorder, and the battery life is wonderful (so long as you don't try to run the wireless communications while on battery). I find I don't carry and use Pocket PCs (either Palm or Windows), and while I bought a Newton on eBay I haven't done much with it: if I have to carry something that large I prefer my Compaq Tablet.
If it's not out checking mail, Outlook on the Tablet PC is very good as a calendar and PDA, much better for me at least than any Palm or Pocket software, and I'm used to it. The bottom line is that if I must carry just one computer on a trip, it will be the Tablet.
However, for many years I set up a heavy duty Compaq Armada laptop in my hotel room and carried a different system around to meetings, and I think I will try that next: a large full featured very fast laptop to set up for working in the room, and the Tablet for everything else, and of course the ability to network them. We'll see: I may find that it's just too much trouble. More another time; this is a continuing story.
Networking Lisabetta
Lisabetta is my Compaq Tablet PC. It wasn't really her fault that her networking got messed up.
If you get a Compaq Tablet PC, get the wonderful docking station. This allows the Tablet to be set up with an external full size keyboard in case you want to use that, but also leaves the machine convenient to hand as a tablet and notepad. The docking station lets you change the Tablet's position, and rotate from Landscape to Portrait. I keep Lisabetta mounted in that docking station close to my telephone, and I scribble notes that I can later translate into ASCII or just print out as images.
Lisabetta came with Windows XP Professional (which I recommend; Home may be cheaper, but I no longer have it running on any machine here). I thought I didn't have any problem getting Lisabetta into the local domain, but when I put her in the docking station there was an odd situation. Lisabetta could see and connect to everything on the network including all the other computers and the printers; but while they could see her, they didn't have permission to connect to her, and nothing I could do would change that.
I made do for a while, since I could do file exchanges and print everything and the Tablet sits right here at my desk so it wasn't a lot harder to "push" the files from the Tablet to other systems than it was to "pull" them off the Tablet. It was an inconvenience, though, and after a while it became an annoyance, and it was time to fix it.
First, I did Start >right click My Computer >Properties >Computer Name on the Tablet and "demoted" Lisabetta from a full member of the Domain to a mere member of a Workgroup. (This is what machines running XP Home have to be: they can't join a domain.) Then I went into Active Directory on the Windows 2000 network server and removed all references to the Tablet PC.
Now back to Lisabetta. Open the Local Area Connection and get Properties. Blow away Client for Microsoft Networks, and while you're at it, File and Printer Sharing. Just remove them entirely. Reboot. Open the network connection wizard and start over, reinstalling everything and give the computer the same name (Lisabetta) as before (which is why I removed all traces of it from Active Directory). Install the printers. Set sharing and permissions. And Lo! It all works. Lisabetta is now a proper member of the domain, and can see and be seen by all the other machines. It all works.
So does Wireless.
Wireless Merry Go Round at Chaos Manor
Getting wireless working on Lisabetta the Compaq Tablet PC was simple at SIGGRAPH (and previously at Microsoft's WinHEC conference) but getting her wireless here at Chaos Manor was another story.
There are a couple of wireless setups here. One uses Cisco and only works with Cisco, and I really don't want to put a wireless card into a machine that has 802.11 built in. This may not be a permanent condition, but getting a machine onto a Cisco secure net without using a Cisco wireless card takes a lot more expertise than I have.
The other wireless set up was installed to let my TiVo, located in a downstairs bedroom, connect to the Internet. We used a D Link AirPlus DI 614+ Wireless Router to connect to a D Link Ethernet Bridge. That let the Series 2 TiVo get TV program information and times via the broadband connection instead of using the slower built in dial up modem. This worked just fine. It was set up as a subnet, not connected to the rest of the Chaos Manor networking at all.
Unfortunately the D Link subnet was configured for 256 bit WEP. I am not sure why we set it up that way, but 256 bit WEP is not an industry standard, and wouldn't allow the Tablet PC to connect at all. First thing, then, was to change this D Link subnet to 128 bit WEP. Then we had to enter the WEP key; that turned out to be impossible to do in hex on the Tablet PC. We had to create a new key in ASCII that was easier to enter on the Tablet PC as well as being possible to remember.
Once the new key was entered in the D Link it we tried to put it into the Compaq's Wireless Networking configuration and things went strange. Once we had entered the WEP key and SSID into the Tablet it would say it was connected to the wireless network but refused to DHCP for an IP address. The SSID is jargon for "Service Set Identifier," the wireless network's name in plainer terms. Our D Link is set to not broadcast its SSID to discourage nosy war drivers, and you should do the same.
We went to the system tray icon for the wireless network and told it to show all available wireless networks, then manually put in the ASCII WEP key one more time. Once more the Compaq refused to DHCP for an IP address yet claimed to be connected to the wireless network. At this point we disabled the wireless network interface blew it away entirely and re enabled it from the Network Connections window in Windows XP. That did it, and now we successfully connect to the encrypted network and DHCP for an IP address from the D Link. Note that this is still not part of the full Chaos Manor network, and moreover, the D Link access point is located so that we can only get signal strength inside the walls of the Chaos Manor compound. War drivers aren't even going to see this net.
Why Worry About Security?
I am not particularly paranoid, but my friends Roland Dobbins and Dan Spisak are, and I let them handle my networking security.
I'm not just concerned about the integrity of my own files. I recently read a story about a man whose computer was taken over by a Trojan that then used his machine, and his high speed Internet connection, to distribute child pornography. This happened in the UK and was the second case of that kind there. You really do not want to let your machine be used by intruders. Always operate behind a firewall, and never open unexpected mail attachments. Always.
Looking forward to that.