Personal Safety From Google

[yogi]

The computer in the Blazer reminds me of the computer I built from scratch. It's a pure gaming machine, and them gamer people want more from their hardware than us normal people. There are sensors all over the motherboard and SMART software is installed to read them. That's no big deal because most recently built computers come that way. I selected a special 650 power supply that included ATX technology and a cable jack to tap into it. I had very little idea what that meant when I bought it and to this day do not use it. However, I learned that an add-on box can be plugged into that jack and mounted onto the cabinet. This box has a variety of LED's and numeric displays that tell you about every freaking voltage that can be measured on the motherboard and inside the PS. I've seen it in use and is very impressive given that all this monitoring is displayed on a box about the size of a small modem. Only over-clockers would know what those voltages mean. But, apparently you can push a CPU's clock to it's absolute physical limit and monitor the temperatures at each core of the processor. When they reach a maximum value (which can be adjusted) the system backs off or gives a warning for you to do the same manually. I don't recall what I paid for that power supply, but I'm certain it was a premium. Only a few people would know what the heck ATX is, and fewer yet would have a need for it. But, I got it in my tower computer. LOL

[Kellemora]

I may be slipping in my olde age, but I think ALL of my computers have ATX boards, but I doubt they have any sensor readings available.

One interesting thing about my original Blazer is the service engine light was always on. Unless I cleared the computer, then it would come on again within a couple of miles. The computer always showed the same sensor was what triggered it. I had it replaced like four times while the car was under warranty, it didn't make a difference. They finally said it was the way I drive. Although it is an automatic, it is a Slap-Stick automatic and I use it like a manual transmission. I downshift coming up to stop signs, and upshift as I leave a stop sign. I rarely if ever get up into OverDrive unless I'm driving a long distance on the highway, hi hi.
I think it was a problem with the computer programming myself, especially now that I have an identical car and drive it the same way and the engine light never comes on. So maybe the fancy computer wasn't exactly designed for a car with a Slap-Stick and the normal computer is.

Debi's son has been a gamer since his first computer. He always has all the fancy stuff hooked up to it. And you should see his meeces. One looks like something used to control a space shuttle, hi hi.
The computer he gave to Debi with Win7 in it, was one of his early gaming computers, so has lots of memory. He set it back to factory settings before giving it to her and removed many programs, I think he actually reloaded Win7 as well, because when she got it from him, she had to go through all the same set-up you have to do with a new computer.

[yogi]

Brain Fart: Scratch ATX. Insert DSP

You are the only person I know who goes through the trouble of shifting an automatic transmission. There may be some advantages to that but I can also see how it would mess up the engine control computer. You are not doing anything the car isn't designed to do, but those guys who write the firmware for computers only know about general usage. Special cases seem to be locked out of their knowledgebase.

My tower was a gamer's dream back when Windows 8 hit the streets. One of the reasons I chose to go with such high power and exquisite components is that I fully intended from the start to keep this machine for at least 10 years. The capacitors in the power supply are guaranteed for seven years so that I think I have a decent chance of accomplishing my mission. If they are still offering a free upgrade to Windows 10 (from a legacy Windows 7 machine) I probably will convert at that time. I only have one game that might not work on the new OS and I'll test that out before I do any switching. That's my favorite pool table simulation, and I'd hate to lose it. I'll just keep Windows 7 on a drive of it's own in that case and bite the bullet to purchase a new Windows 10 license. They claim Windows can run more than one version of itself. Believe it or not, that is one scenario of multi-booting that i have not tried yet. I have read about other people having problems doing it, but if I can get flaky Linux distributions to work with Windows (7 and 10), putting two Windows together should be easy. What could go wrong?

[Kellemora]

It gives me much better control of the vehicle, like back when all of my cars are sticks.
The first time I had a car with an automatic, it literally drove me nuts, especially trying to drive through Kirkwood with a stop sign every other block. About the time you get going you are upon another stop sign, and about the time you take your foot off the gas to start hitting the brake, it would upshift a gear and try to shove you through the stop sign.
I got rid of that car right away and went back to buying only 4 on the floor, usually Muncie/Hurst.
Didn't own another automatic until we bought the Blazer with the Slap-Stick Automatic.
I start out in 1st gear, shift up to second, and as I approach the next stop sign back down to 1st.
If I get on a main road I may get up into 3rd gear, but never use ODrive unless I'm going to be on the highway for a long way.
Rented a few cars with QuickShift transmission, but they were not quick at all, and never did what I wanted them to.
About the only way to get a properly shifting QuickShift is to rent a large Box Truck, then they work right.

I happen to have Windows XP on the second drive in this computer. But I have to go into Bios and tell it to boot from that drive, which it don't like to do, hi hi. I only did it a couple of times when I first got this machine from you, and now just use that drive for file storage. On Linux, you cannot tell what drive or partition you are on by looking at the Index, it shows all the partitions. I can figure it out using GParted real fast though.
I wanted to see if I had space to try out the latest Debian, since I'm still using Debian 8 upgrade to Debian 9. I wanted to do a clean install. I was afraid I might delete the wrong partition since I'm not sure which of the partitions I'm running on right now. I could figure it out easily enough, just didn't want to mess with it at the time.

My computer guy who used to build computers for me for 300 bucks each, then later on around 400, says he could build me one for 600 but I probably wouldn't like it after using the Silver Yogi, which I gave him the specs for. Said if I wanted something comparable to this computer, I would have to spend around 8 to 9 hundred dollars. I told him I don't have that much money to play with. So he showed me a used machine they took in on trade. It is only 3 years old, cost the guy 2 grand to build, and he just bought a 4 grand machine. Said he wanted 850 bucks for it, but would let me pay it off in two payments both applied to my credit card. I just said it was tempting, but I really can't afford it right now.
I was hoping he would come down perhaps to 750 but he didn't. I said I would be back after talking to the frau.

[yogi]

Not too long ago somebody asked if I could build them a desktop computer. After doing a little bit of research I could probably put together an 8-core AMD Rhyzen for $700-$800 . It would be close to the Silver Yogi but sans the video card that you can't use anyway. I could shave off maybe $100 by using a lower class AMD processor, but then we'd be talking WalMart quality. Might as well just buy one from them if I had to go that route. I don't recall the exact cost numbers for the components in that tower you have, but even if I had them, what you have is not the original version. I upgraded a few things along the way since the original build. I'd have to agree with the fellow you talked to. While there are a lot of inexpensive and good computers out there, I don't think you would be happy with anything less than a $750 machine.


My current tower, with Windows 7, has two hard drives. One of them is dedicated to Windows only. If I have to keep Win 7 and also upgrade to Windows 10 I would put the new OS on a drive of it's own That would make three hard drives. So, when I boot into Windows 7 I know exactly what hard drive I'm using. The Windows OS drive consists of two partitions: drive \C: and drive \D:. That's left over from when the hard drives were legacy boot in the MBR mode. I needed two separate drives because the gaming I was doing would wear out the SSD too quickly otherwise. Now I combined both drives onto one piece of hardware and simply partitioned them as needed. I'd love to merge them back into a single partition, but it's not worth the trouble. I also have a secure (BitLocker encrypoted) data drive \E: which is on the second physical hard drive. It's NTFS formatted. Also on that second drive are two Linux distributions. Each of the three partitions take up around 100GB which leaves about 600GB empty for future expansion.

Since both of the drives are formatted GPT, sorting out the boot sequence became an issue. Back in the MBR configuration Windows took precedence in BIOS. If I wanted to boot from any of the other drives (containing Linux), I'd have to do it through BIOS. Grub was not located on the Windows drive which meant that I actually had two separate bootloaders. That would confuse a normal system, but since BIOS was set to boot from the Windows drive by default I never had a problem. It would boot into Windows unattended. However, GPT formatted drives want to see an ESP partition to boot any OS's. This is fine in theory, but not fine in my case where I'm multibooting from two different drives. EFI gets uber confused when left to it's own devices. I can set it up to do so without any trouble, but any updates to Linux (what else?) reconfigures the Windows EFI boot partition. I'm sure Linux developers think this is humorous in that they steal the show from Microsoft, but it breaks my system. Fortunately I discovered the beauty of rEFInd booting. I now let Grub install itself on the same partition as the OS is installed on just to get it out of my way and not destroy the boot process. rEFInd is the default bootloader now and will boot into Windows unattended as did the old MBR system. Or, I can hit the arrow keys to select any of the Linux systems. There is a timeout that must be executed before it does the boot and that pisses me off. I didn't need that doing it the old way. But, now I can boot any OS installed in that tower, and the best part is that I don't need Grub to do it. LOL Screw YOU, Linux developers.

[Kellemora]

I've always preferred AMD over Intel CPUs. Plus they cost less for the same power ratings and are more secure.
AMD Ryzen 7 is 280 bucks, the Ryzen 9 is 430 bucks.
Intel i7 is 400 bucks, the i9 is between 500 and 600 bucks. Xeon Gold is almost 4 grand for a CPU.
I've seen some Intel 8 core chips down to under 50 bucks.

AMD chips use more wattage than Intel, but are usually faster so in the end it's a wash.

I don't think I need anything quite that expensive for my needs.
The guy I talked to said on the lower price machine, he could use the faster of the Ryzen 3 CPUs for 110 bucks, which was 20 bucks more than the first Ryzen 3 he mentioned for 90 bucks.
16 gig board is 70 bucks.
He suggested I move from Asus MoBo's to ASrock, said it is much better, can handle more memory, and had more available slots, it was only 100 bucks.
That's how he got up above 400 so quick, he can use my cabinets but will need to add a bigger power supply than I have in them. So, with labor it is back up to 600 bucks, and as I said earlier, he said I wouldn't be happy if I go under 750 bucks.

Something else he talked about was I had to consider using a graphics card instead of the onboard graphics. I've never had a problem with onboard graphics, so I told him no, don't need that extra GPU board. He frowned, hi hi.

[yogi]

I've read the same Intel vs AMD arguments as I've read about Windows vs Linux. Both have been debated for the same amount of time and both arguments probably come from the same groups of people. If you can afford it, Intel is best. If not, then AMD is best. I have one of each here on my desk. The tower has an Intel processor and the laptop AMD. While I've seen accusations that Intel is in bed with Microsoft, I don't see any processor related performance issues between the two machines. Both run Windows and Linux in multiboot. The hardware is pretty close to identical except for the form factors. When I build my next machine I'll use an AMD processor if I can find a compelling reason to do so.

As far as added GPU cards go, they are necessary in certain cases, such as gaming or where 3D rendering is required. The nVidia card far outshines the Intel graphics on many motherboards, but if the only gaming you do is on Facebook, then you don't need the additional power. It might also come in handy if you do a lot of HD video editing, but more than a GPU is required in that case. About the only compelling reason to have a dedicated GPU is if you are going to use it to mine bitcoin. Other than that they are nice, but not a requirement.

[Kellemora]

One computer I bought did not have a video socket on the motherboard, so it had an add-in card.
After I retired that computer, I kept the video card just in case.
Unfortunately the computer that the on-board video went out, didn't have the right size slot for that card.
So I went out and bought a super cheap video card for it, only to find it wouldn't work due to other problems on the mobo.
I kept it around here for a few years, then plugged it into another computer so I could have two monitors going.
Worked OK, but really slowed down the computer from how fast it used to run.
As I said, it was a cheap one, hi hi. I think less than 14 bucks.

[yogi]

Generally speaking video cards take a burden off the main CPU. That was a big issue in the old days, but now with multiple cores and GB clock speed the main processor is very capable on it's own. nVidia has its own CUDA technology which I don't fully understand, but it supposedly helps developers. I guess a GPU is also good to have when streaming HD video. Since I don't do more than watch YouTube, I don't need high definition processing. A lot of people are getting into streaming as an alternative to cable television. I think those services almost always benefit from a dedicated video processor. Video cards are one of the few things that have come down in price over the years; much like memory costs. However, I don't think you can get much more than an edge connector for $14 these days. LOL

[Kellemora]

Way too many rich people out there these days for us old guys on fixed incomes to keep up.

You wouldn't believe the number of high-dollar items are sold where my wife works.
And they don't bat an eye at paying 400 bucks for a ice chest, or a couple of grand for a BBQ grill.

There is one guy always coming in to buy tools of all sorts.
Seems they don't keep them anymore like we did, hopefully for life.
No sir, when they finish the project, they also get rid of the tools they bought.

A women's clothing store where one of Debi's cousins worked, over the course of a year sold over 500 different styles of dresses and gowns to the same gal, and they were all for her. Most of them were in the 200+ dollar range also.
She only wears them one time, and some she never wore at all. In all the years her cousin worked there, she never once returned a single thing she bought.

Both of my step-kids got jobs paying well over 50k per year, the boy after only 2 years of college, and the girl right out of high school. Within two years both were making over 100k per year. No wonder everything costs so much now!

I've talked with a few guys at the barber shop who work in management positions for some of the larger chain stores around here. The barber told me they make over 200 grand a year for basically doing nothing except filling a chair and telling underlings what to do.

Heck, even the prep cook at Waffle house makes over 30k a year now.
So it doesn't surprise me that those who work at my computer store now make over 60k a year.

[yogi]

One of the things being done to boost the economy during this pandemic is that the US Treasury is printing money as fast as it is physically possible. This is not replacement money either. It's brand new $100 bills going into circulation. The theory behind this has not come to my attention, but it does obviously make the existing dollars worth less. It's about supply and demand. More dollars could under some circumstances give liquidity where none existed before, but it dilutes the value of the dollar. That's how that $150 ice chest from five years ago suddenly sells for $400 today at the Ace Hardware store. People on fixed incomes no longer can get the same amount of goods for the $700 that was adequate a dozen years ago. About half of that income has been eaten up by inflation and now by an increase in the money supply.


My wife, the company comptroller for a huge insurance company, retired one year and decided to work part time at a local Chicago department store called Marshall Fields. She got a job as sales clerk in woman's clothing; not just any woman's clothing, but the St John line of clothing. That department didn't bother with dresses as cheap as $200. Think more like $1200 for a nice dress to host a cocktail party. It takes a special kind of customer to be able to afford that kind of clothing, and my wife loved it. Once in a while she would see a prom queen looking over the clothes racks, but most of the customers were driven to the mall in their Benz or Rolls or possibly the Bentley. That's only a slight exaggeration. The customers were as high falutin as were the designer clothes they bought. While my wife enjoyed dealing with such people, the best part of the job was the bonuses. The regular pay wasn't anything to write home about, but if you made or exceeded your monthly sales goals, you would get one of those dresses, coats, sweaters, or whatever as a bonus. This happened every month. Well wifey didn't make the goals every month, but she had quite a collection of St John clothing after working there a couple years. Most of it was sold on E-bay because, well, we just weren't the cocktail party type of couple. You know?

[Kellemora]

Now wait a minute. There is no money printed by the Federal Reserve that is not backed by shareholders and bonds. The money is first loaned to the Federal Reserve in order for them to print the bills for that money. And they pay dividends and interest on that money.
To just print money without backup funds to cover it would cause hyperinflation.

I am familiar with Marshall Fields! We used to use them as an example in sales talks all the time.
I even went there myself a few times to see what made them so unique.
At the same time I learned our sales pitch was technically incorrect, because they did have more than one store, they eventually became a chain.

My first wife worked for Famous-Barr Department Store. She started in the candy department, then moved around in the women's clothing departments. She had previously worked for a candy company, and at the time she was hired, they still made some of their own candies in each store, so that was the part of the candy department she worked in, not sales. When they cut out making their own in-store candies is when she was moved to the women's clothing department. They needed the most help in the Missus size clothing area, but she was larger than that so they put her in the next department up whatever that was called. They fairly quickly took her off the sales floor and put her in inventory and ordering. This gave her some experience and she moved on to working for car dealers, which is where she was at when we finally divorced.

[yogi]

The money supply can be manipulated in several ways.
1) The most popular method is to change the reserve requirements banks must maintain which in turn allows more or less loans to be granted.
2) The discount rate, interest on government bonds, can also be changed to encourage or discourage their purchase. This is the preferred method used to pay off the national debt.
3) The Treasury Department can simply print money at will. This will increase the money supply and as you point out bring on inflation.
There probably are other methods used by central banks to control the money supply, but the three above are the most common.


Marshall Fields was a big influence in Chicago. The Fields family owned most of it at one time. It's not too surprising that their name is known beyond the Windy CIty. I believe they mostly left the area now, but their name and buildings will be around forever.

[Kellemora]

All of our paper money now is nothing more than Fiat Currency with no real value other than perceived value.

At one time, before they became a chain, Marshall Fields was the LARGEST single department store in the world!

[yogi]

I've been to that downtown version of Marshall Fields when I was a kid. They had one hella display in their windows when it was Christmas time. Mom and I made the trip via the famous Chicago Loop elevated train, which actually was a subway out where we lived. LOL We would wander around inside the store too and then go to Chinatown for something to eat before we came home. It might have been the largest department store around at that time. Skipping ahead to when I was newly married, they build the largest shopping mall under one roof out in the suburbs of Chicago, Woodfield Mall. They had a "Fields" store center stage, but also a few other big brand stores. That mall was indeed huge but it didn't hold it's title very long. For a while it seems as if a bigger and better one was being build every year. Macy's bought out Marshall Fields, which is why my wife left. Recently I read where Macy's went belly up. I am wondering what is or will fill the vacuum.

Before I left town my wife and I visited the Apple Computer store in Woodfield Mall to purchase an iPad. They sure had a different way of selling things compared to WalMart. LOL At each stage of the sale you would get passed over to a different specialist. The last one was there to help you set up the new machine you bought so that there was nothing for you to do but use it when you got home. This Apple Store was on the second floor of the mall overlooking a courtyard of other stores. Prominently placed in that group was ... Microsoft. The two stores had an easy view of each other. Everybody up at the Apple store would look down and laugh - very symbolic, indeed. Well just a couple months ago Microsoft announced they were closing all their stores. Apple is STILL there from what I understand.

[Kellemora]

My mom used to take us downtown at Christmas also to see all the window displays at all the big department stores, and there were a lot of them. Famous Barr, Stix Baer and Fuller, Sears, Neiman Marcus (aka Needless Markup), Penney's, Sax Fifth Avenue, and several others I don't remember the names of anymore.
Macy's is who bought out Famous Barr, I think. Famous and Barr merged some time before I was born I suppose.

We had some of the largest grocery stores also. One of my classmates and a Des Peres resident owned all the IGA stores, and he expanded many to become Jansen's IGA Foodliners. But even his stores were small compared to Rapp and Dierberg's before the kids took over. Bettendorfs merged with Rapp for several years, but not all of Bettendorf's became Bettendorf-Rapp stores. So Schnucks bought out those that were still just Bettendorf's and although they were named Schnucks Markets, we locals called them Schnuckendorfs, hi hi.
Once the kids took over Dierbergs, they began building new stores like tossing hotcakes, placing them six mile apart from each other. At first Schnucks always had the lower prices, the once Dierbergs had about 20 stores, their prices came down usually lower than Schnucks across the board. But you had to watch closely as each Dierbergs set their own prices.

We had a HUGE Apple Corporate Complex in Des Peres, but it was all offices.
Every mall had an Apple Computer store at one end, and a Dell store at the other end, not too many Microsoft stores in our area though, probably because that is what all the department stores sold was Microsoft computers.
But then stores would pop up for short times, like an e-Machine store, oh I forgot about the small Kaypro store in the old strip mall. They didn't last long though.
The store I normally bought computer stuff from was named Computer Country, and prior to that Better Business World.
Better Business World is who I got my first built-up machines from, both were only 286's, but held up a lot of years.
Most everything after that, namely the 386s, came from Computer Country. They are where I bought my first Integral Data Systems dot matrix printer, and who ordered us the Lisa system for at work.
Which of course you know was replaced with WANG VS 300 mainframe, later sold to Tradin' Times newspaper when we closed up shop.

I don't know about other states, but in Missouri, Apple Computer supplied their computers to almost all the schools in St. Louis county and perhaps other counties. I thought it was a smart move, get the kids used to using Apples or MAC's and they would probably stick with them. Trouble was, most businesses used Microsoft products, so they had to learn Microsoft if they wanted to work there.
When I opened Wonder Plants, we went with MAC computers and the TOPS network. They had all the software we needed for that business and then some. But then for myself and my late wife, we had to switch to Windows to appease the clients we did work for at the time.
I still have some of the expensive at the time transcription equipment we bought for our little business, it's been stored now for about 25 years, so probably wouldn't work anymore. Capacitors would have dried out, and if it had belts, which is most likely, they would have dry rotted also. I tried to sell it all before I moved south, and it didn't wind up in the auction for some reason. Probably because I hoped to use it after I moved south to get some work from old clients.
Of course that never came to be the way things turned out down here. Never got my Ham Radio station set back up again either.

[yogi]

Before I moved to O'Fallon I've been through, but never stopped in, St Louis a couple times. My first time was about when I was 16 and we were traveling Rt 66 to California. I recall it being big, but my only reference point was Chicago. I was intimately aware of the size of Chi Town and going through St Lous didn't impress me at all. It was very small compared to where I lived. Of course that was only a passing impression and not a very fair evaluation. Regardless, it didn't seem like the kind of town that would host Nieman Macus or Fields; it was more of a Sears type town. LOL Since those early days I've learned a few things about St Louis which brings it up to a "big city" class in my mind. I've stayed in Clayton but that was as close as I ever got to the city of St Louis. Since I've been living here I passed through the inner city a few times on my way to somewhere else. My only venture into the actual city proper was to pick out a dog at the Humane Society. That was a pretty nice part of town as I recall, but I couldn't tell you where it is located.

I've seen a few "big" cities with a lake shore or river front, and none of them measure up to Chicago. The Windy City skyline is clean and beautiful compared to Coleveland, OH, or Buffalo, NY, for example. I've been to a few places on the Mississippi too. One expedition was to the Quad Cities, which I believe Bentendorf is one of the four. I'm guessing it was named after the same family who you mention being store owners in St Louis. I never heard of them prior to my excursion and until you mentioned their name. I believe of the four cities on the river Bentendorf is the most exclusive and highly regarded.

The only other comment I have is that I never saw a Dell computer store, although I imagine they must exist. Microsoft opened stores to sell their Surface computers and the now defunct Zune Windows phone. Well Zune tanked rather quickly and I'm sure Bill Gates was laughing his head off at the new CEO for trying something stupid like that. Unfortunately, the Surface product isn't doing that well either. It's a pretty classy looking device, but from what I've read it's full of bugs. Kind of like Linux.

[Kellemora]

Chicago is many years older than St. Louis too.
Plus they were hindered from Urban Sprawl because St. Louis County wouldn't let them annex into the county.

The scruffy little city I live in now keeps annexing areas of the county and even picking up municipality names and moving them to other areas. Driving us all nuts down here with all the community borders being moved around.

While driving OTR I've been to nearly every major city in the continental U.S. Primarily only because after running the same small route for a while, I wanted to venture out so began selecting loads headed to cities I had never been to yet. Made a few mistakes doing that, like the load I took to Long Island, NY. I quickly learned why it paid almost double and nobody wanted it. You ended up earning half because it takes so long to get through the city and across the bridge.

There was a huge Dell Store just outside of Des Peres, in an unincorporated zone and a good ways before you got as far as Manchester, MO on Manchester Road, aka Hwy 100, formerly Route-66.
Ironically, there was a decent size Dell Store here too, but they were geared mostly to commercial sales and leasing. I stopped in a couple of times, but they were slowly winding down, and if I wanted to buy a used machine I had to go this small hotel. Dell leased like 6 hotel rooms, 4 were used as storage, 1 for servicing, and 1 to store the refurbished units for sale. However, they could not sell from the hotel room, if you wanted to buy you met the salesman either in Shoney's parking lot, or where a car wash used to be located, on that empty lot.
They were in that motel for a good 6 years as their lease contracts to businesses ran out.
Then it was a hayday for anyone wanting a computer, they were dumping them over the railing into a dumpster below to empty the 6 hotel rooms. The hotel is now torn down too!
I should mention the hotel was closed as a hotel. A Bicycle Dealer leased 3 rooms on the back next to Dell after he closed his store. Same deal with him too, if you wanted to buy a bike, if he had it, you could meet him on the empty lot where the car wash was. Must have been some law that prevented them from having customers come to the hotel.

Speaking of small stores. Remember when the little grocery store used to sit in residential areas? There was one about 3 blocks from where Debi was raised. It became a church for a few years after the grocery store closed, and then became a house for probably 20 years. The guy who owned the house decided to do some remodeling and after gutting the inside found the huge plate glass store windows still in place and not a single crack in any of them. He went to the city to see if he could get a permit to convert it back into a grocery store again. They turned him down flat, said no commercial businesses in residential areas are allowed anymore. He talked to his lawyer about possibly using some historical way to get around it. No way. However, the city cannot block it from becoming a church, but then you can't live in it.
He decided just to go ahead and finish his original planned renovation, again without damaging the windows, and they would be covered back up as before once again.

[yogi]

So Dell was selling computers from a vacant parking lot? Mmhmm. Sounds like the Dell computer company I'm familiar with.

Motorola was big on Apple computers because for a while they made the processors for the SE II, I believe it was. They were special processors just for Apple which is something they used to their advantage in the graphics world. Well, Apple dumped Motorola after a while and switched over to Intel. Motorola switched to Windows PC, but didn't really have a plan in the beginning. Our department bought a bunch of Compaq desktops at at time when they were still Compaq and not HP. They were great workstations for their day running Windows NT. Then the IT department reorganized and got a new head honcho. That guy decided everybody should have the same type of computer where possible. He cut a deal with Dell to supply our needs. Dell came out and trained us individually on the use of Windows so that the transition would go smoothly. They also never repaired a broken computer. Dell replaced it instead. That was part of the deal. The IT people would only spend 15 minutes or so on any desktop support call. If they could not identify and fix the problem in that amount of time, they would re-image the hard drive with a stock OS. Well, you can imagine what kind of havoc that all caused, but it actually went pretty smoothly after the transition period. Most engineers could fix their own problems or opt out of the re-image. The Compaq computers we had were retired. I got one for "field testing" purposes and somehow never was asked to bring it back. That was the machine I put Windows 98 on for ten years.

Dell might be pretty good in the corporate world, but they stink to high heaven for personal computers. I know that a lot of people are happy with Dell, but those people never had to call on Dell for service and repair. If you didn't know which vacant lot to got to, you were SOL as far as getting anything fixed by Dell.

[Kellemora]

The old Dell I bought from them in the parking lot, with Windows XP is still here and still running and I use it every day to play FreeCell on, hi hi. I hate to have to open it to clean the insides from dust, it is such a pain, and it is heavy too. Only has two 512k memory sticks in it. Slow as molasses in the dead of winter if I try doing anything on it other than playing a game. It is next to be moved to my accounting when that really old computer finally dies. Actually, none of them are really old anymore since that lightning strike ruined all of them I had at the time. But I did replace three with used ones right after that. Plus then a few months later got the Silver Yogi from you.
The one and only problem I have with the Silver Yogi is it spews much more RF into the room than all of my other computers combined. Don't know why this is though. The frequency I know it is spewing out is in the 420 to 480 mHz range, with some interference above and below that area.

When my wife worked for Nova, which became Elavon, the credit card handling folks.
Whenever something went wrong with an employees computer, they gave them a new or rebuilt one while they fixed theirs.
One thing was though, they completely reinstalled everything that was on your computer, although the icons might end up sorted differently. I'm not sure, but I think everything is done on-line anyhow. So if she typed a memo to another person on her computer, it was still saved on their mainframe. How exactly I don't know, because if she had a document she was working on open on her desktop, when she got a new computer, her document was still there, just as she left it, only closed instead of open and she had to reopen it. Because of this, I think each employee's computer is a separate file on the mainframe. But these are real computers, not just workstations, but perhaps act like workstations since everything is on the mainframe.

My book promoter uses a Dell computer. She had a problem and said they fixed it over the phone with a download. Then two days later she was suddenly gone, no e-mails, no responses to e-mails and none of the sites she promotes on has anything new from her. I've told her for years to buy a used computer to have a backup, but she never did. She's also very lax about backing up her work and has ended up losing it all at least three times over the past decade.