25 Mar
2005
25 Mar
'05
5:04 a.m.
In message <1111749690.3827.11.camel at weka.localdomain
Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Gotta love the BBC Micro.. a boot time of less than a second, 1MHz Bus port,
User port, onboard floppy controller, printer port, RS423, and a 6502 CPU.
The height of expandable hardware (ignoring, perhaps, the Apple II, but I've
never even seen one of those so I can't really comment). I would however like
to get an Apple II for my collection (or what I laughably call a
'collection'), assuming my Microvitec Cub653 can sync to its video output. If
it's standard PAL- or NTSC-resolution RGB, it should only be a case of
bodging up an adapter cable.
Later.
--
Phil. | Acorn Risc PC600 Mk3, SA202, 64MB, 6GB,
philpem at philpem.me.uk | ViewFinder, 10BaseT Ethernet, 2-slice,
http://www.philpem.me.uk/ | 48xCD, ARCINv6c IDE, SCSI
... File not found. Should I fake it? (Y/N)
Thin clients do a little better usually. Beats me what
the heck a modern
PC's BIOS does on startup by the way to make it take so long.
Mostly delays. The Award BIOS, for example, gives the hard drives 5 seconds
EACH to initialise, plus another 5 seconds for the controller to initialise.
If there's nothing on the IDE/ATA bus, it takes 25 seconds (or sometimes
longer) for the BIOS to finally decide that there's nothing there.
Then there's PnP initialisation and all the insane power checks. Some BIOSes
take an average of the supply voltages over the course of 3-7 seconds...
Umm... thin client...? ;)
Um... Server for thin client?
Don't things like Norton Ghost take care of
imaging a Windows OS between
machines? Or do they only work when the source and target drives are the
same size? And of course in the Unix world cloning a disk is easy as
all the tools are already there.
Ghost has this rotten tendency of falling over without erroring out,
scrambling the destination drive in the process. You don't find out that the
copy failed until you try and read from the destination drive.
I've had much better luck with "dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdb1 bs=32M". The
partitions don't even have to be the same size - run resize.reiserfs (IIRC)
and/or FAT Resizer after the clone and the inodes/FATs/superblocks are
updated to match the new partition geometry.
Memory tests on a "real" system need to be
thorough at boot time too for
obvious reasons
In my experience, the BIOS memory checks are worse than useless (false sense
of security). The only surefire RAM check is MemTest86 left for a few hours
in "burn in" mode.
Different for desktops though; 90% of the time I'm
using about 30%
of the RAM in this PC...
I guess you're using Linux or BSD then. [fx: checks headers]. Hmm. Ximian
Evolution. That'll be Linux with GNOME then.
I miss the days of the 8-bit "desktop"
machines (CMB/Sinclair etc.) -
turn it on and it's ready, no messing around...
[fx: Brrrr-Bip!]
Acorn MOS
Acorn 1770 DFS
BASIC