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Windows 95 on Pentium 350

Microsoft doesn’t want you to install Windows 95 on a Pentium 350. Why not? Well, obviously, if you can use Windows 95 on your new Pentium 350, you don’t need a copy of Windows 98. Seeing as most people can’t buy a new computer without paying the Microsoft Tax, it’s probably a moot point. Or is it? Windows 98 doesn’t run particularly well. And some applications won’t run at all under Windows 98. Anyway, here’s how you do it.

1. Delete Windows 98 if it’s already on there. Here’s how: first, create a Win98 boot disk with CD ROM drivers (Go to Control Panel/Install Software). Boot to it. Fdisk the drive, delete the partition, create a new partition, and format it.

2. Boot up to the Win 98 boot disk with CD ROM support. Put the Windows 95 CD in the drive and run SETUP.

3. Windows will stupidly lose the CD ROM drive when it gets to the “install printers” stage, which it won’t let you skip. Skip it anyway by clicking on cancel. Reboot. Your CD will be back.

4. Once Win 95 is installed, you will find that ethernet cards, modems, and other devices will not be recognized. That’s because Win 95 doesn’t talk to the PCI IRQ manager the way it should. Here’s how you fix it.

5. Get the file USBSUP.EXE from the internet. If I get time, I’ll post it here. You also need the PCI INF update file. I got my copy from my computer vendor. Run the USBSUP.EXE program first (just run it: don’t try to install it as a device driver). Then run the PCI INF program (called “setup”). You must do it in this order.

6. Install the devices and drivers as usual. You should now have a functioning Windows 95 installation on a Pentium 350.

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Freddy Shero’s Legacy

The last time the Toronto Maple Leafs faced the Philadelphia Flyers in the playoffs, Roger Neilson was behind the Leafs’ bench and Fred Shero was behind the Flyers’ bench, and the series consisted mostly of a sequence of mad brawls followed by flurries of penalties and goals. The Flyers were known as the “Broad Street Bullies” for their style of hacking, hitting, and chopping their way to victory.

The Flyers won that series. This year, the Leafs won. The Leafs won a playoff series without ever scoring more than 2 goals in a single game. Ironically, this is the long-term result of the style of play popularized by those Shero Flyers years ago.

What Shero realized before anyone else did, was that the officiating in the NHL had reached a kind of regulatory quandary by the early 1970’s. The NHL was busy trying to sell hockey to expansion U.S. markets and it was widely believed that U.S. audiences were more attracted by fisticuffs and brawling than the slick play-making of teams like the Canadiens and Maple Leafs or Red Wings. So fighting was “good” for hockey. But even hockey has rules. If players like Ken Linseman of the Flyers got penalties for all the rule infractions he committed, the Flyers would lose every game.

Fights or no fights, sports fans hate losers, so the NHL had to find some way to allow the violence to continue, while giving dirty teams a chance to win.

Now, nobody that I know of ever actually came right out and said, “hey, let’s just call the same number of penalties on both teams no matter who actually breaks the rules”. They didn’t have to. You heard it from coaches and managers and sports analysts and Don Cherry. They used euphemistic phrases like, “let the boys play”, “the referee shouldn’t become part of the game”, “they play an aggressive style” (not a dirty style– “aggressive”). I’m sure that within the private offices of the NHL, more explicit instructions were issued.

The strategy was very simple. There are a thousand interactions in any particular game of hockey that could, with a stretch of the imagination, be called a penalty. So the referees would occasionally call a penalty when a thug like Dave “Hammer” Schultz tried to take somebody’s head off, but the next penalty would inevitably be called on the other team. Schultz could hook, hack, chop, grab, elbow, and punch a dozen players and get one penalty. A few minutes later, Borje Salming would lean on a player in front of the net and get called for interference. Even-steven. If a referee ever dared to call three penalties in a row on the same team, coaches, players, and managers screamed bloody murder– the referee had broken one of the unspoken rules of the game: he had actually penalized the team that committed the most infractions!

The end result was that teams like Philadelphia, and, later, New Jersey, could commit hundreds of fouls and still win, because no matter how many fouls Philadelphia committed, the other team would get just about as many penalties. Philadelphia rode this strategy to a Stanley Cup. New Jersey learned to simply mug players in the neutral zone less conspicuously than the Flyers, but it worked just as well and they won several Stanley Cups.

Well, even the NHL has some shame. After a few years of pronounced media coverage of the “Broad Street Bullies”, the NHL decided to make a relatively modest attempt to eliminate fighting. They started handing out serious penalties for actual fisticuffs, especially in the playoffs when fighting seems more… “unseemly”. But it did not eliminate the officiating style that permitted teams to get away with thousands of little infractions. Teams like New Jersey refined the schtick, with holding, interference, and obstruction, refined to a high art. Because it didn’t look as dirty as a Ken Linseman cross-check or a Bobby Clarke slash, the officials tended to let it go. New Jersey was able to win a Stanley Cup with its “neutral zone trap”. The drawbacks, however, were obvious: scoring decreased and many hockey games became nothing more than a long boring sequence of impeded skaters and incomplete passes.

The lack of scoring alarmed the NHL. Next to fighting, fans want to see scoring. They tried various strategies, adding space behind the net, trying to call more “obstruction” penalties, and so on. But ingrained habits are hard to change. The referees keep drifting back to their old style of indifference and equity, just like the umpires in baseball keep calling the same ridiculously low strike zone.

If you look at the over-time stats for the past year in the NHL, the numbers are truly embarrassing. Only a small percentage of the games ended with a victor. And everybody knows that a tie “is like kissing your sister”.

And thus we have the 1999 Toronto-Philadelphia series. During the regular season, Toronto scored more goals than any other team in the NHL. Philadelphia was in the middle of the pack, but it was clear that their strategy depended upon the ability of their huge defensemen to impede, obstruct, and interfere with their faster opponents.

It is a bit of the miracle that the Leafs won, and the way they did it is telling: they simply did to the Flyers what the Flyers intended to do to them. The Leafs only scored about six goals altogether. Well, all right: they scored about 10. They held the lead, all told, for about ten minutes over six games. Unfortunately for Philadelphia, those few minutes were always at the end of the game.

The winning difference was Curtis Joseph, who seems to be able to make the big stop when it is most needed, and the Leaf forwards, almost all of whom can shoot, who were able to get a goal when it really counted: in the last minute, or in overtime.

The biggest irony was the series deciding goal– on a power play with three minutes left. Toronto had been called for five penalties in a row in the second and third periods, and Philadelphia had been unable to cash in. If anyone had a right to complain, it was Toronto: the referees (two of them now) broke the unspoken agreement– they called real infractions, even if all of them went against the same team. When they finally did call a Flyers’ penalty, it looked like something they might have let go in the Dave Schultz era.

The Flyers complained bitterly about it afterwards. They ought to be ashamed of themselves. They lost the series because of their pathetic inability to score during five consecutive man advantages, including 3 in a span of 7 minutes, not because of the one Leaf goal at the end.

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Intel’s Sweatshops

Some former employees of Intel have set up a website which complains bitterly about Intel’s employment practices. According to Ken Hamidi, Intel hires young university graduates, drives them to work like slaves–sacrificing family, personal life, and sometimes health–and then casts them off like so much lint, so they can cycle the next generation of programmers and engineers through the system. How do they get rid of these employees? By giving them negative job evaluations, demanding more and more from them, and offering incentives to “quit”, to minimize Intel’s exposure to wrongful dismissal suits.

Intel denies Hamidi’s allegations. Do you believe Ken Hamidi? Maybe Hamidi is just an embittered former employee who couldn’t hack life in the fast lane. On the other hand, I have no problem believing that a large corporation like Intel can be dominated by materialistic sadists with the personal ethics of alley cats. Who is right?

Consider this. Intel’s employees all have e-mail accounts. Intel’s email system is directly linked to the Internet. The Internet is public and free— except in China and Afghanistan and a few other enlightened polities. Well, Ken Hamidi decided to send information about his website to all Intel employees. When Intel found out about this, they put a filter on their e-mail system to keep Hamidi’s messages out. Then they went to Hamidi’s internet service providers and allegedly bullied them into terminating Hamidi’s account. To top it off, they persuaded these ISP’s to delete any replies from Intel employees to Hamidi’s messages.

A little heavy-handed? A little like the Taliban? Don’t forget, this is the corporation that tried to put a hidden serial number into everybody’s computer so that user activities on the Internet could be traced.

I suspect that Hamidi is largely correct in his assessment of Intel’s corporate culture. For one thing, we have statements from Intel executives themselves that indicate that they believe that employees are only “useful” for a limited amount of time. There is a stage in a person’s life, between, say, 24 and 35, when one wants to get ahead in the work world, and is willing to work outrageous hours and put with horrendous abuse to get there. This is, coincidentally, also the age at which people are still pretty naïve about how employers really feel about them.

I hope those employees at Intel join a union.

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Les Miserables Los Angeles

Some people don’t believe me when I tell them that a black man in Los Angeles has just been sentenced to 25 years in jail for stealing a loaf of bread.

I don’t have a lot to say about something like this. Some things, like gun control, are quite debatable, though I still think the debate is one-sided, in terms of logic. But putting a homeless man in jail for 25 years for stealing a loaf of bread is beyond all logic and sanity and reasonableness. It will cost the State of California at least $1 million to keep this “threat” to society locked up. From a strictly economic point of view, how many of California’s politicians would have been willing to chip in $2.50 to buy the man a loaf of bread and save the taxpayer a million bucks?

How many of the legislators who voted for the “three strikes and you’re out” law go around pontificating about the decline of moral values in our society? What is a “moral” value? Locking up an indigent man because our society cares so damn little about the poor that we tolerate extreme poverty in our midst while squandering billions of dollars on new military toys for men who award themselves medals every time they fart in the direction of the enemy?

Only two states (California is one, I don’t know the other) apply the “three strikes and you’re out” law to non-violent crimes. Tom Hayden is trying to change the law in California but they say he doesn’t have the 2/3 votes he needs to do it.

If I were a cop in California and I was called in to arrest somebody for stealing a loaf of bread, I’d pay the shopkeeper the two bucks myself and turn the guy loose.

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The Last Refuge of These Scoundrels

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee has just approved a proposal to pass a constitutional amendment which would make it a crime to “desecrate” an American flag. The vote was 11-7. Who are the patriots? Who are the scoundrels?

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What is a flag? It’s a piece of cloth. That’s all. There is nothing sacred about a piece of cloth. Who is harmed by the “desecration” of a flag? No one. What utility does it serve to attribute such magical power to a symbol that the law must protect it from those who do not subscribe to it’s mystical power? None whatsoever. Unless you believe that it is a good thing when men are stirred by symbols to incomprehensible feelings of loyalty and devotion and are, then therefore susceptible to manipulation by evil men and scoundrels.

So the purpose of this law would be to protect the dainty affectations of scoundrels, who, as we all know, take refuge in patriotism. In other words, the purpose of this law is essentially religious. The flag is the bible, the cross, the alter of nationalism.

Nationalism is a religion. It’s values cannot coexist harmoniously with the values of any other mainstream religion. Nationalism demands of us greed, selfishness, and brutality. It demands that we place our interests first. It demands that we worship our ancestors who fought in wars. It demands uniforms and parades and brass bands and cemeteries and monuments and medals and solemn oaths and hymns and eyes teared over with myopic miasmic melodrama– crocodile tears– and myth and lies and “saints”. We always say that these “saints” sacrificed their lives for our noble cause. We act as if our armies are not equipped to kill and destroy, but to preserve life, even at the expense of their own lives.

We ask, are you willing to die for your country– as if this is a good idea– instead of the honest question: are you willing to kill for your country?

I know why militarists and nationalists love the flag. Because they are idiots. Anyone who has examined the history of western civilizations over the past 500 years cannot have missed the fact that nationalism is responsible for more carnage and evil than any other single factor. From Napoleon to Hitler to Stalin, humans have done more evil to each other in the name of nation and state than they ever did in the name of any other religion.

“Without a strong value system, our children cannot distinguish good from bad or right from wrong,” says Orrin Hatch, one of the Lewinsky conspirators, who may have a point here, but one that has nothing to do with flags.

The simple question is, what values is Orrin talking about?

Most of us agree that selflessness and the love of justice are good values. So is compassion, mercy, and toleration. Hatch’s logic is hypocritical: the exact purpose of a flag is to arouse patriotic fervor in the service of selfish nationalist impulses. A flag is used to stir patriotic feelings, and patriotic feelings are used to persuade men to join armies, where they are taught to act with aggression and strength, to obey orders without question, to kill for no reason known to themselves. In other words, to over-ride good values and replace them with bad values.

A constitutional amendment banning “desecration” of any national symbol is nothing less than an intrusion of the state into religion. If Orrin and the other Senators want to bow down and worship the flag, they are welcome to do so, in their own cathedrals, on their own time. Keep the government out of it.

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The Festive Charlton Heston

In a letter, the N.R.A. president, actor Charlton Heston, said the group was canceling a gun show along with all other “festive ceremonies normally associated with our annual gathering.” The group was nevertheless going to hold its annual members meeting at the city’s convention center. From the New York Times, April 21, 1999

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“Festive ceremonies normally associated with our annual gathering”?????

This is Moses speaking. Moses also asserted that the massacre at Littleton, Colorado shows that every school should have armed guards. Governor of Minnesota and Wrestler Jesse Ventura agreed: “Had there been someone who was armed, in this particular situation, in my opinion, it may have stabilized.” But what does “stabilized” mean to a man who used to run around in tight underpants and throw chairs at people in masks?

Well, why stop at permitting concealed handguns? I think they should be obligatory. Just imagine: you’re at school. A couple of kids come in wearing black trench-coats with furtive expressions on their faces. You gonna wait to see what happens? Hell, no. Case closed. Incident ended. No more anxiety for all those parents sending their kids off to school in the morning– they can trust that everyone is well protected!

Wouldn’t you feel better knowing that your teenage daughter was at school, surrounded by a bunch of illiterate metal morons carrying concealed handguns?

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Think of how convenient that concealed hand-gun might be as well, next time you meet up with those hooligans from that rival football team across town, or that dorky teacher that failed you in Consumer Ed!

Charlton Moses Heston, interrupting his prayer breakfast (I kid you not) also said this: “If there had been even one armed guard in the school, he could have saved a lot of lives and perhaps ended the whole thing instantly.”

Errr…. according to the New York Times, Neil Gardner, of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s department, was in the school at the time, and was quite armed. In fact, sounds like he took a few shots and then cleared out as quickly as possible.

And I’m ashamed about the prayer breakfast bit. Deeply ashamed. Deeply, deeply, deeply. Everyone reading this should know that many, many Christians abhor violence and guns, and don’t consider a gun show to be a “festive” occasion, regardless of whether or not it opens with a prayer breakfast.

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School Killers

I can’t think of any sensible thing to say when two students dressed in black trench coats bundle themselves up with explosive devices and guns and set out to achieve their 15 minutes of fame by killing as many of their classmates as they can. We think the world is a pressure-cooker out there in the Stock Exchange and the Bank Towers and the Emergency Wards– it’s a pressure-cooker out here too, in our vacuous suburbs, with our mall-rat status-rated designer running shoes and gilded suburban off-road super-trucks and Hollywood heroic bionic mega-metal men with laser guided killer stilettos whipping the forces of darkness without concept, idea, abstraction, or reflection, and our moral barometric Wall-Street pressure pages of translucent stock quotes: all on a race to achieve, obtain, impress and express, communicate and digitate in the soft blue glow of television on the sideboard at dinner with whatever molecules of your nuclear family are available tonight.

So a couple of boys in their color-drained coats mull over their failures and fantasies. Those girls with the curled blonde hair, up so early to remake their faces… those studs in the Tommy Hilfiger sweats reaping their squeals and nuzzling nipples with their slam-dunks and hail marys… those geeks in the turbo pascal class hacking their uncles pims and measuring their dicks for Harvardized condoms… those fay artistes craving exclusivity through obscurantism… those achievers with the part-time jobs and daddy’s RAV on the weekends and drinking parties and future flatulent frat freaks… those fundies with their pre-school bible studies and Samaritan smiles… the fat girls leaning with desperation… those skinny girls colluding behind their compressed lips… and you just can’t get the grease off your face or the smell off your fingers or lose that dull inviscerating impression that your life is going to end in one long interminable trailer park whimper. And so you trade it all in for your 15 minutes of fame, and you’re going to be bigger than fucking Charles Whitman or Richard Speck and you’re going to know it, for who’d have thought a few hours— hours and hours — who’d have thought it’d take the police that long to find you in this gleaming chromium diaphragm of literate washfulness, here, here in the library, with the brains of your class-mates splattered around you, here among the books of which you never finished a one without thinking it was small or irrelevant, here below the sirens, and the helicopters, and the cameras, and CNN With A NEW SPECIAL LOGO AND MUSIC just for you, my sweet, now that your immortality has bled down the wires and who’d have thought it would take them four hours to find out your blood wasn’t even hot enough to face down your own killers?

And I’m curious as hell about those last moments– not even alone, like Whitman in his tower– Charles, of course, not Walt– not even alone, as if there was something you could say to each other, like Jesus, we really showed them, didn’t we– and you wouldn’t probably even be quite so obvious as to say you have their attention now, would you? What were your last words to each other? Where have they gone? Where are they now? Where are the blondes and the geeks and the jocks and the brains and those oh-so-ephemeral have everything to die for most-popular and likely to succeed barbies and kens, who formerly, obliviously, oh so vacantly, surrounded us—- yes, they noticed.

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“Our Whole School Year is Ruined”

“…our whole school year is ruined.” — student Casey Brackley

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I’m never sure what goes through the mind of Charlton Heston at a moment like this.

Charlton Heston is the president of the National Rifle Association. It is the stated aim of the NRA to prevent the slightest legal restriction from being imposed upon the ownership of almost any type of gun. I’m not exaggerating.

A naïve person might think that the NRA doesn’t know where to “draw the line”. The NRA doesn’t think automatic or semi-automatic assault rifles should be outlawed. It doesn’t think you should have to wait a day or two when you apply to get a handgun. It doesn’t think you should be held responsible if you leave a loaded gun sitting around somewhere and a child picks it up and accidentally kills another child. It is quite comfortable with the fact that you can get 30 years in prison for possession of five ounces of marijuana, but not even one day, if you happen to shoot someone who walks up your driveway one evening to ask directions, or if you happen to shoot your own daughter because she decided to hide in a closet and scare you when you came home late one evening. (Yes, both really happened.)

The NRA has a very strong presence in Colorado. Right at this very moment, the Colorado State Legislature is considering a law that would make it legal to carry a concealed handgun. Charlton Heston’s boys—I am not kidding – are already arguing that if only a teacher had had a concealed handgun, he could have put a stop the carnage immediately.

If a manufacturer made a product that was so defective that it caused injury or death, the lawyers would descend like flies and there would be billions of dollars in lawsuits. I’ve never understood why the parents of children who are killed by other children using guns that were stored carelessly or not at all don’t sue.

In the past several years, two children were killed in Pearl, Mississippi, five in Jonesboro, Arkansas, three in Moses Lake, Washington, two in Springfield, Oregon, and three in West Paducah, Kentucky. In almost all cases, they were killed by young males using weapons easily obtained from careless relatives or friends. I have not heard of a single lawsuit launched against the owners of the guns.

The law requires seatbelts in cars, pets on leashes, and litter in bags. For some bizarre reason, Americans have chosen to award special status to the gun. If you dropped it in a park, you could not be charged with littering. If you made the trigger so sensitive that a fart would set it off, you could not be subject to a safety inspection. If you sold it to a half-witted naked dwarf with a noose around his neck, you could not be held liable for anything.

I am also baffled by the police. Whenever a cop is killed in the line of duty, there is a massive funeral, with tributes to the courage, selflessness, determination, and virtue of the slain officers. But the 911 call from Columbine High School came at 11:30. Police arrived within minutes but did not enter the building until 12:30. They proceeded slowly, checking every knapsack and desk for bombs, and did not reach the library, where they found the bodies of the two killers, until 4:00 p.m. Clearly, some of the wounded teenagers died between 11:30 and 4:00 p.m. I don’t understand why they were left lying there, mortally wounded, while the police “secured” the perimeter.

Well, I do understand. The police were operating on the basis of conventional military strategy: you secure the area, quadrant by quadrant, before proceeding to the primary objective. That’s why they were in no hurry to stop the shooting. That’s why the students fleeing the building were practically arrested.

I don’t get it. Where was the courage and determination? There were hundreds of police surrounding the building, including agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Firearms, Tobacco, and Alcohol, yet two children with guns held a school of 1800 hostage. Were they thinking Waco?

When students were able to leave the building, the suddenly powerful and courageous police made them hold their hands up and chased them into a corner or lined them up against a wall so they could be frisked. Did they really think that the killers would try to escape with a gaggle of terrorized cheerleaders? It looked like Attica on television. It bothered me a lot. Some kids dress up in black and come into your school with guns and start shooting the place up. You think you’ve escaped, but then men dressed in black with guns make you put your hands on your heads and line up against a wall. Who decided that this procedure was suitable?

CNN, right after showing us the results of the carnage in Colorado, showed us some of the carnage in Kosovo. It left an indelible impression: man is a killer.

So, Charlton Heston, where are you now? How come you aren’t on CNN telling us that this is all the result of rock music or feminism or homosexual rights or declining morals or communist infiltration, and that guns have nothing to do with it?

Charlton would probably tell us that if only some of the victims had been armed…

And if you could ignore the past and the future and concentrate purely on the moment the two boys appeared in the cafeteria with their weapons and their empty grimaces, you might have a point. And then you would come to your senses and ask yourself if we are better off with everyone having a gun, or with no one having a gun.

How extreme is the NRA? They make it easy for us liberals. We don’t even have to argue that guns should be banned, to get the NRA upset. All we have to do is argue that guns should come with a child-proof lock, like aspirin containers, and that guns should be electronically disabled until the owner has entered his very own personal identification number. The NRA become apoplectic at the very suggestion!

Charlton Heston once played Moses, in the movie “The Ten Commandments”, one of the worst of the big-budget spectacles Hollywood liked to foist on us in the 1950’s and early 60’s. “The Ten Commandments” bore little resemblance to the real story in Genesis, just as the NRA’s vision of reality bears little resemblance to anything but a Hollywood spectacle.

Charlton Heston can shrug. It was just an unfortunate incident. I don’t think God shrugs.

 

“Wouldn’t it be great if everybody had a gun
Wouldn’t it be great if everybody had a gun
Nobody’d ever get shot
‘Cause everybody’d have a gun
Wouldn’t it be great if everybody had a gun”

– The Arrogant Worms

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Garbage Compaqter

My first experience with a Compaq computer must have been about ten years ago. A social service agency in Chatham had been persuaded, by MicroAge, to buy one Compaq’s “Deskpro” models. It had run pretty well for them for a couple of years, but when we needed to upgrade the memory for some new applications we wanted to run– surprise! You couldn’t just go to the computer store and buy a couple of off the shelf SIMMS. Oh no– you had to buy Compaq’s own proprietary memory modules. I’ll give you one guess as to which cost more. A lot more.

The Compaq representative tried to tell me that Compaq’s memory was more than twice as expensive because it was “better quality”. Leaving aside the question of whether or not any sane customer would be willing to pay $575 instead of $150 for memory that might be 1 nanosecond faster on a 386 computer, you have to ask yourself what Compaq really thinks of their customers.

That was the last time I recommended Compaq computers to anybody in a long time. I would guess that in the seven or eight years since I became aware of Compaq’s nasty tendency to booby-trap their hardware with proprietary devices (they even sometimes soldered memory onto the motherboard) my recommendations have been the deciding factor in about $200,000.00 of computer purchases. Maybe Compaq doesn’t care about the business they lost. They did pretty well anyway– until this year–, meaning that you can fool a lot of the people a lot of the time.

Don’t ask me why, but I recently recommended the Compaq notebook computer, an Armada 1700, to a few people. Lapse in judgment? I thought maybe Compaq had changed. Most of the computer press had given the Armada 1700 favourable reviews and I didn’t have time to review every detail, so I made a snap decision.

Surprise! Compaqs now come with built-in WINmodems. You know what a WINmodem is? Well, in the old days, a modem was a device that translated analog signals from a telephone line into digital information that was then forwarded to your CPU for processing. Well, the WINmodem offloads that translation function onto the CPU itself. This has a couple of wonderful effects. First of all, it adds work to your CPU, slowing down your computer. Secondly, it is proprietary to Windows– you can’t access this modem with Linux because Linux programmers aren’t stupid.

The real effect of WINmodems is to increase Microsoft’s death-grip on your desktop, and to add profits to the modem industry by making it cheaper for them to change models (they only have to rewrite the software: they don’t actually have to manufacturer new chips anymore).

Isn’t this a GREAT idea? No wonder Compaq embraced it!

There is nothing on the advertising or system information that comes with the Compaq notebook that tells you that you are getting a WINmodem. You have been suckered.

I called Compaq about a week after I received a Presario 1920 with this problem. I explained that I had been tricked: I had expected a real modem. I wanted to return my Presario for a similar model with a real modem. The technical support guy, who was polite at all times, said that Compaq did not make any notebook computers that did not have a WINmodem. Fine, I said, I’ll take my money back and go shopping for a brand (like Sony) that does have a real modem.

Unfortunately, Compaq said– in polite, but firm language: SUCKER! WE ALREADY HAVE YOUR MONEY! Even though the computer was less than 2 weeks old, there was no way that Compaq was going to take it back.

I said to the technical support guy something to this effect: A week ago you told me (figuratively) that this was such a wonderful, valuable, noble notebook computer that was worth every penny of what you were asking for it. In only one week, is it now so worthless that even Compaq doesn’t want it? There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

There are a couple of other reasons to dislike Compaq Notebooks:

Compaq has their own version of Windows and makes dire threats of evil consequences if you dare to install any other.

Compaq loads the notebook with tons of advertising and software for AOL, GENIE, MSN, and other on-line services. This is YOUR hard drive we’re talking about.

Compaq advertises a 6.4 GIG hard drive, but 1.5 GIG is taken up with something called “System Save”. Apparently, you can delete it if you want to, but, once again, you get dire warnings about potential problems.

Compaq’s installation CD over-writes everything on the hard drive. So, let’s say your Windows 98 gets buggered up somehow. Normally, you could try reinstalling it over your current system. If that fails, you can delete the Windows directory and try reinstalling again. Either way, you get to keep your precious data and configuration files. But Compaq’s install disk OVER-WRITES everything on your hard drive!

Here’s the biggest idiocy of all: due to overwhelming consumer demand, Compaq has decided to do away with the OFF switch. I kid you not. Compaq is so sure that Windows 98 is going to work just great that they have left it up to Bill Gates’ malevolent mishmash of mushy modules to shut your computer off.

How fool-proof is this? Within three hours, my Presario would no longer shut off. I called technical support. They said to hold the button down for four seconds. No dice. They said try again. Try again. Try again. Finally, he put me on hold and went off seeking advanced expertise. The advanced expert advised me to unplug the thing and pull out the battery. Brilliant! This approach has the advantage of possibly corrupting your systems files, requiring a re-install of Compaq’s proprietary Windows and the destruction of all of your data.

Finally, after about six or seven hours of use, my Compaq Presario 1920 began to lock up while running Word for Windows. Again, I am not kidding. A brand new 300 Mz. Pentium notebook computer with 64 MB of RAM locked up within six hours of use. And before it locked up, it began to thrash and hesitate: I would be typing away and the keyboard would be locked out while the CPU ran off to lala land. When it locked up, not even ctrl-alt-delete could revive it. Dead meat. Lost work. Thank you, Compaq. Thank you Microsoft.

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Labatts Blues

Monkey See…

The Labatt’s Brewing Company of Canada recently ran an ad in which the two male characters were cleaning out their garages. One of them took an old “Yield” sign to the road for disposal; the other took an old “Stop” sign. Apparently, the two men had “grown up” and put youthful indiscretions behind them, including, presumably, the theft of traffic signs.

Now that they were grown up, they could be suckered into drinking Carlsberg Beer by stupid tv ads.

Well, why not? If a tv ad can persuade you to commit a criminal act–as every two-bit pundit in the wake of the Colorado shootings believes– it can probably sell you some beer too.

Six viewers of the Labatt’s Carlsberg ad were so alarmed by this implied endorsement of theft that they contacted Advertising Standards Canada and complained. As a result, Labatt’s pulled the ad. Six viewers. Six.

In another Labatt’s ad last year, a woman changes her clothes in a taxi. When she arrives at her destination, the driver flips the meter over– indicating that he was not going to charge her for the trip. Someone complained about this ad too, and Labatt’s, ever the responsible corporate citizen, edited the ad. In the new version, the the driver does not cancel the fare.

Notice, they did not change the part about the woman undressing in the back seat of a taxi (red light, anyone?). They merely removed the implication that the taxi driver had rewarded her for the peep show.

Am I alone here in thinking this is a little bizarre? Right after this or any other ad is shown, regular tv programming resumes, with it’s usual cornucopia of murder, rape, arson, drug abuse, and assault. “Trainspotting” ran recently, showing all of the above. If Advertising Standards Canada is trying to say that people may emulate the behaviour of people they see on TV, what about regular tv programming?

And why has nobody complained about car ads that show drivers speeding down the highway, obviously in excess of the speed limit? Why are they allowed to brag about the power of their engines? What’s the point of that power? You’re trying persuade someone to buy your car because it goes fast? Why? Are there cars on the road that can’t reach the speed limit?

What about the ads that imply that teenagers can become popular by smearing chemicals on their faces? What about that guy who likes getting hit on the face with a puck? What about those Nike ads that endorse a ruthless attitude towards sports?

Pull them all, I say.