GrumpyGranpa

The Woes of MSN

2008-03-06T21:20:00.001-07:00

Today's poser involved MSN Explorer. Not many of our clients use MSN but it was bundled with Qwest DSL for awhile so there are some users out there. In this case MSN Explorer loaded but displayed only a white screen with no headers or menus.

I did the usual cleanup routine, downloaded Windows Updates and even ran chkdsk and defrag. NAV had expired but this didn't seem to be a virus. Next I checked the installed software. Viola! There was Incredimail.

We don't like Incredimail. For one thing, it is impossible to move a users saved messages to a new computer. While it is not usually considered spyware, it does clutter up the computer. In this case, I began the uninstall process and it immediately went to a website. Hmmm, MSN Explorer loaded normally!

Next I finished uninstalling stuff, including the expired NAV, and rebooted. MSN was back to a blank page!

At this point, I am not clear as to what I did next but somehow I got MSN to load a web page. All of the headings were back. I then went to the home page selection menu and selected MSN. I closed everything and reloaded. Wow! MSN came back up normally. Problem fixed. Wish I knew exactly what I did!

A New Beginning

2008-03-05T20:32:00.001-07:00

After ignoring this blog for over two years, I have decided to begin posting again but with a different purpose. As I go about doing various service calls, I often figure out software conflicts or come up with quick fixes that I then promptly forget. So while returning from Sedona today, I decided that I should start writing things down so I would have something to refer to in the future. Since LJ is primarily a family history blog, this is the most appropriate place to store my reminders. So here is the first one.

Today's major problem was a computer that took forever to open .html files and was generally slow. Since we had just had the machine in the shop and found no malware on it, I assumed that something had become corrupted. I reviewed the installed software by going to add/remove programs. Office 2003 was there but was not on the Start Menu. I checked the Start Menu for all of the other users to see if it got moved and it was nowhere to be found. So first step was to repair Office. This can be done from Add/Remove Programs, without the original CD.

Next I looked for running programs. Nero, if fully installed, puts on a desktop search utility which continuously indexes the hard disk. This had to go. I uninstalled the whole package.

I also found some printer utilities running and turned these off using msconfig.

When I finally rebooted and logged in as the actual user, everything worked just fine.

One of the other things I noted was that the user had installed several software packages of his own and not stuck to the approved stuff provided by the District. In a business, this would not be tolerated but schools are very lax about such things. In this case, the software was not causing any problems but that is often not the case.

So in summary, always check the status of MS Office, if installed. Nero can cause a system to be sluggish due to indexing. Same for Google or MS Desktop Search. Watch for these.

DOS Apps

2005-04-02T22:53:00.000-07:00

Before moving on t0 Windows, it may be interesting to review the various DOS apps which were big in the late 80’s early 90’s.

Most users today consider MS Office with Word and Excel to be the standard for business productivity software. Well, it wasn’t always so. In the DOS era, WordPerfect, not Corel owned at the time, and Lotus, also independent, were the standard. There was no real email so Outlook didn’t exist. For a personal organizer, I used Sidekick. (If you know what Sidekick is, you are really old!) Sometime in that period I also implemented a product called Carousel. This actually allowed multiple apps to be loaded under DOS and then be cycled onto the screen, much as a slide projector brings up slides one at a time, thus the name. It really worked quite well but even my associates found it intimidating to install and confusing to use. I don’t remember a single customer that used it.

As for word processing and spreadsheets, the knowledgeable user chose WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. The MS equivalents were far down the list.

WordPerfect 5.1 was probably the best word processing software ever developed for the DOS OS. I didn’t use it, having no real need for powerful word processing software, but the college students we hired as interns considered it essential. One of its real strengths was printer support. It made printer drivers available for virtually every printer manufactured in the world. In DOS, each app had to have its own printer driver. The OS did not do the job. A universal printer driver for the OS was, perhaps, Windows greatest achievement in the early years.

Lotus was the preferred spreadsheet, though like WordPerfect, I didn’t use it. Many of our customers did. It was so accepted, the early versions of Excel could be set to use Lotus commands. Certainly Triumph of the Nerds credits the availability of Lotus with helping the IBM-PC to become the standard for corporate use. IBM must have been impressed since they bought the company in 1995. Though Lotus Notes may have been more important by then.

The MS application available for DOS that I did use was Works. I still use it. It gives you a simple word processor, now Word, and a simple spreadsheet. Works is considered a home product but that is mainly because it competes with the more expensive MS Office in the business environment. For most small businesses, Works is quite sufficient.

As the DOS era drew to a close, both Lotus and WordPerfect were on top of the mountain. Where they failed, was in adopting to the Windows environment. This was not due to some nefarious scheme on the part of MS. I was an authorized dealer for both products when Windows 3.0 was released. About six months later, I got letters from both informing me that they saw no advantage to moving their products to Windows and were going to continue as DOS applications! Of course a few months later, both were footnotes and MS Office became the defacto standard for productivity software.

DOS

2005-03-29T22:50:00.000-07:00

DOS

In the beginning, there was DOS….actually, there was Apple but I have no real experience with Apple so we are going to talk about DOS.

A short note here: If you are interested in personal computing history, get a copy of Triumph of the Nerds on DVD. This is a 3 hour special made in 1995 covering the evolution of personal computing from the early 70’s through the release of Win 95. I make all of my new employees view it. For an industry full of really smart people, some of them made really dumb decisions.

In late 1985, MS DOS was becoming dominant but CP/M Kaypros were still popular. In our local area, this may have been due to the only computer store in the area selling Kaypro, though when I bought the store in 1985, the inventory included an IBM PC and the departing owner was working with an incredibly powerful IBM-AT.

Since I had just replaced a CP/M Kaypro with a Kaypro 16 DOS computer, I was in favor of DOS. Copy is far easier to learn than PIP. I think I sold off the remaining CP/M products and began stocking DOS systems. As I said earlier, we dabbled in Atari but only sold one. That became a support nightmare.

For younger users who have never used DOS, the idea of doing things with a command line is foreign, and intimidating. Might have to remember more than your name! The command line, however, was good enough for the times and with a little effort, easy to use. Of course UNIX users are experts with the command line and Linux is most flexible with a command line environment. It is also worth noting that with the release of XP Pro, Microsoft has brought certain command line utilities back to the desktop. In the Server environment, they never left. Just hid behind the curtains, so to speak.

For the average user, about the only command required was the ability to open the wanted application. Early on, a number of menu programs were developed so that an integrator like me could call the menu in the autoexec file and all of the user’s programs would be available by just highlighting a menu item or typing a number. I believe the concept became part of DOS, the DOS Shell, with the advent of version 4, but it may have been earlier. Even certain utilities, like format and copy, could be automated with a good menu.

Though DOS has been much maligned due to the limits of the command line interface, there were some very positive aspects. First, considering the hardware of the day, the IBM-AT ran at 8 MHz, DOS was fast. Programs loaded and closed rapidly. Also, since virtually everything was text, specialized graphics drivers were unnecessary. Hercules did develop a monochrome graphics adapter in the early 80’s to allow graphs and charts to display but virtually everything was monochrome. You had your choice of green or amber for the monitor…mostly green.

Color did come to DOS in the form of CGA and then EGA. However, neither standard gave really clear text. CGA was really fuzzy, with only 4 colors. As late as 1989, one of my acquaintances in the business still recommended monochrome to all his customers. Color was expensive and blurry. The database programs he was developing for sale also didn’t benefit from color so that may have been a consideration! Anyway, color was becoming popular, even if pricy, and with the advent of EGA, quite useable. Then IBM released the PS/2 and VGA.

With the release of the PS/2 and VGA in 1987, IBM sought to set a new standard for computers. The PS/2 went nowhere. VGA is still the basic standard we use today. Color computing began to replace monochrome in the general market place. Zenith released the first true flat screen CRT, the FTM 1490, and color took off.

Of course once color became standard, DOS was doomed.

Times Have Changed

2005-03-27T20:47:00.000-07:00

I was reminded of this incident when I delivered a computer to a local doctor over the weekend. We were discussing the tremendous growth that has occurred in the Verde Valley and how the medical community has expanded over the last several years.

In 1986, I was out hiking with my boys along Dry Creek, just west of Sedona. We had parked at the bridge over Hwy 89A and were walking along the creek bed. While resetting the safety on the .22 auto that we were using to break up a group of very dangerous pebbles, the pistol fired. Since I was being very careless and not paying attention to the direction of the muzzle, the Fates taught me, and my boys, a lesson. The little bullet went into my left calf. It entered at a downward angle, splintered the little bone in the rear and then bounced out, lodging just under the skin about 4 inches above my ankle.

After the appropriate amount of cursing, the boys walked and I limped out to the truck. There we proceeded to drive to Cottonwood and the Marcus J. Lawrence Hospital (now Verde Valley Medical Center) Emergency Room.

Since we were driving a 1979 Scout with a clutch that took about 5000 pounds of force to depress, this was a rather trying trip. We arrived at the ER at about 3:00 on a Saturday afternoon. I parked the car and hobbled in.

Now this is where things have changed.

As I entered the waiting room, I found that there was nobody waiting and no staff in sight. I had to walk up to the reception window and ring a bell, like checking into a cheap motel. A nurse, I think, came around the corner and asked, “Can I help you?”

If any of you have had the occasion to go to an emergency room on a Saturday afternoon, you will know that, even in a small town, you will usually encounter a number of patients and a busy staff. Certainly, in 2005, the Cottonwood ER is almost never empty and there is a professional staff of physicians and nurses available. In 1986 there was one nurse and one doctor. I received prompt treatment, gales of laughter from my wife, on the phone and pain killers for after I got home.

I like to tell this story to recent arrivals in the area to illustrate just how far this little ranching community has come. From selling CP/M “portable” computers, we have evolved to installing complete networks, building high performance workstations and mission critical servers. Last year, we even setup a VPN from a local company to a field office in China! Our little community is engaged in international trade.

A Perplexing Problem

2005-03-26T21:43:00.000-07:00

I have been working on a VPN project for a health care customer for nearly two weeks. The local company is switching software and requires a VPN connection with the new company. We have traditionally used Sonicwall for our VPN/firewall units. After installing and configuring the Sonicwall, the VPN come up immediately but would not inniate from the other end. Before I could address this issue, the DSL circuit was moved and remained unstable for a number days.

The configuration involves a Qwest DSL circuit with an Actiontec modem/router. The Sonicwall sits behind the router, set to transparent mode. The Actiontec provides NAT services and passes the IPSEC information to the Sonicwall. The Sonicwall has a setting called NAT Traversal which allows it to route the VPN tunnel through another NAT device. Thus, a VPN between two Sonicwalls, or similar devices, is quite simple over the standard DSL circuit.

After several sessions and discussions with Sonicwall tech support, the situation did not change. The device on the other end was a Nortel Contivity 5000. No one at Sonicwall had any prior experience connecting to this device. Finally, the network tech at the other end realized that the Sonicwall on this end was behind a NAT device. He stated that to the best of his knowledge, the Nortel would not bring up a VPN through a NAT connection. The Sonicwall would have to have a true external IP.

The standard Qwest DSL connection in this area uses an Actiontec modem connecting with PPOa. This allows the Actiontec to forward a user name and password for authentication. The Actiontec has a public IP on the DSL side and a locally assigned private IP on the network side. The Sonicwall, in transparent mode, has another locally assigned IP on its WAN port.

To work correctly in the situation I was in, the Actiontec must be set in bridge mode so the public IP is assigned to the Sonicwall's WAN port. This prevents the Actiontec from passing a username/password to the ISP. The Sonicwall does not do PPOa, only PPOe. Consequently, the ISP has to configure the connection to authenticate in some other manner.

In this case, the ISP, Cybertrails, offered authentication with a dedicated IP. The connection was configured, I reset the Actiontec and Sonicwall, and up came the VPN.

A Brief Summary

2005-03-25T23:36:00.000-07:00

I bought my first computer, a Kaypro II, in 1983. What a machine! Dual floppy drives that used single sided 5.25 floppies holding an astounding 180KB of data. The modem I added ran at 300 baud. I could actually connect to Compuserve. I could also use a spreadsheet, PerfectCalc, I think, and "crunch numbers". The wordprocessor was PerfectWriter, though I also had a weird program called Wordstar as well, that I never used.

This "system" served me well from 1983 until I retired from the Air Force in 1985. When I settled in the Verde Valley, in Arizona, it began having "issues" and I upgraded to a Kaypro 16 computer which used MS DOS instead of CP/M. The store that sold this system was for sale, so being of less than sound mind, I bought it.

Thus I became a Computer Professional!

The computer company/store that I bought was Computer and Terminal Services, located in Sedona, Arizona. We were Kaypro dealers, selling both CP/M and DOS computers. For a short time, we even dabbled with Atari, which actually made a desktop unit in those days--1985-1989. At some point, I don't remember when, we added Zenith to our product line. As with the rest of the world, we had migrated to DOS and left CP/M behind.

In 1987, we opened a store in Prescott, AZ. That company was Prescott Computer Systems, Inc., the company that we still maintain.

In 1989, Computer and Terminal Services--CTS--closed. Prescott Computer Systems--PCS--continued in operation. PCS was eventually moved to Cottonwood, AZ, took a dba name of Professional Computer Services--still PCS--and continues to serve the Verde Valley in Northern Arizona. The rest of this diary will relate the evolution of the computer industry as it has related to PCS.