Astray no more
Now I have a whole bunch of things to talk about. For one thing I was about to work at an infamous large computer retailer, Fry's Electonics, as a summer job and to help fund the "Super VCR Mod". But instead a recruiter called me on Friday and asked me to take part in a big HDD replacement project that was going on. So of course I took it! So that starts tomorrow for me, an entire day after the final I happen to have for the class I've been taking for only 9 weeks. Lucky it worked out that way. Were it fiction it would be "too convenient".
Tomorrow I will work at an office in my city, Wed. and thursday a few hundred miles away in Livermore. Fortunately I have relatives in the area so I won't have to go all the way down there and back two days in a row. Not to mention work starts at 3pm so I would be driving home at midnight which wouldn't be that fun.
Also I did in fact take the first of the two A+ courses, and passed. Didn't pass by as much and I had hoped, but I passed. I didn't learn a lot of the newer stuff was the main problem. And who knows how many pins are on an AMD Athlon anyway? Now I just have to take the second test which was much easier for me in all the practice tests I took.
In addition to all that I bought an SDIO WiFi card for my PocketPC I've been neglecting for the past 18 months. A friend of mine just gave me his LinkSys router so I finally had a reason to get it out and use it. I daisy-chained it with my exisitng switch via "WAN port" (no cross-over cables to buy) and it actually works. And this helped a little with the A+ test actually, it had a couple WiFi questions.
I also finally came into the year 2000 when I recieved a cell phone as a good-you-have-a-job-present from a parent. Now I just have to figure out how to turn it on and make it work and I'll be all set. Now the only is can I make the cell phone into a modem for my PocketPC? He-heh.
Also I turned on the server the other day and it blue-screened. That doesn't do too much good so I reset and the stupid BIOS didn't even find the HDD. So all the documents and back-ups are now in that computer that is unbootable. On a seperate apparently function HDD though, so for now they are safe. I do have a feeling I should figure how to ghost that HDD so I don't lose all that stuff entirely.
I'm thinking up a new project now. One to extend that bootable Win98 project I've been working on. Actually it's a two-level project: The first part would be to use a free USB DOS driver to make my thumb drive work in DOS, which I have yet to test and see if it even works, and use this in place of the RAM drive used in the last solution. The second would be to do the same thing to boot a Windows installation with all the hardware deleted from the hardware manager so Windows detects all the hardware and when all that is done create an ISO of this cutomized Windows 98 installation which can then be burned to a CD. Thus, albeit with a few steps, a customized Win98 bootable CD can be created with for computer without the need for an existing Windows installation on a HDD. It's Live Linux CD or Bart's PE but it should work.
I've even thought of a reason to use this rather ambitious method over Bart's PE: completely configurable and changable. Simply install and configure all programs as normal which will be untouched no matter which computer you go to (with subsequent hardware detect). Then settings can be maintained, display properties adjusted and a normal interface preserved. And dial-up networking won't be any different.
That's all assuming the DOS USB driver works with a thumb drive. Which it might, I don't know. But I'm going to find out.
