IP: State of health of the Farber computers

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Now that my temper is toning down from failures of the past two days all 
due to  software, I am up again on a desktop and most important on a T21 
laptop (heavy but it works not like my X21)( by the way anyone happen to 
know if the T21 HD fits the X21).

So what happened.  First the MAC

I had gotten a new Titanium PB and having read the Apple literature, I 
thought that OS X was a production system. I upgraded all Apple fixes and 
it ran. Problems were mostly with poor mail systems compared to the MS PC 
environment -- for example Eudora is a much less worthwhile system on the 
MAC at least under OS X (and the others were a mess to  port over my mail 
files to. It was nice having a Unix underneath till a system fault ended up 
destroying the boot and keep me from booting anything. All my system disks 
are at work and I am working at home till  Wed.

All in all OS X is just not ready for prime time at all.

Then there is the PC failure. That seems to be a joint blame. I was 
reinstalling PGP Desktop 7.x under Windows 2000. I rebooted and when I did 
W2000 got a failure trying to load a driver for PGPDIsk. So being a 
somewhat experienced person, I said -- simple! I will bring it up under 
safe mode and fix it. Sorry even in safe mode w2000 tries to load that damn 
driver and fails. So at present I need to find the floppy drive for the 
system (God knows where it is) and make a set of restore floppies and see 
if that works. I wish I could make a bootable restore CDROM!!  (Why can't I?).

MS has offered to help (many thanks!!) so I may bail out of that.

All in all, a bad weekend. One wonders how someone with less background 
ever survives in the computer field.

Dave

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