My computer history starts in 92. I think I purchased Goliath in 97. In the beginning was the 386 with a 5 1/4 disc and 40meg hard drive. Then came the 486 from the home schooling company. The 386 is no longer with me. I use the 486 that has a calendar running that comes from the Geoworks OS. Runs well, didn't even come with an operating system. Just DOS. Took the Geoworks from the 386 and loaded that. Also bought a laptop from Computer Renaissance, that purchase I question quite often. What was I thinking. In that time frame came Goliath, named by my mother. Goliath was purchased as a late model from OfficeMax, where I work. The system in its present form now has two Hard Drives, a 1gig, and a 10gig. A 56k 90v modem, a SoundBlaster card with 32X CD drive, scuzzy port and USB, and a new 166 processor. Runs on the Windows98 platform. Shoot it's a Microsoft system to be blunt.

  Goliath recarnate

The system in its original form consisted of Windows95, Cyrix 166, 8 speed CD-ROM, 32 megs of ram, 1gig hard drive, and the worst creation in the annuls of the computer kingdom, an IBM Mwave card. Yeah, feel sorry for me. It isn't bad enough with the Pentium wannabe chip but they had to put in THAT card. Sure it does it all, you have the sound, the joystick controller, a modem, the connection to the CD-ROM vxd errors that were daily, driver errors that were daily and no documentation or software drivers with the machine! I don't think I have to tell ya what happened when I loaded Windows98. Plus the fact that this thing was sold to me by a co-worker. But imagine my surprise when I found the BIOS password protected. UH, this was a floor model at some point. I found the Mwave driver stuff in a folder on the Hard Drive nice place to have it if you have to re-format the Drive. DOH! Yeah, hand me the scalpel we're going to remove this cancer. So I purchased a Creative SoundBlaster that came with the 32x I also picked up a 56k, modem. Oh yeah, if you want to save equipment during a storm, buy a surge protector with modem protection too. That modem got replaced yet again. Godsend though, I could never get above 33k with that modem. The new one hovers around 48 - 53.

Then the hard drive BIOS bit. This is where I came to the conclusion that this thing was a floor model. How do you fix a system that has BIOS protection? Remove the battery for a day. I had to do all this because I bought a new HD. I wanted two drives now I have two drives. I had tried this before but with stuff that didn't have documentation. For a while I had the software on one drive and the documents made ported to the other. Neat, but slowed the system down. What I need to do is put Windows on the bigger drive as well. But this will be weekend chore, and genetics have left me follicle challenged already. Much of the software has been put on the bigger drive. Some of my Windows98 OS will port to it though. Like My Documents, My Photos, and other system folders.

Challenges along the way

There was a day when the old 8 speed drive wouldn't work. Man that thing shook. Anyway, the OS at the time Win95 wouldn't see it any longer. It was hooked up and the power supply hadn't disconnected. So, software I reckon. With Win95 I had a floppy that controlled the CD-ROM for restore purposes. It took trial after trial of different things to get it to work, I tried the on-line help (?) thing. All the multimedia options, the system folder. The works. Finally after 36 hours a stroke of brilliance (I'm a man, women are Geniuses) it dawned on me to just use the CD-ROM floppy and launch the CD-ROM and then stop restore at that point. It worked.

The Mwave card was always a challenge, finally got rid of that thing when I got the bigger Hard Drive. Reloading and restoring pretty much lost all the info needed to run the thing anymore. The chronology of all these happenings elude me. And to some degree, I think to myself, ok how did I do this? Cause I know eventually this will all have to be done again.

The processor, now this I have to mention. Seems I also have a new one of those, one good reason Goliath is plugging away so well, new heart. His old run lost the coolant. The heat sink fan went on the fritz. It ran for at least a year in that fatal state. I would get blue screen errors quite often, then one day.......

I received a toy in the mail. One of those immersion gimmicks. Seems you could have this thing and scan a code from a magazine or item and go strait to it's homepage. It also would pick up a sound you couldn't hear from your TV, and go to a site on the web. Neat huh, well it wasn't neat for an already hot and tired little processor. After loading and starting I got the last gasp blue screen from the processor. I undid that device and software but the damage already was done. Grabbed all the clock speed this dickens had left. I let it set for a day to see how much I could get out of it. A few minutes. Then one day I needed my bank statement from the web. I wouldn't be able to go far, fatal error blue screen. I needed this info so I took it out and stuck it in the freezer. Got the info I needed then flatline, nothing,  shut it down and proceeded to computer renaissance. That concludes this chapter. All's well that ends ok.

New Ordeal

One really should listen to those little voices in their head. All I did was move Goliath from one end of the desk to the other. Just so I could get the monitor to a better location so I could get typing better. After doing so the mouse would not work. It's a USB mouse and the port is new. Coincidentally in the move ( short, for Pete's sake ) that reboot screen came up where the drives are checked for errors. Well I exited it in half app. Now the mouse wouldn't work. Comes the little voice in the head. "Dave, now I know you think it's in the software but it's really the card". Seems reasonable enough but how could have it come loose, I chose not to listen. It persisted. In the meantime I tried to reload the mouse software and USB drivers, no go. I checked the drives for errors and rebooted several times. I even loaded software for a standard mouse, still no go. I was getting ready to re-load Window98 at that thought I gave in to the little voice. It was right. Lesson to be learned, listen to those little voices. Or to sound less like a nut, let your conscience be your guide.

I don't know when
revised: Saturday, October 01, 2005