Computer Stuff
My computer is one of my favorite hobbies. I built it myself, because
I like knowing I've got good parts in it and it's running excellent
software. I've never met a clone that I liked as much as I like the
one I have. Of course, it's starting to show its age, and I'll want
to replace it soon with a more capable model. Time to build again!
Hardware
In and attached to the box itself, I have...
-
An ASUS VX97 motherboard;
-
An Intel Pentium 200MMX processor
and chipset;
-
128 Megabytes of RAM, an ungodly huge amount when I bought it but a
more-or-less minimum requirement now;
-
An ELSA Winner 2000/Office video card with 8MB RAM;
-
A Quantum Bigfoot 8 gig hard disk;
-
A Seagate 2.1 gig hard disk;
-
A Panasonic 40x CD-ROM drive;
-
A Sound Blaster AWE32 sound
card and speakers;
-
A 3Com/US Robotics 56k modem (with
jumpers, the way God intended);
-
A
Logitech Mouseman three-button mouse;
-
A Gravis Gamepad (hey, my first
computer was an 8-bit Nintendo game system);
-
A Lexmark Optra Color
40 printer (postscript, extra memory... nice);
-
An IBM keyboard to replace the generic one I wore out;
-
A 31/2" floppy
diskette drive; and
-
A brand-new NEC MultiSync 95
19" color monitor.
I do a lot of my hardware shopping through the
PriceWatch website, by the way.
Operating System and Extensions
Running the whole show is the world's greatest PC operating system,
IBM OS/2 Warp.
I'm at the new version 4.52 with 4OS2
3.04E and 4DOS 6.02A as command processors. When I was running Warp 4
up to Fixpack 10, I also had Object
Desktop 2.0 on top, but I've avoided installing it so far and I'm
trying to find other ways of getting the functions I miss.
Some other links of interest:
Oh, by the way, I did try BeOS once.
Only once.
Software
People ask me if I have trouble finding software for my OS/2 system. The
answer is "definitely not." I have plenty to keep my busy and
functional and I can do anything I want to do. Some of the stuff I run:
-
Polarbar Mailer, an excellent
e-mail program written entirely in Java.
-
SLRN, a powerful
newsreader ported to OS/2 from *nix.
-
Privoxy used to be called
"Internet Junkbuster".
-
ZOC, EmTec's Superior
Modem/Telnet Program. They have it for Win32 as well. It's the best I've
ever tried.
-
WordPerfect 6.2 for DOS runs better under OS/2
than under plain DOS, and much better than under any flavor of
Windows.
-
Netscape/2 4.61 is available for free download, as is
Mozilla/2. I use Mozilla almost
exclusively anymore.
-
SmartCache is an amazing Java browser cache and ad-buster.
-
Info-Zip, the archiver
nobody should be without.
-
CheckURL, a Rexx script which verifies my Netscape/Mozilla bookmark file.
-
FTE Text Editor, what I'm using
to compose these page. It's the finest text editor I've ever used, even though
it's still in beta. I've had the pleasure of having some of my configuration
files added to CVS.
-
Wanda, a "yellow sticky note" application for PM.
-
Rexx, a powerful scripting
language built into OS/2.
-
Much more. Maybe I'll upload some of the Rexx utilities I've written for
my own use, just in case the Rexxperts need a laugh.
Shop at BMT Micro for software.
There is lots more to go, and I'll get to it soon enough.
