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Your tax dollars at work...

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by njanear

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Purchased workstations for checking e-mail and mindless web surfing:
(12) 850 MHz PIII, 30GB HD, 128MB RAM, CD Burners, DVD CD ROMS
(7) NT SERVER 4.0's, 3x9 GB HD, Seagate Tape backup, PCMCIA slots, Adaptec SCSI, 52X CD ROMs, oh and woops we wanted Windows 98 can you install that for us instead.

What kind of training is it? AAAAAAAAArmy training SIR! (from the movie Stripe's circa 1982).

Regards,

Njanear

3 replies

by thmiuatga

Njanear;
One would sensibly ask for the justification
of such a purchase. Burners would be required for archival of sensitive data, DVD's? There should be no movie watching but as a former USAF SGT I know the unspoken "rules" on this affair. Is there any concern with this vast expenditure on security with the PIII's? maybe not. Celeron CPU's in my book would be better, and if the concern is speed then overclocking would be an option. Can't apply logical thought to this for any application oflogic to the Military no matter what branch is an absurdity at best.
I doubt that anything can be done about this. A majority of the hardware in this system is not needed for websurfing but it's easy to see someone got gadget-itus and came up with that monster mix.
With the defense budget cut so badly you'd think they would try to save a few bucks (oops! a logical thought). What! no win NT?
I shouldn't be surprised since hearing from a marine sergeant here on camp Lejeune that his section recieved the Microsoft Office 2000 software but no manuals. No common sense at the top and very little brains at the bottom.
(sigh!)

by njanear

Well I was able to blow away NT on (6) of the servers and install 98, and now the big guys are saying "shouldn't you have installed NT?", "...but you said to install 98", "I know thats what I said, but you should have known what I meant to say" kindof situation. One of the PC's has turned into a nightmare, it hangs at the splash screen, seems it's a known MSOFT bug (Q156329) with the SCSI card + FAT32. The word about the problem has spread to another base via e-mail and now I'm in trouble.
Cheers,

~n

by thmiuatga

Uh oh!
As to be expected it seems to me that you have a person or persons in charge of a project like this that don't have a clue of what's required and lack the common sense to ask. typical military standard no matter the branch. I must ask.. does the SCSI card have it's own BIOS/drivers as a RAID card would?
(I use one) It's rather tricky to find out why Windows freezes at the opening screen especially if you can't boot in safe mode
and attempt to access the system registry to fix the problem. try checking the BIOS settings on the computer. Usually if you leave the motherboard BIOS settings for the SCSI card on auto you won't have to make any additional settings for the card's ports.make sure your PNP (plug and play) function is on,enable the PC/IDE busmaster and check to make sure that the card is in the right slot. usually it is required that the card be placed in PCI slot #1 or else there will be some problems. Windows is rather bitchy about
misconfigured hardware. while you're doing this check the remainder of the hardware settings and restart the system. If Windows still freezes and you can't reboot in safe mode you'll have to reinstall it. only a clean or install-in-place will repair/replace a damaged file in windows. Hopefully it won't come to that.

Good luck!

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