Ding Dong Dell

I always like it when you get a strange message on a computer that relates to nothing seen before.
My brother slapped what first appeared to be a warm steaming turd on my desk but after polishing it for a while it showed itself to be a Dell GX280.

It was his old work machine until they made him redundant so I can't blame him for picking such filth up.

Ironically I regard these machines as exceptionally well made, if you open the clam shell the cables are always a lesson in how to do it, the design with the drives contained in the lid and the main system in the base plate is also commendable.

They let themselves down by small things like the units running hot on some processors, difficult expansion and we have seen a lot of system boards fail (faulty capacitors) or simply blow themselves up.

Anyway to cut a very long story into a slightly less long story, he was having trouble - it turns out after a while in storage it beeps like mad when turned on and does very little (sounds like a typical Gx280).

This unit needs DDR2 533mhz Ram so it was no surprise to find his previous company had put Kingston Value RAM in, one stick was 533mhz, the other 400mhz!
A quick replacement with some 533mhz and were at least booting to BIOS screen now.

For added fun value the GX then decided to give a "OS Install mode enabled" and told us memory was limited to 256MB.
Amusingly boot into any OS and it shows 256MB despite 1GB being fitted.

Even more amusingly the boffins who wrote the BIOS decided you can't do anything to turn this option on or off, there's simply no setting in the later versions of BIOS.

After much cursing to the shoddy dick head who thought this up I resorted to the time honored "Clear CMOS", the good news is if your in the same position i.e just about to insert a large foot up the Arse of your Dell because of this error and finding the option does not exist in BIOS then clearing the CMOS cured it.
I presume it was an relic from a previous BIOS, the CMOS battery was a little low so somehow that option got toggled in the BIOS memory, you then get the message and can't do anything about it because the newer BIOS has no options !

If there's one thing you can't beat it's a PC sticking it's arse in your face and calling you a bitch.

I don't think the GX realizes how lucky it's been, it's a cold and lonely place on our local tip - next time you might not be so lucky !

Quick tip for anyone running Ubuntu (hopefully all the sensible people who are fed up to the back teeth with the shit delivered by WinDoze and it's happy band of 12 year olf Virus creators etc) - in preparation for 9.10 (Karmic Koala) Ubuntu rolled out some updates, Wicd (the replacement network manager) seemed to go a bit nutty with these updates and sometimes wouldn't connect to wireless or connect then drop off later.

Fortunately you can remove it and put the original network manager on with a quick trip to the terminal screen and a "sudo apt-get install network-manager" - this removes Wicd (which I still hope to put back on when Karmic is installed) and replaces with the network manager.
Now comes an interesting situation, I've seen it on one or two machines, the network manager says no networks are connected but your actually connected !

Hold your mouse over the network manager icon and it gives a clue, it says "not managed", the reason your showing no network connection is the network manager has been told not to manage the connection (possibly Wicd did this when it took over? but I've seen it on a fresh install).
The fix is nice and simple.

Locate the network manager configuration file i.e open a terminal.
cd /etc/NetworkManager
edit it ...
sudo gedit nm-system-settings.conf

you will see
[main]
plugins=ifupdown,keyfile

[ifupdown]
managed=false

Change false to "True" and save the file.
Either restart or better still kill the network manager processes.
sudo killall nm-system-settings

This will force network manager to restart and Robert is inded your Mothers Brother.

This is what I like about Ubuntu or any linux for that matter, kill a major service and it just knows to restart it and carry on.
Windows on the other hand, simply boot it up and your in deep shit.

My work colleague made the fatal mistake of updating his video driver in Vista, his 4 day old laptop (quad core no less) was left with an operating system that may as well have been a block of wood.
You would ask why can't a stable operating system be made before the decision is made to abandon it and go onto the next one.
Already Windows 7 is being installed the world over, XP is effectively not supported and Vista is only worth installing on your ex-wife/girlfriends machine or your worst enemies PC.
I was chatting to a customer Thursday, he was running SCO unix, his clients first reboot on a server i.e the FIRST time it needed a power down or reboot was THREE YEARS from the day it was installed.

I've said it before, I'll say it again, why tolerate paying for an operating system that continually demands more and more overheads, has poor virus protection and will force you to upgrade your hardware regularly or replace itself regularly just so you can type one or two letters ?

Peace to everyone (Unless your a Windoze lover - in which case I hope your computers running shitty - like they always do).