I was in Fry's yesterday, to wallow in consumerism. I like two things about Fry's -- they have everything, and -- like sprinkles to your donut -- they also have a whole section devoted to Apple stuff. In fact, they probably have more Mac crap than anywhere except for an Apple store; they certainly beat the Pantolianis off of CompUSA.
One of my objectives on this browsing mission was to actually see a new iMac, and I was successful (and it is... nice!). The neck action is suitably stiff yet adjustable -- about the same level of stiff v. adjustable as my PowerBook's screen, actually.
The salesbeasts noticed my approach with a money-making glint, Fry's being the one place that correctly assesses "t-shirt + shorts + nice shoes == reasonably well-paid hacker with money to burn," and descended upon me ravenously. They were quick to point out that if I wanted one, I'd need to move fast. "We've only got two left!"
"You just got these in today?" I asked, wide eyed and blinking.
"We just got these in an hour ago!" he said triumphantly.
I walked away with that secret smile of the Apple employee who's just confirmed that we're gonna move some god-damned computers! this year.
I was over at a friend's house, doing some emergency late night surgery on her Gateway box. She'd booted up, only to be greeted with the dreaded "Non-system disk error, press any key to continue." I still had my 3.5" Win98 boot disks with me, so I stuck one in so I could get a DOS prompt and poke around.
Happily, the hard drive didn't appear to be fried -- I still could poke around the directoy listings. I started to run Scandisk, which lasted about ten minutes before I remembered how mother-luvvin' long it can take on any hard drive bigger than about 500MB.
Then I tried to get into BIOS setup, only to be foiled by the apparent lack of a BIOS setup key (more on this later).
So I uttered a brief prayer to Philomena, patron saint of lost causes, and whipped out the OS reinstall CD. It booted up fine -- thank god PCs finally started booted from CDs in the mid-90s -- and then I had the choice of the "basic format your harddrive and generally brainwipe the machine" install, or the "expert (where we actually let you run the Windows installer yourself) install".
I was feeling a little crazy, so I opted for the latter.
The first time I tried this, I got a blank screen. The CD light stayed on for about two minutes, and then went off. I waited. Some more. And then rebooted the recalcitrant fucker.
The second time I tried this, I got the "Setup is about to test your computer, press ENTER to continue" folderol that I expected. So I pressed ENTER. Nothing. I pressed it again, hopeful bastard that I am. Nothing.
The light dawns.
The machine, having been built in the modern era, had no PS/2 style keyboard connector on the back. Considering that the keyboard was USB only, this was probably a lucky thing. However. BIOSes, still owing a debt of loyalty to the distant past, don't seem to know what to do with USB keyboards unless DOS loads some kind of USB keyboard driver. Which can have at least two effects I'm aware of:
- You can't freakin' type ENTER to start your install of Windows.
- You can't freakin' hit F1 or DEL or whatever you need to hit at boot to enter the BIOS. (For which reason I still have a crummy old PS/2 keyboard attached to my PC, stuffed off to the side. The keyboard I actually type on is an MS ergonomic USB keyboard.)
The light dawns.
Happily, I didn't have to putz back over here to get my PS/2 keyboard -- double happily, since the astute reader will recall that the box didn't even have a PS/2 keyboard port. What to do?
Never fear! I whipped back out my Win98 boot disk (which you'll again recall allowed me to type after booting) and got to a dos prompt. Then I issued the ever popular "e:\win9x\setup.exe" and was off to the races. Half an hour of disk blatting later, the machine was up and running -- and even still had all of its original data.
But let's observe the crucial flaw here: the machine only allowed you to plug in a USB keyboard, which by itself is not damning -- quite the contrary, it's actually the right thing to do these days -- except for the fact that the system-supplied restoration CD didn't work properly with a USB keyboard.
Whoops!
Here's the shameless pro-Apple part: Macs also only have USB keyboards. And guess what -- you can do all of the boot-up time keyboard funky shit you need to do with them. Which shouldn't be a big deal -- so why do PCs still generally get it wrong? It's just stupid detail thing -- it could totally be done in the BIOS with a little extra effort.
