The Coppermine arrived during yesterday’s snowstorm, with the wind blowing outside, temperature dropping, and the snow piling high along side the cabin up to the bottom of the windowsill. What a great way to relax, to sit on the floor in front of a glowing fireplace with it’s embers rhythmically crackling, setting the scene for an inviting trance-like evening of enchantment and the long awaited fulfillment of the most secret desires of the heart and the soul.
Wake up, Al. NO! WAIT! Don’t wake up, dreams like this happen only once every other blue moon….
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Dennis was there when the invitation to descend into the Coppermine arrived. It was this young teenager who aggressively ripped open the cardboard container and fearlessly disassembled the old worn-out Pentium II into it’s component pieces, and it was he who assembled the 733 and the PC133 to the newly-unwrapped motherboard, mere child’s play.
To the young man goes the glory, while the elderly man was left to fend for himself and pick up the remaining breadcrumbs for substinence.
My part was to decide which peripheral to put where. The most difficult part was removing the Zip drive from the DELL 450. This package was truly designed by a mechanical engineer who got a 4.0 in Lego Interlocking 601. It was even more interesting to reassemble. Working on DELL mechanics is definitely NOT for the faint hearted.
The first disappointment of the evening came when a 40-meg graphic-intense file (the Sanchin chapter) would not load instantly, display instantly, and save back to ATA-66 EIDE hard drives instantly. But Alas, this was a mere Coppermine with lowly EIDE hard drives. How quickly we forget how fast we arrive at how fast we have become.
Everything went together without a hitch. I unplugged the 27Gig boot drive from the DELL and it worked immediately. Everything was up and running, and a c++ project with hundreds of files built in seconds instead of minutes. The Copper mine was a good choice.
One problem, though; internet connection was rendered useless, and a diagnostic message relating that hardware failure had occurred arrogantly displayed itself as if to rub-in the salt. Neither did my backup US Robotics work. There is a driver bug in the Tyan motherboard, and a CD disk was supplied. Either this, and/or reinstallation of the modem drivers themselves will most likely solve the problem, except this machine may, in fact, be modemless.
The wait was worth it. The decision was a good one. The timing was right.
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Allen, now at his new website http://www.ury2k.com/pulse/index.htm
