I know, I know, it's ancient. It's a computer that we use in the Clerk of Court to run plates and licenses with the state. It just 'works' so they have no interest in upgrading to the new version of the software that just blows.

Anyway, Last week I got a call the the state computer was broken, so I sent a tech to fix it. The computer no longer boots into windows at all. DOS is working fine. Four hours later he came and told me he gives up. I sent the second (more experienced) tech the next day. After a few hours HE tells me he gives up.

I am now out of techs to send so I go myself. I spend 20 minutes trying to remember how 3.11 works (God, how did we WORK like that?!) and start troubleshooting. It appears that win /n will boot with no problems all the way into windows. Of course, this is little help as the whole point of the computer is to use the frame to talk to the state. I adjust the pagefile. Nope. I check the video card. Nope. I disable crap that shouldn't have been in the autoexec in the first place. Nope. Start pulling cards and reseating them. The computer IS 15 years old, after all. No dice. If I leave the nic out completely it boots fine. Again, no help as I NEED the network and there is no chance I'm going to be able to find a new nic that works with 3.11.

At this point I start looking at the back of the machine to see if the nic is completely dead. Sure enough, no lights. On a whim, I decided to trace the cable back to the frame to make sure it wasn't something stupid not lighting the nic up. Guess what! The 10baseT hub it's plugged into is off. Odd... Oh wait. The cleaning crew must have kicked the wall wart out of the socket. I plug it in, and the nic lights up. All of a sudden the computer boots with no issues whatsoever, connects to the state, and I can look up my license. Un-freaking-believeable. I just spent 2 hours troubleshooting an unplugged hub.

I simply CANNOT believe that something so simple as an unplugged hub would cause windows to fail to boot! Was it really that bad in the early 90's? I honestly can't remember. Anyway, thanks for letting me vent. I surely can't tell anyone at city hall know we spent ~9 hours to diagnose an unplugged power cord, but I figured you all would feel my pain.

We waited till NT before networking windows, Dos 6 with Novell worked quite well till then.

Good to know... I'll start looking for one today.

Or, if he's really lucky, MCA.

I bet I still have a couple ISA NE 2000 compatable cards lying around the house. My dad used to work for National Semiconductor so we had a few.

Nice one! I spent an hour and a half yesterday troubleshooting a networked fax - turns out the end user was trying to use an area code to dial a local number (which only requires 7 digits, not 10) so of course none of his 'test' faxes ever got through.

-Zeke

Mark, It's a rusty ISA slot. Believe it or not, I took a trip to the salvage building and found -=3=- ISA nics. Two of which had 10-base2 connectors on them.

I guess what really threw me about the whole situation is that it wasn't really hung, it was just waiting for the network to come up, which it never would. It really scares me that something that used to be so fomfortable to me is now so totally foreign.

Not that you're asking for suggestions, but....

My concern here would be that that computer is going to give up the ghost at some point and you aren't going to have a viable replacement. I'd look into running Win3.11 on VMWare. Or maybe even run the application in Wine.

But, if you're connecting to a mainframe and it's a Win3.11 program, is it just a 3270 terminal? If so, I've used x3270 many times and it works great. You can run it under Unix via X-Windows or on a curses-compatible terminal (xterm or the Linux console, for example), or under Windows inside cmd.exe or as its own window.

Yeah, if the caps don't kill it, a component will just randomly fail. My Linksys LNE100TX PCI network cards just randomly die after 5 years. Maybe ISA is made of sterner stuff.

I agree with Bitt. While you've got the machine working, build a backup in parallel. You've got plenty of time to test it before the Win 3.11 machine fails and there's a huge crisis.

What amazed me was that when I first opened the case up the chip fan wasn't moving at all. In fact I could barely move it by hand. I happened to find a replacement on a pentium II heatsink in one of my drawers that actually fit. God knows how long the fan has been out, but it has obviously been a while and the system was rock solid when it was overheating. Nowadays my system starts getting unstable when my video card fan has too much dust in it.

Tony, I definitely was thinking along the lines of VMware until I got it working. Now that it's up and running, I can start the hassle of replacing the State's ssoftware with the modern stuff, but at the much more leisurely pace required with dealing with anything having to do with the state.

Oh, how about them being in a building attached to a fire department. Every thursday a 6AM the generator is tested for an hour. That's a live load test. The generator powers the entire building. I have ups's for the $60 print servers in that building.

When I worked for the power company I experienced another weirdness. In one particular office building, every computer, after 6 months or so, started rebooting itself or simply turning itself off. It didn't matter how old the computer was. In other words, bring in a computer that had been working for 3 years, give it six months, and it will start rebooting. Buy a brand new computer, plug it in, and wait six months. Turns out that the building was slightly overvoltaged (130V), and was burning out PSU's over time. It wasn't enough for the UPS's to kick in, but enough to damage the PC's over time.

Luckily, since I was working for the POWER company, it was easily remedied.