A Death in the Ham Shack

The night after Ron, W2RIP and his lovely wife left, my old homebrew computer died. It started out with the USB ports becoming non-responsive, and none of my USB devices would function. For first aid, until I could completely diagnose the problem, I installed a spare enhanced USB PCI card that I had hanging around and that allowed me to complete the most important project - backing up my data!

These USB 2.0 connected hard drives are the trick for back-ups. They are protected from the foibles of an unsteady operating system, and, best of all, they are portable from machine to machine with no hassle. After I had everything backed up, I went off to bed. As I always do, I left the computer running. The little known fact of electrical machinery is that running a piece of equipment in a constant powered state doesn't hurt it as much as turning it on and off. Cycling may be good for your body, but it's not good for electronics.

I came into the shack the next morning and tried to wake Bigboy (as the computer was named on the home network here) and he was unresponsive. His heart had given out and he died peacefully in his sleep. I ran all the diagnostics and found that the motherboard was dead.

As I mourned the loss of my old computing friend (and the loss of the hamdollars it would take to replace him), I had to think of where to go from here. Should I buy a new motherboard and CPU? As an aside, computers are in a way like motorcycles; just as you would never replace a chain on a motorbike without replacing the sprockets, you would never replace a motherboard without replacing the CPU. I hate to throw new money at old technology, so I thought it more appropriate to move from IDE based technology to serial.

As I walked into the door of the local Staples, I sensed that the salesman saw my need to spend hamdollars. It could have been the black armband that tipped him off, I don't know, but he certainly homed right in on me. I'm standing in front of the row of shiny laptops all with their screens bright with swimming fish, so strong in their youthful vigor and I think fondly of Bigboy and his days of glory... But enough of that. I had told myself over and over that if I have to, God forbid, replace Bigboy it would be with a super whiz-bang laptop with bluetooth and Centrino processing and constantly on line with the world from every coffee house in the world.

Fortunately, a cooler head and shrinking hamdollars convinced me that I no longer travel the world (except by radio) and I haven't hung out at coffee shops since my days at the Army Language School in Monterey. Sancho Panza's Coffee House downtown was THE place to meet women. No Wi-Fi in 1962!

To an old computer builder like me, there is no nastier words to hear than "bundled," but there on the floor of Staples was a stack of boxes with bundled kits of Dell Inspiron 530's with a 20 inch monitor for fewer hamdollars than I had figured I'd had to spend. All that new technology in one big package was more than I could stand. I had priced this very machine pretty much in this configuration online at Dell for about 300 hamdollars more than was being offered at Staples. It was that bargain hunters dream - a closeout sale!

I thought the price was fair and decided that I would take it. Rather I decided that the salesman could take it for me out to the car - those bundles weigh a ton! At the register, I presented my Staples Business Owners card and found that the price was reduced by yet another 100 hamdollars. The bargain gets even better! Business owner? You don't have to be it when you apply; all you have to do is say it!

I have spent the best part of two days now dragging off all that junky software they put on the hard drive and installing the good stuff like HRD and DM-780. There are no ports for keyboard and mouse! Everything and I mean everything runs off the serial bus. There are eight ports on the machine (four in front and four in back) and I have an external USB hub. I have two USB to serial port adapters and they posted just fine for radio control and for digital working via DM780.

I had to install a firewire card (from the junk box) and a video card (NOT from the junk box, but from Bigboy himself), and I bought a USB to IDE box to house the old 400gb drive from Bigboy. Sigh, it looks like we're finished for now.

I decided, after a lot of hand ringing, to leave the VISTA SP1 operating system on the machine. I was sorely tempted to wipe the hard drive and start with a fresh copy of Windows XP pro, but in the end I decided that I'd leave it, but the moment it starts getting unstable, I'll jerk it out and replace it with XP in a flash.

Finally I had to name it. That's the hard part part you know. Once you name it, you just can't take it back to the store! I tried several names; Farmer... for Farmer in the Dell; I thought maybe "Little Boy," but that sounded too nuclear, but finally I decided on "John's PC." O.K. so my poet's soul takes a rest from time to time, but the machine doesn't know it has an ugly name, and to me it'll always be "Bigboy II."