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Re: can I use Apple II with a vga/dvi monitor? how to get software?

Paul Schlyter wrote:

In article <RL7mi.114117$NV3.3285@pd7urf2no>,
The Wizard of Oz  <wizard@emeraldcity.gov> wrote:


Paul Schlyter wrote:

In article <l%Mli.111516$NV3.19072@pd7urf2no>,

.............

        This was back in 2000. No administrator accounts.

Windows NT had admin and user accounts before 2000 ....

        Never said I was running an NT class of Windows.


Most people didn't back then - but you could have, if stability and
robustness had been important enough for you.  On my work I ran NT
from 1995 and on.... I never had a disk crash.


	I couldn't afford NT back then.


2. You didn't back up your stuff properly - so you lost a months (sic!)
worth of work instead of merely a few hours worth of work.

        It WAS backed up. To the second hard drive in the same system.

:-)

A really proper backup shouldn't just be stored outside your computer,
but even in a different building!  The building where you're working
can catch fire.....
Correct. However you have to work with the constraints of what you have. If all you can afford is a second hard drive in the same machine then that's all you can do. It's a different story now though. Especially since people are scrapping fully functional machines just to run Vista. 

A backup doesn't have to reside in another computer to be "elsewhere"!
You could have written your backups to CD-R or DVD-R disks, or backup
tapes, and then stored the backup media somewhere else.  Today you can
also put your backups on some suitable storage space on the Internet.
Back then the burners were starting to drop in price from the $2000 mark. The media was still around $10 per disk. Over the next year and a half the price of the burners dropped to around $250 (I picked up a used one for $50) and the media dropped to under $1.00 per disk. 


There are btw hard drive recovery services one can buy, which can do
really amazing things at recovering seemingly lost data.  These people
pick the hard drive apart, remove the magnetic disks, insert them in
their own recovery apparatus and read the disks, one by one, as much
as they can on every disk.  They they put it all together to one big
disk image, as complete as they can.  These services aren't cheap of
course, but can still be worthwhile in situations like the one you
encountered, where one full month's of work was at stake.
$20,000 to start and they'll get the new drive back to the customer within a month. This is good if there is physical damage to the hard drive. In my case the physical mechanisms were fine (still work in fact). It was the content of the hard drives which got scrambled. The modern way to recover data (I've done this for countless friends running Windows) is to try to back up the files under another operating system. Then reformat the hard drive and put the files back. The other way to do this (assuming the modern method doesn't work) is to send the drive to a company associated with the CIA. They are able to recover data up to 13 previous reformats ago. Starting cost is $200,000. 

That stuff is overkill for normal disk crashes!  You do the stuff you
describe here only if you want to recover data others have
deliberately erased from their disks.
Actually this describes two different situations. Hardware problems like the disk not spinning. The other is for software or user problems. The modern method works most of the time. The other two are for extreme cases (and extreme budgets). 


A third option is this: get a new, blank, harddrive, format it and
reinstall Windows on that drive and make it the primary HD on your
system.  Install your original harddrive as the secondary HD.  Boot up
your machine from the new drive, and then read your documents from
your old drive.  If needed, let some disk recovery utility work on the
original drive.
That's a variation of the modern method I described earlier. I've found it better to read the data to either a *NIX or OS X system rather than moving it from one Windows drive to another. Both (*NIX in particular) are better for recovering mangled files. FYI, many if not most recovery utilities (boot CDs) are Linux based. For me, that procedure usually works fine. 


I did this on a friend's computer the other week: their computer just
refused to boot.  When trying to boot the system CD and telling it to
either reinstall Windows or reformat the drive, the system CD got so
confused by the damaged registry that it crashed!  So I bought a new
harddrive for them, reinstalled Windows on it, installed their
original harddrive as a secondary drive and then I could just read all
their data from the original drive without problems.  A virus scanning
program later found some viruses on that harddrive -- now they've
learnt to _not_ log in to an administrator's account all the time....
Man they were lucky. When Word crashed my system the disks wouldn't even mount/read. The only thing to do was reformat and reinstall. Normally you'd expect the problems of this nature to happen to the C: drive. It took out the D: drive too.
My solution of scrapping Microsoft for everything but games works very well for me. YMMV. Of course there are those who believe the propaganda and will never consider the option. 

One should of course not believe in any propaganda - neither the
propaganda that says you shouldn't run anything but Micro$oft'$ stuff,
nor the propaganda that says you should avoid Microsoft like the
plague.  As usual, the truth is somewhere in between.
True. What I described works for *ME*. My philosophy is anybody else can do what ever the heck they want with their own computer. I'll give advice when asked (like this time). My advice is to try a bunch of different things and go with what works. Since a lot of people are advocating M$, I have no need to go over the same material they have. To get back to the VM thread, VMs work well. They generally don't take down an entire system. Install them on a stable and secure box then have fun. 


The major advantage of Windows is the very large amount of software
available for it, which means you're most likely to find the
application you need for that OS.  That's why Linux has Wine, and
that's why modern Macs also can run Windows.  And that's why you run
your games on Windows rather than on Linux..... :-)
I won't argue Windows has a large software base. However if you take a measure of the quality of the software available you'll find there are a lot of terrible programs out there produced by guys who just want to make a fast buck. I should know. I reviewed my fair share of terrible games for Digital Civilization and Call-A.P.P.L.E.. I've also talked with a number of developers. A lot of the more successful games under Windows are developed under BSD and Linux then ported to the Windows environment. The main reason people don't see these games for *NIX is because of the various agreements signed with Microsoft. I won't even talk about what happened to Loki Software.
In terms of running the same software under Windows or something else... I've always found less problems with the actual programs (the third party add ons are another story) when I get away from Windows. Again, this is where running a VM helps. 

				Later
				Mike