The Tech in a Sec retail location

this is my biggest undertaking since college. its probably not as big as that, but its close. Where do I begin? I got the store, the website, landlord and employees already. I just havent opened yet!

I'm waiting until aug 10 for my landlord, and I need to get some documentation to get everything rolling nicely along.

1. new york state Tax ID
2. Bank account in the businesse's name
3. letter of credit for international purchases
4. merchant account to accept credit transactions
5. POS system software and fully operational transaction database (wow)
6. Domain controller for the network
7. Liability insurance

I couldnt start on this tonight since I'm nocturnal and nothing's open... so I did what I could do, and got the Domain controller to work. Holy crap was that a nightmare with DNS... But its distributing addresses and sharing printers/files like a pro under windows 2003 server standard.

Any computer was going to work, so I used my very slowest one... a pentium II @ 350mhz from Q1 of 1998. It had a bad CD-ROM drive, floppy, hard drive and even the power button failed because it was caked with industrial sludge.

But I quickly replaced all those things with throw-away parts, and got it working on a refurb 40GB hdd using a cheap PCI RAID controller with its updated (2004) BIOS. I spliced the power button wires over to the unused reset button. This became the new power button.

Then I added a USB 2.0 controller from which the very large archive of ISO images, applets and other tools will be hosted on external hard drives totalling 2 TB. The controller also has two laser printers on a self-powered hub.

It distributes IP addresses, takes large print jobs, and authenticates in no time, all across the gigabit switch.

this useless piece of junk has been transformed into a worthy backbone for my business, but of course not without its many frustrated hours into the making.

Solid State drive in a pentium pro system

I wanted to make the coolest pentium 1 based system anywhere, and so I thought, why not make it solid state?

So I got an IDE interface to Compact Flash card adapter, as well as an 8GB sandisk Ultra III (30mb/sec read) compact flash card.

This is what it had:

Broken hard drive 3.4GB
3 PCI slots, 4 ISA slots
1 DIMM slot, 4 SIMM slots
socket 7 CPU, cyrix instead @ 250Mhz (upgrade from pentium 1)
CD-RW drive
broken floppy
Token Ring network adapter


I added this:
New hard drive 4.1GB standard hdd
256mb of PC-133, but only reads 128mb @66mhz
ATI All in wonder 128 16mb PCI video
Sound Blaster Live! Basic sound
Netgear 10/100 ethernet card PCI
USB 2.0 PCI

then I installed windows 2000 (2+hrs). I then took the basic 4.1GB drive, adapted it to a usb external enclosure hooked up to a new computer. I ghosted it over to the CF card.

I put the CF card back into the pentium pro and it started booting windows 2000. Everything was going great, I even played Zdoom for windows at 640x480, 25 FPS and with working sound. I was golden, and in solid state, no less. The boot and shut down times were phenomenal! The USB 2.0 card could never install devices correctly, however. I removed it.

I hit reset, and it froze while booting into windows 2000. I booted into safe mode and determined that the registry wasnt being handeled correctly on the CF card. the yellow exclamation points dotted device manager, and the reason was a "corrupt registry."

oh well. I just want to play doom again.

So reset, try again, reset, tried again, reset... success.

Now what?

well, this thing doesnt have enough ram to be a decent server of any kind... so I guess I'll try adding more ram to the available SIMM slots that were unused. I guess SIMM and DIMM simultaneously is bad news. The memory test tallied the total, but i got the black screen of nothing during POST.

I removed the simm ram and tried it again and it was running good in safe mode.

about a day later I returned to find that the system stopped booting entirely, even from the old hard drive.

OLD TECHNOLOGY is so unreliable! the HDD controller just failed for no reason! well, its actually the power supply's fault. it always is on old systems! and just a tip, when the Powersupply goes, the hdd controller is the first thing that follows.

But it sure was fun to have a solid state windows 2000 installation on an ancient 1996 AT-board PC! I hope to have a better ATX setup next time.