It started out innocuously enough. For nearly three years
I had been using my old Compu-Add 386SL-20 for road work.
Compu-Add 320FX (left): 386SL-20 CPU, 4Mb RAM, 40Mb HDD, 64-grayscale monochrome
VGA display, 2400bd internal modem. State-of-the-art computing technology for the
serious 1992 power user. Preloaded with DOS/Windows 3.1
Compaq Presario 1070 (right): P5-133 CPU, 32Mb RAM, 1Gb HDD, 800x600SVGA display,
33.6Kbd internal modem (more about the damn modem later). State of the art computing
technology for the serious Windoze 95 user. Preloaded with Windows 95b, which is
not available in retail channels. Compaq and Bill Gates wanted me to make 31
floppy disks to recover the system in case of emergency. Yeah, right.
Clearly, it was time to upgrade. I began
to work.............
(Beginning to get worried)
.....And the screen looked like crap. The drivers were dated sometime during the
eighteenth century, so I searched and searched on the Compaq
website for newer ones. No luck. It was time [shudder] to call their tech support
line. I hafta give them credit--I didn't wait very long before a nice teenager answered
the phone. For ten minutes I was grilled like a suspect in a murder case about my
serial numbers and customer ID stuff, and finally the nice teenager asked me what
my problem was. I told him: I needed the latest OS/2 drivers for the MagicGraph
128. "We don't support OS/2," said the teenager. (Actually, I knew they
didn't. I just thought I could pull a quick one past them. Boy was I wrong. This
kid had been trained to repeat the MS mantra like Pavlov's Dog.)
("We don't support OS/2." Surely Compaq Computer Corporation hadn't fallen
to the Evil Empire of Micro$oft?????!)
Then the teenager seemed to take pity on me: "OS/2...who makes that?"
I am not making this up. He really asked me that. Finally I exploded at him. "You
call yourself a technical support representative? Eye-Bee-blankety-blank-Emm makes
it! There are more than fifteen million OS/2 users out there, and your company
has decided to just lock them out!"
You know how the voice mail message tells you "this call may be recorded for
quality control purposes". Well, the teenager was still infuriatingly polite.
He suggested I call IBM. Probably afraid he'd lose his Clearasil money if he got
fired.
So, I called IBM. This guy was at least 20, so I can't call him a teenager. You
know how those Level One support guys are anyway though. He was very helpful in
a Department of Motor Vehicles sort of way. "You see, Mr Bookter, these drivers
don't come from IBM, so we can't do anything."
(IBM doesn't support OS/2 on my laptop either!!!)
He really did try to assist me; I must give him a lot more credit than the idiot
at Compaq. But he just simply didn't know how to help. He listened as I recounted
my loyalty to OS/2 ever since Warp 3 Red Spine. I told him about how I burn incense
at the feet of a pagan statue of Lou Gerstner every night. Alas, my prayers were
not enough. Bumping this up to PMR status and sending it to Level Two would yield
exactly the same result. Nothing. I thanked him and hung up the phone. (Serious
note: Nothing in this satire should be taken as a slam against the people working
for IBM Tech Support in Austin. This guy genuinely tried, and again, that's more
than I can say for the pudknockers at Compaq. I have _plenty_ of complaints about
IBM and its support structure in general, but the people I've talked to have always
tried to do their best.)
I ended up eventually lucking onto the solution: I got ahold of the person whose
great-great-grandfather actually wrote the drivers back in 1889, and he told me
where to get the new ones...on the Dell Computer website.
I got 'em, installed 'em, and the display looked great. Everything seemed to work,
and I got ready for a trip to Jacksonville to visit my inlaws.
PART II: The Modem From Hell
Imagine my chagrin, when I tried to log on to Compuserve from Florida. The
computer would absolutely not recognize the internal modem. I tried every combination
of COM port and IRQ possible. The BIOS in the Presario is, ah, shall we say....minimally
configurable. There isn't much control over the settings. I tried and tried and
tried to get the system to see the modem, and eventually concluded that I must've
fried it somehow by plugging in the cord while the unit was on. I was faced with
either taking the whole computer back to Best Buy (which was 330 miles away in Columbia,
and I needed this machine to work NOW) or I could do something stupid, like, say,
throw good money after bad....
Off to a local Jax computer shop I went, and bought a PCMCIA modem. These were refurbished
ones they had for sale and they were cheap. I bought a USR model, a good brand name,
and went back to give it a try....
AND THE DAMN THING STILL WOULDN'T WORK! Now I was really getting angry.
(An example of the proper tool for fixing a Compaq computer)
I took the new modem back the next morning. The salesman, an individual for whom
English was a second, perhaps even third language, was very understanding. "Why
don't you use Windows 95?" he said. "You have a WINMODEM in your
laptop. That's why it won't work." I ended up swapping the PCMCIA for a refurbished
USR Sportster External modem. It would defeat the purpose of portability for the
system, but at least I could communicate again, and besides, I needed a new one
to replace the aging Zoom connected to my desktop system at home. So I got the new
external and plugged it in. Voila! A dial tone and everything. I was in business
at last!
Except the connection would never negotiate. It would dial and connect but would
time out. Changing the init strings didn't help.
(Another example of how to fix a Compaq product)
I was devastated. Bill Gates and his minions had me at their mercy. First they took
over the software industry and made it proprietery. Now they were making firmware/hardware
proprietery too. Without much enthusiasm for life itself, I rebooted and went back
into the BIOS settings---and saw that I hadn't disabled the internal piece-of-crap
Winmodem. I did so........
And finally was up and running. At last!!!!!!
Part III
(08/12/97) UPDATE!
I've been getting a lot of inquiries into how to set up PCMCIA socket
services on the 1070...
Here's the
slot, on the right-hand side of the unit, right next to the wonderfully cutting-edge
technological marvel of a WinModem. Gag.
Here's some Spam.
It doesn't have anything to do with Warp or PCMCIA or anything else on this page,
but I've had this really neat picture of a can of Spam I've been wanting to do something
with for a long time....Hormel actually has a website
where you can send Spam to your friends.
This is an
ordinary PCMCIA modem. You're probably saying to yourself, "Dammit Bookter,
just cut out all this foolishness and tell me how to set up socket services for
Warp on my Presario, and cut out all the crap with the pictures of Spam!" Funny
you should say that. In fact it's so funny I typed it in right here. The sentence
before the one before this sentence. The sentence before before before the last
sentence. Boy, are we having a good time or what?
It goes in the
slot like this. Again, you're probably thinking, "Bookter, you're so full of
crap your eyes are bulging out. I know where to put it! Now where's the
damn PCMCIA driver for Warp?!??" Well, it's funny you should say that.
Heh heh heh. And you'd be surprised at how many people don't 'know where to put
it'. Barney Frank for example.
You want that file don't you? Just a minute. I'm finding it.
Spam is pretty good if you cook it. I like to slice mine thin and fry it 'til it
turns brown. You can of course put it in sandwiches, but a little-known Southern
culinary delight is Spam grits. Grits, which are really very tiny potatoes (they're
hell to peel) are also one of Big Boy's favorite foods. Add some cheddar cheese
to your Spam grits, and you're in for a real treat!
I used to have a crush on a girl in the 7th grade named Ellie Mandell. Ellie was
Jewish, so Spam wasn't kosher for her to eat. Pity.
There was another girl in the 10th grade I knew who was so fat she had gravity.
I'll bet she still eats Spam to this very day.
Spam spelled backwards is Maps. Imagine that.
I don't have the link handy, but there's a guy somewhere on the web who has a Spam
page, who claims he's created a new artificial lifeform by leaving an opened can
of it in his refrigerator for ten months.
Am I boring you? You sure you want that file? I could talk about Spam all day long!
No, really. Did you know we won World War II because of Spam? It's true. Spam and
Jeeps. The Germans and the Japanese only had sauerkraut and Toyotas. Surely it isn't
a coincidence either that the Iron Curtain & Communism fell because the Soviets
didn't have Spam....? THINK ABOUT IT!
Okay, I'm still looking for that file. Won't be much longer. Besides, you're having
fun, aren't you? Of course, you could just scroll down to the bottom of the page,
but that's cheating.
Lou Gerstner's wife should fix Spam for him more often. If she did, we might actually
see some marketing for OS/2, as the plain good nutrition and happy feelings Iron
Lou would get from his Spam would cause him to have an awakening.
I'm still looking for it......
Just think if all of Compaq's employees ate Spam for lunch every day, we wouldn't
have to deal with BS like WinModems or proprietery HD partitions in their machines.
Mother Theresa eats Spam. So did Joan of Arc and Gandhi. Hitler, Stalin, Attilla
the Hun, Jack the Ripper, and Pol Pot didn't.
Alright, alright, enough torture. Here it is--the file that will enable you to set
up socket services on your Presario 1000 Series laptop. Click here.
The chipset the Presarios use is from Cirrus Logic. IBM, in their never-ending quest
to drive away every single possible home/SOHO user they can from OS/2, doesn't have
the Presario listed in the Device
Driver Pack Online page. Take the file and unzip it, then follow the ordinary
procedure for installing socket services (Selective Install). You'll be in business.
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