Stupid old computers drive me insane

Ever worked on an old reflex database or a computer that it is stored on? Because I am. Pretty stupid huh. It's an old old old DOS system, and it just quit working yesterday, it has an old reflex database on it that has an inventory of the electrical meters used by our municipal light and water people, and they are in the process of switching it over to our shiny new updated program with a postgresql database. The guy doing the transfer is all butt hurt because his 13 or 15 year old computer died on him and I can't fix it because I can't get parts and junk. My boss has already told him and his boss that it is a lost cause and we aren't going to do anything about it. I think it is just a power supply or something because it won't boot and no lights, but we don't have any psu's that will go in that system.

How do you deal with an irate network user with equipment that is almost as old as I am and not working?

Convince him to use a different type of network that you think is good for both of you?

The computer isn't even worth fixing, it's not plugged into the network (doesn't even have a network card) and gets used maybe once or twice a week for a few minutes at a time. The guy is disapointed because we are refusing to fix it because it is so flipping old.

We had a windows 95 computer that the rec center uses to control the swimming pool equipment. It had a printer plugged into it and when the printer quit working they went out and bought a new usb printer, but the computer doesn't have usb and they were ticked off that we wouldn't force it to work, as if we could. That computer still functioned, they just couldn't print any more. They wound up returning the printer to the store, and we added a part to the computer use policy that we will not support any equipment that is bought without our approval and no computers will be plugged into the network without our approval. That's because we often get network users calling us saying they are trying to get to their shared folders on their laptop...but they don't have a laptop in their office, thats because it is the persons personal laptop which isn't a member of the domain so it can't access and domain resources.

Ok, enough griping from me. I've got more important things to worry about.

I love dumb people.

And the data can't be pulled from the system because ?

Were there no harddrives during this time ?
I don't understand why the disk, or tape, or whatever holds the data can't be shipped to a data recovery specialist, how long would it take to recollect all of the "lost cause" data VS the cost of a specialist ?

It's got a hard drive, not IDE but maybe scsi, the ribbon cable must be 3 or 4 inches wide, it's one of those that is about the size of three modern hard drive stacked on top of each other. The data isn't completely critical, its all old electrical meters that are not in use but are still in storage. Mostly it is just the guy wants it back and he is being a grumpy SOB.

We sent a drive off to get data recovered once at the approval of the city administrator (2nd only to the mayor) and we told him it would be expensive. I think he though $1000 tops, but when the bill for $5000 came in he said there isn't much data that we have worth $5000. Recovering data ourselves we are about 75% successful, our biggest problems is drilling it into our network users that they need to save stuff to the servers so that it can be backed up every night. But that wouldn't help us on this old piece of junk in front of me anyway........

The term "dos" makes me laugh. Mostly because I downloaded a dos simulator recently in order to play old computer games and got called a nerd by everyone who found out Any way, if this thing is THAT old, I don't see why the guy is making such a flipping big deal. I had a computer running Windows ME die on me recently and it wasn't worth fixing, but it had a lot of my writing on it that I didn't want to lose. Still, that was MY fault for not making back ups. Maybe I don't understand the problem? Or is he just being a stubborn, "must have it my way" type customer that refuses to accept the facts?

Well the other part of it not being worth it is because it is in a reflex database. I had to look that up on the internet because I had never heard of it before today. It is just a flat file kind of database, and the size of the database is limited to the amount of memory in the system. So you can see where it starts getting stupid. I use to play wolfenstein 3d in windows XP back before I went microsoft free at home, and that is funny because wolfenstein was a pre-NT game.

I used to love DOS. (and I still do ) Very few games today beat the likes of Duke Nukem and Wacky Wheels (I still play them on an emulator) and it's a wonder how programmers those days managed to pack so much into a few hundred kilobytes, whilst many games today fail to come up with even a decent storyline, given the humongous amounts of disk space and the monstrous graphics cards that they require.

Hrm... emulator, simulator... same thing. Kind of. I downloaded it any way Mainly to play the first of the Elder Scrolls games since I got addicted to Morrowind when I was younger, and more recently Oblivion.

Hm... Yay for off-topic-ness?

And kc I got stupid just trying to comprehend that post.

I've been wanting to try Elder Scrolls too. The developers released the first game for free, right?

And now I can hear crickets chirping while I try and decide what you mean.

Yeah they did. It's available for download on their site. Which I forgot, but a quick Google search should bring it up. It's rather amusing to play. Personally I think Morrowind was better than Oblivion story wise. Also in Oblivion they did this thing where the monsters, armor and weapons level up with you. It was kind of cool at first but it got annoying after a while when I started thinking... wait... why am I leveling up to get better armor when the better armor isn't going to matter because it isn't really better it just looks cooler...



Just that I had no idea what you were talking about.

About a flat file database, or that it is a 12-15 year old system and they don't understand that we can't get parts for it to fix it?

That bit.

I understand about it being to old to get the parts to fix it. It must be really frustrating trying to get them to understand that when they don't want to, though.