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Yesterday we had sunny weather with a few extended spells of rain (real rain, not the drizzle we have been "enjoying" these last weeks months). Today we have raining and grey weather with a few extended spells of sun. The temperature got parked at 5C, morning, noon, evening.
I have been hacking at the documentation, mainly for the invoicing part of OMSI-3. The main reason was that I had to solve a problem with the filtering in the invoice printing process. And I got it solved.
Ronny is, together with Theo, introducing the Progress people to TeleSales. The Tele Ordering application (web based ordering) wil be done by them.
According to the planning I should be doing that, in cooperation with some Progress people. Now it seems the whole planning is being by passed. I haven't seen a byte of coding jet, I haven't even been included in any of the discussions or presentations. The reason that is brought forward is that I don't know the tools and the project must be finished on short notice. Valid reason. Only, I just heard that one of the Progress people is new, recruited off school just a few weeks, and will be learning the tools 'on the job'.
Yea, right.
Not that I am now sitting idle.
I let my brother choose which note book he wants as "temporal" replacement for his old Toshiba (286/12 1M 20M). The problem with the Toshiba is that it is failing slowly. The keyboard is temperamental with various keys refusing to work at times and the hard disk is giving strange DOS and BIOS messages ("int-xx error xxxx" type of stuff ) This is not surprising as it is over 10 years old and has seen extensive use, it has traveled a lot as well. (My brother was deck-officer, mainly on gas and chemical tankers, before he became pilot.) The Toshiba has been in his dorm in Zeebrugge these last few years.
The replacements he had to chose from were my old Mitac (486/100 40M 2G) which has no CD and is missing some bits (it is actually a sub-notebook) or a new Fujitsu LiteLine (AMD K6/350 32M 2Gb) this has a CD drive built in and gets up to 800x600 (actually it is a Mitac 5033 but I only found out later).
He only runs WordPerfect 5.1 and Lotus Symphony 2.0 (on DR DOS 6.0) so both notebooks are over the top.
He couldn't chose so I did. He will get the Fujitsu and I keep the Mitac (for a firewall, remember). So I will be installing his stuff on it. Got Win98 and a few of the standard programs on it a few days ago. (Standard means 'standard here' : Lotus SmartSuite, CorrelDraw 4, WordPerfect 6.1, Psi-Link (for the Psions) Netscape, etc. (no MS stuff other than the OS) .)
I got bitten. Hard
I had the Fujitsu notebook for Peter ready. I installed Symphony and WP5.1 and Norton AntiVirus. Then rebooted.
And it never came up again. It trudled for some ten minutes and than dropped back into DOS mode with the message that Win#$%^&& couldn't load because HIMEM.SYS wasn't loaded. Heu.
Up to now it ran and booted OK so I thought Symphony or WP had changed something (it had changed the config and autoexec so maybe it had done just a bit more). These are old DOS programs so luckily there wouldn't be changes in the registry. I checked the autoexec, only a path statement added, and I checked the config.sys, only files=20 added. There was no himem.sys in the config.sys so I added it. And rebooted. Same problem.
I tried Save-mode but got the same error. Oh oh, how do you get Windows repaired if you cannot get into Windows?
(And who is saying Linux is difficult while Windows is easy?). Yes I have booted a few times off the installation CD and that doesn't change a sh****.
Running the startup with selective loading of the drivers shows that HIMEM.SYS is found but that it cancels because it cannot get control of the A20 gate. On some BIOS's there is an A20 related option so maybe the installation has messed with that (almost virus like but not unheard of). The BIOS is from Systemsoft (r1.2) and has only a very limited set of options. Nothing about A20 there. I remember from somewhere (old-times) that cache settings can (could) some times interfere with the A20 gate so I disable all caching. To no avail.
Short of scrubbing down the disk and reinstall I don't see a way out. And if the BIOS is altered even that may not be enough. I could need a BIOS flash.
Luckily this is not my only computer (yea, I am a kind of Joe-sixpack, I sort of buy my computers in six-packs :-> ) so I can still get on the internet.
However, Fujitsu doesn't have my model on its site, not for sale nor on the support pages. On the support I find nothing even remotely remotely related to my problem. I also don't find a BIOS upgrade. I do find a support mail address in Europe and fire off a mail. I will not get the reply here but it is now about 23h00 so I intend to pack it up for the day.
I do remember that Fujitsu doesn't build all its notebooks themselves (if any) but that they OEM some from Mitac (one of the biggest notebook OEMs). And a number at the bottom looks familiar (5033) so I surf off to Mitac.
They do have some notebooks with that number (5033e, 5033d, etc.) and after some searching I find my exact problem mentioned in their Q&A section. With a fix. The problem seems to be related with Norton AV which somehow grabs the A20 gate and never releases it again, not even when prodded by a reboot. The proposed fix is a line added to the autoexec and a reboot.
It doesn't help at all but I now know that the culprit is Norton AV. Just get rid of it should do the trick. But how do you get rid of a Windows program like that, if you cannot get into Windows?
Shut down and ponder the reason of life for some time (go down, lock the house, brush teeth etc. ).
Back up I restart the notebook and Lo it gets into Windows, taking over twenty minutes to do so and the box runs slow. I mean SLOW. I have got 12 icons on the desktop and they appear one ... by ... one (almost a minute between first and last). Something is clearly wrong but I do get in Windows. Then I do something stupid (well what 'd you expect?). I reboot. And Windows doesn't want to play. Back to square one. More than an hour and a few boots later I know that Win will start if and only if I do a cold boot with the Win98 CD inserted.
Ok, in Windows, move mouse to the start button (it crawls from the screen center to the corner). Click, the start menu rolls up (should pop but nothing pops now), move to Settings, wait for the menu to display, click on control panel. Between this click and the window actually being displayed an filled with icons took almost two minutes. You know the way further. I uninstalled the Norton AV stuff.
Too late to test now (almost 03h00 and I have to get up at 05h45 at the latest).
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