Return of The Dos Days: Eee PC, Windows 7 and Desktop Picture.

Due to some strange events I would not discuss, I had to obtain a "netbook" - Asus Eee PC with pre-installed Windows 7 Basic. (Or is it translated back in English as Beginner's?)

The desktop on it has a background picture with sand, sky and a shell.
Not particularly nice picture in my opinion.
So it was natural for me to change it.

I spent 15 minutes searching where to click to do this.
Then surrendered myself to Windows Help.
(Come on, I am a man with higher education, I do not need any Help programs!)

Guess what?
You CAN NOT CHANGE DESKTOP BACKGROUND PICTURE in Windows 7 Basic! :rant:
This is really disappointing.

It is like the good old DOS days, when you only had a black screen and grey letters.
But they had some style at least! (And there was also Norton Commander...)

[EDIT. After some thinking I beleived such a thing to be impossible. An indeed, wallpaper can be changed, but only through separate, ASUS-provided system configuration program... They tried hard to hide this from me, and were successful, but for a short time only.]

 

Ahhh, the glorious days of yore. Norton Commander was a program worth its weight in gold. I really loved, but can't recall its name, the Norton program that replaced the Win3.1 shell and still have it around here somewhere. Was that Commander? Remember When is FUN to do, if I could remember what it was I used to do.

Norton's (Symantec) 360 is a piece of trash! Imagine not being able to actually do a drive optimization using my specs. The program is made for the idiots who should not have a computer. And they got rid of GoBack which is far superior to Microsoft's save state (or whatever they call it).

I'm not saying I am stuck in a time warp, but there was something to be said for the simplicity. I think of it each time Adobe's Indesign CS4 trashes a file I have spent three motnhs on. May they rest in the Abyss forever! Aldus' PageMaker was clunky but at least it did'nt take control of my computer. And of course Adobe has release a new suite without fixing the problems in the previous two.

[Edit] Ain't my spelling and puntuation just atrocious! Rotten carpal tunnel and bad shoulder.

 

That is normal for all aspects of life. Everything older is better 2000% of the time.

*edit*
Barring M$ products :evilgrin:

 

You might get a kick out of this. In Duluth, Minnesota where I live, the whole town tends to be at least a few years behind the times concerning almost everything. And I enjoy that aspect. That's why I live here instead of some huge city with 75 squillion people all crawling all over one another to get around, like an anthill.

We have a small retro computer/gaming store that sells ALL the old stuff, starting with Pong and moving up from there. They have all the old original Atari computers, Apples, Commodores and others and some of the old software that you can run on them. It really has a lot of charm. I like them old things. They really specialize in the old game systems like Neo-Geo, Intellivision, Colecovision and others like that. Pre-nintendo stuff, although they do carry some of that newer stuff too. It's not a huge corporate thriving business by any means but they've been open for at least a few years so they DO do some business. Enough interested consumers to keep the place going anyways. And they are not insanely priced or anything. Very reasonable. And everything in their store is guaranteed to work.

The funnest thing I always look at when I go there is what has to be the very first Atari trackball, lol. It's this huge square thing (probably 18 inches by 18 inches) that has this 3 or 4 inch trackball (more like a softball) set right into the middle of it. And it works!

 

Ahhh, the days of olde when knights were bold... I still remember Coleco and the dreaming I would do to get one. When I finally was able to I bought the first Nintendo, after it had been out for a couple of years or so—I played and wore out the Mario cartridge twice. The Missus loved it and Duck Hunt. And the Wii is just not for me—the machine and the adverts look to "sissy" for my likes. I still have the machine hooked up to my big screen and once or twice a year play Mech Warrior on it. I still can't find my Fester's Quest cartridge and I'll probably have to buy one some where.

And I do own an original Miss Pacman machine like you would find in a tavern. I never was able to find the one you sat down at, one of these days I'll have the money and one will strike my fancy.

That store sounds like my cup of tea.

 

Check it out! I'm posting this because there's always a thread popping up about gold box games, so here we go...

http://cgi.ebay.com/Vintage-SSI-AD-...tem&pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item335c87e601

 

Now that is a real shame on several points. The boxes are pretty raggedy is my 1st observation. I think I have some of them around here in shrink wrap as well as the big collector edition (several versions) that has all of them together, or at least most of them.

The second aspect is that we would never be able to play any of the games, and to me they are still playable, as the operating systems choke. I use XP Pro with SP3 and have tried various ways to play the Beholder games to no avail. I still have 3½ floppy drives in my computers and keep a 5¼ drive handy on the shelf so that is no problem. The problem lies in the programs themselves.

If someone knows of a sure fire way to get these old CGA and EGA games to play on our newer computers and operating systems I would love to know.

 

I wonder if DOSBOX would work.

 

I would have to check it out. Just after the Gods give me another 12 hours a day. The problem as I recall had more to do with himem.sys and some other DOS style drivers. I know XP does not have a "restart in DOS 5.0..." sort of thing that loads the old style drivers. Even if you have it restart in DOS it is still WinXP that is loading, just in a DOS atmosphere. And to be honest I don't even know where my old DOS books are around here to lookup the various switches needed.

I remember that in the Beholder games and WinMe I needed some obscure switches on the memory drivers. It was not a problem in Win98. I have a computer on the other desk that still has Win98 on it with WinXP as dual boot. Problem is that the various components on the motherboard are all fairly recent devices (plus the other components) and I was never able to find device drivers compatible with Win98. And I did not want to pay my local computer shop on the off chance they would format the drive or the like. I build my own for just that reason.

 

but really though, would you actually want to be running them games from 5.25"? I think it might be a little tough finding a working floppy drive. I mean a REAL floppy drive, the kind that weighs 10-15 pounds, lol.

 

Nah, but you do need 'em to install the games. A case in point is the first Beholder game. It came on 5¼ discs so in an attempt to save them I copied them over to a 3½ disc. Come to find out the install routine requires that they be on the larger discs. I vividly remember doing this and having to several years later locate a replacement set of discs. One of the first set had gone bad somehow.

And that is another reason that this set we're talking about may not be such a bargain. Seeing as they're not shrink wrapped there may be problems with the floppies. Floppies are inherently bad technology and go bad all the time. I have an emergency boot disk for another computer and went to do a refresh of it several weeks ago only to find it had gone bad. And it is stored in a safe, secure place.