Used Technology

We're always in need of hard drives at The Working Centre's Computer Recycling Project . Hard drives 20GB or larger are especially appreciated. When we get systems and drives in we normally use DBAN, Darik's Boot and Nuke to overwrite hard drives (removing any traces of data). Using a utility like DBAN is much better than formatting the hard drive. Formatting doesn't remove data from a hard drive, it simply breaks links to the data. Data recovery experts can easily recover data from a formatted drive.

This is an example of an ideal donation we'd love to have at The Working Centre's Computer Recycling Project . This generous donation was the second large donation from the same donor. Donations of the same type of computer are wonderful not only because they can be easily sysprepped and cloned, but its easier to teach volunteers how to fix the computers because any problems the machines experience are usually similar since the machines are identical. One of the issues with getting hundreds of computers that are not the same is that they usually have dozens of different problems, and explaining dozens of different problems to volunteers who come in at different times is a difficult task.

Software Freedom Day 2009 is a couple of short months away, September 19, 2009. SFD also happens to be yours truly's birthday. So, this year I want to make this a big event in Kitchener, Ontario. I've already registered The Working Centre's Computer Recycling Project for the event which means we'll likely have a little swag and some posters for the event. I also have a verbal commitment from Marcel Gagne, award-winning Linux Journal Columnist , and author of several Linux books, to appear. We've been working on putting Linux on iMac G3 computers, an area that seems to be sadly lacking in the community with the influx of multi-core PCs. We'll talk about our target market for these iMacs and the ups and downs of installing Linux on the G3. We're also gearing up to give away several PIII systems running Ubuntu Linux, but we need a lot more donations to cover the numbers we'd like to give away. If you have a spare Pentium III lying around and you live in th...

One client brought in his Toshiba Satellite 5000 notebook because his USB ports were not working. After updating some unknown Windows drivers that turned out to be drivers for the SDCard we focused our efforts on the BIOS. Unfortunately it turns out that the Satellite 5000 doesn't have a standard BIOS. The BIOS on the Satellite 5000 is accessed through a program called HWSetup.exe on Windows. We figured that the USB might be disabled in the BIOS since all the drivers looked fine in Windows. The next problem was that the client had installed a non-original version of Windows XP on his Toshiba notebook, which meant that the utility wasn't present. We scoured toshiba.ca to no avail., only finding the utility on toshiba.com. When we ran the Toshiba Utilities installer which installs the HWSetup.exe file along with a few other tools we got an error message about another Toshiba Common Files utility which wasn't installed. More searching on Toshiba. The point here is keep your or...

Modems and More This 28.8 external modem (modulator / demodulator) used to be a pretty penny, but now few people in North America use dial up modems. External modems like this Bocamodem were generally much more expensive than internal modems. This Bocamodem did 28.8 kb/s (28,000 bytes per second) and featured a 14,400 bps Group 3 Fax modem (you could send faxes out through it). With the V.42/MNP5 data compression you could supposedly get 115.2kbs (115,200 bytes/sec). Almost all modems at this stage were "Hayes Compatible" and this Bocamodem was no exception. This particular modem came with an ISA card with a 16550 UART. To most this means nothing, but in the days of 386's many systems didn't come with a 16550 UART chip on the motherboard which meant you couldn't get speeds much faster than 2,400 bytes/sec. This modem had a NVRAM (non-volatile RAM) that could store the modem configuration.