Comfychair - Playstation and PCs

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Sinclair zx Spectrum
Amstrad Mega PC
Time Pentium 1 100mhz
Tiny P111 650mhz Win 98
Dell P4
Consoles
ISPs
Website
TV and digital boxes

Sinclair zx Spectrum

On occasions we get out our Sinclair ZX Spectrum (48Kb memory after an upgrade!) and connect it up to the tape recorder for a little nostalgia. This is Gill's and she has kept loads of games for it. Peter was rather puzzled about how games could be stored on cassette tapes and how long it took to load up and how basic the games seem!

Amstrad Mega PC

We have an Amstrad MegaPC (a 386 sx25, 1mb ram 40mb hard drive pathetic now huh!) but it also plays Sega Megadrive games. Unfortunately the internal battery is failing and I can't find out where it is to replace it. I suspect it is in the power source box and probably soldered in. So if I want to use the PC part I have to go into the bios and set the hard drive etc. It runs DOS5 and plays a number of DOS games. I can think of Contraptions (we call it Zack), Legend and BioMenace together with a few downloaded from the net. We have an early Office pack called MultiWorks which is very basic! The Megadrive part works too. We have got some games for it Crusty's Funhouse, Sonic, Pugsy,Space Harrier amongst others. This machine was taking up valuable space in our spare room and we thought about getting rid of it however Peter complained so much we have decided to keep it.

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Time Pentium 1 100mhz

This one ran Windows 95 and we had Lotus Smartsuite supplied with the PC when I bought it, but when I saw Computer Shopper giving away Lotus 97 I couldn't resist it and installed it . I found it had web authoring tools so I started writing the web page using that. It seemed to do the job it was asked to so but got rather out of date.

Back in December 1999 the hard drive on the old pc was getting full up (only 30 out of 850 mb left - not much bigger than a CD now!) and things weren't working right so I decided to reformat the hard disk. I did all the checks I could think of - backed up my files, checked that I had driver disks and Win 95 CD. I re-read all my magazines and found an article about making sure you could read from your CD rom drive. It included making a boot up disk with all the drivers for the CD player. I tested this and then took the plunge and reformatted the disk. I then put in the boot up disk and started up again Yippee I got a dosprompt and I could change to the CD Rom Drive (D:) so I put in my Win 95 cd and stated setup. Oh No it hung and I had to reboot. It happened several times. I thought that's great I've done it now! To get round the problem I thought I would try installing DOS 5 which I have on my old pc That seemed to work and I went back to installing Win 95 yet again it wouldn't have it. Perhaps the cd was corrupted. I would have to borrow one from someone I knew perhaps. Just as I was about to switch off I got a Dos error message saying something about boot sector virus switch. It clicked, I had the boot sector virus protection enabled in the Bios. I rebooted the pc pressed delete and entered the bios and disabled the virus protection. I was then able to go on and reinstall windows. Phew I thought I'd lost it.

I went on and reinstalled various soundcard drivers but couldn't install win 95 VGA display drivers. I eventually had to go on line to get them as the original diskettes seemed to be incomplete. When I installed Freeserve and Internet Explorer etc I had some fun putting my address book back but copied it from the backup. I reinstalled X-Stream (see below for ISPs I have used) and got back online.

If you ever reformat your hard drive make sure you research it thoroughly to ensure you have all the correct drivers etc. and Good Luck to you.

We got a newer PC in 2004 and I gave the Pentium 1 to my Mother. Some of her senior citizen friends are quite impressed. She had this for quite a while but as we have now got our second Dell PC We gave her the 'Tiny' Pentium 111. Looking back at this P100 pc it seems incredible that the hard drive is only sightly bigger than a single data cd! However it did connect to the internet and could do limited browsing.

Tiny P111 650mhz Win 98.

This one came with a digital camera and we were quite impressed with it although we now realise there are better cameras out there. I wanted to network the P1 and P111 pcs and got a Linksys set of network cards which would network the two via our phone line. we could even share the internet connection. It worked quite well. It did involve having to reformat the P1 pc again and downloading drivers off the Net and contacting Linksys helpdesk but we got it going in the end. Although the PIII had 650mhz 128mb ram and 20gb HDD we found that it couldn't run everything we wanted and so we got our next PC a Dell Pentium IV. We kept the P111 going, disconnected the Linksys 'Telephone network' and used it on dial up for a while. Middle of 2005 we decided to network the P111 and the Dell P4 using Belkin wireless network router to allow sharing of the Wireless Internet connection via our Airzone Broadband connection. This worked quite well although file sharing was slow probably because we had Win 98 at one end and XP at the other! This PC came with a scanner. I thought I could use it with the XP machines but there are no drivers for it. We eventually gave my Mum this pc but thought the scanner would never be used and be too confusing so we kept thatfor the moment.

Dell P4 with 3ghz 512mb Ram 80gb had disk

We got our first Dell in December 2003 and It's great. The only thing is Windows XP Home Edition can't be configured to tweak the access for children. We set up the accounts for Peter with limited access and found he couldn't save his Petz in his Dogs and Cats game as the game saves in the Programs folder to which he wouldn't have access. Unfortunately he has now password protected his account. If we find he is being silly he knows we will delete his account!! .

Now we have only two pcs around the house (not including the Spectrum or Amstrad). We had given the old PI to my 76 year old Mother. She had been using a Bush Internet Box which l linked into her TV for accessing the internet which had been Ok, but a bit limited. Now she's got the P111 there's no stopping her. She now surfs the net like a pro!

Our second Dell uses a Pentium D processor. It is pretty fast and seems great. It came with XP Media edition which seems like overkill of combining Windows Media Player with lots of Internet links to subscription only services. One thing to watch out for was that Dell load up all sorts of software which have very little practical use. They included something called Digital Line Detector. a programme which ran all the time to check you wen't using a digital phone line. What a waste of resources! I think there's another bit of kit which checks if you have a DVD in your DVD player. I think you'd know if you'd just put one in and it didn't run! Theres another programme Installshield Manager which ensures you have the latest updates for software such as the CD burner I think this ought to be classified as spyware. If I want to update it I'll find the appropriate website! Most of these unwanted programs can be stopped by running MSCONFIG or removing the shortcut from theStartup folder. Oh By the way make sure you have anti spyware such as Ad-Aware by Lavasoft.

Consoles

We bought a Playstation in January 1999 for Gill's birthday and have since acquired lots of games! We've now got a PS 2 and Peter's Nintendo DS. He did have a GBA, and Gamecube. Peter was very brave and decided he wanted to trade them in for some new games. He was very pleased when he was able to swap them for an Eyetoy and a couple of new games. I don't think we have time for gardening now! His Nintendo DS works with wireless networking and he has been able to play online. Our network is secured and private but when Peter used his DS at a friends house they found they could get online via the neighbours wireless network which wasn't protected!

ISPs

Freeserve - My first - local rate calls - ok no probs but I had to pay for calls (Huh? thats not free!)
Xstream - alongside Freeserve as they were giving totally FREE access on 0800 line with no phone call charges. I don't think they are operating now. I wasn't keen about their menuing system. They had another line available at local call rates. When you dialed up on local rates the download speed was OK, but when it was free it was really slow. I think they slowed down the servers so you spend more time looking at adverts.
IC24 - I could connect at local rates but their claim of free connection at weekends failed to work for me so I gave up on them.
Callnet0800 - Yes another free ISP so long as you used their adapter dialler to route phone calls through them. But they went as well probably because they failed to send out any bills! .
Freeserve Unlimited - it cost £10 a month with £10 of free phone calls. But Good things always come to an end they put up the price and stopped the free phone calls.
Freeserve Anytime - we signed up for that and found it great apart from the two hour cut off and sometimes not being able to connect. Freeserve introduced the connection kit which would use a range of phone numbers to dial up to but this seems to have caused a lot of problems for some people according to the newsgroups. A strange thing about the connection kit was it interfered with the Microsoft game Freecell which comes with Windows 98.
Broadband - British Telecom refused to connect us to Broadband as they said we were too far away from the exchange :(
We got quite excited when we heard in the local press that our town was going to be completely covered by Broadband. However all they did was enabled the exchanges. The one we were on was already enabled and we were too far away. Despite contacting our local councillor, who had the same problem, we still can't get connected. We then found out that a local Wireless broadband company Airzone was extending coverage in our area and we went for it. It's more expensive than normal Broadband but I think it is worth it. Had difficulty connecting to newsgroups but have since found out how, and I had to upload these pages using Freeserve/Wanadoo dialup, I couldn't connect to the webservers using broadband.
Tiscali - In 2006 a number of ISPs decided we could now receive Broadband. I don't think BT had done anything to improve the wires and had just relaxed the rules around the state of the connection. We eventually settled on Tiscali because of the unlimited downloads (within reason) at the speed we were allowed. Now we would like to get 24Mbps! Come on BT! Airzone were good while we didn't have any broadband, but recently the signal seemed to be cutting out for no reason. So we plumped for the change. This also meant that we would move away from Freeserve/Wannadoo/Orange or whatever they call themselves nowadays.

Website

I started writing the Borderts (Bordert Terriers Etcetera) website back in Feb/Mar 1999 using Zyweb through Freeserve. It took an hour on line to get started. The results were quite good. But it took ages I only had a 14K modem at the time.

OK I also tried shareware versions of Coffeecup HTML and Dreamweave. Dreamweave seemed great. But I couldn't get them to connect up FTP. So I went to Tucows and downloaded FTPCOMM Its a small file and seems to work great although I then had to dial up using IE then switch to FTP for file transfer. Using Tiscali Broadband it is much easier to load up files via FTP.

I started looking at HTML at work and found that styles and formats were important so I got a book "Your Own Web Site on the Internet" by Oliver and Kantaris. I thought it gave more general information in one place than by surfing round waiting for clever tutorial pages to download.

When I gave up on Zyweb I started typing this using Notepad! I now use FrontPage Express and use Notepad to tweak the code.

I have experimented with adding sound and video to hopefully create a multimedia experience. Yes I know it's not very impressive compared to some professional sites but I'm quite pleased with the results. If it takes too long to download let me know. If you know some code to make it better tell me. I shall be eternally grateful.

Kaboom!

When I joined the Border Terriers Web Ring the Webmaster found my site was kicking her off the Internet. My apologies to her. It works for me and must for other people who visit but I noticed some errors in the code and have tried to fix it, so hopefully it all works ok. I have tried using one of the online tools to check the HTML but the various tools I have tried can't seem to agree. I have had a look at FrontPage 98 at work and even the textbooks say this can take over your site and introduce unwanted code!

I have been looking to find a menuing system that works. Freeserve don't allow Server Side Include (SSI) or PHP so I can't make includes tags work. I discovered a Flash animator (3D Flash Animator) which can do menus and used this for a while. I have since found out that it doesn't work with Firefox and I think IE doesn't like it too much so I have reverted to simple links in a table.

Up to now the website has been hosted on Freeserve but this was limited to 15mb so I signed up for Lycos webspace to hold other pages. Now I have Tiscali 50 Mb with possibility of 100 Mb I will move everything there. I have changed the name From Border Terriers Etcetera to Comfychair as Harry now forms only a part of the site. I'm not sure what sort of files are allowed. I think that SSI is not allowed so I am still stuck with using simple html menus. Now this is with Tiscali I will have to sort out the guestbook, the counter and the WebRing entries. I think that I will drop the webrings as they don't seem to be maintaining them anymore.

TV & Digital boxes

Yes we watch TV as well and although the digital reception checker in the UK says we cannot get Freeview we can and we have a couple of Digiboxes. The first one was basically a test to see if we could get reception a Philips DTR100. Not bad but kept on losing the signal. We upgraded our aerial and it improved it a bit but kept on cutting out. So in July 2006 we decided to try a better Digibox and paid £125 for a Digifusion FVRT145. This was great it held the signal and also recorded programmes onto an internal hard drive. It was just what we wanted. Until just before christmas 2006 when something happened it just seized up. Programmes took over a minute to change channel and menus took an age to appear, as for recording we think it recorded somthing about 30 minutes after it should have done but we were unable to play it back. We tried resetting factory defaults and formatting the hard drive even sent an email to Digifusion - we got a reply and guidance but it related to a different model. We could see no way of reparing it so back it went to Argos. We then went out and bought a Humax PVR 9200 which is great, it even has a usb port for uploading pictures and downloading programmes. The downloaded programmes can be converted to .mpg files using software which can be got on the internet and the quality of the mpgs is excellent. The files are large though and the download to pc can fail as the software provided with the Humax doesn't have error detection. I split programmes on the Humax before downloading them to PC and this seems to work ok. Only trouble now is the PC is filling up!

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Last Updated 06 January 2007