Dell Optiplex 755 Refurbished

Posted by Brad

I received an email several weeks ago from Buy.com advertising many older Dell models refurbished on sale. Some of these systems came with Windows XP which I needed for better compatibility with some of our apps. I settled on the Optiplex 755 model because I liked the small form factor to fit in tight spaces and it ranged in price between around $250 – 350 depending on the specs and if it included a monitor. I also decided to stick with one model so I could make a base image to save time getting other similar PCs ready to deploy.

Although these systems are advertised as refurbished, I thought it was interesting than one reviewer described them as “used.” These are off lease computers around 3 years old (I checked the date on the hard drives) and the exterior of the systems were a little beat up. But I reloaded XP and both units I bought are functioning just fine. These systems came with a 60 day warranty from the distributor U.S. Micro. As long as only the hard drives go out I figure I’m fine (remember I have a disk image for quick reload).

I checked Buy.com a few days ago, but they were sold out of all the different units including Optiplex 745 and 760 models. I did some searching and found similar deals at Overstock.com. I purchased 3 more systems from them so I will see in the next few days if they are from the same distributor. At these prices, I think if you need some cheap Windows XP systems with decent specs (dual core, minimum 1 GB RAM, minimum 80 GB hard drive) you might want to take a chance on these systems.

Sacred and Sacred Underworld (AKA Sacred Gold)

Posted by Brad

Sacred is a nice Diablo-like action RPG from Ascaron that came out several years ago. You can choose from several different character classes and explore the huge world of Ancaria. The main storyline is pretty basic and can be ignored for a while if you just want to explore the world, fight different creatures, and gain cool items. There are over 200 side quests in dozens of different regions of the world. There are some annoying fed ex quests where you go to point a and get something and bring it back; sometimes these are items, but sometimes you have to find or free people. There are some cool quests where you can choose between following the original quest mission to kill or capture someone, or turn on the quest giver usually because they are actually evil.

Occasionally you get a companion to fight with you. A couple of these cannot be killed; when they run out of hit points they fall unconscious for a while and then get up again. There are many monsters and people to fight in the game from goblins and orcs to undead to huge dragons. The enemies also scale to your level so they are not always easy to kill when you get higher level; however at some point in the game you become quite powerful and although there are tough enemies to fight like dragons, other enemies will try to overwhelm you with numbers to wear you down. One cool feature for characters is creating combo special moves which a combo master NPC in the game can create for you and you can assign to a hotkey. A smith can improve armor and weapons if they have 1 – 3 open expansion areas; you can also find weapon and armor collections to use together for extra bonuses. Your character earns levels throughout the game and earns skills points and an attributes point at each level. Items can also give bonuses.

I had a lot of fun with the original game, but the expansion can be skipped. I was happy I had the expansion only because it added two extra classes, one of which is the dwarf. I played the dwarf character through the game and loved that he had guns and explosives to use on enemies. Later in the game the flamethrower was useful in eliminating large groups of enemies. However, the expansion play was a complete waste. There are very few side quests in the expansion (side quests were part of what made the original game fun), and the game play is very linear. Unlike the original game, exploring is pretty much unavailable. I tried exploring a few times only to have to go through the same areas again because of the main storyline. Also, portals, which were good ways to travel quickly around the world in Sacred, are useless in the expansion except in one case where I used one to go to the next area in the story. Thus, I was not surprised after playing the expansion why I couldn’t find any hint files; you simply don’t need hints in the expansion because it is completely linear. And if you thought Sacred’s story was bad, try the expansion’s.

Since Sacred Gold is available now on GOG for $9.99 you will end up with the main game and the expansion for a good price. I think Sacred was a fun game and is worth playing if you like action RPGs like Diablo.

One quick piece of trivia on Sacred: the European version contains blood, but the blood was removed in the U.S. version to get a T rating. I played through the International English version so I saw the blood; it could be amusing and cool when enemy limbs were removed, but you probably won’t have a worse experience without the blood.

The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century

Posted by Brad

This is another large collection of short stories edited by Harry Turtle dove with Martin Greenberg. However, compared to the other collection I reviewed here, this book had many great stories. The book contains a total of 13 short stories, three of which are predecessors for successful novels by their authors: Hero by Joe Haldeman is part of his Forever War novel; Ender’s Game is a short version of Orson Scott Card’s novel of the same name; and Dragonrider by Anne McCaffrey is one of her first Pern stories.

I really enjoyed all of the stories in this book but one. I did not like the story by Cordwainer Smith because it was difficult to follow and imagine and not too interesting. McCaffrey’s story was not high on my list either; I had never read any Pern novels, but the story was more about character interaction and creating the world of Pern than great military battles. Maybe the fact that the characters’ great enemy was pieces of a planet that passed Pern every so often and destroyed organic life also suppressed my interest, especially compared to the other stories in this collection.

I had read The Last Article by Turtledove before in a collection of alternate history stories. While I like this story and it has military themes in it, I think Turtledove was pushing it by including it here. It is most definitely alternate history and not military science fiction, and contrasts greatly with the other stories here.

Of the remaining stories I liked, I think Second Variety by Philip K. Dick and Wolf Time by Walter Jon Williams were my favorites. I have a collection of Dick short stories that I have not read yet; after reading Second Variety I am anxious to read more. I liked Williams tale so much I purchased the three books in his Drake Maijstral series from Amazon. One of the good things about this collection is that each story is prefaced with information about the author and his or her works if one wants to explore other books by a particular author.

For fans of good science fiction with military themes, this collection of short stories will give you many hours of reading pleasure.

Real VNC Free and Windows 7

Posted by Brad

I just started deploying Windows 7 on computers a little at offices and started running into a problem with the Free Edition of VNC. The version is 4.1.3 I think (though the Personal Edition is up to around 4.6). The software installs, but the first thing you notice is the lack of an icon in the system tray. The service says it is running, but when you attempt to connect the connection is refused. I did some digging because I had a Windows 7 computer I had to make work with VNC. I found an article that pertains to Windows Vista but also applies to 7. The article mentions unregistering VNC as a service, then using the software in user mode. I had to run the unregister service command from the start menu as an administrator, but it worked. In user mode VNC will now work on Windows 7, but I also added a shortcut to the startup folder so VNC would load at login.

Apparently the Personal Edition does not have this problem (maybe Real VNC is in no rush to update their Free Edition and would rather have you buy a license). I have a license of the Personal Edition for one computer at each of our offices, but I am not going to buy a license to connect to the computers occasionally. I like the Personal Edition, though, because it encrypts the connection and lets you print from a remote computer locally.

Another online post suggested using the free version of TightVNC which works with Windows 7. I did try TightVNC and have decided to use it for now because it installs easy, works with Windows 7, and even creates a firewall rule for itself during install (something RealVNC’s Free Edition does not). Using RealVNC’s personal edition viewer I had no problem connecting to a computer running TightVNC.

Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate

Posted by Brad

This is an old late 1990’s Warhammer 40,000 universe game from SSI. Very good soundtrack and tough tactical combat. The game has a narrated story between missions with in game graphics for the video and audio. You get to equip one or more squads for each mission with different weapons and other items. There is no fog of war over the map (you also get a minimap on screen if you desire), but enemies only appear if a soldier can see them. Each soldier has a certain amount of action points per turn to move, fire, use equipment, etc. There are some decent sound effects and voice overs during combat.

I played the first couple of levels of this game on Windows 98, then I decided to retire that machine when it didn’t want to boot for me. I was able to get my old games off, including Chaos Gate, so I wouldn’t lose my progress. Chaos Gate looked like it would work on XP, but I found out it has some troubles there and is very buggy in general.

I was able to play the game somewhat and solve one annoying bug involving enemy fire by following the advice on a Warhammer 40K forum site. One problem I tried to overcome was patching the game to version 1.2. I didn’t even know the game had a patch, and it is very difficult to find after all these years. I did find it, but it wouldn’t work on my game (my version may have already included the patch as it was part of a 4 game set of Warhammer games, not a standalone version). However, on the fourth level of the game, after battling long and hard, I killed the last enemy on the level only to have the game crash. I tried again several times with the same result.

Unfortunately for now I will give up on this game. This would be a good one for GOG.com to pick up though.

Enable Administrator Account from Command Line

Posted by Brad

In dealing with that messed up computer mentioned in my last post, I learned a command for enabling the administrator account to use to fix a problem. In this case, the user account was not working and Windows would boot into a limited account desktop from which you could do very little. There were no other accounts available to log into to address the problem and Windows now disables the administrator account by default. However, from the limited account I was able to open a command prompt and type the following command to enable the administrator account:

net user administrator /active:yes

Changing the yes to no will disable an active administrator account.

Yet another reason not to write off the command line.

Active Boot Disk 5.3

Posted by Brad

I have already written a post on my good experiences with the Active Boot Disk product from LSoft technologies. Recently I had to work on a messed up system and I upgraded to the latest version of Active Boot Disk (5.3). The new version is more polished and includes instructions on downloading an open source anti-virus program that you can run while working inside of Active Boot Disk. The software includes other new features and updates to the included utilities, but overall I was impressed with how much easier it was to use.

If you haven’t used Active Boot Disk before, I highly recommend it for PC repair on software problems. It is also useful for backing up data from a bad hard drive (if you can read the drive), resetting user passwords, making partition changes, disk images, and wiping hard drives. The new version also lets you load drivers and other software into the boot CD image. If you have an older version of Active Boot Disk, check out the new features and see if it’s worth an upgrade.

Go to LSoft’s Active Boot Disk page for more information on this product.

Game of Thrones – Season One

Posted by Brad

I finished watching HBO’s Game of Thrones Season One and was very impressed with it. I have read four of the five books in Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series and I thought the first season’s ten episodes captured the events of first book very well. The acting was superb and the choice of actors well done. The settings were also well done. Since I finished the fourth book six years ago, season one was a nice refresher. I think I may wait until the last two books come out before finishing (or rereading) the series; anyone who has read one or more of the books can attest to the many characters and the complicated plot of the series. At least with the HBO series Martin might actually get the last two books out in the next four to five years so HBO can make all seven books in a row since they are doing one book per year.

If you haven’t seen the series or read any of the books but like Lord of the Rings style fantasy (with an adult flair) then read and watch immediately. Martin has created a very complicated and interesting world that holds nothing back; great characters, great plots, twists, and many deaths. This is definitely adult material, though.

I cannot wait until season two comes out in the spring!

The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century

Posted by Brad

The first thing I’ll say about this collection is that not all of the content lives up to the title. In fact, after reading the first several stories which comprise about the first third of the book, I was only happy with a couple out of eight stories. The others were either too short to be interesting or too political for my taste. The last six stories, though, ranged from okay to outstanding. My favorite of the book was “The Death of Captain Future” by Allen Steele, which was more of a straight science fiction story than alternate history. Ward Moore’s “Bring the Jubilee” was the longest story in the book, but very good as well; it dealt with an alternate Civil War history and the consequences of time travel.

Some other good stories included “Islands in the Sea” by Harry Turtledove (also an editor of the collection), “Dance Band on the Titanic” by Jack Chalker, and “Moon of Ice” by Brad Linaweaver. Turtledove deals with a history where Byzantium falls earlier to Moslems and Bulgaria must choose between Islam and Christianity. Chalker’s story is about a steamboat that follows a route through several different alternate Earths on each leg of its journey. Finally, Linaweaver spins a tale of a Nazi victory in WWII and the startling events that transpire in a German Europe in the 1960’s as told by Joseph Goebbels.

Overall, this collection is similar to many collections of short stories: some are good, one or two great, and many okay or not so good. Also, I had read three of these previously in other collections, so one also runs the chance of encountering stories more than once. I would not call this the best collection of alternate history stories from the 20th century; I have read many other stories that are better than some of the stories included. However, depending on your taste, there are some good stories here to read.