A Conversation for Talking Point: Good or Bad by Design
The Game
Fruitbat (Eric the) Posted Jul 22, 2001
Hi Spiny,
While I'm not up on the details (I'm still using a 266 G3), I suggest you look into AirPort technology. You might have to add a card to the Firewire bus or something, but the AirPort is designed to link computers up to 40 metres apart, through walls, down stairs and across open spaces. I've seen this stuff working off a laptop that was being carried by a Mac employee. If you can run a G4 you can probably run AirPort.
Worth checking out, anyway.
Fruitbat
The Game
Peet (the Pedantic Punctuation Policeman, Muse of Lateral Programming Ideas, Eggcups-Spurtle-and-Spoonswinner, BBC Cheese Namer & Zaphodista) Posted Jul 22, 2001
Fruitbat, the reason Spiny wanted to run it from a seperate room was that he didn't want to have a computer in that room because the noise of the system was intruding on his recordings. AirPort isn't much use without a computer... 
The Game
SPINY (aka Ship's Cook) Posted Jul 22, 2001
Aye, that's right , Peet, but a laptop would be quiet enough to do the job, it's just that I don't have the cash just now.
Thanks for the suggestion, Fruitbat: the G4 will indeed run Airport, but being an Apple device, I'm sure it would be costly. On another forum (yes, I'm allowed out of here occasionally 
) someone suggested using a games controller. I could program the buttons to do some of the commands I need for simple recording, so that's something I'm going to look into. And there's also the MIDI option, because there are a lot of MIDI controllers for audio recorders out there. Again I'm not sure what the practical cable length is, though.
The Game
Pyrex Muse of Unbreakable Space-age Wonder Glass, Student of Life, Keeper of the Seven Keys of Ventuslor Posted Jul 23, 2001
And then you could just build a completely new sound studio complete with sound proof glass and acoustic tiles and get a person to run the computer for you while you played...
The Game
Lentilla (Keeper of Non-Sequiturs) Posted Jul 23, 2001
Speaking of proprietary systems...
The all-time worst computer to purchase has to be the Packard Bell. Some friends of ours bought one about five years ago. When Windows 2000 came out, they decided to upgrade. To their horror, they found that Windows 95 was burned into the Packard Bell motherboard. Utterly useless.
The best way to acquire a PC is to build it yourself, I think. As long as all your drivers are in order, and all your devices mainstream, you're better off - and you'll know how to fix it if something goes wrong. We've got several parts for different PCs, but we need a new or recent motherboard and case to upgrade substantially. Like Peet was saying, we'll need to spend about $300 or so to get things going... and I still need a daughtercard for the Amiga 4000.
The Game
Peet (the Pedantic Punctuation Policeman, Muse of Lateral Programming Ideas, Eggcups-Spurtle-and-Spoonswinner, BBC Cheese Namer & Zaphodista) Posted Jul 24, 2001
Packard Bell customer support is worse than useless if you're trying to upgrade. I tried to find out what spec. of memory was required to upgrade an out-of-warranty machine from the supplied 8MB to at least 32MB. Customer Support said they weren't even able to confirm if the machine *could* be upgraded unless we bought an extended warranty, and that paying over £100 for an extended warranty would in no way ensure that we would be able to perform the required upgrade...
I had fitted 32MB of standard (72 pin 60ns) RAM, but kept getting a "blue screen of death". Further to the above, they said that with or without an extended warranty they would not look at a machine containing non-PB parts, so the only way to tell if this machine would run with 32MB of RAM was to buy 32MB of expensive RAM from them (non-refundable) then if that didn't work we had to buy the extended warranty, where there still remained a chance they would tell us that the specific model we had (P120) didn't support that much RAM!
Three words to remember about Packard Bell PCs if you plan to perform any form of upgrade in the future: Avoid, Avoid, Avoid!!!!!
The Game
Pyrex Muse of Unbreakable Space-age Wonder Glass, Student of Life, Keeper of the Seven Keys of Ventuslor Posted Jul 24, 2001
Ahh the infamous Packard Bell... They used to use those at our school, Oh how I hated them, they are worse than Apples! Oh how their slow processor (no Idea why it was so slow) and poor design led to the degridation of all that is holy in computers... When our school got a grant for new computers they bought somthing much better than that luckly... But a Pacard bell with the same stats (Hard drive, Ram, and Processor speed) as my computer would somehow be ten times as slow!
The Game
Peet (the Pedantic Punctuation Policeman, Muse of Lateral Programming Ideas, Eggcups-Spurtle-and-Spoonswinner, BBC Cheese Namer & Zaphodista) Posted Jul 24, 2001
When I was fixing computers for a living, everyone in the workshop used to refer to them as "Knackard Bell"... 
The Game
Lentilla (Keeper of Non-Sequiturs) Posted Jul 25, 2001
Our friends refer to it as the 'Packard Hell.'
The Game
Lentilla (Keeper of Non-Sequiturs) Posted Jul 25, 2001
Oh - and Circuit City refuses to work on them!
The Game
Lentilla (Keeper of Non-Sequiturs) Posted Jul 25, 2001
Oh - and Circuit City refuses to work on them!
The Game
Pyrex Muse of Unbreakable Space-age Wonder Glass, Student of Life, Keeper of the Seven Keys of Ventuslor Posted Jul 25, 2001
Good for them... Packards are probably the worst computer system that is built... next to maybe a Tandy... of corse... that is all another story...
Key: Complain about this post
The Game
- 81: Fruitbat (Eric the) (Jul 22, 2001)
- 82: Peet (the Pedantic Punctuation Policeman, Muse of Lateral Programming Ideas, Eggcups-Spurtle-and-Spoonswinner, BBC Cheese Namer & Zaphodista) (Jul 22, 2001)
- 83: SPINY (aka Ship's Cook) (Jul 22, 2001)
- 84: Pyrex Muse of Unbreakable Space-age Wonder Glass, Student of Life, Keeper of the Seven Keys of Ventuslor (Jul 23, 2001)
- 85: SPINY (aka Ship's Cook) (Jul 23, 2001)
- 86: Lentilla (Keeper of Non-Sequiturs) (Jul 23, 2001)
- 87: Peet (the Pedantic Punctuation Policeman, Muse of Lateral Programming Ideas, Eggcups-Spurtle-and-Spoonswinner, BBC Cheese Namer & Zaphodista) (Jul 24, 2001)
- 88: Pyrex Muse of Unbreakable Space-age Wonder Glass, Student of Life, Keeper of the Seven Keys of Ventuslor (Jul 24, 2001)
- 89: Peet (the Pedantic Punctuation Policeman, Muse of Lateral Programming Ideas, Eggcups-Spurtle-and-Spoonswinner, BBC Cheese Namer & Zaphodista) (Jul 24, 2001)
- 90: Lentilla (Keeper of Non-Sequiturs) (Jul 25, 2001)
- 91: Lentilla (Keeper of Non-Sequiturs) (Jul 25, 2001)
- 92: Lentilla (Keeper of Non-Sequiturs) (Jul 25, 2001)
- 93: Pyrex Muse of Unbreakable Space-age Wonder Glass, Student of Life, Keeper of the Seven Keys of Ventuslor (Jul 25, 2001)
More Conversations for Talking Point: Good or Bad by Design
Write an Entry
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book. It has been compiled and recompiled many times and under many different editorships. It contains contributions from countless numbers of travellers and researchers."