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Sept. 22, 1999 - Bill Cooper
01:00:42
Computer Puzzle
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Time Text
White Allah.
He's the power of the dark.
Light's power for the broken.
The kind of power I so desire.
Light's power for the broken.
All right.
Oh yes.
All right.
All right.
Yeah.
All right.
All right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
You're listening to the hour of the time.
I'm William Cooper.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
You're listening to a very, very happy man.
God made the entire universe, the whole world, all of the animals, plants, and man in six days, and on the seventh day he rested.
I couldn't even fix one stupid computer in six days, and it wasn't until half of the seventh day that I finally sat down and put my brain to work and discovered that the solution was so simple that I couldn't see the forest for the trees.
I had become lost in the trees.
And I mean lost.
Wait until you hear what it was, but I'm not going to tell you right off the bat.
We'll take some calls and see if any of you can guess.
I'll tell you what the symptoms were.
I've already told you several times, but I'll tell you again what the symptoms were and we'll see if any computer experts can guess what I figured out after finally sitting down and actually looking at the problem as a whole instead of each individual little tree.
And all of a sudden I knew.
Oh my gosh, I've been so dumb once again in my life.
Which proves that William Cooper is not God.
Which I've told you a million times already.
You're not God either.
And neither are any of these stupid idiots who think they are.
That fool last night who tried to disrupt the broadcast and cause some dissension there.
Really picked the wrong night to try it because I was thoroughly exasperated and very, very, very pissed off, not at anybody, at that stupid computer and at my inability to fix it.
You see, I had to fix it.
I had to fix it.
It was part of the equipment that was purchased by the donations Of all of you out there, the majority of the money for that particular piece of equipment came from my good friends Rick and Barbara Martin.
So I couldn't give up.
But this morning I told Doyle, I said, Doyle, after six days, this is the seventh day.
If I can't fix that computer today, and if nobody who's called tried to help me, all of these computer experts, and they are, And lots of people called and tried to help me and gave me their best advice and I followed it.
And I want to thank all of you who did that.
Even though your solutions didn't do it, you did help me fix some minor problems.
I've got to tell you that.
And I think you're all going to be kicking yourself like I am when you find out what the problem was.
See, I had to fix it.
I could not.
I just could not.
I couldn't trash a computer that we paid $5,000 for that was donated.
That was donated.
I couldn't do it.
See, normally I wouldn't spend six days And the minimum, I worked on that thing every day for 6 days was 12 hours each day and sometimes much longer than that if I wasn't sleepy or if I could get another cup of coffee or another glass of sun tea down my throat, I would stay up.
There was a couple of nights there that I stayed up until 3 or 4 in the morning.
Ask Pauline and Doyle when they came in at the normal time in the morning and I was still in bed.
Because I'd just gone to bed.
I had to fix it.
I couldn't let you guys down that donated the money to purchase that piece of equipment.
It wasn't just the computer.
It's all the boards and the software and the drivers and the drives and everything that we had to purchase to go along with it to make it work for video editing.
Well, I've got to tell you right now, it works better than it has ever worked in its entire history.
it is screaming!
Renders video fast and shows full screen broadcast quality video on the 21 inch monitor with no problem.
Oh.
Oh, it is such a relief.
You just have no idea.
How this thing had driven me to distraction.
And on the evening of the sixth day, we have to have a fool in the audience.
I want you to listen to this, ladies and gentlemen.
I want you to listen to this.
And then, I want you to remember that fool for the rest of your life, because, indeed, he is a fool.
His purpose was not honorable.
You see, I recognized his voice and we've been plagued with this fool many times before.
Many times before.
And true to form, when I came in to rebut what he said, he started just yelling into the phone and would not let me have my say so that then I could shut up and let him have his say.
So I turned the pot down so that I could say what I wanted to say.
And all the time he was screaming into the phone, I could hear him in my earphones.
You couldn't hear a word he was saying.
This person is just absolutely, truly, and always has been an obnoxious hole in the ground.
If you get my drift.
He's a jerk.
First class.
Has plagued this broadcast many times in the past.
And I'm sure plagues many others.
For he truly is one of those despicable jerks that you just wish didn't even exist.
But they did.
See, his whole purpose was to disrupt the broadcast.
Because I was not hosting the broadcast, he thought he could get away with it.
But he'll never get away with it on the hour of the time, and neither will anybody else.
If you were to talk to him privately, he would tell you that he believes wholeheartedly in free speech.
The truth is, he does not.
If he did, he wouldn't be doing that kind of thing.
This is my broadcast.
It's not your broadcast.
It's my broadcast.
I pay for it.
This is my free speech media, not yours.
I don't give a damn whether you like what I say on this broadcast or not.
I don't care if you listen to this broadcast or not.
The only people in this whole world I care about are people who believe in freedom, And that listen to this broadcast to get some kind of information out of it that will help them in their battle with me and many others to save freedom for this country and for the world.
That's the only thing I care about.
I don't care about anything else.
I don't care about ratings.
I don't make any money from this broadcast.
Never have in its entire history made a penny from it.
It costs us a lot of money to produce, to pay for, And it cost me an awful lot of time and effort.
So, for all you little wacko, nut, fool, idiot, traitor, Marxist, puke-faced pigs, people who claim to believe in free speech but really don't, or whatever other category you fall into, let me acquaint you with the dial on your radio.
It's called, if you don't like a radio host or a radio show, you turn the dial and find something that you love to listen to.
And if you can't do that, then you're sick.
You're mentally ill.
You're most probably a masochist.
And if you continue to listen to what you don't like and what you cannot stand, you need to see a psychiatrist.
You are in great need of mental health care.
And if you think for one instant that I care whether you're listening or not, or that I care whether you like me or not, or whether you like the hour of the time or not, or whether you like what I say or not, you are hallucinating.
You are deluded.
You have delusions of grandeur.
You are a megalomaniac.
Because I can tell you honestly and truthfully I don't give a rat's ass what you think about anything in this whole world.
Period.
And you can take that right down to the bank and deposit it.
It's as good as gold.
You see, I know what free speech is all about.
I know what freedom is all about.
And you will have absolutely no effect here.
And anytime you try to impose your puny little will upon me or this broadcast, I will chop you down to your toes into hamburger meat, grind you up in the garbage disposal, and flush you down the toilet just as quickly and as thoroughly as I possibly can.
Because you have no value here.
If you listen to this broadcast long enough, You'll find out who has value here.
And it certainly was not last night's fool.
He never will, he never has.
Now listen to this, ladies and gentlemen, and then remember that fool.
Just listen.
I've got something to say about that.
I think that the caller brought up a good question, and Pauline answered it absolutely correctly.
How in the world can a little baby, just a few days after it's born, make an intelligent decision, or any decision at all, about what happens to his body?
They can't, and therefore it's wrong.
Because what you're doing is butchering the baby's body.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not telling you not to do this.
What I'm telling you is, any time you intrude upon any person's personal body themselves, you have committed a terrible, terrible assault in which, if they were not able to make the decision or defend themselves, you've committed a crime, in my personal opinion.
If a man wants to be circumcised and he's of age to make the decision intelligently based upon research and information, I have no problem with that.
But taking a little baby who has no choice in the matter and subjecting them to the pain and the terrible trauma associated with such an event is wrong in my personal opinion.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, if there's anybody in the entire world that can point fault, any fault whatsoever with what I said, then you are someone who does not believe in any form whatsoever of free speech, nor do you tolerate the opinions of others.
And I really, frankly, don't give a damn about you or what you think.
Like I said, take that to the bank and deposit it.
It's as good as gold.
I will not tolerate intrusions upon this broadcast by people who have any other agenda than contributing intelligently and politely.
You better take that to heart.
If you've been listening to this broadcast for very long, you know I don't tolerate it.
I don't tolerate fools.
I do not tolerate stupidity.
I will tolerate ignorance.
I will tolerate someone's anger if they're politely angry.
I will allow anyone to pose their argument if they have an intelligent and polite argument to pose.
You all know that.
But I will not tolerate intrusions such as that which was attempted last night in which that fool has attempted in the past.
We'll not tolerate it.
Absolutely, we will not tolerate it, ladies and gentlemen.
So, I suggest that you all keep that in mind.
And if you don't like me or this broadcast, change the dial.
If you can't change the dial and you must be flogged by that which you hate on a nightly basis, you are in dire need of psychiatric care.
something sick about you.
Very, very, very sick.
Please subscribe to my channel.
International Short Week. This is the planet.
Another hour of free speech.
Ha! Ha! Ha! Woo!
Okay, let me tell you the symptoms of this computer.
And then we'll open the phones.
And we'll hear what it is that you think was wrong with it.
Here are the symptoms.
First I'll tell you what kind of computer it is.
It's a dual Pentium II 300MHz processor motherboard.
In other words, it has two 300MHz Pentium II processors.
It's a powerful computer.
It has a fast track RAID controller with two 9GB drives attached to it.
It has a nine point something, I forget the exact number, nine point something gigabyte SCSI drive.
Ultra wide drive.
It has a six gigabyte C drive that holds all the programs and things, and it has two partitions on it.
It has a Targa 1000 Pro board in it.
That's for video capture and rendering and And, uh, all, you know, analog video stuff.
It's an analog board.
It has a, uh, Pinnacle DV300 for digital video.
So we have an analog board and a digital board.
It has a, uh, 3DLabs Fantastic Video, uh, board for the, uh, CRT for the, uh, For the monitor.
And it has over 24 megabyte of RAM just on that video board.
It's for the display of full screen broadcast quality video with no jitters, no jerks, no nothing.
Just like you would see it in the movie or on a TV screen.
A good TV screen.
The best TV screen.
It has, uh, also in it... Well, I've missed something.
No, I haven't missed anything.
It has a, uh, AWE64 Creative, uh, sound card in it.
It has also a, uh, a modem.
a modem, 33.6 bar of modem. And that's it.
and number four, you can have a good life.
That's what this thing has in it.
Oh, it has a floppy drive.
Three and a half inch floppy drive.
And a CD.
I think it's a 24X CD player.
So it has all of those things.
And the software that's on it is Windows NT 4 with Service Pack 5.
It has Internet Explorer 4 and Outlook, which is the email program.
It has Adobe Premiere 5.1.
The Targa software, which is video capture and rendering software and audio software.
It also has Adobe After Effects.
And it has the DV-300 software on there which is digital video capture rendering, you know, and it has programs that show the full screen video and all of this kind of stuff.
And that's all.
Nothing else on there.
There will probably be Photoshop 5 And maybe one or two other things.
One that's a plug-in for Adobe Premiere that controls cameras and tape decks for capturing and recording video.
So that's what it has.
So we'll open the phones now.
520-333-4578.
And let me tell you, if you all write that down, let me tell you what the symptoms were.
Here's the symptoms.
Every time we booted up the computer, sometimes it would go directly to the blue screen of death.
If you know anything about Windows NT, you know that's the end.
It's all over.
You have to reboot the computer or just shut it down.
Sometimes when we rebooted the computer, it would go right back to the blue screen of death, and sometimes it would go right into Windows NT, and we could even work in NT for a little while, maybe as long sometimes as 30 minutes.
And then the blue screen of death would come up and every time the blue screen of death comes up it tells you which driver or which program or whatever it is, is causing it to go to the blue screen of death.
And every single time it was something different.
It was either a driver conflict, an IRQ conflict.
Every time it was something different for six and a half days.
This was happening no matter what we did.
And there was a couple of times when we thought we had it fixed.
Everything was working right and we were just clicking buttons and going everywhere and you know for as long as 30 minutes and loading programs and stuff and boy I was just so happy and enthusiastic and then blue screen of death.
Until today.
I sat down today and figured that out.
So, the phones are open.
520-333-4578.
We'll see if there's anybody out here who can do what I did.
Let me tell you something.
It can only be one of two possible problems.
And they're simple.
If you just think about it for a minute.
And if you know anything about computers, you see, I knew this.
But I get lost in all of these different problems.
And so every time the blue screen of death came up and told me there was a conflict with some other driver or some other IRQ or something like that, I was switching boards and I was, you know, removing drivers and trying to go on the internet on another computer and get the updated drivers so that we wouldn't have these conflicts.
Hmm.
Well, we've got a call.
Let's see if somebody has the answer.
Good evening, you're on the air.
Yes.
Bill, if I was going to make a heavy-headed guess on that, I would say that it was probably a flaky memory module, RAM module.
Nope, that's not it.
Okay, that's my shot.
Well, that's a good shot, but that's not it.
And if you think about it a little longer, you'll find out that that couldn't possibly be the problem.
Ah, okay.
Okay, but thanks for calling.
Thanks for trying.
Numbers 520-333-4578.
If you know anything about computers, give it a try.
You know, you can't be any more embarrassed than I am, because I knew what this problem was on the first day that it occurred, but I didn't sit down and really evaluate it as I should have.
Instead, I looked at the blue screen of death and I saw, oh, it's this driver right here, or it's this DLL file right here, and I would go and try to correct that stuff.
Instead of sitting down and realizing it couldn't possibly be that.
And there's a reason it couldn't possibly be that.
I mean, the first couple of times, yeah, it could have been.
But after that, I mean, it keeps coming up and every time it's a different problem.
You can't, it can't possibly happen in any computer.
Especially for six days.
And every problem's different.
And you know, with all the drivers and boards and combinations of IRQs and DMA's and all of these other things.
There's literally thousands of possible things that can go wrong.
And I literally thought that this computer was disintegrating right before my very eyes.
And of course I was wrong.
520-333-4578 is the number.
If you know anything about computers, call me.
Give it a shot.
I know a lot of you called me and helped me out, or tried to help me out, and I really, really appreciate that.
I really do.
I was exasperated.
I was lost.
I thought, oh my gosh, you know I've been messing with computers for years and I don't in any manner in my wildest dreams consider myself to be a computer expert.
But I do know a lot about computers because I've learned the hard way.
Simply by being broke and having to fix the darn things whenever they go wrong.
And this one, for six and a half days, literally beat me to death.
And I'm exhausted from working on this thing.
Did you ever stare at a computer screen for 12 to 20 hours a day for six and a half days?
Well, that's exactly what I've been doing.
And staring at the inside.
Changing boards around.
Going on the internet to get new drivers and updates because I thought maybe my software is old and maybe I just didn't update it and it's just got to be updated and then if I do that everything will be fine.
And sometimes that's exactly what could be wrong but not in this instance.
It was a cold hard lesson One of the lessons that I've been trying to teach all of you, and that is to think.
Take all the available facts, and don't run with any of them.
Sit down and try to look at the big picture and figure out what's really going on, what the truth is.
And I didn't follow my own advice.
Good evening, you're on the air.
Hey, Paul, this is Doug.
Hi, Doug.
Can I guess?
Yeah.
It's probably something real simple.
The first thing I take a shot at is cooling fans.
No, but you're awful close.
Power supply.
Nope.
Ah, close.
Yeah, you're close.
Man, because I've seen things blue screen when they overheat.
Yeah, they will do that when they overheat.
You better bet your life.
Well, I'm going to think about this one.
Okay.
Keep listening.
Okay.
Thanks for calling.
5-2-0-3-3-3-4-5-7.
That's my good friend Doug.
Doug is one of the people who called and tried to help.
And, uh, he did help with a couple of things.
And, uh, he's going to help with a couple of more things.
I mean, he told me about a couple of drives that we've got to get that are not very expensive.
And, uh, hold Buku, and I mean lots and lots and lots of stuff, excellent for video, and fast!
Boom!
Fast!
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Hi, Bill.
This is Greg from Indiana.
Hi, Greg.
I'm going to make just a wild guess.
I'm a Macintosh user, so hopefully it isn't one that I'm going to have, but could it have something to do with the battery for the clock chip?
No.
Okay.
That's my guess.
Nope.
It wasn't that.
Have a good evening, Bill.
Thank you.
And thanks for calling.
520-333-4570.
These are all good guesses, but they're not right.
If you just look at the description of the problem that I told you, you'll see instantly that it could not be those things.
Just absolutely could not be.
You can't have... You see, if you have a problem in a computer, that problem will repeat itself over and over again.
You will not have a different problem every time you boot.
Even if it's overheated.
Good evening, you're on the air.
Hi Bill, it's a pleasure and honor to speak with you.
Well, thank you.
I spent 13 years as an engineer at Digital Equipment and I'll probably embarrass myself, but I do know what you're going through, or went through.
I would guess that it was probably something to do with plug and play not being set up in the BIOS.
Nope, that wasn't it.
I've been through plug-and-play problems before trying to install a board that required plug-and-play and not realizing that NT didn't automatically install the plug-and-play drive.
Sometimes it jettisons a perfectly good setup, too, on power-up.
You'll have it running good for months, turn it on one day, bingo, it doesn't work, turn it on again and it's fine.
You're absolutely correct.
It will do that.
That's a good idea.
Okay, well, thank you.
Thanks for trying.
Bye-bye.
Thanks for calling.
Yeah, you're all going to kick yourself when you find out what the problem was.
I mean, the minute I sat down, I mean, it wasn't three minutes after I sat down and really looked at what was happening, I knew exactly what the answer was, and I knew that there was only two things I had to check.
The first one was easy, and it was it.
It was the problem.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Yeah, hi.
How are you doing, Bill?
Good.
Thank you.
I had the same thing happen to me about four or five weeks ago.
Not when running NT, but I was running 98.
I kept on getting a blue screen at death.
I tried everything.
I had an old computer.
I tried going online, downloading stuff and everything.
I wound up just using the computer as a footstool for a while.
I got so aggravated with it, I guess I spent hours, I was late to work in the morning because I'd be spending all night on this thing.
What I wound up doing was changing the motherboard.
I went with a different brand, and it seemed to clear everything up.
There was a compatibility problem with the chipset on the board with the processor I was using.
Well, that's not the problem, but that's one of the only two that was possible.
Right.
Early on, I thought, you know, same thing, over-temperature, and I tried a new fan.
That helped a little bit.
I tried, like I said, changing my IRQs.
I tried working in the BIOS.
Yeah, I did all that.
I even upgraded the BIOS.
Yeah, I did that too.
I tried to flash a new BIOS.
You had to download a new flash utility.
You even got to take the board and the makers of the board and say,
Oh, it works fine for us.
And I did that.
You know what?
I'll just try another motherboard.
That too.
I tried flashing a new BIOS.
You had to download a new flash utility.
You even got tech support?
Right.
I said, you know what, I'll just try another motherboard and put it in, turn it on and
it's just working like butter now.
Well that is one of the only two possible problems that it could have been.
Right.
But that's not the problem that fixed it.
Well, I'm having a really tough time receiving your show so hopefully maybe I'll be able
to do static and find out what your answer is.
Okay.
Take care.
Thanks for calling.
Well, he got half of the problem right, because what he just said was one of the solutions that I came up with today when I sat down and really looked at this problem.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Hi, fellas.
It's Curve again from Buffalo.
Hi.
Let me just take a stab.
You're saying it's something kind of simple.
I would guess one of two possibilities.
An IDE cable, which is not sitting in the socket right.
It was one of those stupid little plastic metal two-pronged jumpers.
Nope, that's not it.
Not even close?
Nope.
Oh, bummer.
Oh well.
Alright, thanks.
You're welcome.
Bye.
5-2-0-3-3-3-4-5-7-8.
You're all going to kick yourself just like I did.
I've been kicking myself all day long.
I wasted six and a half days.
Messing with this thing when I knew on the first day, if I had just sat down at the end of the first day, after this computer had presented me with eight or nine different problems, I would have known.
It can't, you know, this never happens.
Good evening, you're on the air.
Bill Cooper?
Yes.
LT from Greenville, Texas.
Hi, LT.
I didn't have a computer to do that, but I had a projector and I was blocking the band.
Oh, you're talking about overheating?
Yeah, it was overheating because I had something sitting by the vent.
I was going to throw it away until I realized that.
No, that's not it.
That previous caller already ventured that.
Yeah, I heard that.
He said a cooling fan, but I was thinking maybe he just had a book sitting next to the vent or something like that.
Oh, no.
If he just said cooling fan, and if it had been overheating, I would have given him that.
I can't wait to find out.
I'm going to listen.
Okay.
Thanks for calling.
5, 2, 0, 3, 3, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8.
It really is very simple.
And it's just incredible that nobody has guessed it yet.
And I know there's a lot of people out there who deal with computers every day.
And you know, we'll all learn something from this.
Well, I learned a big lesson.
You see, at the end of that first day, I should have sat down and I should have done what I did today.
I should have sat down today and I should have said, what is this computer doing?
What is it showing me?
And what can I deduce from that evidence?
Good evening, you're on the air.
Yeah, Jim from Pennsylvania.
Hi, Jim.
The problem sounds like it was common to everything there.
Yeah, why?
Incoming power, you're having a lot of problems with your thunderstorms.
No.
No?
No.
I'll take a shot.
Okay.
Thank you.
Thanks for calling.
You guys are repeating what earlier callers have already said.
An earlier caller said power supply, too.
But that's okay.
Keep guessing, you know, and we'll see what we can come up with.
Good evening, you're on the air.
Hi, it's Louise Rader from New Chicago.
Hi, Louise.
I'm going to take a big stab here.
Yeah?
For working with Windows 3.1.
Now this thing gave a different error problem each time.
Yeah, every time.
For six and a half days.
And how big is your disk?
Well, we have several disks.
There's two nine gigabyte ID, what do you call it?
Ultra ID drives.
And you have them partitioned?
No, not those.
And then there's one almost 10 gigabyte SCSI drive.
It's not partitioned either.
I mean, it's partitioned, but it's one partition.
It's one drive, OK?
OK.
And then the C drive is partitioned.
There's a partition that holds all of the programs, and then there's another partition, which I just use kind of like a scratch drive for video editing.
But where's the operating system residing?
Where's Windows NT sitting?
It's on the C drive.
It's on the C drive?
Yeah.
You know what it sounds like?
It almost sounds like a swap file is somehow either overrunning itself for its parameters or overrunning a partition.
Nope, that's not it.
Well, like I said, I used to.
Well, it's a good try.
Yeah, I know.
I've had it with mine.
Hasn't happened.
Okay.
Well, I'll keep listening.
You're the right answer.
Thanks, Louise.
Bye-bye.
Louise is a long-time listener and contributor to everything that we do.
Good lady.
520-333-4578.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Phil, this is Doug again.
Hi, Doug.
You did mention that it's running faster now.
Yeah.
CPU.
You got it.
That's exactly what it was.
It was one of the two, and it was the first one that I pulled out.
I reached in and I just said eeny, meeny, miny, moe.
I pulled one out and unplugged its power supply and rebooted and everything was fine.
And it's been fine ever since.
It's been running faster.
It's been running better than it's ever run.
It is just screaming and doing things.
It's beautiful.
With only one CPU.
Yeah, with only one CPU.
It must have had a problem from the start.
It must have and I never knew it.
See, it could only be one or two problems.
When I sat down and looked at what was happening, it could only be a CPU or the motherboard.
After hearing your full description tonight, it kind of made things a little more obvious.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But you see, I was looking at all these little problems.
I didn't step back and look at the whole thing and say, there couldn't possibly be all these problems in this computer.
It's absolutely impossible.
Can't happen.
And if I'd have done that, I would have known, gee, this has got to be one of the CPUs or both of the CPUs of the motherboard.
Those are the only two possible solutions.
And I just reached in and pulled out a processor, a CPU, and that was it.
Boy, I am too.
Well, I thought I was losing my sanity.
And I just couldn't give up though.
I mean, this is the longest I've ever worked on a computer that was down.
And I did it because the value in that computer is the donations that people made to purchase it That came from their loyalty and their caring and all of their dreams and hopes that we may be able to change things for the better in the future.
And I just could not let them down.
I couldn't do it.
And so I kept working at it and plugging away and I figured, you know, if I didn't get it solved today, either that computer was going to get gutted out and we'd rebuild a new one from scratch with what would work.
Or I was going to go off to the loony bin somewhere.
Well, we're glad that didn't happen.
Well, I am too, to tell you the truth.
And I'm exhausted.
I'm going to get a good night's sleep tonight, I'll tell you, right now.
That's good.
Okay, we'll get off the phone and let you continue with the show.
Okay, thanks, Eric.
Thanks, Paul.
You're welcome.
Well, that's it, folks.
And everybody out there who works with computers, remember that.
You know, it was the simplest thing, and I didn't even think to try it until after six and a half days had gone by.
But that, you know, that's true.
It could only be one of two solutions.
It could either be a CPU, or both CPUs are the motherboard, and the chances of being both CPUs are pretty slim, unless there was some kind of power surge that just blew them both or something, but that didn't happen.
Good evening, you're on the air.
Yeah, Bill, this is Bruce in Omaha.
Hi, Bruce.
I'm an old computer geek.
I've got a couple of questions about that.
Yeah, go ahead.
A dual CPU, one of them should be like a master and the other a slave, right?
No, they work... Independently?
Yeah.
So there's some sort of a controller that should control which has control, right?
Yeah.
You understand what I'm saying?
Yeah, but they work together to process information.
Well, it's kind of like a... But it's not a master and slave thing.
Kind of like a vector processor.
I don't know.
But it's not a master and slave thing.
The only jumpers that you have to set is the speed.
Hello.
Hello.
I'm listening.
I said the only jumper that you have to set is the speed.
There's no other jumper.
Well, I was wondering that possibility that There might have been some sort of a hardware priority contention between the two.
And it might not have made any difference which one you pulled out.
As long as you pulled out one, then the thing would work fine.
Well, you could be absolutely right.
But since it's working real good right now, I'm not going to test that by putting this back in and pulling the other one.
I'm not going to do that.
Don't mess with me.
You're right.
I understand that.
I've been there with problems on computers.
You know what's funny?
I'm an old Honeywell type myself.
I used to know Geco's real well.
I've got some worse stories on Gecko's operating system.
You're out for days trying to figure out what's going on.
Computers can be the greatest help that you could possibly imagine.
I mean you can process amounts of information and do tons of work in a short period of time that would take 500 people to do without it.
You got it.
So they're a tremendous boon and benefit to mankind.
But they're also the most exasperating, dangerous things that you can think of.
Oh yes.
Even my old Commodore 64 can do a lot of things.
And I'm still using my old 64.
And when it all comes down to the final wire, it will be the computer that will allow those in power to enslave the human race.
If we let that happen.
If we bow down to the computer.
That's right.
We don't have to bow down to the computer.
We have a computer in our heads.
It's called our brain.
That's right.
Thank you.
I got some more stories I'll talk to you later about, like an Apple Macintosh.
If I ever get the time, just sit down with it and figure it out.
Okay.
Talk to you later.
Thank you.
And thanks for calling.
Yeah, well this has been a fun broadcast.
It has not been fun past six and a half days, but this afternoon for me has been fun.
And seeing what this computer can do with video has just blown my mind.
It's the first time we've really had video in it.
It's the first time that we've actually begun to put it to use for what it's supposed to be, for what it was purchased for.
And it's incredible.
It's an incredible machine.
And the software is incredible.
This Premiere 5.1 is incredible.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Bill?
Yes.
I'll give you a little tip when you're hunting around on boards or trying to find a suspect ship.
They make stuff called coal shot, which is essentially a little bit of Freon in a can with a little spout on it like WD-40 or something.
Yeah, I'm familiar with it.
They go around zapping them, and when you hit the miscreant, you know, things quiet down all of a sudden.
It can be handy to have around.
Oh.
And, you know, I mean, it doesn't matter whether it's a radio set or not.
Are you saying that whatever it is, it's malfunctioning?
Well, I'm trying to say, often those CPU chips and other chips like them, If they have instability, it's often thermal in nature, and you cool them way down, and they'll temporarily quiet down on you.
That's what I was going to ask you.
If you were saying the malfunctioning unit, whatever it was, was overheated.
Yeah, it's quite possible.
I can't say for sure, but what I'm saying is it's a nice diagnostic if you're wondering, gee, which chip on this thick board here is acting up on me.
You go around spritzing them, and all of a sudden you spritz one, and the thing quiets, Well, now that we've solved that, we'll just open the phones to whatever you want to talk about.
I mean, negative information doesn't help you, you know what I'm saying, but positive
520-333-4578.
information does.
Sure, we look for that all the time.
Keep the can in the shop.
Great, thank you.
Take care, bye bye.
Thank you for calling.
Well, now that we've solved that, we'll just open the phones to whatever you want to talk
about.
520-333-4578.
Good evening, you're on the air.
I called you before, I guess last Thursday was.
The only thing that I've noticed about those Pentium II processors is that sometimes, exactly like that, they seem to pop out.
Wait, what do you mean by pop out?
Well, it's kind of the same with AGP cards that I've found.
You didn't answer my question.
What do you mean by pop out?
It's kind of strange.
You don't even have to jiggle the computer that much.
They almost kind of even work themselves out.
Wait, what do you mean by that?
You mean they go bad or they pop out of the socket or what?
Yeah, they kind of pop out of the socket on the surface between the heating and cooling of it.
They kind of work themselves out of the socket.
Well, you can't do that with a Pentium II because you have these two little levers that lock them in.
They're locked in the socket unless you forget to put them down.
Well, I realize that, but even so, even with, like I said, even with ATP cards, but I know the Pentium II processors, you lock them in and they're in there, but they do work themselves out before I've seen that, where you exactly have to do just that.
Uh huh.
These were systems with one Pentium II processor in it.
Uh huh.
You take it out and you put it back in and it works just fine.
I've seen them come, uh, you know, from, you know, Compaq computers and other computers come from the company just like that.
Uh huh.
Uh, you know, especially, you know, they're just, you know, work themselves loose, uh, or, uh, even systems that have been around a while just need to be reseated.
Well, this, this one wasn't loose at all.
It was still locked in, the levers were still down, and I had to unlock those before I could pull it out of the board.
Well, you know, like I say, it might work, but that's up to you if you want to do it.
No, no, no.
After six and a half days, I'm not putting that back in that board.
I'm not going to do it.
You know, I may later, if we need another computer, we may order a computer without a processor and then try this in there.
You know, and if that works fine, if it doesn't, then we'll buy the processor and put it in because we would have had to buy it anyway.
Right, exactly.
Well, that's a very good thing.
Don't mess with something that's working just fine.
Oh yeah, I'm not going to do that.
If I put that thing back in there, it could cause something else to go bad.
You don't want that.
No.
No, I certainly don't.
No, you don't want that.
But that's interesting, what you said.
I've never heard of a Pentium II working itself out.
Yeah, I've worked with Compaq computers coming right from Compaq and reassembling them, putting in CD-ROMs.
I feel sorry for you if you worked with Compaq because I've never seen a Compaq computer that works longer than two months anyway.
You get them, you pay all this money for them, they work about two months and you try to get help from Compaq and they tell you, You know, and you're stuck with this dead computer that they won't even honor their guarantee or anything.
I wouldn't buy a compact computer for all the tea in China.
And I wouldn't recommend anybody else do it either.
Yeah, you're best off making your own or having somebody make one for you.
Yeah, if you know about computers and you know what you want in it and you read about the motherboards and you study these different components and learn what they'll work with and what they won't, you actually are better off putting your own computer together.
And yeah, let me tell you, there's many, many small computer companies across the nation that do that exact thing that will custom make it for you.
You know, that's what their job is.
Those are the small businesses that, you know, we need to support, not these big CompUSA stores and Best Buy, you know.
Go to your guy that'll custom make it, you know.
That's what he's, you know, that's what he needs for people to come in and get custom computers.
Yeah.
I used to do that, but I know that the prices of regular computers like IBM's and Compaq, they slash their prices.
And now it's more expensive to build your computer from scratch than it is to... Oh, but it's so much better.
Even if it costs you more money, it's so much better to do that.
Then you have what you want and what will work and do what you want it to do.
Exactly.
And a lot of times I find it's faster and you get a lot more features.
You used to be able to do it for less than the cost, but they dropped their prices.
But that's the best thing is they can custom make it just the way you want it and you have somebody to go back to in your local community to fix it.
Yeah.
Okay, well thanks for calling.
Okay, thank you.
Hi-ho!
Oh, Alan, I'm so happy I got this jingle CD.
I love it.
In fact, I play these jingles during the day, you know, when I'm not on the air.
But sometimes I play the whole CD and just listen to it while I've been working on that stupid computer!
Can't believe it.
But, you know, that's the way it goes sometimes.
Had a call from those of you who attended our conferences at the ranch.
Had a call from Jeff today and he wanted me to tell everybody that he met and got to know and likes and loves that, uh, hello.
So there's a hello from Jeff for all of you.
520-333-4578 is the number.
Well, I don't know about all of you, but I really learned a big lesson this week, and it's the lesson that I teach all the time, and sometimes I forget to follow my own advice.
In six and a half days, it just disappeared.
Nothing else was accomplished.
I hate that.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Yeah, but you did.
I'm Rick from New Jersey again.
Hi there.
Yeah, I called to say I came up with a motherboard solution, but my second guess was up in the
CPU.
Yeah, but you didn't.
I went with the cheaper option for me, which was the motherboard.
Yeah.
You know me, I try cheap first.
It's expensive.
Yeah, the CPU is, I think it's about seven or eight dollars.
Yeah, I think it's about seven or eight dollars.
Right, yeah.
I went with the $99 motherboard as opposed to a $700 CPU, so of course my pocket dictated what I was going to use.
Yeah, but you should have known because I told you that it only took me a couple of minutes to fix it.
Oh, right.
Just to change the subject a little bit, I work for a major airline and we had an interesting problem that happened on September 9th.
Oh yeah, the world was going to end on September the 9th.
Well, the world didn't end.
September the 9th went right by and nothing happened.
And I'll tell you something else.
You know, the only possible thing that's going to happen on December the 31st, January the 1st, or any time after that, is that people are going to panic and cause their own problems.
Exactly.
I mean, I feel the same way too, but we had a... This whole thing is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of in my life.
The way people are panicking over this.
Yeah.
We just had a slight problem.
What it was that we have on a new aircraft, a lot of GPS systems and flight management Now remember we're on radio.
It might be somebody who doesn't know what you're talking about.
What's a GPS system?
Okay.
Global Positioning System.
What is it?
What does it do?
Okay.
Basically, it's supposedly a more accurate way of navigation.
Uh-huh.
Aviation.
In other words, they get a fix from satellites.
Exactly.
And the computer tells them where they're at.
Down to within a few yards.
And basically the airplane is a plug and play.
Yeah.
You want to leave New York, you just say, I want to go to California.
You hit a button.
Yeah.
I bet I can tell you what happened.
But you know why, don't you?
I bet I can tell you what happened. They couldn't enter any data. They, every morning, as everybody's flight crew got
to their airplane, they don't have new aircraft, any new systems. But you know why, don't you? Why is that? The
satellites changed their method of dating. And everybody was notified well in advance that GPS systems of the older
variety would malfunction on that date. Simply because of that.
And if they would turn them off and then reboot them, everything would be fine.
Right.
Is that what happened?
Well, basically, we just reverted back to the old way of flying.
Use your radio stations, and basically if you're on the East Coast, you fly wet, you hit the ocean.
Yeah.
But you know, there's a lot of radio stations, VOR stations, which they've been using for 50, 60 years for navigation.
Sure.
Not only that, but you can navigate off AM stations if you know where you're at.
And also, HF is also a form of communication and navigation.
You need to call it the Omega system, but it may be activated at that.
I had one pilot who was giving me a whole... And then they still have the old beacons, don't they?
Oh yeah, non-directional beacons.
But you see they're trying to do away with it because they don't call that precision flying anymore.
Let me tell you something.
If an electronic stump of gizmo gives out on the plane, and that's the only thing the pilots know how to navigate by, what the hell are they going to do?
That's really dumb!
At one point I said, you know, if Lindbergh found Ireland with a knapsack and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I think he'd fly into San Francisco.
Well, I bet he didn't, but it's the truth.
I was a navigator in the Navy.
I was a quartermaster.
My job was navigation.
And I navigated everything from submarines to aircraft carriers.
And I was a good navigator.
In fact, I was one of the few people that's ever lived who could take moon lines in the middle of the night on a false horizon and be within, you know, a half a mile of the real position.
And I did it all the time and was real good at it.
And I used a sextant.
I shot stars in the morning.
I shot a sun line between morning stars and noon, and I shot local apparent noon, and then a sun line in the afternoon, and then evening stars.
And in between this I would be training all my bridge people on how to use the electronic
navigation stuff as well as I would take the smartest ones with me in the morning and the
evening and teach them how to shoot stars and compute our position.
That way a lot of people don't realize yet that the computers were basically designed
to ease your workload but you still have to retain...
No, they were designed to help you in inclement weather when you couldn't see the sun or the
stars or the moon.
The But a lot of people got lazy, and instead of using these instruments in inclement weather when you could not use what you were supposed to be using,
They would use it all the time, and so when this stuff would break down, and the first time this happened was with the Omega System.
I remember one memorable time when the whole Omega System went down.
We had ships lost at sea because the people who were supposed to be doing the navigating hadn't actually done any astronomical observations in so long they couldn't remember how to do it.
I mean that's why I say a lot of times your student pilot will be able to find a destination for a high time flight.
I hate to interrupt you, but we're out of time.
Okay, I'm sorry.
Gotta let you go.
Okay, take care.
Thanks for calling.
Bye.
Good night, folks.
God bless you.
Each and every single one of you.
And good night, Annie, Pooh, and Allison, wherever you are.
I love you.
Think about you all the time.
I will never ever forget you.
Pooh and Allison, I belong to you.
Exactly.
We don't want to waste your money.
Gather what's left by the radio.
Up in Maine, on the Western Plains.
It's a desperate way to go.
Bring the moolah and the galah.
Have a party like down low.
Listen to the radio.
Love is only every night.
And it's on the coast.
It goes to dusk.
Love is everywhere tonight.
You better look to go see us, we'll come.
Each station through us, and each day, we'll have a song coming through.
The reasons, that's what, the reasons, that's what, prepare your world for you.
You never paid for it, paid for it all, you're not a pure elite.
She might sound like things to her.
After all, she likes Rudy fans.
It's so good to know you love to do the things you like to do.
Yeah, it's the longest, longest, longest night!
It's the longest, longest, longest night!
¶.
Now it's here.
the you're listening to one one point one of the eager classic
radio like you always it could be
now it's here listen to it twenty four hours a day
mostly all of these over the very best of the very best music of
all the generations gone by
with no commercial interruptions and only occasionally we have to go off the air
because of lightning storms in the area
video.
Be sure and tune in tomorrow night for another episode of the Hour of the Time.
I'll never forget the people I met, braving those angry skies.
I remember well as the shadows fell, the light of hope in their eyes.
And though I'm far away, I still can hear them say, Thumbs up!
For when the dawn comes up, There'll be bluebirds over the white cliffs, Tomorrow, just you wait and see.
There'll be love and laughter and peace ever after.
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