Ah yes, another day, another piece of stupidity to sort out.

We have some equipment in our lab. It needs a computer to control it. 
Unfortunately, the control software requires somebody to be logged in. 
As soon as you log out, it quits the control program, halting the machine.

But don't worry. There is a straight-forward way to solve this problem. 
We have some other software, which we are already using, which has the 
facility to control this equipment. And *this* software runs as a 
service, as it should, and has appropriate security access controls and 
auditing and so forth. This will make our job vastly easier - even 
easier than it is currently.

So we're _not_ going to use this feature. Why? Because the people at HQ 
don't use this feature. Currently all the sites work slightly 
differently, and the people in charge want to "harmonise" business 
practice across all sites. In English, they want everybody to do exactly 
what HQ does.

I should point out that when somebody asked HQ for the wiring diagram to 
connect up a certain piece of equipment, their senior lab expert sent 
back a diagram that includes, among other things, a paper clip to 
complete the circuit. (We won't be following this practice. We elected 
to use a junction block, like any half-sane person would...)

Getting back on track... How *are* we going to control this equipment 
then? Well, the solution dictated to us by HQ is to use a seperate 
laptop to run the control software. Which seems reasonable, if not 
particularly optimal.

Ah, but here's the fun part: The equipment is controlled by RS-232. Now, 
how many laptops do you know of which actually possess a serial port? 
Exactly.

But it's OK, it's not a problem. All we have to do is purchase a USB to 
serial converter and we're golden.

Except that the control software stubbornly, repeatedly *refuses* to 
believe me that the USB serial port actually exists. Every other piece 
of software I've tried can access it without issue. But not the one 
piece of software that we *need* to access it. No sir. Not interested. 
It can "see" the port, but it refuses to *select* that port. And nothing 
I've done so far seems to convince it to work.

I also got sent three laptops from HQ which have built-in serial ports. 
The reason for this is that they're ancient. One of them is already set 
up and running. One of them won't turn on. The charging indicator comes 
on when I plug it in, but it won't actually switch on. And the third... 
well, I was hoping to set that up today.

I became worried when I saw the big "Designed for Windows 98" sticker on 
it. The harddrive is a mess. It has every application, screensaver, game 
and utility imaginable installed. It has files everywhere. My plan was 
to erase everything and load Windows XP, except - and you can see the 
horrifying inevitability of where this is going - the laptop is powered 
by an AMD K6-II processor and sports 64MB of RAM.

Now there is no way in HELL that Windows XP is going to run like 
anything faster than a glacier with 64MB of RAM. Hell, Windows 98 crawls 
along on this PC!

Clearly improving the CPU is impossible, but maybe adding more RAM would 
speed it up? Except... what the hell kind of RAM does a K6 laptop take 
anyway? Wikipedia claims that the K6 has a 66MHz FSB, so... PC66 maybe? 
Of course, that's no longer on sale. But Wikipedia claims PC100 is 
backwards-compatible. Ah, but *that* isn't available either. But I can 
buy PC133. Wikipedia claims PC133 is backwards-compatible with PC100, 
but is that transitive? Will PC133 work in a PC66 laptop?


128MB is really not enough. But the biggest single-stick listing I can 
find is for 512MB (which should probably just about work). Then again, 
this is a *laptop*. How many tracks do you think Compaq bothered to 
connect up? Can it actually address half a gigabyte of RAM??

Still, I have until tomorrow to sort all this out... no biggie.

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