But while I was there, I did pick up a copy of Beta 2 of Windows XP, aka Whistler. And today, I installed it on the sacrificial machine in my office. It installed easily, but there’s no explicit support for my ancient video card (a Matrox Millennium II), and it didn’t detect my monitor (an IBM P201, which should be Plug-and-Play), so it came up at a 60Hz refresh rate — which is headache-inducing in the extreme. And I couldn’t find anywhere to adjust the refresh rate — unlike Win2000 or the Win9x family, the Device Manager doesn’t show “Monitors” at all (at least not in this configuration), and the Display applet wouldn’t let me change the refresh rate, either.

So I guess I’m done with Whistler until I find a more modern machine on which to experiment. But I wonder if this would work on Whistler, too? (Link via Q.)

[And yes, Mom, this is another one of those talking in initials entries.]

Back in 1982, video tapes were expensive — $10 each if you got them in quantity, and that was back when $10 was a lot more money than it is today. So we taped everything at 6-hour speed, and whatever tape happened to have room on it got used; we made no attempt to put related items together. Some of our compilations are truly weird, such as the tape with two episodes of “Flickers” (from Masterpiece Theatre) surrounding Gorilla at Large (in 3-D!). I’d like to be able to consolidate the good stuff (yes, I realize that is a relative term), but the recordings I have are pretty bad already, and copying them would probably make them completely unwatchable.

I found a bunch of old episodes of SCTV, too, and I enjoyed going to the episode guide — reading the descriptions there made me chuckle. I wonder if the shows themselves are still funny, or if they’ve aged as badly as so much of Saturday Night Live.