Oh the fun of learning new software

Well, its been interesting, for the reasons below I have switched assemblers. I used to code in Turbo Assembler from Borland, but I have switched to Netwide Assembler.......

Reasons include:

1. Netwide assembler is available for DOS (or freedos), windoze, and Linux and probably some other versions of Unix like operating systems as well. This makes porting code a breeze in comparison
2. Netwide assembler is still being updated
3. Turbo Debugger has bugs... (what is the use of a Debugger that is buggy itself)
4. I need to change assemblers anyway and learn about new tools out there. hopefully I find another debugger with the features of Turbo Debugger.
5. Netwide Assembler has support (built-in) for mmx,sse and sse2 instructions which my new laptop supports....
6. Netwide Assembler is also free and open source... :)

but, the switch is not without its difficulties.........

I had some variables that I declared as Uninitialized Data, only to find out that when I tried to access them in my code, that Netwide Assembler decided that I had never defined them! (time to download the proper manual, I guess!!!! (instead of the one included with (a IDE for netwide assembler) ......

Ah and speaking of news, there is a new version available.... heh imagine that....

And now for a Whining Session... This one concerns gateways laptops....

one day, I found 800 dollars, and decided I would invest it in a new laptop. Since there was a gateway model on sale for about 550 dollars I purchased it, took it home and enjoyed my new
toy, only to discover it was loaded with awful software (think AOL and the like) .. So I did what any
tech would do and formatted the hard drive and proceeded to reinstall win XP along with win 2k.

ok, I ran into my first problem.... THE DRIVERS ARE NOT ON THE WINDOWS XP DISK (this was service pack 2 BTW)

grr, so I went to gateways web site and downloaded the drivers for the thing.....

THEY WERE ALL THE WRONG ONES,,,, grrr.........

Eventually, some gentlemen had bought the same laptop at another best buy and done exactly the same thing, he had found the drivers and after asking him to post the web links he did so and the situation was temporarily solved...

Now, the next piece of news with the laptop was

THE F*****ING DVD/CD-RW COMBO DRIVE IS faulty....

it would not read DVD's........ So finally best buy got a another one in stock (open box return actually, and I tested the laptop to be assured it could read DVD's, no problem) took it home
and proceeded to download lots of TV stuff from England (where I am from and born) and all that.

Guess what

on the new laptop, 2/3 times it fails to burn a CD with Nero (the included software) by the way..

The software has no problems burning the disc....(no buffer underruns etc) but as soon as it verifies the data it all goes pear shaped......

So this Sunday is my last day to return this laptop, since I cant burn anything onto CD, I hope that best buy has a Toshiba on sale for less then the price I paid for this laptop.....

Piece of advice, don't buy a gateway laptop.....

if you are curious my model is a mx6131. Do a google search and I am sure you will find the specs there.

anywayz, more ranting tomorrow, time to see whats new with that new release of NASM (netwide assembler) and read the documentation.

cheerz till l8r

baz

p.s.: so much for checking my spelling quickly, I know there are spelling errors in this document, but bear with me due to the fact when I click on check spelling nothing happens...

hmmmm... What was I saying earlier regarding buggy software
(whoops its me that buggy, firefox was blocking the spell check (it's a popup) ha ha!