Nah, but by some fluke (some refer to it as the "1 Million Monkies Theory"), when you power all of these devices at the same time, it plays Duke Nukem Forever!
Re:A nerdy approach that certainly outweighs mine
on
DIY HVAC
·
· Score: 1
I'm a real estate agent, you insensive clod!
Well... Maybe not. I couldn't pass the ethics and morals test. (I had some.)
Seriously, it sounds like you had a bum deal. Of course, don't tar all air conditioners with the same brush.
All refrigerated A/Conds have return-air filters. These should be cleaned regularly; how regularly depends on use and the environment. At worst, I'd love to hear of people cleaning them monthly - it's when I hear "what filter?" that I feel like educating people with a sharp instrument.
Usually the filters are washable, so open up the facia (or the return air vent on a ducted), pop the little bugger out and give it a rinse out under the tap. Let it dry and then throw it back in.
This will not only improve air quality, but will increase efficiency as the air will get to the coils better. Never run a unit without the filter, otherwise you'll need some coil cleaner and an hour or two to spare.
Other maintenance includes ensuring that the condenser (outdoor unit) is kept clean and unobstructed. These fellas get chock full of dust and crap and should be blown out regularly too. Also, ensure that the grasses/plants etc haven't grown into them!
Finally, there are some cleaning products on the market that you can spray into the fancoil while it is running - it kills mould, mildew etc. It's called "Clean Air, Home & Office" IIRC.
My favourite trick with ducteds is to get the cleaner "Vanilla Fridge Wipe" (ingredients: Water, Ethyl Alcohol, Ethyl Vanillin & Vanillin - sounds tasty!) and spray it below the return air box. It sucks up and gets distributed around the system - and makes the place smell nice. And being practically water & ethyl alcohol (which most true geeks are acquanted with), it's not a health hazard.
Re:A nerdy approach that certainly outweighs mine
on
DIY HVAC
·
· Score: 1
'nuff said.
There are two types of landlords:
1) The kind that value their tennants and view their rented premises as a long-term asset. and
2) The kind that spend as little as possible, charge as much as they can get away with, and do token gestures such as put in cheap garbage appliances so that they can justify higher rent.
The latter are notorious for putting in the cheapest, nastiest A/C's that they can find - and it is invariably undersized. ie, the old school 'wet the finger and guess that a 1 HP unit will do.(1)' Heat-loads, actual area size or insulation - let alone other contributing factors such as windows sizes, Northward facing walls/windows, roof style & colour etc.
Alas, there's not much you can do in this situation - unless the machine is faulty.
I recall somebody once putting a nail through the condenser in an obscure position, causing the refrigerant to leak out with great force and losing the oil. After running the compressor without oil for a while (which usually requires manually pushing the contactor) it soon burnt out. The point? Cheapies cost more to fix than they do to replace...Not suggesting anything here, though...
(1)I won't even go into how much I hate people talking in HorsePower when it comes to Air Conditioners. The capacity of the motor is not the only bearing on the operation of the system - I have seen a '1.5 HP' system provide 3.2Kw heating capacity, while another brand was 1.5Kw. Big difference!
Re:A nerdy approach that certainly outweighs mine
on
DIY HVAC
·
· Score: 1
It could also be a case of "You get what you paid for..."
Would it be fair to assume that you are basing your opinion on a brand reknowned for poor quality, power sucking performance like LG, Fujitsu, Samsung, Panasonic or even one of the million no-name brands that are currently being spouted out of China like diarrhoea? (Hint: note how many of them have the same model number)
Air Conditioning is well known as being a highly efficient form of heating and cooling. (Geothermal is better, however!)
In fact, a decent system will have a COP of 3 or more; I've even seen one brand (Toshiba, with their new R410A based systems) claiming a COP of 6! Carrier, before UTC turned them into something worse than LG, have claimed COP of 3+ for as long as I can remember.
Then there are the new 'Inverter' models. Traditional systems draw around three times their operating current when they cut in. Inverter systems do away with this by not actually cutting out, but slowing the compressor's operation when cooling/heating capacity is not required.
This not only consumes less power, but also gives a more stable temperature gradiant, as no dead-bands are needed. It's like comparing an analogue joystick to one of Atari's original digital ones. (Remember them? When things got dodgy, you could disassemble them and play directly on the pads.)
Ducted Inverter systems are also available, and a correctly sized unit will be cheaper to run.
A cheaper option to an Inverter system is to look at 3-phase. Some of the Aussie power companies are making it attractive to install 3-phase to run Air Conds. Once upon a time, you had to justify why you needed it (eg, Welding), and Air Conditioners were not a valid reason.
3 Phase units will draw power from all 3 phases (which saves changing the name), which reduces the actually wattage per phase. Most power companies charge at the same tarriff as single-phase, so you effectively shave the running costs down by 60-70%.
That said, I've got an older (single phase) Carrier ducted myself (before they were K-mart quality), with no particularly fascinating features. This last quarter, my bill was AUD$280 (down from $450) - which includes cooling a 4 bedroom house. I think that a large proportion of this saving was upgrading my 28 year old Kelvinator (still running) to a Liebherr (200kwh/year). And, before you compare tarriff's, South Australia's power is generally more expensive per kwh than Melbourne and Sydney.
The most ineffecient appliances in my house are systems that generate heat with non Heat-Pump technologies. These are my vivarium (Ceramic Heat Emitters & standard filament bulbs) and a PC running an earlier Athlon. (I'm considering housing it in the vivarium to reclaim the heat, however I'm sure the humidity would not be a Good Thing(tm))
Other indications that "Heat Pump" technologies are quite efficient are some of the new 'Heat Pump' hot water systems, where the condenser is used to heat water. (Some people retrofit their A/C to do this, however once their water is hot, their cooling capacity drops dramatically, and liquid refrigerant is piped back to the compressor. Not good for the valves... Also, it can only be taken advantage of during summer.)
My favourite would be a clothes dryer that was once produced by AEG. It was a 6Kg dryer with a 6 star energy rating (earnt 7.9 on calculations), using a mere 130kwh/year. (By comparison, most brands use over 600kwh/year for a 3.5Kg dryer) Unfortunately, I didn't have a spare AUD$5,200 (Not a typo!) lying around while they were still producing them.
So, if you have a ducted AC (and not a split system which you're unfairly trying to use to use to cool/heat more than a single room - they are a room air conditioner) and you're paying too much, then you either need to change brand, t/stat placement or introduce a zoning system like the one mentioned in the article. There's generally a reason why brands like LG are half of the price of a more reputable brand for a ducted system.
FWIW, all of the good commercially-produced zoning systems that I can get my hands on, start at ~AUD$2K
Re:Buy a new fridge, and other suggestions.
on
DIY HVAC
·
· Score: 1
I concur.
I bought a Liebherr refrigerator a while back - the first thing I noticed (when I got over the power consumption - which was a paltry 200kwh per year) was the insulation. We're not talking the piddly 200mm of insulation that you're lucky to get with a fridge. We're talking "try and get your hands around this" thickness.
That model has finished now, but I've been looking at newer ones on Liebherr's site, like this one. 182 kwh per year for a 413 litre fridge? That's an unbelievable difference!
Historically, in this situation I have used Tom's Root Boot Disk and had remarkable success at retreiving some data.
Case in question, a friend's Toshiba laptop with a hard drive falling over - couldn't boot off of the hard drive and so forth. Obviously I did not want to open the unit and void the warranty - but my friend needed some of the data (and to securely erase what was left...) Because, of course, we know what the service agents would do when they saw the drive was knackered...
I threw in Tom's Root Boot, chucked it on a crossover cable and copied it over the network. Problem Solvered.
Nowadays, I'd still use TRB myself, however I'd highly recommend a live distro like Knoppix to a Windows user that isn't prepared to play with the CLI.
Hey, I know that I'm trustworthy... But while I'm at it...
I am the daughter/son/dog/pineapple of the great Mandrake(Ooops!)/Slartibartfast/Richard Nixon, who is presently dead/incarcerated/comatose/stupid while hiding from the authorities/officials/RIAA of Andromeda/Antartica/Newfoundland. I've got $10,000,000/$20,000,000/$1,000,000,000 that he/she/it embezelled/stole-from-druglords/borrowed/won-on-th e-lotto that I'll glady share/steal/rob-you-blind if you will assist me by faxing your bank account details to any of the above fax numbers.
Of course, since the ATO can confirm to Australian businesses that they are legitimate, I wouldn't necessarily want to be giving them too much ammo.;-)
This is actually quite a significant development. The ATO doesn't usually adopt "new technologies" for quite some time.
I was amazed when they snuck in fax numbers to allow businesses to submit their BAS (Business Activity Statement - paperwork for the "New Tax System." Is submitted anywhere from Quarterly through to twice-per-fscking-week depending on size of the business).
Because they aren't publicised, here's some of the fax numbers that I've been able to find out:
+61-3-9937-9200
+61-3-9937-9400
+61-8-8228-4399
+61-8-8228-4297
Of course, now I can sit back and watch these fax machines get slashdotted. Not that they don't every day that a BAS/IAS is due anyway!;-)
"Specifically "not recommended or supported" in the SOE are the GNU/Linux open source operating system and the Mozilla open-source browser."
The non-Linux move comes as no surprise. It's no secret that the current hardware is great for Fragfests (Some of the best Quake players that I knew were ATO employees...)
As to Mozilla? Also no surprise. If their own webpage isn't 100% Mozilla friendly, who'd expect any advances in this field?
What about Freevo?
I've found it to boast similar features, however it works great on lower hardware specs than MythTV.
It's using the ever-popular mplayer (pre-configured - so anyone lacking the intestinal fortitude to configure mplayer can get it going as a no-brainer!), with mencoder for capture.
Add to that the slideshow (for your digital camera images or pR0n collection), MAME support and so forth and it becomes a great option!
I setup one of those crappy "BookPC" machines with MythTV, however it struggled with high-res DivX;-) playback. Upgrading the CPU was not an option (i810 chipset), so I swapped to Freevo and it worked a treat.
As to the ACCC, yes they do have teeth. Most of their work isn't noticed until it is a high-profile case.
Examples include when they stepped in on Sony vs Modchippers (defending the use of modchips), their Anti-DVD Region locking stance, their successful push against licensing DVDs as software and even their muscle to force Telstra (our very own AT&T) to open up and allow the local loop to be shared.
That said, I don't really feel that fraud or slander/libel/defamation is really in their jurisdiction. Sounds much more like a civil suit.
Which brings to mind the next questions:
1) What would it take to start a Class Action against SCO in Oz?
2) How many other Australian companies, consultants, tall poppies and what-not, will get behind such a class action to really shove it up them?
I'd love to see what SCO's accountant claims as "GoodWill" on their balance sheet right now...
First of all, it is old hardware as you said. The advantage in that is that they can be grabbed Cheap!
Now, for uses? Let's look at my favourite - Small to Medium Enterprise (SME). (Why is it my favourite? Because there are so many of them, most of which can benefit from the following example.)
How about LTSP? I'm not suggesting that the GC is usable as a server (unless you start using load balancing) but as a Thin Client.
Imagine a stack of dirt-cheap, small, quiet little boxes in a business, in place of all of those god-awful PeeCee's that are always having to be upgraded. How much more of the IT budget can go towards strengthening the existing server solutions, to providing better systems? And in the meantime, the systems become centrally administered.
Hell, even the heat load reduction from a desktop computer will reduce the need for air conditioning - there's an environmental benefit there, too!
That's before we even look at the prospects of using them for dedicated servers - much along the same lines as an XBox.
So there are many reasons to consider them - some of which are the same as the XBox. And when it comes to streamed resources or remote application display, it doesn't matter what is under the hood as long as it is reliable.
If the GameCube is cheaper, yet more reliable than its XBox competitor, I know which I would consider using for Thin Clients.
Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that the RIAA isn't out to get you...
It's a mis-saying that I pick up on every time I read it and while I always think "why on earth do people say that???" I've never though or read that much about it.
It must of been too hard for some people to grasp.
How about a Windows 2000 box running VMWare with a Linux Guest. On that guest, run Bochs with a Windows XP guest, in which you could run VMWare to fire up a Windows 2.0 box.
After all of that, anything would give a speed increase...
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, but by some fluke (some refer to it as the "1 Million Monkies Theory"), when you power all of these devices at the same time, it plays Duke Nukem Forever!
My 14th level Paladin had a Holy Sunblade once. My thoughts? Paladins + Holy Swords are overrated.
"Circle of Power" be damned...
Paid? I'm supposed to get Paid?!
Duuuude....
I'm a real estate agent, you insensive clod!
Well... Maybe not. I couldn't pass the ethics and morals test. (I had some.)
Seriously, it sounds like you had a bum deal. Of course, don't tar all air conditioners with the same brush.
All refrigerated A/Conds have return-air filters. These should be cleaned regularly; how regularly depends on use and the environment. At worst, I'd love to hear of people cleaning them monthly - it's when I hear "what filter?" that I feel like educating people with a sharp instrument.
Usually the filters are washable, so open up the facia (or the return air vent on a ducted), pop the little bugger out and give it a rinse out under the tap. Let it dry and then throw it back in.
This will not only improve air quality, but will increase efficiency as the air will get to the coils better. Never run a unit without the filter, otherwise you'll need some coil cleaner and an hour or two to spare.
Other maintenance includes ensuring that the condenser (outdoor unit) is kept clean and unobstructed. These fellas get chock full of dust and crap and should be blown out regularly too. Also, ensure that the grasses/plants etc haven't grown into them!
Finally, there are some cleaning products on the market that you can spray into the fancoil while it is running - it kills mould, mildew etc. It's called "Clean Air, Home & Office" IIRC.
My favourite trick with ducteds is to get the cleaner "Vanilla Fridge Wipe" (ingredients: Water, Ethyl Alcohol, Ethyl Vanillin & Vanillin - sounds tasty!) and spray it below the return air box. It sucks up and gets distributed around the system - and makes the place smell nice. And being practically water & ethyl alcohol (which most true geeks are acquanted with), it's not a health hazard.
'nuff said.
There are two types of landlords:
1) The kind that value their tennants and view their rented premises as a long-term asset. and
2) The kind that spend as little as possible, charge as much as they can get away with, and do token gestures such as put in cheap garbage appliances so that they can justify higher rent.
The latter are notorious for putting in the cheapest, nastiest A/C's that they can find - and it is invariably undersized. ie, the old school 'wet the finger and guess that a 1 HP unit will do.(1)' Heat-loads, actual area size or insulation - let alone other contributing factors such as windows sizes, Northward facing walls/windows, roof style & colour etc.
Alas, there's not much you can do in this situation - unless the machine is faulty.
I recall somebody once putting a nail through the condenser in an obscure position, causing the refrigerant to leak out with great force and losing the oil. After running the compressor without oil for a while (which usually requires manually pushing the contactor) it soon burnt out. The point? Cheapies cost more to fix than they do to replace...Not suggesting anything here, though...
(1)I won't even go into how much I hate people talking in HorsePower when it comes to Air Conditioners. The capacity of the motor is not the only bearing on the operation of the system - I have seen a '1.5 HP' system provide 3.2Kw heating capacity, while another brand was 1.5Kw. Big difference!
It could also be a case of "You get what you paid for..."
Would it be fair to assume that you are basing your opinion on a brand reknowned for poor quality, power sucking performance like LG, Fujitsu, Samsung, Panasonic or even one of the million no-name brands that are currently being spouted out of China like diarrhoea? (Hint: note how many of them have the same model number)
Air Conditioning is well known as being a highly efficient form of heating and cooling. (Geothermal is better, however!)
In fact, a decent system will have a COP of 3 or more; I've even seen one brand (Toshiba, with their new R410A based systems) claiming a COP of 6! Carrier, before UTC turned them into something worse than LG, have claimed COP of 3+ for as long as I can remember.
Then there are the new 'Inverter' models. Traditional systems draw around three times their operating current when they cut in. Inverter systems do away with this by not actually cutting out, but slowing the compressor's operation when cooling/heating capacity is not required.
This not only consumes less power, but also gives a more stable temperature gradiant, as no dead-bands are needed. It's like comparing an analogue joystick to one of Atari's original digital ones. (Remember them? When things got dodgy, you could disassemble them and play directly on the pads.)
Ducted Inverter systems are also available, and a correctly sized unit will be cheaper to run.
A cheaper option to an Inverter system is to look at 3-phase. Some of the Aussie power companies are making it attractive to install 3-phase to run Air Conds. Once upon a time, you had to justify why you needed it (eg, Welding), and Air Conditioners were not a valid reason.
3 Phase units will draw power from all 3 phases (which saves changing the name), which reduces the actually wattage per phase. Most power companies charge at the same tarriff as single-phase, so you effectively shave the running costs down by 60-70%.
That said, I've got an older (single phase) Carrier ducted myself (before they were K-mart quality), with no particularly fascinating features. This last quarter, my bill was AUD$280 (down from $450) - which includes cooling a 4 bedroom house. I think that a large proportion of this saving was upgrading my 28 year old Kelvinator (still running) to a Liebherr (200kwh/year). And, before you compare tarriff's, South Australia's power is generally more expensive per kwh than Melbourne and Sydney.
The most ineffecient appliances in my house are systems that generate heat with non Heat-Pump technologies. These are my vivarium (Ceramic Heat Emitters & standard filament bulbs) and a PC running an earlier Athlon. (I'm considering housing it in the vivarium to reclaim the heat, however I'm sure the humidity would not be a Good Thing(tm))
Other indications that "Heat Pump" technologies are quite efficient are some of the new 'Heat Pump' hot water systems, where the condenser is used to heat water. (Some people retrofit their A/C to do this, however once their water is hot, their cooling capacity drops dramatically, and liquid refrigerant is piped back to the compressor. Not good for the valves... Also, it can only be taken advantage of during summer.)
My favourite would be a clothes dryer that was once produced by AEG. It was a 6Kg dryer with a 6 star energy rating (earnt 7.9 on calculations), using a mere 130kwh/year. (By comparison, most brands use over 600kwh/year for a 3.5Kg dryer) Unfortunately, I didn't have a spare AUD$5,200 (Not a typo!) lying around while they were still producing them.
So, if you have a ducted AC (and not a split system which you're unfairly trying to use to use to cool/heat more than a single room - they are a room air conditioner) and you're paying too much, then you either need to change brand, t/stat placement or introduce a zoning system like the one mentioned in the article. There's generally a reason why brands like LG are half of the price of a more reputable brand for a ducted system.
FWIW, all of the good commercially-produced zoning systems that I can get my hands on, start at ~AUD$2K
I concur.
I bought a Liebherr refrigerator a while back - the first thing I noticed (when I got over the power consumption - which was a paltry 200kwh per year) was the insulation. We're not talking the piddly 200mm of insulation that you're lucky to get with a fridge. We're talking "try and get your hands around this" thickness.
That model has finished now, but I've been looking at newer ones on Liebherr's site, like this one. 182 kwh per year for a 413 litre fridge? That's an unbelievable difference!
There is hope for Duke Nukem Forever?
Historically, in this situation I have used Tom's Root Boot Disk and had remarkable success at retreiving some data.
Case in question, a friend's Toshiba laptop with a hard drive falling over - couldn't boot off of the hard drive and so forth. Obviously I did not want to open the unit and void the warranty - but my friend needed some of the data (and to securely erase what was left...) Because, of course, we know what the service agents would do when they saw the drive was knackered...
I threw in Tom's Root Boot, chucked it on a crossover cable and copied it over the network. Problem Solvered.
Nowadays, I'd still use TRB myself, however I'd highly recommend a live distro like Knoppix to a Windows user that isn't prepared to play with the CLI.
Hey, I know that I'm trustworthy... But while I'm at it...
h e-lotto that I'll glady share/steal/rob-you-blind if you will assist me by faxing your bank account details to any of the above fax numbers.
;-)
I am the daughter/son/dog/pineapple of the great Mandrake(Ooops!)/Slartibartfast/Richard Nixon, who is presently dead/incarcerated/comatose/stupid while hiding from the authorities/officials/RIAA of Andromeda/Antartica/Newfoundland. I've got $10,000,000/$20,000,000/$1,000,000,000 that he/she/it embezelled/stole-from-druglords/borrowed/won-on-t
Of course, since the ATO can confirm to Australian businesses that they are legitimate, I wouldn't necessarily want to be giving them too much ammo.
I was amazed when they snuck in fax numbers to allow businesses to submit their BAS (Business Activity Statement - paperwork for the "New Tax System." Is submitted anywhere from Quarterly through to twice-per-fscking-week depending on size of the business).
Because they aren't publicised, here's some of the fax numbers that I've been able to find out:
+61-3-9937-9200
+61-3-9937-9400
+61-8-8228-4399
+61-8-8228-4297
Of course, now I can sit back and watch these fax machines get slashdotted. Not that they don't every day that a BAS/IAS is due anyway!
The non-Linux move comes as no surprise. It's no secret that the current hardware is great for Fragfests (Some of the best Quake players that I knew were ATO employees...)
As to Mozilla? Also no surprise. If their own webpage isn't 100% Mozilla friendly, who'd expect any advances in this field?
Ever since they killed off his character, I always wanted to see them bring back Doyle, played by Glenn Quinn.
Maybe now is the time?
Then again, I'm sure there is only so much of a character dancing with a vaccuum cleaner that we can take...
I take it that I'm the only one who actually liked Edlin?
What about Freevo?
I've found it to boast similar features, however it works great on lower hardware specs than MythTV.
It's using the ever-popular mplayer (pre-configured - so anyone lacking the intestinal fortitude to configure mplayer can get it going as a no-brainer!), with mencoder for capture.
Add to that the slideshow (for your digital camera images or pR0n collection), MAME support and so forth and it becomes a great option!
I setup one of those crappy "BookPC" machines with MythTV, however it struggled with high-res DivX;-) playback. Upgrading the CPU was not an option (i810 chipset), so I swapped to Freevo and it worked a treat.
FWIW, Rum was once used in place of currency as Legal Tender in Australia.
Which brings new meaning to the term "pissing your wages up the wall."
It could be exploited as an inherent security system.
Each plant could be used as part of a sensor grid. Come too close and the alarms go off.
And that's when the Venus Fly Traps sping their ambush... (Anyone remember the "Leather Goddesses of Phobos?")
Whilst I'm Australian, (born, bred and residing), I'm "Marsupially challenged" myself.
As to the ACCC, yes they do have teeth. Most of their work isn't noticed until it is a high-profile case.
Examples include when they stepped in on Sony vs Modchippers (defending the use of modchips), their Anti-DVD Region locking stance, their successful push against licensing DVDs as software and even their muscle to force Telstra (our very own AT&T) to open up and allow the local loop to be shared.
That said, I don't really feel that fraud or slander/libel/defamation is really in their jurisdiction. Sounds much more like a civil suit.
Which brings to mind the next questions:
1) What would it take to start a Class Action against SCO in Oz?
2) How many other Australian companies, consultants, tall poppies and what-not, will get behind such a class action to really shove it up them?
I'd love to see what SCO's accountant claims as "GoodWill" on their balance sheet right now...
First of all, it is old hardware as you said. The advantage in that is that they can be grabbed Cheap!
Now, for uses? Let's look at my favourite - Small to Medium Enterprise (SME). (Why is it my favourite? Because there are so many of them, most of which can benefit from the following example.)
How about LTSP? I'm not suggesting that the GC is usable as a server (unless you start using load balancing) but as a Thin Client.
Imagine a stack of dirt-cheap, small, quiet little boxes in a business, in place of all of those god-awful PeeCee's that are always having to be upgraded. How much more of the IT budget can go towards strengthening the existing server solutions, to providing better systems? And in the meantime, the systems become centrally administered.
Hell, even the heat load reduction from a desktop computer will reduce the need for air conditioning - there's an environmental benefit there, too!
That's before we even look at the prospects of using them for dedicated servers - much along the same lines as an XBox.
So there are many reasons to consider them - some of which are the same as the XBox. And when it comes to streamed resources or remote application display, it doesn't matter what is under the hood as long as it is reliable.
If the GameCube is cheaper, yet more reliable than its XBox competitor, I know which I would consider using for Thin Clients.
Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that the RIAA isn't out to get you...
So *you* are the reason that I keep getting "Meet Women" and "Add inches to your penis" emails?
I've lost *far* too much Frag-time trying to explain those emails to me wife, bastard!
But what did I do to you? I ain't stolen no GPL software in my life! Am I supposed to buy it or something?
Darl, is that you?
It's a mis-saying that I pick up on every time I read it and while I always think "why on earth do people say that???" I've never though or read that much about it.
It must of been too hard for some people to grasp.
Chlorinate the gene pool, I say!
The 7th of the 14th?
Duuuude! What crazy arsed calendar are you using?!
All of the prices being quoted are for Metro areas, of course.
It's worth noting that the Cable broadband is Metro only, the best choices being Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane only. Anywhere else and nobody cares.
Once you move into Region 2, you can add at between $30 and $50/month to any of the non-Telstra plans.
For the unenlightened, "Telstra" is a non de plume for "Microsoft."
Hey, don't knock 386to486 - it works!
How about a Windows 2000 box running VMWare with a Linux Guest. On that guest, run Bochs with a Windows XP guest, in which you could run VMWare to fire up a Windows 2.0 box.
After all of that, anything would give a speed increase...