I have four PCs in the fortress of solitude in the basement. I recently bought a 60 gig hard drive at a garage sale ($3), so I wanted to test it. I tried booting up one machine after another. I hadn’t used the basement machines in a few months. My main machine was totally dead. This was a foundling I picked up at the side of the road during town cleanup. When I got it, it was so full of viruses and adware that it was unuseable. I had to format the disk and re-install XP and then it worked fine for a year. It was a 1.1 ghz with a 20 gig drive. Another was a 500 mhz 10 gig HP machine that wouldn’t see the hard disk (any hard disk) and I spent 45 minutes swapping known good drives and cables proving this. The two others were older 333mhz machines and they each had some problems. Neither would boot off of a HPFS system disk and I didn’t want to start formatting a new OS on FAT from scratch.

I am without a desktop machine for the first time in 20 years.

I had in the back of my mind that I would ship the 500 mhz to Chris B. and Larry would get the 1.1 gig machine as his PC is crapping out. Now I have 4 boxes to put on the side of the road for some other scavenger to work on.

I don’t know when town cleanup starts, but I hope I can pick up another PC or two.

The laptop that Justine sent me is still pretty good, but the screen is getting flacky. You have to angle it just-so or the backlight doesn’t work. I use the laptop to edit stories or play solitaire when TV gets bad.