Cleanng Up and Upgrading

I was cleaning up my computer room over the last few weeks, and I
cam across some things.

I found a 60 gbyte hard drive I had never opened the shrink wrap on.
I discovered some memory sticks that I had forgotten about. A
keyboard drawer that I had gotten for Christmas last year, and had
stashed behind the door.

Y'know, I hate to see stuff wasted like that... Upgrade time.

Aww heck the system hasn't been shut down for a while, and needs a
cleaning anyway. The floppy disk drive hasn't worked for a while now,
and one of the fans was making noise, and now the noise isn't there
anymore; I think it stopped...

I had two 118 meg memory sticks in the machine, plus a 256meg. Not
too shabby, but I had this 512 meg stick and another 256 meg stick.
Now the machine has 1 gbit of memory.

I added the newly discovered 60 gig drive., and now it is time to
move some stuff around. One odd thing...

I had to backup a couple old win '95 machines the other day... Win
'95, yeah, I've been telling them they need to replace this stuff, but
since it'll cost about 100k, they are not inclined to do so. Never
mind that if one of them fails, it's not replaceable. The app
software is too old, and it won't run on anything above a Pentium 1
system with long ISA slots. There is not driver for the proprietary
code in systems greater than win95. Every time we have to get
support, it costs an arm and a leg... Oh well, Fdisk and Format are
your friends.

It had been a while, so I runs up a command prompt in my win 2K
machine, and types FDISK... It didn't now about any FDISK. Then I
remembered it's different. OK, Disk management it is.

Floppy has a green light on all the time. Last time I saw something
like that, the cable was reversed. I switch the connector around;
there is no key on this one. Green light goes out, but the floppy
still doesn't work. Damn. I get a spare floppy out, and plug it in.
Still doesn't work. Notice an electrolytic that is domed on top.
Damn. One thing left to try; change the cable. Go to the junk
drawer, and grab a cable. Success. Floppy works.

Found a bad fan in the front of the case. Back to the junk drawer
for the spare fan. The fan doesn't make noise anymore, and it's
running.

You know, it really helps to have that spare shi^htuff around. I
have two drawers full of cables hardware and other junk. I found a
couple chips used to add a second comm port on some old
motherboards... I hate to throw them away, might need them someday...

Then I tackled the new keyboard drawer. One thing that I have
learned over the years is that I really hate screwing up. I hate
screwing screws in overhead. It is extremely tiring on the arms.
Marking all of the holes with a template, and then screwing up.
Anyway, got the drawer in. Life is good.

Today, I went shopping. On the way, I passed the Computer store. I
had this urge to go in...
--

Cheers! :)
.