Re: OT: New (to us) Computer

Chris Havlicek wrote:
Heh...good catch! Most of my computer equipment is second hand
for similar reasons. Just finished repairing a laptop that supposedly
had a motherboard problem...or at least that's what Geek Squad told
the owner. Either they wanted to gouge her, or they didn't want to be
bothered doing any troubleshooting at all.

Dead DVD/CD drives can cause interesting symptoms, and cost far less
than laptop motherboards.

I've had other machines that I was told were dead, and found various
things like disconnected hard drives or even RAM that wasn't fully
in the socket. The latter wouldn't have been too bad if it wasn't
*obvious* that it wasn't seated properly...;)

Glad you got a nice machine out of it...:) Did it come with Vista
before you upgraded it to XP? >:)

Purrs and skritches to the kitties-

Chris, Tripper, Katie, Hazard and Oreo (aka: the Fairfax Fur Factory)

So many computer "fixers" just tell a client that it's the motherboard and
call it done because they don't want to troubleshoot the problem. I was a
tech at a place like that on Maui called Anything Computes. The owner got
impatient with me because I wanted to find out what was wrong with the
machine. He'd say, "No, just sell them a new one!" I'm not like that; I
really like troubleshooting. I didn't last long there, but, of course,
neither did the business. :~)

I think this Dell computer we aquired had XP on it already, but it had all
the Dell crap that came with it, so it had to go. We found all the drivers
for the video and the sound card online; everything works. Hubby, OTOH,
isn't working (again) today, so I'm hoping he'll help set me up. I can't
pick up anything anymore, so he's got to do all the legwork. Since it's all
SATA based and there are a couple of open PCI slots, I'm going to have Allan
install a RAID card so I can use my existing 160 gig drive with all my data
on it. Hubby has already partitioned the existing SATA drive to 25 gigs for
the operating system and the rest for storage. Between that and my 160 gig
drive, if that's not enough storage, I'm screwed. LOL.

I'm really excited, to be honest. I think the only programs I still need to
install are CorelDraw and Microsoft Office 2007. We installed the Photoshop
CS3 Suite the other night. I'm a happy woman and now I'll be able to make
my business cards and see if I can try to make some money from home. Oh,
and more good news! We acquired a compressor so my carpenter husband can do
side jobs during this extremely slow house building season. Good news all
around. Cats are happy, I'm happy. Life is okay. :~) (I must be happy; I
woke up to three contented cats sleeping in my bed with me - that's RARE.)

kili


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