Anybody have a….

Ok, one of my hobbies is fixing computers (if you haven’t figured that out already…). One of my friends (actually my former district manager) comes to me on e semi-regular basis (I’ve configured 2 laptops, and I think three towers over the years for him) for his IT needs. His first computer, a Gateway Pentium II, he gifted to me about a year and a half ago. It’s a good tower, and the hardware is still sound. It will probably never run WinXP, and don’t even go there about Vista or 7. At first, I thought I was going to put WinME on it, and run some of my old games on it. The problem is that the more I look at it, the processor is too old for even my old games. But, there is hope. Apparently it has a socket one processor. And there appear to be Pentium 3 processors available for it. But the better part of me hesitates at spending any more money on it. Something is telling me that I’d be better off just parting it out. But it’s still here in my room, gathering dust and waiting….

So if anybody has a Pentium 3 socket 1, I might be interested in it. But that’s not a really high priority. I already have a tower that works very well, and I just got a laptop (in fact, this entry is being written on it…).

In a somewhat related story, we got a new Wi-Fi router. My boss was trying to sell me his old computer, which I wasn’t interested at all in (he was asking way too much for it, and when I looked at it, it doesn’t have enough upgradable shoulders for me). S, he was then going to sell me his computer desk, and the monitor (the computer desk, I thought, would be good for my brother and his iMac, and I’d use the monitor for my aforementioned fossil). In the end, I decided against both of them, but he also had a Wi-Fi ‘N’ router available. That I couldn’t pass up. When I put the cable modem and router out in the living room (so my brother could get a decent connection on his box in the kitchen), I had connectivity issues. When I put the Internet Gateway in my room, I get a decent connection (wired is always better than wi-fi), but I felt bad for my brother. So I put the ‘n’ router in my room, and took the laptop out to the living room. And promptly got a 16 mps connection. So the router can stay in my room without guilt. This also means that I can take the wi-fi card out of the tower (it works perfectly, I just like the empty slot next to my video card for air circulation…).

BTW, I’m giving Linux another try….