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Sunday, November 23, 2008 ( 11/23/2008 08:00:00 AM ) Bill S. AUCTION ACTION: Attended an auction yesterday of equipment from Eastern Arizona College: we were looking, initially, for a cheap laptop since the original ad for the auction indicated that there'd be tons of computer equipment. The laptops were few – most with serious hardware issues – but there were six rows of used PCs, most of 'em Gateways that were newer than our ancient machine, so we decided to stay and bid on one. Wound up buying two from the company's E Series for a grand total of seventy dollars. Then came the fun part, taking the machines home and seeing how much they would actually work. The plan was for me to put one in Becky's craft room, and use the second to replace the slow-pokey computer that I'm still using to type this post. None too surprisingly, it was an afternoon long process to get the first one checked out and set up in my wife's room then start to get the second put up in the study. The second was the most maddening process: transfer the stuff I wanna keep onto a flashdrive than see if I can get the second one working. I hooked it up outside the study before going through the act of setting it up on my workstation, verified that the basic system was working (the mouse didn't wanna work at first, but it soon went to work), then went through the body twisting process of getting it all connected in the study. Got it connected, but when I started to see what worked and what didn't, I realized a big problem. The "new" computer had no Ethernet connection, which I needed to be able to surf the net. So I pried open my old Gateway tower, removed the Ethernet card and put it in the new tower, only to discover that now my mouse wasn't working again. Why one would even impact the other is beyond my feeble comprehension, so I wound up returning the card to its original nesting place – and setting the old tower back up in the study. Will probably spend some time playing with the "new" tower over Thanksgiving weekend, but for now I need a working net connection, so it's back to the much-abused ol' machine. Got a newer monitor set up at least, though it's not one of those snazzy flat-screeners . . . # | |
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