bigmacbear (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bigmacbear) wrote2007-01-14 02:03 am
bigmacbear) wrote2007-01-14 02:03 am
Entry tags:
Progress (or, How I've Been Spending My Weekend So Far)
Friday evening I finally got my old computer ready for Gary ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gmjambear to use. He'd just finished transferring his files from the other machines we had around the house. The last step in that process was pulling the Zip drive out of his old boat anchor and putting it in the new machine before he installed it under his new desk from Ikea.
OK, maybe I shouldn't be so blunt in my description of his old machine; in its day it was quite the thing, running NT 4.0 like the desktops I used at work not so long before. It was a gift from his sister-in-law who imported it from Canada when she moved to the US to marry his brother. He's wondering how to break the news to her that it's no longer useful and needs to be recycled.
By far the worse machine of the two we are sending back for recycling is my old Win95 box; while it would do in a pinch (and had served that purpose on several occasions) the last straw was the expiration of its CMOS battery, requiring an extra keypress on every boot along with a clock reset (thankfully I had NISTtime to update automatically from one of the NIST's time servers).
Saturday I wiped both hard disks. I had a bit of a scare when, in an effort to boot the Win95 box into DOS mode to read the CD-ROM (which it was incapable of booting from as required by the disk-wiping software), I managed to get the soft power switch to not respond to the physical power switch on the front of the box for a few seconds. Fortunately just opening up the box brought it back. I ended up having to download the wiper software again, this time as an archive instead of a CD-ROM image so I could use a floppy disk to boot and then wipe the disk from there.
Next I packed up both systems in the box my new Dell came in for shipment. We'll have to find someone with a freight scale to weigh the box (it must not weigh over 50 pounds and I think it's pushing that limit) because it has proven impossible to weigh the box with our bathroom scale. I also packed up my old monitor because the one Gary bought to use with his old computer is newer and a little crisper (once properly adjusted to the new PC). I think our best bet is to take them to a DHL office and, if they pass weight, leave them there with the airbills provided by Dell, in lieu of calling for a pickup. We now have all the old computer boxes out in the hall so the ones we dont use for shipping get recycled themselves.
Now that I have a little space at my desk I decided to re-install my keyboard drawer which had fallen down. I think the reason for that is I used the short screws where I should have used the longer ones (there's only about a pubic hair's width difference between the two, and that's the polite expression). So that seems to work much better now.
After all this work I can now, at last, see the surface of my desk. Next step will be to sort the piles of paperwork and shred up or recycle anything that isn't needed. Gee, by the time I get this all organized the way I want it, it will be time to move again. ;-)
gmjambear to use. He'd just finished transferring his files from the other machines we had around the house. The last step in that process was pulling the Zip drive out of his old boat anchor and putting it in the new machine before he installed it under his new desk from Ikea. OK, maybe I shouldn't be so blunt in my description of his old machine; in its day it was quite the thing, running NT 4.0 like the desktops I used at work not so long before. It was a gift from his sister-in-law who imported it from Canada when she moved to the US to marry his brother. He's wondering how to break the news to her that it's no longer useful and needs to be recycled.
By far the worse machine of the two we are sending back for recycling is my old Win95 box; while it would do in a pinch (and had served that purpose on several occasions) the last straw was the expiration of its CMOS battery, requiring an extra keypress on every boot along with a clock reset (thankfully I had NISTtime to update automatically from one of the NIST's time servers).
Saturday I wiped both hard disks. I had a bit of a scare when, in an effort to boot the Win95 box into DOS mode to read the CD-ROM (which it was incapable of booting from as required by the disk-wiping software), I managed to get the soft power switch to not respond to the physical power switch on the front of the box for a few seconds. Fortunately just opening up the box brought it back. I ended up having to download the wiper software again, this time as an archive instead of a CD-ROM image so I could use a floppy disk to boot and then wipe the disk from there.
Next I packed up both systems in the box my new Dell came in for shipment. We'll have to find someone with a freight scale to weigh the box (it must not weigh over 50 pounds and I think it's pushing that limit) because it has proven impossible to weigh the box with our bathroom scale. I also packed up my old monitor because the one Gary bought to use with his old computer is newer and a little crisper (once properly adjusted to the new PC). I think our best bet is to take them to a DHL office and, if they pass weight, leave them there with the airbills provided by Dell, in lieu of calling for a pickup. We now have all the old computer boxes out in the hall so the ones we dont use for shipping get recycled themselves.
Now that I have a little space at my desk I decided to re-install my keyboard drawer which had fallen down. I think the reason for that is I used the short screws where I should have used the longer ones (there's only about a pubic hair's width difference between the two, and that's the polite expression). So that seems to work much better now.
After all this work I can now, at last, see the surface of my desk. Next step will be to sort the piles of paperwork and shred up or recycle anything that isn't needed. Gee, by the time I get this all organized the way I want it, it will be time to move again. ;-)
no subject
What was exactly the problem with your old box, PSU, MB, ?.
Feels good don't it to have your desktop (physical) cleared off? I'm actually keeping mine cleared for a change which has not been the case of late. :-)
However, I'm still slowly going through my papers, files and doing much the same same. :-)
Gonna be so nice once it's done I'm sure.
no subject
For some reason, as soon as I stopped using the home-brew box on a daily basis it stopped freezing up when I did use it. I did have to blow a lot more dust out of the case (Gary was coughing and gagging over that last remark) and that may have contributed. Other than that, or perhaps a connector having worked itself loose during the move, I have no idea what the cause was but it seems to have resolved itself.
Oh well, at least now I have decent backups and if it freezes again we'll be able to use the new box.
no subject