"FatterDumber& Happier Moe" wrote in
message

stuff snipped

I pick up old computers at the 2nd hand store, get them going and give
them away to someone that doesn't have one. A pretty good hobby and
cheap. Some of the P4s I hate to let go but there's always another one
sooner or later. Main problem lately is people are taking the hard
drives out before donating them to the God place that has the 2nd hand
store. That place is filling up with old CRT TVs as people switch over
to HDTV.

I used to give away the old machines, but it turned out to be a bad idea. I
became the technical support for such machines, and a common complaint was
"They won't play insert popular game of the month here" I would tell the
parents that's a GOOD thing, because kids will be using the machines for
schoolwork and not game playing. Didn't matter.

I finally gave up after one person kept installing animated cursors and
boatloads of some of the seediest looking PD shareware garbage that slowed
an already slow (200MHz PII) down pretty seriously. It was still absolutely
fine for schoolwork, running Quicken, making Powerpoint presentations, etc.
I ran for years doing programming and WP - had an AST TurboLaser board and
laser that went with it (that's about the time HP won the laser printer
wars). I told them that at the time, the machine and laser printer were
still worth at least $700 and they were over $6000 new. Something just
slightly faster from Circuit City would cost at least $1000 and wouldn't
come with a laser printer or any service other than "you need to reformat
and reload."

One day, when I realized I hadn't heard from them in a while, I called only
to find out that they had "junked it" and as far as I could tell, they were
still having the same old problems with their new Circuit City computer,
multiplied by 10 because now they were on the Internet and corresponding
with Nigerian Princes with slight banking problems. (-:

And that's why there are 19 PC's stacked in the basement. Less trouble for
me to hang on to and possibly be able to restore an Email from 15 years ago
if I ever needed to. I stopped doing almost all my tech support efforts
after that, figuring that the old saw was right "no deed goes unpunished."
I am kind of looking forward to seeing which ones will start up after a
5-15 years nap. I'm betting it won't be many. My laptop collection has not
fared well without exercise. The New Year's resolution that I would
exercise them lasted about as long as they all do. Some beep, some don't
and some have their CMOS backup batteries located in impossible to service
places

--
Bobby G.