Junk

I did some cleaning the other day. I went through my spare stuff and ended up throwing out five hard drives (two were kaput, one was a measly 850 MB, and two were Quantum Bigfoots that I was unable to sell on Ebay), a gutted PC, a video card, some memory that didn't work, cables that don't attach to anything I have, and a few other odds and ends. I still have two monitors that I need to dispose of, preferably through a recycling center. All told, I still have plenty of extra parts and enough to put two working PC's together if I wanted to.

I also solved many of the problems on my wife's W98 machine. I had replaced the motherboard a few months ago but three things didn't work right after that - sound, printer, and power on. I gave up on tinkering with it. I reinstalled the printer many times, downloaded some updates and utilities from Asus' web site, and I even tried two other sound cards but finally just decided that a reinstall would be easier. The icing on the cake came last week when Outlook took a dump lost all her email and contacts. Luckily, I had a backup of her contacts but it was from last year. So, I fdisk'd the hard drive and reinstalled Windows. Miraculously, the sound card and printer work again. I think I'll backup her Outlook stuff every month or two from now on also.