Computer woes

I held onto our old computer for a long time. It has sat in the bedroom closet for most of the last couple of years. It was a pretty good machine that we bought refurbished at the Dell Factory Outlet, back when they had a physical store here in town, and not just a website.

Since then we have used up and thrown away an entire HP/Compaq system that was a piece of junk. The Dell sat there, waiting to be called up. For a while it lived in the garage, holding 60 gig of music I burned from my CD collection. It was my workshop jukebox.

Then I swapped out the bootlegged Windows 2000 OS for a bootlegged XP Home OS. And finally Microsoft got smarter than me. After 30 days, XP locked me out of my own machine. But I could not justify buying a full version of XP for $175 or more, just to listen to music in the garage. And I could not find my bootleg copy of the old OS to revert back to.

Yesterday the Dell and I parted ways. It went to the Goodwill computer recycling center, and I went to Computer Works, the Goodwill computer store to buy a second video card for the Gateway XP Media Center Edition machine that we bought several months ago.

I wanted to hook up a second monitor that would sit atop the computer cabinet and run a PowerPoint slideshow of family pictures. Kind of like one of those expensive digital photo frames, but bigger and a lot cheaper. Anyways, I guess the video card I bought will not work with dual monitors. No high tech family photos for us.

So for the first time in years we no longer have a computer the garage, our bedroom or in the closet under a pile of shoes.