Old computers, right? Garrrgh... See, I just came back from my girlfriend's appartment, where I tried to work magic with her old desktop PC while she's at work. How old? Forty-something megs of RAM kind of old, that's how old. So why would anyone... and so on, right? After all she has the laptop. Yeah, about that. The laptop itself also isn't a new thing, to put it mildly. It's actually my mom's laptop from before she got herself a new one a year ago or so. The old laptop which she actually bought second-hand on Allegro (the Polish equivalent of eBay, still much larger than the actual ebay.pl, as a matter of fact). You gettin' the vibe yet?
So the laptop took quite a bit of fussing around to get the Internet working on it. But I screwed up, I admit, and while installing Windows 98, I forgot to install the Polish character set and all that. Now my girlfriend needs to get a move on with her master's thesis but she can't use the laptop and now you know why. And I'd just rather not try the whole installation procedure again for the time being. Enter the grandma PC. My girlfriend came up with the idea I reanimate it and put it on her kitchen table as a typewriter, essentially, for as long as she needs to work on the thesis, while the laptop is going to remains something of an Internet terminal, if you will. Now the desktop PC -- whose age by now you have probably quite accurately guesstimated -- isn't just slow. Ohnono, that wouldn't be exciting, would it? Especially since I only wanted it to run Microsoft Word and that's it. So in addition to being slow, its Win98 spurts out all sorts of funky errors when I try to access anything remotely related to configuration, it corrupts documents saved to My Documents (but not elsewhere), its hard drive is faulty, it stalls at random moments, all of that jazz.
So I thought, Well maybe I'd just give the disk a good old format treatment, install a fresh copy of Win98, install Word 2000 and leave it at that. That's why I went over to my girlfriend's place while she was away, armed with a Windows 98 CD and an Office 2000 CD, bent on making that thing work. First surprise: the BIOS haven't even heard of booting from a CD. Joy. So I think, Ok, let's try running the setup from the existing Windows installation. Think again. The computer's CD drive doesn't read CD-Rs. At that point I sort of gave up. I decided I don't have enough willpower to go back home (even though it's just across the street), open up my PC, take out one of my DVD drives (which, for all I know, might not even work on the old one), carry it over to my girlfriend's place, open up the old PC, put in the drive, install Windows (maybe), take the drive out again, bring it back to my place and put it back in my PC. No way.
So what I ended up doing was tidying up the existing Windows installation as well as I could, clean the desktop, create a folder on the desktop called My New Documents (for if you saved any Word document in the real My Documents folder, closed it and tried to reopen it from Word -- the only possibility, if you recall, since you can't open My Documents folder itself -- it came out all messed up), and write (as in, with a pen on a piece of paper) a point-by-point operating manual for the Typewriter Formerly Known As Old Generation PC, with all the don'ts heavily emphasized.
The list of dos and don'ts had this as one of the points: "Back up your work on a floppy (or better two) as often as you can". And with that I put on my coat and went floppy shopping to a nearby mall. (It also gave me a good excuse to go eat a fish burger, as I had been hungry since getting up at 6 am.) And this was the best part of the experience, I tell ya. I felt so old school. I mean dude. You know, I can't remember when was the last time I bought a box of floppies -- nor when I used a floppy, for that matter. I'm almost glad I bought some new ones before they finally disappear off the face of Earth.
So, old PCs suck royally, but at least they can give you a nostalgic experience. Now if only the somewhat reanimated PC can give my girlfriend some a word-processing experience.
So the laptop took quite a bit of fussing around to get the Internet working on it. But I screwed up, I admit, and while installing Windows 98, I forgot to install the Polish character set and all that. Now my girlfriend needs to get a move on with her master's thesis but she can't use the laptop and now you know why. And I'd just rather not try the whole installation procedure again for the time being. Enter the grandma PC. My girlfriend came up with the idea I reanimate it and put it on her kitchen table as a typewriter, essentially, for as long as she needs to work on the thesis, while the laptop is going to remains something of an Internet terminal, if you will. Now the desktop PC -- whose age by now you have probably quite accurately guesstimated -- isn't just slow. Ohnono, that wouldn't be exciting, would it? Especially since I only wanted it to run Microsoft Word and that's it. So in addition to being slow, its Win98 spurts out all sorts of funky errors when I try to access anything remotely related to configuration, it corrupts documents saved to My Documents (but not elsewhere), its hard drive is faulty, it stalls at random moments, all of that jazz.
So I thought, Well maybe I'd just give the disk a good old format treatment, install a fresh copy of Win98, install Word 2000 and leave it at that. That's why I went over to my girlfriend's place while she was away, armed with a Windows 98 CD and an Office 2000 CD, bent on making that thing work. First surprise: the BIOS haven't even heard of booting from a CD. Joy. So I think, Ok, let's try running the setup from the existing Windows installation. Think again. The computer's CD drive doesn't read CD-Rs. At that point I sort of gave up. I decided I don't have enough willpower to go back home (even though it's just across the street), open up my PC, take out one of my DVD drives (which, for all I know, might not even work on the old one), carry it over to my girlfriend's place, open up the old PC, put in the drive, install Windows (maybe), take the drive out again, bring it back to my place and put it back in my PC. No way.
So what I ended up doing was tidying up the existing Windows installation as well as I could, clean the desktop, create a folder on the desktop called My New Documents (for if you saved any Word document in the real My Documents folder, closed it and tried to reopen it from Word -- the only possibility, if you recall, since you can't open My Documents folder itself -- it came out all messed up), and write (as in, with a pen on a piece of paper) a point-by-point operating manual for the Typewriter Formerly Known As Old Generation PC, with all the don'ts heavily emphasized.
The list of dos and don'ts had this as one of the points: "Back up your work on a floppy (or better two) as often as you can". And with that I put on my coat and went floppy shopping to a nearby mall. (It also gave me a good excuse to go eat a fish burger, as I had been hungry since getting up at 6 am.) And this was the best part of the experience, I tell ya. I felt so old school. I mean dude. You know, I can't remember when was the last time I bought a box of floppies -- nor when I used a floppy, for that matter. I'm almost glad I bought some new ones before they finally disappear off the face of Earth.
So, old PCs suck royally, but at least they can give you a nostalgic experience. Now if only the somewhat reanimated PC can give my girlfriend some a word-processing experience.
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