Honest.

I started off May with 5 computers to my name, 3 desktops and 2 laptops. I am now officially down to 1 each. The winning desktop is the Athlon that used to belong to ayrcha. We pulled hardware out of both the desktops that were recycled. But wow. Most of the sorting is done. I think I found a place to store the 10-12 boxes and the bicycle. When it's really clean on Monday, I'll take pictures. (These are for reference anyway, in case landlord is still a jerk.) We just have a few piles of stuff on various tables and a scant few dishes to clean. We do need to work out a few better places to store dishes, but it's looking very good.

I'm trying to be positive.

Among other errands, we dropped Delirium (the eldest computer I had with me) off at UPS to be shipped to the recycling service.

RIP Delirium.

We started off May with me having 5 computers. We're down to 3. By the end of next week, I should only have two, the Athlon desktop and the working laptop. (One of them is named Desire -- I'm not sure which...) I still have Delirium's pulled hard drive. I still have Discord's hard drive and keyboard, for that matter.

We're going to pull the hard drive, CD drive and floppy drive from the church computer then get rid of it too. And I still have 2 defunct laptop batteries to get rid of safely. Anyone know where?

Still about the computers...

I got to see my wallpaper for 3 old computers. Discord had pink norns playing with flowers. the Athlon has pretty paper doll Louis-Antoine St. Just, and Destiny has an alethiometer from the advertising for The Golden Compass movie.

For some reason this puts me in mind of souvenirs I've wanted for some of the things I am a fan of that not everyone would know is fannish, but pleased me. Not all of these were available as products, or were done badly. Of course, I always wanted a sonic screwdriver from Doctor Who. I settled for a shiny tire pressure gauge. When Anastasia came out, I wanted a music box like the one in the movie, but the one at the gift store was horribly expensive and ugly to boot. I don't think even a little girl would have wanted it in her room. I never minded Star Trek patch insignia and the new comm badges. I have a Blake's Seven logo patch on my letter jacket. And I'd probably be tickled to have an alethiometer. Oddly enough for Scarlet Pimpernel, other than things associated with the musical, I've really only wanted the clothes. And maybe a quizzing glass. My eyes are bad enough that I could actually use one. (And if anyone knows how to get poufy men's hair ribbons other than making them myself which I likely will have to do.)

Last night, Cantropos' geeky and very handy older cousin came over to play with my computers. For those of you who don't know I have a motley collection of 5 aged computers (2 laptops and 3 towers) all running Win98. I have information and programs and games scattered all over the place.

There was much progress in getting them ready to be cleared out. My goal is to end up with 1 desktop that is hopefully upgradable to XP and a working laptop. The working laptop was achieved last night.

I had 2 identical Gateway Solo 1100s which had different problems. Now I have 1 working laptop. It's only problem is that the batteries are so dead the laptop won't run with them so I have to stay plugged in, but I can still visit people's houses or go the library with my computer! The hard drive came from the newer one, so the little compy is now named Destiny. Discord's hard drive was pulled, and I'll see what I can do with it later. I also kept the keyboard. The rest of the broken bits went into the trash. My wish list now includes a PCMIA card and a new battery for Destiny.

Then we moved on to the towers. Delirium, the Athlon and the church computer. We checked the speeds and surprisingly the Athlon is the fastest processor, 850Mhrz. We checked the hard drive (I still have to figure out what is up with that partition). There's already a small 2nd hard drive in it that's a back up of the primary information that we're gonna pull later. Delirium has files and a few programs we need to pull. Then I'm gonna yank the HD and donate the remains. The church computer has very little of my stuff on it. I haven't had it long. So I'll pull what files I need and then we may keep the hard drive and swap with Drive E on the Athlon, and we'll probably end up using the CD burner from there too. I may or may not keep the floppy drive, too, because the floppy on the Athlon does work but it's a bit eccentric.

So in the end we only ended up trashing the remains of 1 laptop, but I have a definite plan for what to do the towers. Once all the bits are moved, I am going to try to get an XP upgrade on the Athlon. Just to date some of these computers for people. Delirium was ordered from Gateway while the final Seinfeld was being broadcast.

Someone just took the trouble to explain OpenID to anyone who's still unclear what it is or how it works. Thanks rydra_wong .

Choir rehearsal was a bit of a farce for me though the pipe organ sounded magnificent. I can barely breathe. The director suggested Mucinex, but I don't think we can afford it. It looks interesting, and maybe a better kind of medicine since it lets the mucus do its work.

And after 2 (maybe 3?) days of fighting with it, I think we finally found the evil virus and got rid of it. That was darn annoying, even though we didn't have the super dangerous part, just the part that popped up every 20 mins or so trying to get us to download something.

Today? Today I have nearly no voice, my throat is ravaged by the cough. My head feels like an overripe melon.

Chris and I finally have two itty bitty flash drives that work with his computer. And the smallest works with Delerium too so that's something.

I'm feeling  a little bit better.

Well, Chris's cousin loaned/gave me a monitor for my computer. It's huge one too. 17 inches. And it works. Yay. So I finally got the bedroom rearrranged with the bed turned and the antique desk moved to where the internet cable could reach. But in adjusting things I accidentally pulled the cable too hard and it disappeared from the other side of the wall, so still no internets for Sam in her bedroom. I hope that we can find the stupid thing and pull it through later.

But it does mean that if I'm willing to burn stuff to CD to cart it back and forth I can make icons and images again.

I worked hard on Delerium the other day to back up enough information onto CDs to be able to run a defrag and recover nearly half the drive space from unnecessary files. I loaded Sims Deluxe on it. Everything was going well. Then my monitor died. Permanently. It's been shutting itsefl off randomly after about 2 hours or work or so. I usually would let it rest for a bit and come back if there was something I particularly needed Delerium for (image editing, uploading/downloading images, etc.) Getting the Sims on there was so that Chris could use his own computer for interneting and such more.

Damn. It's completely dead now. Black. It still gets signal because the computer doens't freak out. Just no picture.

I need to get a new monitor cheap. As soon as I start working again I'm saving up for a laptop from Walmart.

I finally got to find out if my CD burner worked. It's been worrying me that the screencaps I took from The Scarlet Pimpernel the other day made Delerium freak out and give me an 'out of memory' error. And all the files were in temporary 'read-only' mode.

So today I burned all the pics onto one CD, all the writing onto another, and found a file of music files. Music files. A whole CD full of mp3s.

It makes me want to weep.

Also, I ordered that darn movie (TSP) on DVD from Amazon. It should be here next week. Happy Birthday to me.