John W Colby
jwcolby at gmail.com
Sat Mar 1 06:25:53 CST 2014
This week I ordered parts for a gaming machine for my 13 year old son. Newegg rocks. He has a decidedly old PC that I built from parts scavenged from old server parts. Long in the tooth describes it perfectly. So last night, I took my son and Brian (his buddy who spends 1/2 his life at my house) upstairs to start building this PC. The boys did each and every part of the build themselves. We did every step twice, every screw, the motherboard standoffs, motherboard being screwed into place, the memory dimms put in, video card inserted and screwed down, power supply screwed in place and all the leads connected etc. Disk drive and DVD rom drive installed and power / SATA cables installed. The ONLY thing that I did was insert the processor chip into the socket and install the heat sink fan for that while they watched. So my boys built Robbie's computer last night. Turned it on and it came right up. Installed the new OEM Windows 7 disk and did the install. I could have used Windows 8 for that PC, it would have worked just fine, but I just didn't want to have to spend the time and effort supporting a lonely Windows 8 island in a sea of existing Windows 7 PCs around it. There is no "must have" reason to put it on this new machine. And of course no touch screen anyway. Today the boys will personally run Windows update the bajillion times required, download Avast Free and Threatfire, install the games etc. We will install the Office 7 suite, PDF reader, Chrome and Firefox and all that. Then we get to try and figure out whether their game state history for the various games they play are local or on the internet and if local, where and can it be migrated from the old machine to the new. New anything is disruptive, no doubt about that. -- John W. Colby Reality is what refuses to go away when you do not believe in it --- This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active. http://www.avast.com