I bummed around for a bit, I still didn't know what to do with the hardware.

I noticed it was getting a bit dark outside, black rain clouds blowing over.

I decided to go and get rid of the printer cartridge.

I went down, took my mp3 player.

I got all setup, with my earbuds in, I was just about to leave, when the mp3 player turned off with it's low battery beep. Great, that was a waste of time, and I took it off again.

As I rode down, I got a few drops of rain.

It was weird, it was only raining very lightly, but they were big hard drops, making "doink" noises when they hit the visor on my helmet.

As I got close, I had beaten the clouds, so it was fine.

I got to the lady's place, I put the cartridge in for her, did a test print, it was fine.

She paid me back for the cartridge.

She had bought a drier, hadn't had one before, and wanted to know some details about it (like why there were these little plastic things you had to screw onto the back).

I looked at the instructions and worked out they are to stop you from pushing the unit hard up against tge wall and blocking the air intake.

I told her she shouldn't run it with all the doors and windows closed, because of the humidity it creates (the computer is in the same room).

I was just about to leave, when she mentioned something about the medication she was on for her asthma, we chatted about that for a bit (as I am an asthmatic too).

I left her place, on the way home, I stopped in at McDonalds, got some cheeseburgers, I ate one, stuck 2 in the saddle bags, and headed for home.

I was annoyed I didn't put them more conveniently, I could have just about eaten them while I rode home.

I got home, came inside, ate the other 2.

I then tried to work out what to do with the hardware.

I decided to run the 800mhz bare (since I don't have a case for it (maybe I could put it in that busted case)) with just a disk on it, and use it to run the sat decoder, and then I can put all my big disks attached to the new cpu/mobo/mem in the old case.

I mucked around and rearranged the disks in the machine, since I don't have 2 *DR drives in there anymore, only the DVDR, there's no need to have the disks staggered and be streching the IDE cables around.

I took all the disks out, fitted the cooling fan to the first one. I then realised it wouldn't fit into the case.

I took the DVDR drive out, moved it to the bottom from the top, put the hard disk back in.

I went to put the fan on the next disk, and realised it still wasn't going to fit.

I had to remove and rotate the 3.5" - 5.25" adapters I have on the disks, that worked a bit better.

I did that to all the disks, and fitted all the fans.

I put them all back in the machine.

One thing I don't like, is that they are hard pressed together, while it's a piece of metal, with big holes in it, which should act like a heatsick where it's in contact, and the air movement should get the heat away, I'm worried that the fans won't work properly because the holes where the air is supposed to go/come through, are blocked by the top of the next disk.

We'll see what they do, worst thing is that the fans burn out I suppose.

I put the motherboard in. D'oh.. it won't fit, because now the fat ass of the DVDR protrudes into where the corner of the motherboard needs to go.

I don't want the DVDR drive hanging out of the machine by 3 inches.

I pulled all the disks out, and put them back in again, with the DVDR back at the top, where it doesn't get in the way of the mobo.

My brother came in, watched a bit of tv, and said we were having barbeque for tea. Dad came in a few minutes after he went out, said the same thing, but didn't say when it was being served. I wasn't really in the mood for it anyway.

I plugged all the cables in to the disks, and left it.

I went back to the other machine.

I found a disk for it, the 3gb disk I was supposed to put into the busted machine, that didn't sound healthy. I plugged it on, it still didn't sound healthy.

I tried installing windows on it, it failed. When the drive didn't sound like a ping pong ball bouncing on tiles, it sounded like a piezo speaker screeching. Every now and then it would throw this nasty grinding sound in for good measure.

The files were corrupt, and windows install didn't finish.

I noticed another disk hanging around on the desk, a 2gb disk. I think I tried to use this as a linux disk in my mac, but I couldn't work out how to make it boot properly.

I plugged it in, the BIOS took ages to detect, or do anything. I gave up on that after a short while.

I was also trying to get the machine to run off a PCI video card, because I've only got the one AGP card for these now 2 machines. It would not run a PCI card, I tried 2 different ones, in different slots.

At one point, when I put the AGP card back, it still wouldn't even work.

I pulled the board away, and looked at it closely.

All the capacitors are on an angle, it's weird, and they don't go straight. I looked even more closely.. the cases off the capacitors has popped off, and there is brown crud sticking out of the bottom of most of them, electrolyte I assume. Some of it had even run a short way on the board, looked like chocolate melted on the board.

It was hard, and I was able to use a screwdriver to carefully remove it.

It's no wonder this board is flakey, out of about 15 large capacitors, about 8 are all blown like this, pushed over, with the cases lifting (and bulging at the top).

Maybe I should replace the capacitors, it doesn't look that hard, they are all straight through mounted, and there's only 2 types of cap, and all the ones that are blown are the same.

I put the board back, fiddled around a bit more, and got it working again.

I pulled the 10gb disk with linux on it I found the other day out of the games machine, and connected it.

It booted, started X, but I couldn't login, the keyboard wouldn't work, just like on the other machine I tried to run it in.

I rebooted, booted it in single user mode.

I had a poke around on the disk, there's nothing on it. I must have been building it as a router to replace the 486 that runs LRP to connect my network to my parent's machines.

I don't even remember. It had debian 3.0 on it, so it's not too old, but that's still a couple of years. The fact the disks hadn't been scanned for 760 days or whatever it was the other day when I frst booted it is a bit of a hint.

I couldn't find anything on the disk, I must have installed it, and then done nothing with it.

I had it in a different machine, I remember I had to muck around with the disks in that machine a while back, I think it was when the 2 IBM deathstar disks in the 800 died, and I had to salvage what I could.

I must have taken this disk out, to put a bigger one in, to salvage the data on to, and then never changed it all back (there is still salvaged data on the disks in that machine, a couple of years later).

Anyway, I repartitioned, installed windows.

The network was really slow in it for some reason (to the point where it didn't actually work), same card, same slot, same port on the switch.

I tried different slots and stuff, made no difference. When I moved it to the 10mb hub, it was a lot better. Weird.

I put the card stuff on the machine, moved the phoenix interface and the card/box interface back on to the serial ports on this machine (and reconfigured my parent's client).

It was now about 10.15pm, and I called my mate to find out if anything is going on tonight.

That's in the next blog.