Down the Dump….

…we went yesterday, to virtuously dispose of our accumulated plastic, cardboard and bottles. While we were slinging bottles into the banks, I noticed a laptop bag sitting on top of the adjacent (overflowing) electronics bin. I took a peek inside – yes, there was a laptop! I grabbed it and slung it into the car before anybody else spotted it.
Once home, I examined my prize. Not only was the lappie all in one piece, it had a power cable and spare batteries packed in the bag with it, so no time was lost in turning it on. It powered up, but sadly, it proved to be BIOS password-protected – which meant there was no way I could get it to boot up.
Went to the manufacturers’ site and checked the specs – it’s an old machine, with only 128g RAM, 10 gig HD, Win98 and no wifi. But it’s upgradable; once I get it running (which will be soon – I’ve discovered how to get around the password protection), I’ll install Ubuntu on it and start playing.
Meanwhile, I’m still gobsmacked at what people chuck away!

That wasn’t all that I found yesterday – searching through our Big Box of Computer Bits for a spare cable ribbon for B’s machine, I came across an old hard drive that I had completely forgotten about. I’ve been planning for some time to get a bigger drive for my machine – 30G is too small, and I’m continually clearing stuff off; this old drive is 40G. So, this morning, I cabled it in as a slave drive, checked it, took off what little stuff I wanted to keep and formatted it. I’m now copying my DVDs of photos and music onto it.

And that’s still not all – I bought my usual scratchcard yesterday – I found I had won £4. This morning, I took it into the shop to collect my winnings – and according to the machine, my prize was actually £14. I didn’t stay to argue, but I did get another pair of scratchcards. Sitting in the car, we scratched our cards together. B scratched his and came up with nothing; “If you get another prize, I think I’ll slap you.”
“OK, slap me now!” was my reply – I’d won £12!

So, right now, my mood is cautiously cheerful (there still might be a catch in something somewhere….)