The Red Brick Times

I am newly computered. I went to Royal Business Equipment in Elyria and they built a desktop cube to my specs. I have joined the LCD monitor age and have room on my desk for more piles of paper than before.

I have been working on a combination of two 7-year-old HP Pavilions and an IBM Thinkpad 600 laptop wedded to a docking station the size of a small suitcase. All were slow, requiring too much time to even refresh a screen. At first, I attributed that to the crawly dialup connection via the bearskin and stone-knife equipment maintained by the previous-Century Telephone Company. But as I upgraded software and tried to keep everything ticking, it became apparent that computers designed for former cutting edge technology (Windows 95 and IBM OS2) were not up to handling Windows XP, Mozilla, Adobe Acrobat, and the myriad of audio and video mushrooms that have sprung from the undergrowth. Don't even think about Windows Vista that is in Beta now and will be coming out next year.

So I have two old, slow computers to donate. One HP pavilion desktop, one IBM Thinkpad 600 laptop. They both have telephone modems and USB ports. The desktop has a 15" monitor with built in microphone, and Polk speakers that attach. It has a speakerphone funtion built into the modem that uses these for phone calls. Both computers are fully operational. The HP has Windows 98 and the IBM has Windows XP and Windows 2000 (select which one you want at boot-up). The IBM laptop battery is toast, but it operates from the power adaptor, or when plugged into the docking station. HP 600 batteries are on eBay ($50 to $170).

Unless anyone on the RBT needs them, I will give them to a friend who donates computers to those in his church who have none and who need to learn basic computer skills to become more employable.

I also have an HP Pavilion from which I have removed the hard drive (it failed), the 3.5" floppy, and the CD R/W to add to the new box.

Anybody need a desktop computer with power supply, motherboard, CPU (Intel Celeron), 128 Mb RAM, USB ports and an ethernet card for a you-build project?

I will throw in keyboard, mouse, CD ROM drive, monitor, cords. I will also include an ATI "All-in-Wonder" card, cables and software that lets you manipulate video tape and television images. It has a bunch of input-output connections and a TV cable coax imput. Watch TV on your screen. capture images. Play with video tape. It has a video monitor output jack in addition to the normal computer monitor output.

To make this computer work, you will need only a hard drive (used 10-40Gb drive, maybe $20-$50 on eBay) and an operating system disk (Windows 98 perhaps) to make it go. Plus some hard drive formatting and reloading time. The operating system disk should boot the computer for you to let you build the hard drive.
Posted 10:38 AM by Andy (1) comments

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PS:
Both the HP desktop and the IBM laptop have ethernet ports for those of you who are DSL'd or networked. The IBM RJ41 ethernet plug (8-pin telephone plug) is in the docking station, but there is also a PCMCIA ethernet card and RJ41 cord for stand-alone use.

# posted by  Andy : August 29, 2006 11:45 AM
 
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