Nothing much to report . . . it seems simple . . . what does? . . . well, I have all these computers lying around my house . . . I kinda feel sorry for computers that society deems obsolete . . . all those 80486's and older. Especially when in less developed (technologically, that is) countries any computer would be a luxury. So, with this is mind, I became determined to find a use for this poor old neglected 486DX. That computer is now happily running FreeSCO now, but I have yet to decide what to do with it. It still has a few quirks . . . like, you turn it on - the power (not sexually) - and after a few seconds (although this can vary from one second to about fifteen) the power will just turn off and then on again. Very odd. At first, I thought I was trying to power too many components (four circuit boards, a CD-ROM, two hard-drives and a floppy drive) but after removing all but the essential, this power cycling thing was still happening. Anyway, it only seems to happen for the first few minutes of use, and then seems to settle down. Strange. Very strange. So, it works now anyway. Perhaps now I can remove the floppy drive, the video card and the CD-ROM and just have it as a dumb terminal.

You see? This is the kind of stuff I write about. I could go on. I will go on. You see, my main computer, the important one on which I do all my university work has some problems of its own. I think (although I'm not sure) that the video card (an old 16MB Voodoo 2000, I think) keeps overheating. I think this, because what I'm about to describe only ever happens when I'm flicking between video modes. So, what happens . . . well there's me, doing something in text mode, then back to 800X600 graphics mode, then I click the 'Full Screen' button in VMWare, thereby making Windows 2000 use the full screen, then I go out of this, do something in KDE, blah blah blah blah . . . and then, occasionally, the screen will go black and the machine will completely lock up. And I'm using . . . oh dear, the 486DX just resetted itself . . . hmmmm . . . not good . . . where was I? . . . oh yes . . . so I'm using Linux, so one hardly expects the machine to ever completely lock-up due to a software issue, so I figure it must be something hardware related. Then I noticed how hot the heat-sinks were getting on the video card (then get a better heat sink - duh) and so I . . . no, you don't understand. I got a memory upgrade recently, from 256MB up to 768MB, and it's hardly made any difference, so I'm suspecting bottle-neck somewhere. So I get this new video card, at the same time as getting the memory but, of course, the thing's so new, that SuSE 7.3 doesn't seem to support it. Plus, in trying to support this new video card, my computer kept crashing (so I've had to put back the old video card, for the time being). And every time the computer crashes, there's that risk that another chunk of my hard-disk gets corrupted. I've already had to reinstall KDE because of such corruption. And now, I find my mail reader no longer works and . . . so Paul says to me, "You wanna get a new version of SuSE. Newer version have a more robust file system, whereby if the system crashes, the computer can pick up from exactly where it was last time, so you don't lose anything," but I guess to do this, I'll need to format my hard-drive, which I cannot do, as there's loads of important stuff there, so perhaps if I buy a new hard-drive, format that, install the most recent SuSE on that, then maybe that will support my new video card and NOT have such a destructive impact on the hard-drive upon crashing . . . I don't know. It's never simple, is it?