R
Richard Steven Hack
It's that I want to your attention to this fact: Many posters, right here
in ACF, are not what you and I might get called. Fat Americans.
Actually I'm American and I'm fat (let's not mince words, forty to
fifty pounds overweight at 5'8" is fat) and I'm living on Pell Grants
and welfare (and the welfare ends next month).
Buying PCs is not feasible for me except last year when I managed to
divert a portion of a Pell Grant and my college work-study to pick up
a fairly nice PC (AMD 2GHz, 60MB HD, 512MB RAM, 16X DVD) for around
$585 from a local clone store.
Previously I was using an old Compaq Deskpro 4000 which was given to
me by the Veterans Administration homeless project here in San
Francisco (they got it from Macy's here) plus a Dell monitor from a
retraining program I went through in 2001. I use the Dell and the
Compaq keyboard with the new machine. I'm hoping to network the two
machines at some point here.
Which is why I use freeware a lot and am moving to Linux slowly. I've
just downloaded WIndows XP as part of the Microsoft Academy project
via City College of San Francisco, and a developer has given me a
Windows 2000 CD since he is an MSDN member and gets all the OS's and
ten seats for them. So I can use Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Windows
XP to support my clients in my freelance tech support business I'm
starting.
Hopefully soon I can be making enough bucks to be able to buy hardware
(would love a decent laptop - also useful for tech support) more
frequently and maybe even the odd shareware or commercial software.
Two years ago, I would have kissed ass for a PIII 800MHz, 256MB and
20GB HD. The Compaq had a 2GB drive (which I managed to improve with
a 30GB HD second drive), 96MB which I increased to 256MB, and
eventually replaced the 166MHz CPU with an Evergreen Technologies AMD
K6-2 CPU upgrade for around $80. Even today, a PIII 800MHz level
machine will go for several hundred dollars on used machine sites -
even though a machine like my current one goes for barely a couple
hundred more.
The only machines I see given away in Goodwill stores and the like are
mostly ancient 486's.