Coming soon

I disconnected the CPU (aka "the tower") from my PC yesterday, packed it and the mouse and the keyboard into my Tercel, and headed 70 miles to my friends' place in the Poconos. (It's 20 miles away as the crow flies according to my GPS thingie, a Christmas present from these same friends, but Pennsylvania's geography does not permit cars to travel like crows.) We disassembled the case to get at the hard drive for cloning. There was dust in the case, but not as much as I'd expected, and none of it appeared to be scorched. It also didn't seem to be completely clogging any of the ventilation holes. So the "critical overheating due to dust buildup" theory was moved to the back burner.

(I'm finishing writing this after an eleven-hour hiatus - brought on, initially, by failures of Internet Explorer, Firefox, and finally AOL - during which temperatures soared into the 90's, followed by a decent afternoon thunderstorm that cooled things off a bit. There's another thunderstorm on the way, so I need to get this wrapped up quickly and then disconnect the plugs from the electrical outlets.)

The good news is that the old computer survived the 140-mile round-trip to and from my friends' place, and came back in the company of a newly built PC running Windows XP Pro with vastly superior RAM, hard drive space, and processing power. It also weighs a fraction of what this computer does. I ordered a DSL kit yesterday, taking advantage of Verizon's offer that ends at the end of the month; I was planning on setting up DSL at the new house, but as I don't even live there yet, that seemed like an unnecessary expense. So the DSL will go here, possibly by the end of this week, and will be installed there at a later date.

I'm writing this offline in Wordpad. The time now is 10:07 PM. We'll see if I get back online long enough to get it posted.