Well, I am relieved to find that at least two other people have or have had DSL PCs in their garage. It's good to not be alone.
But this week has been a scavenger hunt for old Dell laptop parts. You see, my wife's Latitude 500Mhz CPx was falling apart and overburdened by too much Windows and too little ram. So I raided the store of old Latitudes stored (for some unknown reason) in the server room at work. Now I'm not the "IT Guy" and it requires special cooperation and skills to "borrow" "dead" laptops "to get a few parts from". God bless my IT guys. I help them out (ie: let them borrow my tools and am generally a low-maintenance user) and they let me part-out old laptops. Symbiosis, pure and simple... Although they have asset tags, old, dead laptops probably don't exist "officially" any more, most of them having last been booted over two years ago. Of course, all of them were under 1Ghz. Two yielded good keyboards, one yielded a PCMCIA slot assembly, one yielded a good touchpad/wrist rest/speakers. Before long I had three whole, working machines and one really dead one and a slow one. One of the repaired ones is a 400Mhz CPi, much like the 333Mhz CPi that was so useful in the garage, but with a LCD panel that stands up straight.
Now the cool part. We Experiment: take the drive out of the DSL laptop and put it in the other soon-to-be-formerly corporate windoze laptop. I do. It boots. It runs. It lets me blog. So now I reassemble up the old 333Mhz and pack it back to the server room for semi-permanent storage. It's a zero-sum game here: you only get one laptop to play with at a time and always need to return what you "borrowed". So the stack of laptops in the server room is the same height and I now have two dsl-capable laptops (500Mhz CPx and 400Mhz CPi) and a "new" 750Mhz CPx for the wife.
Can life get any better? I submit that it can not.
From N. Texas,
--jm