Tony Westbrook

I find myself in rather a strange situation this month. Like many of you, I have lots of PCs at home. There's an old Dell Inspiron, which is a perfectly serviceable notebook, but it just doesn't cut it as a working machine - slightly too heavy, operating system too old, processor too slow, hard drive too small, graphics card inadequate. It's fine as a word processor, complete with docking station, PC Card add-ons and a good colour LCD.

Then there's an 800MHz HP Celeron machine I bought for the highly competitive price of £425 (two years ago), which has Windows ME as its operating system and now seems to crash whenever new programs are loaded on it.

Finally, there's the Athlon 1800+ homebrew machine I made as my personal response to PC Magazine's successful 'Build your own PC' feature last year. It used to work well running Windows XP, sporting plenty of memory, a reasonably current 3D graphics card and decent-sized storage.

But now there are times when it can't find the IBM hard file to boot up from and others when it shuts down unexpectedly. I have still to detect any repeatable pattern to these events, but clearly it's not a very useful machine until I've worked out why it does this ...

So now I have a dilemma (as well as no usable home PC). Clearly I have plenty of processor power on hand. Maybe I should spend more time trying to get these machines sorted out, upgrade the Windows ME PC so that I actually have a home PC that works reliably and will allow my underprivileged children to load some of the games they can't use now.

Having a close involvement with PC Magazine, obviously I can find the best bargains and the cheapest ways to upgrade my machines; except that I keep looking at the ads and wondering why I would want to do any of that. Wouldn't it be much better to start again with a new machine?

A peremptory scan of the Dell site this week reveals that £491 (ex. VAT) would buy a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 PC with 17in. monitor, 80GB hard drive and 256MB of Ram. And I could send back if it didn't work.

So, is it really worth spending weeks tinkering with all my sub-standard kit, spending money on new bits when what I really need is a new machine that will be better, integrated and supported?

And yet, it's the lot of the PC Magazine enthusiast not to be able to cast out perfectly serviceable gear, however old it may be. I've only just been able to dump the multiple copies of Ashton Tate's dBase IV, propriety ISA card-based Amstrad networking system and a (physically) huge 40MB SCSI drive that's been in my garage for 10 years.

As soon as I removed these things from my PC, I should have binned them. And I know there's still a 486DX holding a door open in my house, because I feel sure it can still serve in some role or another - one day.

The PC may have become a commodity, but its builders remain members of the most shockingly wasteful branch of manufacturing. I feel so bad about this that I'm on the hunt for new uses for all these bits of equipment.

One of the working PCs could serve as a useful Linux testbed, I suppose, and the notebook could go to a daughter as a homework machine. Or maybe it could become my home network server; I could cannibalise what I need from my homemade PC.

But deep down this is dissatisfying, not least because these changes will require plenty of my time to effect. So, has anyone got a better idea of what to do with all this 'only just past its sell-by date' gear? Email me and let me know what I can do with this stuff. Please! I need your help.

tony_westbrook@vnu.co.uk

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