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Btw, my PC is 11 years old. No laughing, please.



I knew a guy who bragged about this axe his grandfather had given him when he was fifteen. "Best axe I've ever owned," he said. "I've put three new heads on it and changed the handle five times. Granddad's axe is just amazing!"

My PC is seven years old, but it's more like granddad's axe, or Frankenstein's monster. The mobo failed just before the warranty was up, so I have a six-year-old replacement. I've replaced the power supply two or three times, the last being this past fall. The $200 gamer video card that I bought at a yard sale for $10 just blew, so I replaced it with a new OEM piece with twice as much RAM for $15. The C: drive--the 60 gig Maxtor with Win2K loaded--failed when I moved in the summer of 08. Its replacement is running a factory-fresh copy of XP Pro SP2 I got from a Microsoft employee for $35. I replaced the D: drive, too, because it seemed a little ridiculous to have an 80 gig 5400 RPM drive backing up a 160 Gb 7200 RPM main drive. Now the secondary is a 500 Gb Western Digital 7200 RPM Caviar Blue server-grade drive. Oh, and the USB bus fried when BIAB 2009 UltraPAK came on a defective HD in the winter of 09, so I installed a new USB IDE adapter.

Best seven-year-old PC I've ever owned!

Be sure you're ready for the demise of Old Paint by having everything backed up and ready to put into a new box.

R.

"My primary musical instrument is the personal computer."