Hard Disk Drives, Part 3

We have E-mail! The Windows XP installation on the old Dell system went smoothly. Had to install some drivers from a second CD. I picked up the old laptop's hard drive from the repair shop this afternoon. They were pleased to get my check. I left the laptop with them. They may be able to use it for parts, like the keyboard and/or screen.

I pulled a stick of memory from the old gaming system and put it in the old Dell, downloaded and installed SP3 and Firefox. The SP3 installation turned on the firewall by default and left the other stuff turned off, which suited me fine. Imported my wife's address book and old messages directly from the hard drive from her laptop.

Now all we need is the password. Calling Verizon gets me a number to Frontier. Call Frontier and I get exactly the same Robo-cop automatic menu system as I got with Verizon. Finally get through to a person and he tells me it's going to be another week before their email system is actually working. My wife finally gets in the act and starts looking for the folder with the email id's and passwords. I've been looking for it for days. She finds it in five minutes. Open the folder and there's her ID and password. Type them in and presto! Downloading 549 new messages . . .

She gets a lot of spam. Total expense for this operation was under $100. $30 to the repair shop, $48 to Newegg for the new hard disk drive and $19 to Iguana Micro for the external hard drive case for the disk from the laptop. The only thing lacking on the resurrected Dell is a decent screen. Right now it has an old 17" CRT. Remember when a 17" screen was the cat's pajamas? No, probably not.