I popped over to Finchampstead in the afternoon. After working at AI for a year I would've thought I could've come up with more excuses for going there as I have to drive past barracks to get to the office. Today was hot and there were a couple looking gorgeous and forlorn. Bless. Anyway. Over in the afternoon and collected my new toy: a PII 233 with 64 meg of RAM, a 9 gig SCSI drive and a network card.

When I got back to the office, Jon and I set to trying to set the beastie up so I could take it home and play with pieces of electric string. First off was that we were missing the special adaptor things for the SCSI drive, so that came out and was replaced by an IDE one of the same size. We got that to boot Linux and did some installing before LILO barfed and complained it couldn't be on /hdc (we'd got our ribbons plugged in the wrong place) so we set to changing things around then went to re-boot.

Nada. No beep. No keyboard lights. No monitor. Nada.

Jon at this point was concerned that he'd just killed my new toy. I was somewhat disturbed by the prospect as well! So we set to twiddling bits and pieces - just in case we'd unseated anything along the way - and generally scratching heads. With each subsequent graphics card, the monitor just didn't do anything - and the computer refused to budge.

So we took everything out of the machine - Jon being very apologetic - and shoved it into a spare chassis which was lying next to Jon's desk. Everything was fine again! Then we introduced the network card from the old machine and nothing worked. Removed the card and nothing worked. Moved the graphics card into another location and bingo! So we came to the conclusion the network card must've killed the machine after SuSE's auto-detect. Or something. Not entirely sure. Anyway - the result is I have a new machine with 80 meg of RAM, a 9 gig drive, a Linux setup and a working modem. No network cards though - that'll have to be tomorrow.

I've got 128 meg of memory sitting around now which I tried putting into my home machine but it doesn't quite seat properly and the machine doesn't notice it anyway. I will have a play with that sometime soon.

Work was fun. I got some stuff done on AIMMS which Jon was starting to fret over. I've got plenty to do next week so we'll see how much time I end up having. Have a meeting with my second paying client on July 2nd at midday to discuss their website. It's all very exciting!

Mildred has so far managed more than 450 miles on this one tank of petrol. The light's on now but I'd reckon on another 50 miles or so with a light right foot. I've not been driving all that economically either anyway- still accelerating hard but cruising at only about 75mph. Interesting exercise anyway.