mercredi 19 juin 2013

DELL 4500s from the forest - chapter 4 : the giveaway

Having toyed enough with this machine I started to look for potential collectors. There's not a lot of such enterprises nearby but I found one email. It took them 7 days to answer me negatively. So I was wrong, twice, for thinking they were out of business and for thinking this machine had any value at all. Yesterday, my father caught a neighbor saying she had issues installing a computer her grandchild gave her so she can learn to surf the web. On her living room floor lies an ATX mid-tower, a big SONY vaio desktop from 2002~ I guess. Problem .. it's booting quite randomly (1 on 10 on average). After an hour trying to unsuccessfully isolate the problem I tell her about my encounter with the DELL. She agrees to try it. I also proposed to sell her my ThinkPad x61 for $150. But she didn't want to spend money so .. she'll take the old Pentium 4.

Last time she had to use a computer was long ago at work. I didn't understand that it was already twenty years since she retired, she's actually 82~. At that time I'm not even sure she was given a graphical interface. Probably some complex mainframe terminal system. And so I didn't mind blindly throwing her this instrument of torture called a mouse. Suddenly explaining her things looks a lot longer then I thought. Classic first encounter with a mouse. Even the basic web conventions (pages, clickable [blue] text as links, searching,...) is heavier than it seems. She's completely unsaavy regarding contemporary usage, and doesn't look very fond of the digital world but she's kinda witty, I'm sure she'll manage.

Aucun commentaire:

Enregistrer un commentaire