I’m still doing PC repair for the summer camp at which I once worked and today I investigated two doozies.

1. Operator couldn’t install Office 2003.  The box had a 4 kilobytes of free space on its  3 gigabyte hard drive.  At the time I was looking at the device I had my phone, keychain flash drive, and iPod on me giving me 30 times the storage of that device in my pockets.  Despite having 4 k of free space it ran XP on its 1.4 GHz proc like a champ.  I was slightly impressed.  I cleared off some unnecessary programs and installed Office via USB 1.1 leaving the PC enough space for a whole hour of music in MP3 form at 128k bitrate.
2. This PC wouldn’t turn on and had a slight rattle.  I found out what the rattle was: the processor and a cooling fan.  This was a Pentium 2 that had a slot CPU that were all the rage in 1997 during the hayday of the serial port.  This one had a 20 gig hard drive and I felt someone had played a cruel trick on the other PC.  Repair that PC will consist of recycling the case and its consecrated to remove the demons that inhabited the ball mouse and 5-Pin DIN keyboard that were probably used on it.