I thank those for the welcome. I can agree about more damage coming from overchilled HDDs, but on my present system, I need to keep a 24" boxer fan blowing into the case to maintain drive temps under 50C. When I keep the air moving, they stay consistent at around 32-24 C.
As for knowledge...well, if ya wanna know why they ran Binary Coded Decimal-based machines for banking, I can tell ya about that. (It was to avoid that extra fraction of a cent in interest created with floating point math that some programmers routed into their own accounts.)
I can also tell about the first multi-processor mini-computer (Burroughs B-900...that's who I worked for) which was a great machine...unfortunately those who marketed it didn't know nuttin about computers so I'd have to go in after the installation and make it work right.
Ohh...I started out with a TI-99 toy, then went to a Commodore 64 and then a 128. I considered an Amiga, but went with MS-DOS based machines because there was more of a market for what I wsa doing on the side...writing dBase III applications. I've worked on a vast array of Burroughs systems, from mechanical adding machines to B-7900 and A-9 mainframes, HP3000s, IBM AS400s and a whole buncha server boxes. When I retired I specialized in writing interfaces between machines that didn't speak the same language...like the AS400s. It was a lotta fun to get data out of an Oracle database and into the 400s flat file system although they called it "an object-oriented system. You can call files anything ya want, but if they're just a collection of pre-defined records especially without inheritance, they're flat files.
Yeah...it's been an interesting journey. Most of the time I use the machines for photo editing and other graphic development and from April through October I'm at hot rod cruises, sports car and bike races or on the salt flats. I have a 29 Model A rat rod (what else would a rat have?) and a car that my partner and I are hoping to have ready for the salt this September.
I play blues bass and Hammond organ (I'm much better on bass than organ...but I'm still workin on it) and I'm a widower living alone in a big house that I bought for my wife before I lost her. Things is what they is. Can't change what already is. Oh...I've been a friend of Bill W since 1992.
My main sites are
http://www.chevyasylum.com/Welcome.html and
http://www.raytherat.com/Welcome.html I maintain a whole buncha other ones. I thought retirement would mean takin it easy, but I've never worked harder nor enjoyed it as much. I'm livin a dream. Best life I've ever had.
Edit: I've ordered a full version of Win 7 Pro. I figured that since it was gonna live on an SSD, I didn't want to fight the upgrade process and scatter the SSD's data. Easier to do it once and not mess with it.