Being a man of more leisure than I ever thought possible, I decided to sort out my CD-ROM collection. I’ve amassed a fair number over the years but a lot of them went the way of all those 12" video discs made to celebrate “The Millennium” (as if there was only ever one) by the likes of the BBC, only for the format and the players to vanish, leaving all the information inaccessible.
I was annoyed when I found that a fair number of excellent CD-ROMs wouldn’t run on the combination of hardware and Windows XP offered by the cheap but good PCs I bought from about 2007 on. By then, the older PCs, on which the disks still ran, were limping along and tedious to use.
My new-found leisure has allowed me to screen the collection for those which will still run on an up-to-date PC and do something about making the older PCs work better. The first thing I noticed was that they had Alzheimer’s. Luckily, new coin-cell back-up batteries are readily available at my local hardware shop. Unluckily, they have to be fitted in the most inaccessible part of the motherboard imaginable.
Irwin was able to find me some memory boards for the make-over. It’s truly amazing how much difference doubling the memory of a computer makes. And at the Mansion, I have room to deploy my collection of obsolete PCs and the ability to enjoy the ‘lost’ CD-ROMs on a revived PC which zips along instead of clunking. Super!
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