I have been doing computer repair and troubleshooting since 1999 anyway. I have done all of my own computer work myself since 2001 when I watched a local computer guy do all of the things that I could do already, and listened to his comments as he belittled me for needing to take the machine to him.

Almost no one around here (Corydon Indiana) is certified. I also don't like how many computer repair people handle their components. I have not the money to keep buying the same component because of mis-handling of the device. I treat the devices very carefully.

That is why I am still using many of the same computer parts for as long as 10 years now. I collect computer parts also. I am growing quite a collection. I was thinking about building a nice powerful system (when this economy and society feels like allowing me to make the money to afford it) and put a good old 5.25 inch floppy drive in it, just to hear the complaints.
Ha ha ha aha ha ah ah aha ah aha ha ah aha ha ah aha ha aha ah aha ha!

But seriously, I go into local computer shops to talk to the owners and look for parts. Most of them have enough things in common that their businesses are about the same. Some of the shops are filthier and more disorganized than others.

I have been getting more nostalgic lately with computers. I have an 8086 system that I gave to a friend (and could get back if I need), I have a 286 system, I have an old Compaq 486DX2 66Mhz system, I have a Pentium 166 system, I have a laptop with an AMD K6-2 533Mhz processor, I have the Green Machine that I built with an AMD K6-2 500Mhz processor in it with an ATI All-In-Wonder 128 32MB AGP video card, and I have my DCC (Digital Content Creation) system that I built in early 2004. It has an AMD Athlon Thunderbird 850Mhz processor and an ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 9200 AGP video card.

If I were to build a system for someone, they would have to pay for parts. There are many reasons for this, one is because I don't have the money to buy things for people, and the best reason is so that I can't cheat people on prices for parts. They would only pay for the convience of me putting it together for them and solving problems. But I like the barter system, no money required. I can work for parts, fuel, food, antiques, and some junk that I am interested in.

If they order the parts themselves from catalogs, stores, and pay for them, how can I cheat them and overcharge them for parts? I just put them in the machine and THEY CAN WATCH ME WORK ON IT,. I actually recommend it so I can teach them the process. But I don't have to worry too much about people nagging me to see what I am doing, because most people are too superficial.

They'd rather be doing things with their time like cruising around in their new Social Utility Vehicles and talking on their cell phones on the way to the restaraunt to eat because they have a dependancy on social interaction and are too lazy to cook.

They are not really concerned with monitoring the repair process to make sure everything goes well, they just want it done.

Being like that never got me anywhere. Being superficial never helped me solve problems. I really don't like being SORRY OUT OF LUCK. So I really strive to prevent it. You can be S.O.L. all of the time if you want, if you enjoy being at a disadvantage and being taken advantage of often. If that is your fortay.

That is how I have been getting so many computer parts for FREE! Because I learned how. The average person spends more money for fuel or eating at a restaraunt in a month than I commonly spend on computers and the internet in more than 6 months.

My Green Machine is my general use computer that I use the most often. Do you know how much it cost me?
I will tell you.

• Computer case with 250 watt power supply: FREE, because someone gave it to me who didn't need it anymore.
• Motherboard and processor with CPU cooler: You can get a decent motherboard and a processor with a cooler for the processor for under $150 easy now. I had these from 4 years ago. But for this motherboard and processor that I have, you might find someone who will give you one of these for FREE or usually under $40. Keep in mind that these AMD K6-2 processors are dated from 1998-2000 and the motherboards were popular in the mid-1990's through the late 1990's.
• Memory (RAM): Back in 2001 when I bought some RAM, I could get a module of 128MB for as cheap as $20. I have 192MB of RAM in this Green Machine. That is a 128MB module and a 64MB module. But I had these two from years ago.
• Video card: I got this ATI All-In-Wonder 128 32MB AGP video card in December of 2003 on half.com for only $55 and $10 for shipping. It works good. It was ATI's best multi-media card in 1999 and it does all the things of a normal video card plus video recording, TV, and more.
• CD-ROM drive: This cost me $20 at a local computer shop, I have a 44X which is just fine.
• Floppy drives: I have two floppy drives in this computer. One is a 3.5 inch that I already had from a previous computer. They are about $20 new and less than $10 used. I also have an old nostalgic 5.25 inch floppy drive. The BIG LOUD drives. I got this one for only $5 and I had to look harder to find this one. It is in good condition. I need it to play my old computer games that ran in DOS, yes, before the necessity for too many mouse-clicks ruined computing.
• Iomega internal zip100 drive: I get them for $5.
• Monitor: BOW DOWN SUCKER!!! I get them for FREE! But I paid $35 for this 15 inch monitor that I use on the Green Machine because it was at a shop and had integrated speakers. It is a pretty nice monitor, I do think it was worth the $35 because the picture quality is still really good on it.
• Hard drive (primary storage): I got this 6GB Ultra DMA33 Western Digital Caviar hard drive for only $15 at a computer shop and although it is slower and smaller in capacity, it still works great.
• Sound card: I have many of them, but the one in the Green Machine is a Creative Labs Sound Blaster 128 PCI that I got with a motherboard bundle from TigerDirect in 2001. You might be able to get one for $5 or $10 from a local computer shop if they have them.
• Keyboard: People have given some to me for free but I paid only $2 for this one, it is AMERICAN MADE, and as a bonus it is correctly missing keys in ALL of the right places. Meaning that it is not a MACR$OFT keyboard. It does not have the Winblows keys.
• Mouse: I have a Macro$oft wheelmouse from 2000 on this machine but you can get a NEW optical scroll wheel mouse made by Micro (company brandname) for only about $15 at a retail store. I like everything about them except for the length of the chord.
• Scanner: I have a USB Visioneer OneTouch 5600 that I got for FREE. Someone gave it to my uncle and he gave it to me complete with power adapter and driver disc.
• Printer: I got a new Lexmark Z32 at the local retail store for about less than $50 was it? I think that might be right, it wasn't their newest product line. But that was years ago. But people keep giving me printers for free.
• Modem & network: I have an old 8-bit ISA 56K modem that came in a computer case that I bought. Since this is an old card, most places will sell it to you for an average of $5 or sometimes give it to you for free with another item's purchase. They should be sold for no more than $10 unless the owner is a collector like me. I got this Linksys 10/100 USB network adapter for I think about $20 new. The store originally had them for $50 but they didn't sell well so they put them on clearance and marked down the price.

That is about it, now lets estimate the cost.
I have just under $300 at an actual average of $297 depending on the price that people would charge and if you can get things for free or not.

Now, I hear people talk all of the time saying, "I don't need anything fancy, I just want to get on the internet and chat or check e-mail or surf the internet." So why do they spend more than $500 buying a Hell (Dell computer - Hell is my favorite alternate name for Dell) system and load it down with Gay O.L. (another favorite alternative name, that is the alternative name for AOL) and pay $25 for DIAL-UP??!!!

Then because they have bought into the imperialistic company's products, they have to spend another $60 for Norton Internet Security (software) because they use Macro$oft Internet Exploiter (Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser) and because Macro$oft is an IMPERIALISTIC company who in the computer industry, has set unsurpassed records for their amount of security flaws in their products.

These people are the ones who suffer. Because they don't learn. I still only pay $8.49 each month for UNLIMMITED old-school style dial-up internet access with Internet Express (http://corp.ixpres.com). I called it "old-school" because Internet Express is an Internet Service Provider that does their service the way the internet was back in the mid and late 1990's before the corporate take-overs in the ISP market got widespread.

Back in the day when you talked to them (the Internet Service Provider) on the phone to a person in the United States, chose your own user name and password, then they gave you a phone number for your computer to dial to connect to the internet. Those were the days when users configured their computers to dial to the ISP's server through their computer's operating system using the dial-up networking manager.

Those were the days before Macro$oft did all of that scripting in their operating systems that caused security flaws which resulted in getting infected with worms by simply connecting to the internet and opening the web browser program to surf the net. Thanks William Henry Gates 3rd, you greedy piece of trash!

I remember when if you got infected with viruses, it was because you were using infected disks or downloaded a program from a website and the program was infected. Now, simply connect to the internet with programs made by imperialistic companies and you get to start your own worm collection with your computer. Not too bad of a use for your new $500+ budget computer in the first week, is it? Because you didn't learn what to do, you'd rather spend that time to learn the latest gossip with your cell phone driving down the street in your Social Utility Vehicle.

Do you know how I learn what specific worms and viruses do to computers now? I have to read about them on the internet, BECAUSE worms don't effect me anymore and I am not as vulnerable as I used to be. I don't use Dunno, Gay O.L., Birthlink, M$N, or FecalPC to connect to the internet. I don't use Macro$oft Internet Exploiter, Nutscrape, or Gay O.L to browse the internet with. I don't use the popular anti-virus programs that the hackers can buy from the store shelf and learn to make their viruses to get around programs like SucAfee or PortON that scan for viruses.

I don't use the popular P2P filesharing programs like Kazaa because I have seen where people write viruses and worms to exploit holes in those programs to infect mass amounts of people. I don't use Macro$oft Outlook for my e-mail client needs, so I don't get to see the newest e-mail worms come through my system.

I never had Melissa and the I love you virus. I did have Opas.I, Opas.G, nimda, boza, and a few others running rampant on my system while I was using Macro$oft Outlook, Macro$oft Internet Exploiter, Norton's anti-virus, and Juno in 2001 and early 2002. After I learned what was going on, by mid-2002 and into 2003, I never had those problems again.

Do you know how I PREVENTED those worm and virus threats? I stopped using Macro$oft Internet Exploiter to browse the internet, I secured Exploiter as high as the program would allow, this stopped Juno from letting the worms in through ActiveXploit scripts because Juno is based on Internet Exploiter, I began using Opera to browse the internet, I began using Grisoft's AVG FREE edition because it could catch new worms that even an updated Norton's anti-virus couldn't cope with at the time, I learned what loads in my startup in the "msconfig" utility and the Winblows registry, eventually stopped using Juno for the internet and used a real ISP.

I began looking at alternatives to imperialistic company's software, I began to use Mozilla Thunderbird as my e-mail client, and used a free firewall to secure my system. I know that the free firewalls don't always do the best job, but they do better than no firewall.

Those are the major steps that I took to prevent the problems. Now, I haven't had problems with worms in about a year. Occasionally, because servers will be infected with worms because the companies are dumb enough to use Macro$oft's Winblows operating systems on various servers on the internet, this is what makes them vulnerable.

So because a server is infected, javascript files will be altered by worms at times and your browser will result in loading a normal page that has links to infected scripts usually through java or Macro$oft's stab in the back to Sun who invented java, by releasing their own Sun liscense violating (Macro$oft at one time had liscense from Sun to use java which Sun invented and pioneered) proprietary scripting technology that Macro$oft named "ActiveX" but is properly ActiveXploit because of their massive amount of vulnerability possibilities for the software.

So I use Opera which does not support ActiveXploit scripts because Opera does not bow and submitt to Macro$oft and ActiveXploit is a technology that Opera is not willing to pay for. They use the original and SAFER java technology developed and pioneered by Sun in the Opera web browser. So sometimes an occasional infected script passes through and gets in my system.

Ahhh haaa! Here is the trick, when I installed Macro$oft Winblows 98 Second Edition, I NEVER install the Winblows scripting host. So because I did not install it and I use Opera, a firewall, AVG, and I know my system well, the worm can do nothing, because Opera does not recognize what the worm is designed to do and because I have no automatic scripting, then no scipt runs automatically. Thus the worm just sits on the hard drive inactive and taking up space unable to do anything. Then I detect the worm with the AVG FREE anti-virus scanning program and delete the file.

And the system stays clean and safe. At a very very affordable price. You can use Opera for free or you can buy it for $40. If you buy it there is just not a "buy Opera" banner in the browser but you have full use of the browser anyway. Piracy is not required to use the browser for free, Opera has money as an option to use their browser.

It is about the same with Mozilla Thunderbird because they will let you use their mail client and browser for free but it is really cheap to buy their software. You can get everything that the organization makes for less than $10 on disc. That is cheap. And if you are accustomed to using Macro$oft Outlook for e-mail, Mozilla Thunderbird will be almost no transition for you because the user interface is about the same.

I found Thunderbird to be an enjoyable and SAFER mail client program. But you can keep using Outlook if you like counting worms and constantly paying Macro$oft for CD-keys to re-install Winblows XP all of the time. Ha ha ha ha ah ah! I sometimes use good old safe DOS as an operating system and the Arachne GRAPHICAL web browser to connect to the internet with and surf the internet.

That is why I like old-school style Internet Service Providers like Internet Express to connect to the internet because they do not use software for you to connect to the internet, you can use the internet in any operating system you want. Mac, Linux, DOS, BSD, Solaris, and Macro$oft Winblows. Try that with AOL, MSN, PeoplePC, Juno, Earthlink, and the big names. You will not always be able to use them in other operating systems if you even can at all. Because they require you to use their proprietary software designed for Windows. I like my FREEDOM!!!