Computer

For a while I've wanted to know how to dispose of my computer junk. As a geek, you can imagine that I have computers and spare parts coming out of my ears.

One of the main reasons I have collected a lot of the junk over the years is because I didn't actually know *how* to safely dispose of it. All our rubbish gets carted off to landfill sites, and I don't feel happy knowing that in 5 or 10 years time the capacitors on that old motherboard I threw away have leaked, and poisoned someone's water supply.

As you might have read in my previous blog post, my computer died the other day, and I've been going through the process of geting new hardware.

On Wednesday evening I searched through the product listings on the sites of local computer dealers, and on Thursday I placed my order for a new motherboard, graphics card, case (with PSU) and processor (my existing hard drive was quite new, and the motherboard contains all the other things like LAN and sound card).

I got home last night and tried to switch on my PC, and it didn't want to boot up. So I restarted it, and continued trying to get it to boot for an hour, but I eventually gave up. My PC has been giving me problems recently (not booting up), so this was not completely unexpected. However, I hadn't expected it to happen so soon.

I've been given a printer to review, one of these fancy printer/scanner/copier jobs, with photo-quality printing. Big printer, but it looks nice... all black...

Obviously I'm going to check that it works well with Linux. I have a Windows box to fall back on if necessary, but we'll see. Which brings me to my first issue...

The background

We have a chap at church who is very pro Microsoft. The type where, when confronted with an inescapable fact that shows Microsoft for who they really are, will come up with some excuse to help him deny the truth. While ordinarily this would not make a difference, in our situation, he is on the church council, and is a respected member of the church. He is also able to get hardware from the suppliers due to a business of his which has accounts with said suppliers. This means that when the church needs new computers, they ask him.