Meet the New Computer

Today I acquired a new computer. It's an eMachines T5082. It's black and silver, and has a monitor, but the monitor has a few small problems. But it'll do. I ordered it from...well, actually, I didn't order it from anywhere. The place I got it from...well, it was removed in a hurry, so it didn't come with any cords. I had to find a typical desktop power cord, then I had to use my laptop's AC adapter to power the monitor. Come to find out, the previous user- this is uh, in no way related to me recently learning how to steal a car- had their account password-protected.

If this was XP, I'd be rolling around in fields of lillies because honestly, XP's password protection doesn't exist. It's as simple as holding down an F-key then changing a setting, if I recall. You don't need any special thumbdrive loaded with worms or virals or anticoagulants.

But Vista...is a little different. Their password hint was "[edited out- 072408]", and that wasn't the password. What a useless password hint!


Anyways, I did some digging. You have to run a boot disk or CD. Then, you use the CD's little program and "hack" away at it. I guess Vista allows you to "lock" profiles...so that you can't see them. All I saw on their profile screen was their main account, but with the program, I "unstealthed" their secondary account, which had admin privileges, and which had no password protection.

So basically, I enabled their other account which had no password, then I logged into that account, and erased the other account's password, and logged in and looked at their credit card information. Aren't I smart? No, but these guys sure are. Search the page for "Vista" and follow their instructions. It takes some know-how, i.e., if you're tech illiterate, you won't be able to do it. One word of warning: if they have encrypted their files, the files will be non-retrievable without the correct password. Study up if you have encrypted your files. Apparently, if you don't know you did, then you didn't.


So, just who did I acquire this computer from? None other than The Thirsty Wolf, the guy I previously delivered water to. As you'll note, his house burnt to the ground a few weeks ago. See my mom's blog post, Fire Season is Coming. We took a trailer of his stuff to store at our place, a computer amongst them. The computer was stored in the house. Today, he came a-howling for his air compressor.

"AWHOOOOoooooooAirCompressor!" we heard him howl. "OK." We let him in the gate, and he followed us to the trailer. He was probably impressed that we completely covered his valuables up.

He took the compressor, a box of tools, then told us that we could have the punching bag, the Good Speaker, and the ice chest. He said, "Is the ice chest empty?" I was on the correct side of the trailer to look, so I checked. It was full to the top with air tools, i.e., tools run off of air compressors, i.e., darn expensive tools! I said, "It's filled to the brim with heavy machinery!" He hopped into the trailer to get them. He laughed. "You shoulda just said it was empty!" There was a slicer (God knows its classification or technical name, I just call it a slicer), a large nail gun, and a small nail gun. And hoses. Probably some clamps, too. Ahh, bathe your senses in the technicality of the names. Culture. Culture!

Then he said, "Hey, you guys can keep the computer." I said, "Wow! Really?" he said, "Yeah." I said, "Are you sure?" and then he tapped the side of the trailer. "Yeah, you guys helped me." As he was leaving, my mom said "If your wife says that you can't give the computer away, feel free to tell us." He said that he already discussed it with his wife. Hmm. It sounds like they communicate really well.


Thanks, Thirsty Wolf and Wife! The computer has a 3 GHz processor. My mom says that she doesn't want it, so it's my new "gaming rig." It's laughable as a gaming rig when you consider that it's Vista Home running off of 512 MB of RAM and no video card. It has an integrated ATI Radeon 200, same as my laptop. My laptop's version is mobile, though, so give or take. (I think my laptop has 128 MB dedicated, and the desktop's is 128 MB shared. Ooh, shared memory...creepy, weird, pale stuff.)

I suspect that, at this point, CNC3 would completely obliterate it. The operating system can barely run off of 512 MB. It's stable, but unacceptably slow. My plan is to buy another gig of ram for it, then a 256-to-512 MB video card and call it a day (after I buy a keyboard).


I have no idea how I'm going to set it up peripheral-wise, but I think I'm going to get the monitor nailed onto a board, then it'll be just like my laptop. I can set a keyboard (wireless) and my mouse on it and, voila! Hey, if I know exactly how I'm going to do it, why did I say I "have no idea how I'm going to set it up peripheral-wise"?

Oh, it also needs speakers. Now I went and made a long post. It appears that they didn't use the computer much if at all. There's approximately 1 page of items in My Documents, most aren't even files. No installed programs that I saw. Oh, for the record...I didn't see any credit card information, I was joking. Thanks again, Wolf!