The Girl-Geek Anthropologist

Eleven years ago, I bought a Gateway laptop for $1,700. At the time, it was the hottest and greatest thing out there. 10 Gigs, swappable DVDRom and floppy disk, and a whopping 512MB of RAM! At the time, I was in the middle of my MA degree, and thought that would be a good idea to invest in a laptop. Windows ME had just come out, so it was a very big deal to have moved from Windows 95 (which I STILL miss) and Windows ME.

Over the years, I have used it for basic word processing, and as new versions of Windows came, this poor little thing was left behind in the dust. But, in the meantime, it traveled to Trinidad, London, Lebanon, and all over the United States. The fact that it still works is mind boggling. Sure, many of the new softwares don't work on it anymore, but for basic things, it works.

In the last four years, I have used mainly laptops from the various contracts I have worked for, but still used the ME one for text, basic browsing, and Solitaire.

My last two projects have ended, and thus, I had to give up their respective laptops, and was left with this one. After visiting my mom, she was amazed that I was still using this piece of junk, and decided that she would buy me not only a happy new shiny laptop, but also a digital camera. I love my mom!

I was thinking about turning this laptop into a Linux machine, but mom asked for it so that she would give it to a friend. So now, I have to reformat it, reinstall Windows ME, basic programs, and then give it back.

So, in the last hour or so, I have reformatted a 3.5" floppy disk, reformatted the harddrive, and err... oh no! Swappable drives! That means that I can't run a floppy and the CD-Rom at the same time. And, since ME is not bootable, I have to figure out how to do boot into it somehow. Ugh.

This will probably take all day, and I will update as I go.

12:30 - Formatted A:\ disk, and tried to boot up
12:45 - Somehow made it to the D: drive, and now formatting C:\. It's 8 percent complete.
12:53 - Not bad. Completely finished. Um... how do I install from a D:\ drive, while there's no setup file? This is going to be interesting.
1:04 - I'm stuck!!