out of pram

After eagerly accepting the offer of Nicky's dad's old desktop box (of which a fair number of internal components were in any case lent spares to try and address some of the problems he created) I now have three old desktops in the house not currently being used. There has been a long-standing plan to have one sitting quietly somewhere pretending to be a wirelessly-accessible backup and media server (and having the printer plugged permanently into it) but it's been several years since I first thought this would be a good idea without yet having got round to it. There's also my old desktop sitting in a spare room at my own parents' house which I hope to be able to retrieve before it gets junked which has a much larger selection of internal drive slots (and a decent Portal-capable video card), though the newer (and not home-made (and therefore probably very much quieter)) unit recently donated by a former colleague after I lent her a drive dock to try and retrieve some of the contents of the worm-ridden hard drive would probably be the most suitable for discreetly tucking into a corner somewhere as the one I gave to my dad has a rather noisy fan, the one just retrieved from Nicky's dad has a ten-year-old socket A mobo of limited capabilities and the other one being possibly older, probably slower and almost definitely no more upgradeable than it was seven years ago when I upgraded it after it was acquired through the former colleague's friend's office's equipment clearout. Nicky expressed dissatisfaction at the acquisition of a cubic foot of obsolete electronics but brought home an old rug to stick in the boy's room which is of greater volume when rolled-up, even if it's probably less noticeable when deployed.