My Millennium Falcon Computer

Okay, I admit there have been days when I have felt like doing this to my computer. You must understand that at home I have the Millennium Falcon computer. It is an old clunker with a warp engine. Basically, a few months back I upgraded the processor to a 3.5 GHz Dual Core AMD processor with new motherboard and video card. I then restored all my old PCI cards and hard drives some of which go back to about 1998.

Lets just say that after fighting to get it to accept my Raid card and my raid drives, which it never did. After getting it to accept my DVD drive, my video capture card, Zip drive, SCSI card, scanner, I was left with a computer that was somewhat unstable. First it would only run for ~10 minutes at a time. This was because it would perform an auto shutdown after it got too hot.

After installing 3 fans and moving one of the raid drives to an external USB box and loosing some 20% of my data; after one of my raid drives was fried, which I blame on the new motherboard; after adjusting and re-adjusting the air flow, I am still left with a system that is less than stable.

Margaret refuses to use the computer. She just doesn't understand that when everything seems to freeze up all you need to do is to unplug the D drive (USB) and turn it off, then plug it in again and turn it back on. If you do this, all of a sudden the windows will start working again. She just doesn't get it that if you cannot find the DVD, all you need to do is go to the device manager and scan for new hardware on the raid controller (now used as just an IDE controller) and it will appear again. She does not understand that all you need to do is open the sliding glass window behind the computer (in Winter) before you rendering your movie file if you wish it to complete without the computer overheating (not sure what I will do this summer).

What can I say, it is the Millennium Falcon.