Evil enters the bedroom

Since the flower_cat expressed an interest in learning to use Windows XP and Excel in order to improve her employability, and since it was dirt cheap, I stopped off at Fry's on my way home from work yesterday and bought a "Great Quality" (their house brand, though they don't advertise it as such) box for $250. Crappy keyboard, not enough RAM (128MB), and a noisy power supply, but it'll do. 40GB hard drive. Tonight I'll swap in a quiet power supply from the Cat's old machine, and see if that helps. And see if I can get Linux up on it, probably by putting it on a second hard drive.

(Update: I've edited the title, s/house/bedroom/, because strictly speaking chaoswolf's laptop was the first XP machine in the house.)

Surreal spam subject:

"Re: To comb my coelacanth"

Evil in the bedroom: part 2

Replacing the power supply with a known-quiet one helps, but only a little. Evidently most of the noise is coming from the CPU fan. Grumble. Also having trouble getting printing to work; administering XP is a nightmare, and the on-line help is no help at all. Never got printers or shares connected from chaoswolf's laptop, either.