Got the HDD back to an acer laptop that was almost thrown at me because the gal that had it was angry with it's overheating/ shutdown problems. I offered to investigate but she said, "Nope, I bought a new one. That acer has been a pain ever since I got it and I never want to see it again."
Silly chick.

Shrunk the vista partition, stuck some debian on it tonight and it ran just fine.
After the install and goofing around with it a bit, I booted to the vista partition to see if it still worked.
I sure am glad I don't have a need for windows products. I almost thought it was hung at first. The boot logo thing was there for over a minute. The desktop finally showed up but performance was quite sluggish. I got to the task manager to find that a spyware scanner was doing it's thing. OK. I went to the kwik trip to grab a can o Foster's, as this is my Friday and it's time to wind er down. Got back and a virus scanner was finishing up, still giving relevance to the old 'turn on the windohs box and go have lunch'.
After all that was done, a svchost.exe process was still chewing up almost 50% CPU time at what was supposed to be idle. (wow?!)
Rebooted back to the debian install to find that CPU temp was 50c. Pretty warm for booting from what was supposed to be an idle machine.
CPU really was showing idle, this time, so let it sit for a while longer, as I sat on the porch and enjoyed a thunderstorm.
Came back in and it was in the 30s. Installed and goofed around with a couple things and CPU temp was 39c.

There is a vista sticker on the thing that I think I'll peel off. It runs WAY better with debian on it.

I got a lot of free computers here that way. I have a stack of hard drives because people want a new computer. Our local computer gives me a lot good deals on old boxes because of the frustration people come in with computers full of viruses, malware and trogans because they use Windows. So they figure the problem is that there computer is just too old and that is the reason it is too slow. Since he is also a fellow Ham I am sure a lot of the old computers go to the local radio club especially since a lot of hams are aware of all the good Linux hamware.
Fedora I know especially has one section in Synaptic just for radio programs for Hams. I remember in college one professor who $60.00 a hour would defrag your computer.

You a ham Trout? I used to spend some time on 40 meters in the early/ mid 90s before a house fire burnt my radio.
I still have my di-pole in a box here, somewhere.
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