One a day, plus iron

He has a better, more functional computer at home already. The reasons he wants this one worked on are (a) to give the box to the kids and (b) in the data that he would like to get off are the last pictures taken of my friend La's son before he died last year. He thinks she'd maybe like to have them. I concur.

The hard drive works OK and I think I'll be able to recover data off it. The box boots to win98 and logs me in and everything. I can get to (in a blurry and unreadable fashion) Control Panel and browse the C: drive and the fucking internet (when it's plugged into my DSL router) even works. The problem is not the hard drive. The problem is that I can barely see the screen. The video doesn't work any better when booted off of Trinity or off of other linux distro boot disk. The video issue feels very hardware to me... changing the OS that boots the box doesn't fix things, so I can't blame this on a "windows" problem.