Decided to start posting on LQ again. Was going to explain why I stopped posting (if anybody noticed?), but cant be bothered.

Just bought a new toy: refurbished Dell Precision T3600, for £350. Very good condition.
Intel Xeon E5-1650
16 GB RAM
NVidia Quadro 2000 graphics card
1 TB HDD
Very nice!
Only problem so far: can't install Slackware. Hopefully soon resolved. See thread in Slackware Installation forum.

It's been a while since I got one of these calls. Somebody with a strong Indian accent, using an English name (Andrew, this time), and claiming to work for Microsoft.
After introductions, this is the conversation:
Andrew: we have reports that your computer has been downloading malicious software.
Me: Oh? That sounds bad.
Andrew: Don't worry, we can fix it.
Me: I hope so.
Then asks if I'm at my computer & is it on. And which browser I use.
Andrew:...

Am I crazy? A lot of people say so, and they can't all be wrong.
I was so impressed by my recently acquired Thinkpad (T 410), that I've bought another one. A refurbished X 200: Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 2.4 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD, 9 cell battery. All for £83. The only thing wrong with it was that it had Vista Business edition installed, but that was easily cured. It's now feeling a lot healthier running Slackware 14.1.

Well, a refurbished one. Although it looks good enough to be new.
A Lenovo Thinkpad T410. With an i5-520 CPU, 8 GB RAM, and a 320 GB HDD, all for £219. Seems like good value for money to me, considering I paid about £199 for a new eee pc 1001ha a few years ago. The T410 has Windows 7 Professional installed, and the C:\ drive (/dev/sda2) is sandwiched between a system partition and a recovery partition. I resized C:\, tried to install Slackware, but had a problem with lilo. So I tried again...