Will Honea wrote in a message to James Byrnes:
JB> Now I will have to tell my daughter to haul her machine home 
JB> from school again.  She is already grumbling that I should have 
JB> bought her a laptop. 
 WH> Hmmm.. My approach was slightly different.  First, I made HER 
 WH> swap the motherboard in her original case for one 4 times as 
 WH> fast.  After that, a full tower was her idea of the right size 
 WH> - the cuts and scratches were eloquent arguments.  Then I added 
 WH> features: new sound card, extra disk space, new video card, 
 WH> etc.  All the while I kept mentioning how a laptop or discount 
 WH> store machine would fare trying to make upgrades.  The crowning 
 WH> moment was when a teacher friend called to say she had broken 
 WH> the display on the HP laptop the school system supplied her.  
 WH> She wanted to know about what it was going to cost to get it 
 WH> fixed.  When my daughter heard the answer, that ended all 
 WH> discussion.  The teacher thought I was joking - until she took 
 WH> it in....

I like your approach...
That's like when we got the machine up for "Grammy" and "The munchkins" to 
use in the other room,  I got the stuff together and talked _her_ through the 
whole process.  The only snag during all of that was that the power switch 
wires were initially installed 90 degrees off from the way that they should 
have been,  which made the cord installed at that time get rather warm,  as 
well as dimming the lights,  etc.  Good thing I have a lot of those cords 
around.
BTW,  how much did that display cost?  I'd *love* to get my hands on some 
sort of a laptop system,  but until there's something close to as much 
hardware standardization in that area as there is in desktop boxes,  I think 
I'll hold off,  I don't *need* portability that much.
email: roy.j.tellason%tanstaaf@frackit.com 
--- 
---------------