Does it have to be?
No, not at all. In fact if it is itâs boring.
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As an aside (son is now happy with ânewâ PC now that we have most things installed and working again) - when I realised that I needed a WiFi card my natural reaction was âIâll just get the spare that I know is in the garage1â - needless to say I could not find it so bought a new one.
Nothing exciting or bank breaking - think it was ÂŁ16.
Of course I went into the garage to look for something else today and the old Wi-Fi card was almost the first thing I put my hand on 
1] The garage is something of an Aladdinâs cave of old electronics - one other item I spied was âKrytenâ an old PC which is, at best, a 166Mhz Pentium Pro - possibly a 133MHz Pentium 5 - Iâm not quite sure whether to throw it away or hang on until it becomes a museum piece, a few more months should do it
Well, thatâs interesting. Kryten appears to have an Asus P55T2P4 motherboard, not sure what processor (but it definitely isnât a P Pro as it is a Socket 7 board - so Pentium or Pentium MMX), looks like I have 64MB RAM installed out of a maximum of 512MB.
Dating from 1996 itâs amazing how primitive this board is, the PS/2 mouse connector was âoptionalâ and although it had USB (1.0) the manual notes:
It has a STB Velocity 64 PCI video card - now so old and obscure I can find almost nothing about it online.
Iâm tempted to fire it up and see if it still works.
I know itâs off topic Paul but are you and you family OK? Looking at BBC and CH 4 news things do seem out of control in the UK. Iâd just like to wish you the best.
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Yes, weâre fine, thanks for asking. N°1 son doesnât like remote learning but the school is heavily invested in IT anyway and has flipped it back into action very quickly - and, of course, we have decent broadband and plenty of IT at home.
Covid is a bit rampant (current ONS figures suggest 2% incidence, 3.3% in London), and the government is âterminally useless but we, at least, seem to be getting on with vaccinating people at a good rate - not quite âas fast as we need but getting there.
Lockdown doesnât change my day-to-day existence much. I travel to work as normal but am lucky to work in the one area of the NHS that is relatively protected from having to down tools and join the frontline fight against Covid - Iâd like to think the patients with cancer are just as important and their condition will not wait for us to deal with something else and get back to them.
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