It was world-beating when it was new, but now has less processor power than a bargain bin handset. Nevertheless, it's been dutifully in service for 15 years, and for the past 7 or so has been working well as a file server with 9TB of disk. The 5 disks are due for replacement soon, but I still see no reason to replace the system itself. Next year it will be eligible for a driver's license in the US.

"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"

I reflowed the solder on my ThinkPad T40 GPU a number of years ago. I masked the board with foil and heated it up with a heat gun, and watched the temperature with an IR thermometer. The computer lasted another two years, and by the time it went off again, it was 7 years old and due for replacement anyway.

I blame the failure on that computer primarily to a case that was too flexible. Picking it up at a corner caused a lot of flex, and it didn't occur to me that it was happening until after it was too late. The ThinkPad that replaced it has a much more solid case, almost no flex, but I still avoid picking it up at the corner...

This all boils down to a supplier mix-up. The ignition switches used by GM were headed for Toyota cars, and the system used by Toyota should have gone to GM. The GM cars would have kept the airbags on, and the Toyota's could have been turned off once they found themselves in an unintended acceleration condition.

There is nothing to "get" regarding a hybrid versus any other car. If I drive my turbo roadster with my foot hard down all the time, I might get 18 mpg or worse on a trip. If I drive it gently, accelerate slowly (keeping it off the turbo), brake early, keep to the speed limit or a reasonable speed--I can quite easily exceed 35 mpg for the entire trip. Purely on the highway it's possible to exceed 40 mpg. The same variations are true for hybrid cars, with the only real difference being that really aggressive braking will throw away some of the energy that might have been recovered by regenerative braking.

Better known as No-Automaker-Left-Behind.

The Power Mac G4 "Digital Audio" only has 3 DIMM slots, each supporting up to 512mb. The older machines (which came with the divisible by 50 processor speeds) had 4 slots, and could actually hold 2 GB even though they claimed a 1.5 maximum. Mine physically cannot accept that much memory.

My home server is a 12-year-old Power Mac G4 533mhz that I bought brand new in 2001. I've stuffed it with over 9TB of disks and the RAM is maxed out (at an amusing 1.5GB), but other than that it's as it was when it was new. It works better than any consumer grade off-the-shelf NAS you can buy today, and there's no reason to replace something that works just fine.

Search the web for Windows 7 SLP installation. The computer you buy will almost certainly have a valid, genuine Windows 7 key already installed in its BIOS, and with just a teeny, tiny bit of Google searching, you'll figure out how to do a legal, clean installation using that key. FYI: Windows 8 uses a newer version of the same technology that doesn't require any actions on the part of the end user to invoke. Just put in a Win8 disk, install, and you're done.