HOW TO TELL IF YOUR COMPUTER WAS MADE IN A GARAGE

Thousands of computers are being cobbled together from systems bought at yard sales, and second rate parts dumped on the market by otherwise legitimate manufacturers, and sold to unsuspecting buyers. But they are cheap.

"Computers are basically tinker toys that can be assembled from whatever parts that fit," explained Seymor Syber, Professor of Low Technology at the General Delivery University. "We have even seen brand name computers with bastardized parts," Syber said.

The ten tops ways you can tell if your computer was built with swap meet and yard sale parts are:

1. It won't run Word Perfect 5.1 (No computer runs WP 6.1 or above).

2. The stencil on the chip that says 1600Mhz is peeling off and it is really a 16Mhz chip.

3. The modem and printer have an irreconcilable IRQ conflict.

4. The computer has insufficient memory to run autoexecbat.

5. The CD Rom drive is really an 8 track from a stolen car.

6. The video card originally came in a gum wrapper.

7. The little brown things on the motherboard are mouse droppings.

8. The "mouse" came from a taxidermist's estate sale. The teeth making the clicking sound.

9. The hard drive has a capacity of 300mb. That means it will store 300 m's and 300 b's. No k's, l's, or anything else.

10. The technical support number starts with 1-900 and the first 16 choices involve which kind of phone sex you want for $2.99 per minute.

BACK TO INDEX