Got a call: “I’ve just bought a PC for $20, but I can’t get past the password prompt”. He spoke to the “vendor” who gave him the password, and said something about resetting the bios setting…

Anyway, It sounds like a bios password… it should just be a matter of shorting a jumper.

When I get there, it turns out to be a large tower, running a pentium 2 & 64 Mb ram… Nothing wrong with the bios.

I let the PC boot normally, & I see it starts running redhat linux (my first in-the-field encounter with linux since I started my business). I like unix/linux, so I’d like to see more of these systems out there one day…

It gets to the linux login prompt & now I understand the problem: Client knows the password, but not the userid… I type in “root” and then password, & everything works fine.

I help out getting the sound plugged in correctly.

Client wants to try playing some windows games… I tell him its not possible (linux cannot run games designed for pentium 4 windows systems, and also: a pentium 2 has no chance of running the latest games).

Client then says: “maybe I should get my pentium 4 system out of storage”… I agree with him.