Finally, after months of real-life issues encroaching on my free time, I finished a very large project and can relax a little. Once again I’ll apologize for stepping away from this blog for so long; looking back at June I made about five meaningful posts over the course of the month, which is not acceptable to me. Compare that with some other months, and you’ll see why.
So I intend to make up for it over the next three weeks or so, adding points and issues that I’ve collected in the few odd moments here or there, or added from stuff I’ve seen elsewhere.
The first is to note that the hand-me-down desktop system I inherited when I gave the rehabilitated Thinkpad a new home … is more or less in perfect working condition. I’ve done one or two test installs — mostly Arch and Crux — and found everything acceptable.
The video system is working well and can hit 1280×1024 on the included boat-anchor monitor. The DVD-ROM/CDRW burned a rewritable disc for me, and seemed successful. Network speeds are excellent, with rtorrent hitting well over 2.4Mbps on consistent, popular torrents (the Arch ISO is an excellent torrent speed checker, by the way).
The next step of course, is to tear the thing apart and clean it top to bottom. I’ll have to look for a proper keyboard since the one I have is kind of sketchy, and the old mouse was strictly unusable. But after that, I’ll start looking for potential recipients while I disassemble, clean and install. Timing is important here. 
Glad to see you back!