2008-03-01 Dell P4 machines

Three Dell Pentium 4 PC machines all seemingly complete and in good order, they were all dumped off by the same guy. Jumping ahead, they all seem to come from the office of a "fund of funds manager".

First one is a hyperthreading 2.8Ghz 512M RAM with an 80G HD. No reason for discard, boots to XP fine. The following summarizes their computer usage:

• Music, 699 mp3s, seemingly sourced from Limewire, well represented artists shown here

       28 disturbed 
       14 blue october 
       12 nickelback 
       11 vertical horizon 
       10 pink 
       10 maroon 5 
       10 concrete blonde 
        9 vast 
        9 queen 
        9 pm dawn 
        9 my chemical romance 
        9 house of pain 
        9 him 
        9 fall out boy 
        8 toad the wet sprocket 
        8 korn 
        8 blake lewis 
  

• Lots of (gothic?) wedding pics and baby pics. Lovely. You are invited to guess, based on the music selection, whether the former owners have tattoos or not. Go on, guess.
• IE caches completely empty, cleaned we would say. Given the facts that the cache dirs were present and these machines are all from a common admin domain and the others have full caches I would say that this user surfed loads of NSFW stuff and knew enough to clean up. We may try an undelete on this at some stage.
• Documents present include resumes, house purchase docs, pleading letters to lawyers, that sort of thing.

The next one is also a Dell hyperthreading machine, 2.6Ghz, 512M RAM, 80G HD. It seems to function well with no apparent reason for discard. Only 15G or so of the disk used. Salient points include:

• Browser cache present and correct, no porn visible upon quick check.
• Lots of google maps usage, many closeup zooms of houses on satellite view.
• Recycler was full of pics, business documents and all sorts of good stuff. Good job they threw these out before tossing the machine. Dop!
• One user has lots of Dell stuff in their cache, presumably browsing for the replacement machine.
• 5 mp3s, bah!

Next machine is a Dell Pentium 4 1.6Ghz 384M RAM with a 20G HD. No apparent reason for discard, seems to work fine. Though obviously if you are going to toss the above machines this one is going to go also.

• Cache has lots of Britney and Rudy pics and no porn.
• The dir "Copy of g drive" has all sorts of stuff in it that may have been forgotten there, lots of stuff presumably related to managing funds of funds. Mixed docs, ppt, and xls. How do these people do any work with these constraints?

The 2.8 benchmarked 12300 secs vs an existing machine's 15600 secs, and hence will be pressed into service.