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    Task difficulty: medium

    Alright, things are better for the little laptop. When I tried to view the hard drive through a USB device (basically, an IDE port stuck onto a USB cable), both XP and Windows 2000 saw the drive as a 1.4 TB drive that was uninitialized. And it couldn’t initialize it. Fiddling with various drivers made no difference. A scanning program like R-Studio could see perfectly well the partitions and old files on the drive (including from the Windows installation that had been there), but it still thought it was a 1.4 TB drive. So that was a no-go. The drive is too tall to fit into the bay of my…

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    Task difficulty: hard

    I have a 486 laptop with 16 MB of memory. It has no floppy, no CD-ROM, no USB (except through PCMCIA) and only a PCMCIA ethernet card that can’t be booted from. Right now, it has command.com and a few associated .sys files on its 400 MB hard drive. I want to install Linux on it. Or full-fledged DOS. Or Win 3.1. Or Win NT 4.0. Or something appropriate to a 486, but I’m leaning towards Slackware. So. Without a bootable drive other than the hard drive, how do I get Linux on it? The idea came to mind to get a 2.5 inch hard drive adapter and just load…

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    The last thing I remember is the oxygen tube…

    Yesterday I had an endoscopy (EGD?) to check for ulcers and an ultrasound to check for gall stones. Both were negative. Last Friday, it was an abdominal and pelvic CT scan (without contrast). All my organs were normal. Repeated blood tests show low white blood cell counts, indicating it may be viral. What is it? Sharp, persistent abdominal pain, accompanied by strong nausea (but no vomiting). Not burning, like heartburn. It doesn’t move, like trapped air might. Nexium and other acid-reducers don’t help. I don’t remember the name of my new medicine, but so far, it just makes me dizzy and sleepy. The endoscopy came with a dose of Demerol.…