I bought almost $100 worth of USB sticks this past Friday when our back to school tax holiday weekend began thanks to a "letter from home" payback of money I loaned a friend a couple of years back and wrote off as he has been in hard times since but happily helped me with tasks around my place a number of times at no charge while he was between jobs.
When he came over after work last week five or six pay periods into his current job to pay it back, I declined it but he said of the folks he called friends, I was one of the few who hadn't dunned him since he got employed again and as he shoved the money down the neck of my shirt and I tried to tell him his helping me around my place was enough payback , he laughed and said it helped him keep his sanity after reading the rejection letters for the day as he sprinted to his car to end our game of "Take it , I owe you /keep it, your just getting steady back in your zone" country boy's courtesy back and forth .
After stocking up, this weekend I used the high speed connected machine to try to get dial up drivers on the drive to try here but I couldn't get it to see my USR linux friendly modem.
Two on high speed connections like MX and are having fun learning to use it and after 3 days of trying to make it work here, I decided to set that stick aside and later this week see what I can do with one of the other Linux distros suggested by y'all.
The way I look at it is I am batting 500 now and the worse case scenario will bethe high speed folks I use to get us dial ups going can choose what they like best as I learn the different OS options while getting my own OS and if they go in different directions, it wont be that much different than what I did when I was cleaning up /restoring MS OS machines from XP to 7 and 8.
Only thing slowing me down now is although I taught the two trying MX how to get back to 8.1 to run their anti virus in case they think they messed up even though from my understanding they are only running on the stick, they call wanting me to make house calls to run all the security layers and check their 8.1 settings , I have made trips to the one house and talked the other through his doh moments over the phone using my MX stick that won't connect.
So goes the life of a nerd , but it's all good because as they are learning so am I. Hopefully my copper wire crew understand I'm not showing high speed favoritism because I need to keep the high speed half happy because I need their flatland machines to make something as light weight as possible sticks for us in copper wire land.