Learn how to construct your own empire! Like Intel, SGI, etc.

> Where can you get a laptop with better performance > than the iOpener for $230?

From ME, of course.

IOpener has one key disadvantage to the P-style budget laptop, you can't take it with you.

A 100Mhz winshit chip... I got a P90 laptop for $241 and that's a real pentium with the actual floating point miscalcuations and everything. Screens on those need to be fixed manually, of course, but _I know how to do that_.

I am the junk computer expert. Every POS Dell computer from East Bay Municipal Utility District passed through my hands. I have countless motherboards, chip fans, powersources, cases, ram chips, MODEL M keyboards, 10,000,000+ bps communication cards, and yes even monochrome Samsung monitors (fuck hitachi!)

$200 for all that stuff and made more money selling the crap than I originally spent and still have static bag upon static bag filled with it.

My closet makes any Used Computer store look like a den of Apple IIes, any wholesale junk store look like the resting place of your CGA XT, and weirdstuff look like Red Foxx in Sanford and Son.

YOU TOO can pull off this bullshit in 10 EASY steps involved in the quest for obsolete hardware. Follow the directions and soon you'll be speaking chinese, wearing glasses, and getting blasted off of TetraFluoroEthane.

1. Rent a place for a month in South Richmond near 32nd street in one of those apartment buildings that are zoned as ``non-residential property'' in order for the landlords to house illegal immigrants. This is the most expensive ordeal, $200 avg. Make SURE it is non-residential.

2. Set up a ficticious bidness name in your county for yourself. Like Taipan Productions or Pigdog Unlimited.

3. Get a resale license attached to your ``storefront'' i.e. your spanish quarter.

4. Go to 23rd street in Oakland, by that ``Slave Labor Unlimited'' place that hires people on the spot for a days work and bribe a couple of people whose nickname should be ``Big Wheel'' out of line with a half eighth of hooter.

5. Take you and your crew in a rented U-Haul truck down to the silicon industry sections of Palo Alto, San Francisco, and Oakland. Bust open their dumpsters with a bolt cutter. Take all their computer looking stuff. Do not stop until you have taken at least 1,000 kg of computer junk.

6. Head down to a local computer auction and sign in, legally, as ``People's Republic of Pigdog,'' and make monster bids on whatever you are looking for. I'm talking bid $100 on a lot of as-is BROKEN computer shit. Give them $200 if you have to.

7. Get BWA, BWB, and Big Wheel Theta to lift the auction lot into your U-Haul and back into your storefront.

8. Get rid of the BW crew by bribing them with a half-empty bottle of VSOP and a 12-pack of Tequiza.

9. Fix everything and advertise junk computers in the Examiner for a week or so until you get enough money to break even.

10. Take your whole salvage back to your closet and put together 100Mhz computers. Remember, even if you quit early you still have to run the business name for four weeks to be legit with the county.

And don't forget, computer cases make brilliant drug smuggling devices.

punchbowl@pigdog.org