failing in my duty as a nerd

[waider]

So, just for the record:

• My primary home machine is a 7-year-old laptop, a 450MHz PIII Compaq Armada M700 which I purchased[1] from my employer when I quit. It has had several replacement harddrives and screens, and is now starting to lose structural integrity - the case is bent such that the screen doesn't latch any more. It's also started to exhibit spurious hardware failure, specifically the USB port which dies randomly.
• My fileserver is a 166 MHz PII with about 90GB of disk and, er, 30MB of ram. The BIOS is so old that it can't boot off the drives, so I have to boot it from a floppy disk.
• My webserver, probably the best of my hardware at the moment, is a 1GHz Via C3, bought with the intention of building a PVR or an in-car computer, but my previous web/mail server died (motherboard failure due to cheap capacitors, never managed to repair it) and this remains the only useful hardware capable of handling the abuse.

I also have a second, beefier laptop, but the screen died some time ago so it's hooked up to a flat panel monitor and used mainly as a Windows machine/test box, plus in service as my webserver it kept locking up hard so I'm not entirely convinced that it's healthy. My PDA is a Palm Vx, so old that the various open source PDA tools will occasionally fail to recognise it. About the newest technology I have would be the iPod (bought for me) and my phone (I generally avail of my provider's "free" upgrades when they occur).

I am at risk of losing my nerd merit badge, maybe.

[1] The deal was that I'd work consultancy for it. In the end, I did far less consultancy than was agreed, and my ex-boss handwaved and said, "screw it, it's yours."