Random progress

So now the hard drive has been moved to it's new home. A dual core pentium 4 and it lives further on sata2

I had run about 9 passes of memtest 86 and have done an emerge -e system since then. Everything is pretty stable.
Did have a bug report but this was an issue that occurred long before moving to this hardware but bug-buddy was
unable to report due to the keyboard failing to work when nautilus crashed. After moving from Nvidia/AMD 64 to radeon/dual core P4 I was able to type in my email address which was preventing the crash report.

The ATI TV 650 reports as

02:00.0 Multimedia controller: ATI Technologies Inc Device 4d51
Subsystem: ATI Technologies Inc Device b041
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 11
Memory at ff400000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1M]
Memory at dc000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=32M]
Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 3
Capabilities: [58] Express Endpoint, MSI 00

I do not see the Xcieve module loading via lsmod. I do have I believe the proper firmware installed for the Xcieve 3028
I built much of v4l/tuner in kernel as modules Likely will try installing a tv app (after re-check MSI in kernel support)

Rescued a docking station for tuxmobl It was a timely event as it was on it's way to the great electronics graveyard in the sky

I am quite satisfied with the new Windows laptop it is snappy and capable. I have yet to try to boot a linux on that machine yet. May try a liveusb image at some point. The biggest drawback was the lack of hdmi Although the vga out is compatible with about any conference room in the US and a ton of image projectors.

At a time when labor is taking a beating sellable skills are still at a premium and so things may change for me soon.

For anyone using Gentoo please avail yourself of the 'eclean' command I have suggested some enhancements but it is already very useful.