I have banned all laptop activity

mainly because I am sick to the back teeth of fixing the damn thing, it already has a dodgy power connector which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't caused by unnecessary strain put on the connector and the PCMCIA wifi card looks like it has been bent over at 90 degrees and hastily bent back with an silent "ooops" nobody admitted that one, although there was an admission by the 2nd youngest that he had dropped the laptop ONCE !!

that probably accounts for the recent hard drive I have had to replace to get it working again, all in all it's been slowly getting hammered by the kids, I've said nobody in particular is to blame, (but that's mainly because none of them would actually admit abusing it!!!) but it doesn't stop them asking to use it.... so it has a drivelock password and only has one login account on it now (mine) and has been installed with Unbuntu 7.10 Linux to make it even more unattractive for the kids to use.....yet still they ask "can I go on the laptop please ?" they seem to completely and consistently misunderstand what "NO" means, I'm not sure if it's the "N" or the "O" which is causing the problem. Either way it usually ends up with me being called "sly" for not letting them (whatever that means these days)

it doesn't help when they do get access to it they punch away at the keys like its some kind of strenuous finger workout, and it doesn't matter how many times I tell them to treat it gently, they usually end up playing mindless shootemup games which requires the space bar or some other poor unfortunate key being battered to a splintered pulp in order for the game to be won

anyway it's off the radar now only myself and Andrea can use it, least that way it might last longer than five minutes, I honestly don't know why they don't use the two computers they already have, it's one more than they used to have, (plus they have another one in the pipeline once I fix one of the monitors I have) I dunno kids these days never bloody satisfied are they ???? AND STILL they complain they are BORED !!!