| |
|
Home: Windows XP on an old Celeron 1.8 Fujitsu-Siemens SCALEO. Mini-ATX motherboard, 512MB RAM (upgraded from 256MB). I bought this when I was a bit cash-poor, and have been upgrading it with bottom-end parts ever since - sticking in a graphics card (Geforce 5200) here, a WLAN card there. Despite the slow processor, it does pretty much everything I've wanted from it, up to playing Half-Life 2 (although it does tend to hang on the busy later levels). The main problem is a) the processor and b) that Fujitsu-Siemens helpfully set the jumper on the one (40GB) hard drive to "slave", meaning that to install another hard drive I'd have to back up and reformat, which would be sufficiently annoying (lots of freeware, stuff I've lost the disks for - you know the drill) to be disincentivy. This has been compensated by the addition of a 200GB LaCie external HDD - the aluminium LaCie drives are cheap as chips and work fine - half formatted for NTFS (for backups) and half FAT32 (for transferring files to proper computers).
The small size of the HDD means a dual-boot is impractical, so I'm running Ubuntu Linux on my old Dell - P3 450, I think, 128MB RAM, 12GB HDD. I originally revived this one purely to play X:COM - Apocalypse on Win 98, then reformatted and reinstalled. I use it mainly for secure surfing and web browsing, playing CDs when I'm using the optical drives in my PC, chatting. Ultimately, I'll reformat the drive a couple more times and pass the PC on to whoever wants it.
Also running Ubuntu now is my old Dell PowerEdge Server, because the NT Server installation became so unstable I got bored and killed it. Again, one to be disposed of.
I've also got a P75 running Windows 3.11 - I can't think of a use for this, and I'm not even sure how you go about wiping hard drives that old, so am probably goign to have tyo take it about at some point and destroy the HDD physically, then trash the box.
My laptop _was_ a Multivision Solus 1010, with an Athlon XP-M 2600+ processor, 512MB memory, 60GB hard drive, but I dropped it. Bit of a pain, that. Once Tiger is out, I'm getting an iBook.
It also means that the plan of moving the laptop into a desktop replacement role has been a bit hamstrung, so at some point I need a new PC. However, since the only tangible advantage it woudl provide would be better HL2 framerates, I'm not sure that can be justified. I've spent the last year or so speccing stuff, but the world of PCs has been very good in constantly having stuff around the corner (socket 939, PCI Express, SATA hard drives, 64-bit processors, 64-bit Windows and now dual core) that have justified holding off.... |
|
|
