Computers
I’ve been told that I have too many computers. I tend to agree expecially with the number I have acquired in the past year..
History:
My first computer was an Amstrad cpc464 with colour monitor. Great for simple games, and it kept me occupied.
First PC was an AST pentium 133 with a 2.1gb harddrive and 16mb ram running Win95. It got upgraded and frankensteined over the next few years up to 64mb of ram, 2 harddrives for 20gb, a cd writer and other goodies like a network card and a voodoo1 card.
After I got bought some components from various people in UL such as a p3-500 chip, 265mb ram, 9gb scsi disc, 73gb scsi disc, a SoundBlaster Live! 64 soundcard and a TNT 16mb pci graphics card. I built up a rather nice pc from these, and I watched my first downloaded film on this – ‘The Matrix’ and I went to the cinema twice based on this!
I upgraded the motherboard, the graphics card, memory and a few other bits over the next year or so. It was great as a college machine, multibooting linux and various windows installations. This was the first case that I prepped and painted, and I installed a side-window in it as well. All long before it became popular.
I started overclocking this machine too, after buying a p3-650/100 socket chip on a slocket adapter. This chip ram at over 900 safely and booted at 1.1ghz. Fantastic performance from a cpu that I paid €150ish for.
I did an upgrade jump then to an AMD64 3000+ with 1gb of ram, geforce 6600gt vivo graphics and a chieftec case that I prettified with EL cable along the louvres in the front, LED illumination inside, UV cable sleeving and UV cold-cathode lamps as well. This was a fantastic machine, and Sarah bought me a 200gb harddrive as a wonderful christmas present, I added another 400gb later. It’s a pity that this machine was stolen from 109, and this pretty much killed my casemod desires. (may that thief get crotchrot.)
I bought a Lidl special athlon64 4200+ which is still my current main desktop machine. I have a few issues with it but it is serviceable for the moment. I’ve just ordered a new upgrade/replacement motherboard as I am getting fed up of not being able to populate all 4 memory slots and I’m getting fed up of the bluescreens and crashes in all operating systems caused by high SATA i/o.
That new motherboard fixed a few issues for sure. Since then I’ve upgraded my graphics card to an MSI HD5770 Hawk as the 7600GT was no longer giving DVI output. I also got a few harddrives which I’m using in Raid for speed and reliability. I also got my hands on an Athlonx2 5000+ Black Edition chip to allow me to move from the current 2.2ghz to about 3.2ghz for a faster machine.
I’ve also moved to win7 64-bit as well, and I’ll be putting back in another drive exclusivly for Ubuntu methinks.
Machines I own:
- Lidl AMD4200+ desktop/frankenbox.
- Asus Eeepc 1000h linux 160gb with Bluetooth, in white
- p3-600 Dell desktop as a firewall in 102.
- p3-500 Dell desktop as a torrent server in 102
- p3-800 beigebox desktop as a video capture box in 102
- p2-450 beigebox desktop, Smoothwall in Ballybrit.
- HTC Wizard pocketPC on O2 network, upgraded rom from WM5 to WM6.5 (thanks to TNT)
- iPhone 3G 16gb, black, iOS 3.1, cydia
- Little cappucino p3-1.4 lunchbox, idle
- p4-1.4 desktop with 128mb rambus memory, idle
Other machines that are lying around.
- P2-450 beigebox awaiting repurposing.
- p3-1000 beigebox.
- p3-866 beigebox.
- P3-1.13 dell Inspiron laptop. (effectively retired)
- Nokia ip330 firewall, running Smoothwall (retired).
- HP 2u server, runs HP/UX, idle (retired)
- p3-700 Compaq 1u server, idle (needs psu) scrapped
- p3-700 Compaq 1u server, idle (needs PSU and Memory) scrapped
- p3-700×2 Compaq 1u server, needs PSU