Cav's Place

My computer is now over five years old… During this time, it got a TV tuner, a LAN card (from her old computer), a new HDD, a new monitor, a DVD drive (both of these this February, I plan to pass them over to dad when I’ll get the parts for the new one), a new mouse and an UPS (both of these she kept, so I had them replaced after being thrown back here). As you can see, nothing to technically increase performance. But there was something to lower it, a RAM module failed in June last year and I didn’t have it replaced, so I’m down to 256 Mb since then.
Either way, I’m happy that it still works, since the plans for a new one have been delayed from November last year till February (my choice), and from February till sometime around the end of the year (because of dad not keeping his word, as usual)…
It’s a good thing that I got it before meeting her, otherwise I’d have serious issues about replacing it. Still do actually, a little. As silly as it may sound, that’s because she put a sticker on the inside once… I actually think that weighed noticeably in favor of the delays…

This is weird. Since I started this blog on here, I posted precisely 3 planned entries, and too many to be filed under “Personal“… And now I’m posting that whole story too, which I really never planned to post here. Believe me or not, I don’t care… I just can’t do anything else…

But, since I’m at computers, let me go through the list of all I had… Interesting, how I grew up along with them…
Technically, you can say the first one was a Spectrum-compatible one, home-built by somebody. He named it Cobra, it had 48 kb of memory, ran BASIC and usually overheated after two hours of use…
First PC was a 16 MHz 386 SX, with 2 Mb RAM, 120 Mb HDD, 512 kb video card and a monitor that could only support 640×480 and 256 colors.
Some two years later came a 66 MHz 486 DX2, with 4 Mb RAM (later upgraded to 8 Mb), 540 Mb HDD, 8X CD-ROM (that might have been a later addition, not sure), but same video card and monitor. The CPU and mainboard from it fried ten days after getting the next one, did its job…
Then, some five or six years later, was the first time when I got to pick the computer. I picked a ready-made one, though, wasn’t about to build one myself just yet. 266 MHz Pentium II, with 32 Mb RAM (later upgraded to 64 Mb) (66 MHz SDR), 3.2 Gb HDD (later a 20 Gb one was added to it), 4 Mb video card and a monitor that could show all it could do (up to 1280×1024 and 24-bit color). The CD-ROM from the 486 was moved to it as well. Monitor was changed with a similar one a little before the computer since the old one fried. My parents still used that computer till I left to move with her, then gave it away to some friends when they got their new one. Was having issues for a while already, but apparently it’s still somewhat functional.
Some three and a half years after that, this one, the first one that I built out of parts. 2.0 GHz Pentium 4, with 512 Mb RAM (256 Mb left now) (266 MHz DDR) and a 64 Mb video card. It got the 20 Gb HDD, CD-ROM and monitor from the old one. After a little while, it got a 52X/24X/52X CD-RW, then the TV/FM tuner, then the 160 Gb HDD, then the 19″ LCD and the DVD drive (16X/16X/10X/6X/8X/6X/16X/48X/24X/48X, if you’re interested).
I didn’t include modems, LAN cards and any peripherals besides monitors in the list. But, speaking of modems, I first got on-line in 1998.
Major leaps here, as you can see. Noting starting configurations, not upgrades (or, as the case is with this one, downgrades), you have x4, x4, x7.5 for CPU speed, x2, x8, x16 for RAM size, x4.5, x6, x6.25 for HDD size, and same video card for first two, but then x8, x8 as far as video memory size goes…

My plan for replacing it, if that would have happened in February, was a Core 2 Duo E6700 (2×2.66 MHz), 2 Gb RAM (800 MHz DDR2), 320 Gb SATA2 HDD and a GeForce 8800 GTS (640 Mb) as video card. Also had a far better LCD than this one in mind, plus Windows Vista Home Premium. Naturally, since that got delayed, when I’ll look again, I’ll be looking for something that will be around the same price range at that moment, if not even higher, to cover for all the stress of having to stay on this one for so much longer.