two-pot screamer dot com

I used to get really excited about PC hardware. I mean really excited. I recently found an old piece of paper from high school. It was labelled “My Dream System”. Other people might have had a dream house or a dream car; I had a dream computer.

I had outlined the specifications in exacting detail. It was going to be the best computer ever. Top of the range. So good I would never have to buy another one. The list started: 486dx2-66, 192MB of RAM…you can guess the rest.

These days I have no interest in the sort of computer that lives on the desktop. It’s a tool to do a job, and I’ll hang onto it for as long as possible. The days of 2 year upgrade cycles are long over. I don’t play games anymore and I haven’t upgraded my operating system since 2000. I’ve even reversed my position on motherboards that have everything onboard. I haven’t had to upgrade anything except RAM or storage since the days of the Voodoo2. I even walk away from conversations about desktop PC hardware unless someone makes a really stupid assertion (got to preserve alpha geek status somehow).

So, having given you the background on how I feel about computers, you can imagine it was with bad grace that I finally decided that it was time I blow a small amount of money on a rapidly depreciating asset in an attempt to wring another couple of years of useful life out of it.

What would have been a fun task for me as a 15 year old was a huge pain in the arse for someone with better things to do with their time. My motherboard manual was missing all sorts of key information (like how big a hard drive it could address) and, in the years since I’ve been paying attention, the industry had invented a whole bunch of new busses and acronyms I didn’t know how to pronounce. Not to mention all the misleading marketing bullshit - my favourite one was an IDE harddrive rack that advertised itself as hot-swappable (yeah, if you don’t mind hosing your file system).

I now have slightly more sympathy for members of the general public when they are buying technology.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 7th, 2005 at 3:26 pm and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.