Continuing from the previous post, lets move beyond the original Pentium systems and towards the era of laptops and dual core processors.

December 1999 – Celeron 433

After being jealous of friends and their Pentium II systems with the mysterious MMX instruction set we finally jumped ahead again, albeit not at the high end this time. We opted for the Celeron 433Mhz chip, a processor that was more than powerful enough for the computing we performed – largely the Internet, light media and document creation. The modem in this machine was 56K giving us slightly better speeds than the previous systems. I should also mention here that it did not take us long to switch from the image-less ‘net access to dial-up that was fully functional – this occurred around the end of 1996.

This system offered sufficient power for many of the games I wished to play, notably Age of Empires II, Roller Coast Tycoon and The Sims. Age of Empires became a popular game to play online amongst a small group of friends – there was nothing better than teaming up for a 3-on-1 assault from land and sea.

I was generally a system hog with this machine so, as my interest in programming and lack of challenge at school increased, my parents decided it was time for me to have my own system. Check out the original receipt for this Celeron 433.

September 2000 – Celeron 433 – MY FIRST COMPUTER

It was as if I were destined for a career in programming as nearly every waking moment I had was spent writing code on this machine. This was almost identical to the family computer with a slightly smaller hard drive and this time, a network card. As I recall, soon after receiving this computer, high speed Internet became available in the area and we jumped on board. For years the high speed was solely for my system with the rest of the family sharing dial-up access on the other computer.

I generally stuck to network programming with Visual Basic 6 using the then-glorious Winsock control for establishing connections and transferring data. There were definitely some “shady” programs created here, but there was also a cool program I made calledInfoChat that allowed users to create/mod/setup file transfers within a clean group chat interface. I wish that I knew where files and screenshots were as this was actually a pretty slick program that was only hampered by the terrible VB6run-time . Another cool program I made was a 3D simulator that complimented a physics project that I made for one of the teaching greats, Mr.Stover (Stovedog, if you read this email me…I haven’t been able to track you down).

Other than coding, I generally continued my previous usage pattern with occasional gaming, media hogging using eDonkey and chatting with friends. This system also marked another big step in my computer past as the installation of Corel Linux began my love for all things open source, particularly Debian – I suppose that you could say I was apt. While similar to the previous system, the receipt shows a few of the minor differences.

Fall 2001 – PIII 800

This was more-so an upgrade to the previous system, but with a substantial boost in power. This system took an absolute beating over the years, but was probably the most fun I have ever had with a computer. With the ability of the motherboard and power supply toaccommodate the Pentium III chip this upgrade made a lot of sense as the newly released Pentium 4′s were out of budget – of course, my good friend Mike had one of those P4′s and I still recall the jealousy.

Anyways, I gradually added a DVD drive, CD burner, more RAM and a top-of-the-line video card before realizing that this beautiful Coppermine chip could be overclocked like mad so I could run the chip beyond spec with an acceptable amount of heat. I continued my obsession with programming, but also go into much more graphic-intensive games like Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and my favourite video game ever, The Elders Scrolls III: Morrowind.

This upgraded system was running on Windows XP, beta at the beginning, but I often used the Knoppix live CD Debian system for those times I needed to rock the ‘nux. Even as I bought new computers this system ran beautifully until one of my university roommates (yeah, YOU Andrew) did something that rendered it useless. Before Andrew’s ability to destroy everything he touched developed, my other roommate, Jody (now living in a forest in rural New York state), and I decided we needed to ruin the beautiful NASA paint job so that we could match the system to a lovely living room cabinet. I urge you to check out the photostream of the monstrosity we created – note the ninja drives, 2600 magazines and what we were told was an original painting that was really a copy of a default Windows background.

July 2003 – Inspiron 8500

The biggest purchase of my life was this $3500 15.4″ beast! This laptop was purchased just before heading off to university at a time when laptops were rarely seen on campus – due to the cost, I imagine. This was not just any laptop, this was a gaming laptop with 128MB video card, 1680×1050 screen, and a built-in wireless G card. The 2.4GHz Pentium 4 Mobile processor kicked out a ton of power that really took my gaming and media watching to the next level.

This computer was a huge help during those night-long group meetings and allowed me to avoid the Andrew-ridden campus computer labs.

August 2005 – AMD 64

Built to be a gaming and number crunching machine, this computer was created using inheritance money, sweat and tears. Built from the best parts affordable at the time, including a sweet 20″widescreen LCD monitor (only to be outdone by two friends shortly after), this beast still sits beside me today, albeit headless, to serve my media on demand.

This computer has been beaten and abused by 12-hour Maple calculations, serving websites, extended periods of intense gaming (Battledfield 2 and The Elders Scrolls IV: Oblivion this time around), hundred day up-times and intense overclocking. I have treated the system well by providing it with the best peripherals (Logitech MX 5000 keyboard and mouse, G5 mouse, G15 keyboard, Z5300 5.1 speakers and terabytes of hard drives) and triple boots. Hopefully I can continue to use this computer for many years to come.

March 2008 – MacBook

While the AMD 64 was running like a beast, it began to have performance issues resulting in occasional, and unwelcomed, shutdowns – this was not acceptable while doing school work, notably a massive coding project involving moving object databases and data loaders. It was time for a change and after using Linux religiously for years I opted to take my first step into the Mac world with a refurbished 13″ white MacBook. After booting the MacBook for the first time I quickly shut it down and upgraded the RAM to a full 4GB.

When choosing a system I really just wanted to experience something new – it didn’t have to be a graphics powerhouse as I already owned an Xbox 360 so I wanted something that just worked and was quiet in the classroom. Since becoming a Mac owner I have flip-flopped between OSX and Ubuntu and have been very satisfied with how media is shared from my desktop to the MacBook (and the 360, I should add) regardless of the OS I run. With the 4GB of RAM I have absolutely no complaints about power or memory usage and shutdown only when operating system updates require.

There you have it, I have encountered a lot of computers in my life time and look forward to seeing what comes next. I encourage anyone to post your early and recent experiences with computers. Thanks for reading!