Goodbye Old Friend

Many important events happened to me in 1999.  I officially moved out of my mothers apartment (if only for 6 months).  My first child was born.  I also built my first computer, with the help of the awesome guys at Edgewood Computers, based out of Ellettsville, IN; where I lived at the time.

It has some amazing specifications for the time.  A 450mhz AMD K6/2 processor, 96mb of PC133 ram, a 10gb hard drive, an ATI All-In-Wonder video card, which allowed you to record video directly from cable.  It has a 48x cd-rom drive, that’s right not even a burner.  I also installed the hard drive from my first computer, to be used as a secondary place to store my stuff, at 200mb it wasn’t large, but it was something.  In total I paid just under a cool grand for this computer, which wasn’t bad at the time.

This computer only had 2 problems.  First it had to be thoroughly cleaned with alcohol, as I used to smoke inside my home, which led to a residue buildup on the machine.  Then a few years ago, the power supply went out.  That’s it!

In 2005 I built a new computer, one that grossly outdated this one.  We ended up giving this one to my in-laws.  With 2 of their daughters a minimum of 2 hours away, we wanted to get them connected via email and able to get on the internet.

My in-laws had been complaining about it running slow, they thought it was their dial-up internet access, but in reality it was the aging computer.  Last night I booted it up to see what was going on and discovered the IDE (Hard drive) controller had went bad.  I knew then that it was time to find my in-laws a new machine.

We got them a Dell Optiplex 745 from Dell’s auction website.  I plan on acquiring them a flat panel monitor sometime soon as well.

Goodbye old friend, you’ve been the most reliable machine I’ve ever known of and you’ll be missed.