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In 2005 I built a new computer, one that grossly outdated this one.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.