Believe it or not, I'm actually not a mennonite when it comes to technology. I'm pretty astute when it comes to current day laptops and desktops. I have been a certified Dell technician off/on since 2005. I am also CompTIA A+ Certified and I make the money to do all this stuff on this website doing I.T. support. I also spent 7 years doing hardware and software support for the various teams at Microsoft in Redmond, WA. I am famliar with Windows, Apple Macintosh OS X, and Linux. Currently I've moved 100% OpenSource at my house because I'm sick and tired of dealing with the same frustrations at home when I'm not getting paid to deal with them. Seriously - OpenSource rules!
I don't exactly hate any of the hardware platforms, they all have good and bad that go with them. Apple makes great hardware but they do a great job (which isn't so great) at planned obsolescence. Dell makes great stuff that lasts awhile but the docking solutions SUUUUCK (especiaully ANYTHING from ANY make that uses a USB-C docking station), HP is alright, Lenovo is my brand of choice for PCs but they'e hard to find at a good price on the second hand market without buying something closer to 1999 but after 2005 but before 2013. You remember the "no Child Left Behind" crap of the 90's, I applied that to computers - no PC left behind - PC, Mac, Sun, or whatever the heck it is. If I can throw linux on it, and daily drive it, I will!
Typically, I'm a Linux user, but I'm not one of those guys who believes Linux is the only operating anyone should use....here's my stance on operating systems....sorry, this is going to be BRUTALLY honest...| PICTURES | SPECS & DESCRIPTION |
2015/2024 FrankenDell "Piecision" XPS 15  |
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To be quite frank, I'm not even sure where I got this PC from anymore. It was a long time ago, someone gave me a crapped out carcass of a Dell XPS 9550 with a busted up touch screen and a buldged out battery. Now me, at work, during COVID, in desparate times, started learning how to cross-reference Dell model parts and figured out how to "Kit-Bash" various Dell models together that share the same platform to make some wacky unique thing. So I've replaced the RAM, Battery, Screen (which probably came from various Precision models because it's the same part as those use), power jack, and did some metalwork to the trackpad. The old clunker runs great, but it's ain't pretty. Maybe this should be the spirtual successor to Damon's "Millennium Falcon" Pentium Pro - hehehe - she ain't pretty, but she's got it where it counts! She's also growing new stickers over time, like I maybe should change the hostname to "ruth" since Ruth Bader Ginsbourg has covered the Dell Logo, and The ATARI Logo is on the upper corner. Most of my modern gaming goes on on this old thing. |
2015 Dell XPS 13  |
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A co-worker of mine had this and didn't want it anymore because it won't run Windows 11, and said I could have it or he'll recycle it. So I decided to take this pretty killer little Core i7 under my wing as my "tiny" linux Laptop (as compared to the more delicate but more powerful "FrankenDell" above). What's funny. I remember these being some of the better laptops that came out in 2013 when Microsoft/the Industry in general started pushing toward touch screen convertible PCs. Yes, the RAM is soldered to the motherboard, and I'll probably put a new mSATA drive in it someday of much larger capacity, but for right now, it's a nice little laptop. I usually use it for things like working on the site...maybe soon hand-drawing images for the site in GiMP (I'm actually a rather skilled artist - go look at my pixel art on the Ultima V page - I drew all that freehand in Graf-X II). Actually, funny trivia is I remember working on these at Microsoft circa 2013-2017 where they were probably one of the most reliable touch-screen Laptops of any that came out during that crazy Windows 8 era. |
| IBM Personal Computer |
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Not really an IBM but the closest thing you'll get to one in 2025 used. Yeah, I decided to retire the Apple Mac mini for this, so that I could have a decent system for playing games from Steam. The whole project started when I started having to delete stuff from my profile because I could not run it. I've also been getting into the graphically heavy walking simulator genre, and looking into OpenSource 100% Audio Production, so I needed a PC with enough "oomph" to carry those sorts of things out decently - not perfectly - but decently. Since the barebones was free, as was the CPU, and the RAM and Graphics were cheap, for around...I dunno, $45-60 I built myself a decent-ish gaming rig that's low frills and not a big pain in the ass, and it has a nice, loud, internal speaker. Right now it's on Garage duty but the plan is after the 2026 album is done this PC is taking over as my main computer upstairs and the iMac will be back on Garage Duty. |
2015 Apple iMac 21.5" |
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Now recently upgraded, the once "Garage Mac" is now back in the house running with an SSD after taking my chances for the first time on opening up and upgrading a Sealed Mac. I made every mistake in the book (crack to the upper glass layer, broke the power button - but repaired it), but it was a real good idea anyway, since I managed to get this thing running and you can't see the crack in the glass anyway, so I'm pretty happy. Also the SSD upgrade is like night and day on this machine - it really RIPS with the SSD. Everything that took insane amounts of time has now been HALVED! Because of this, the mac Mini is now the Garage Mac. As of 12/2024 this one is making the Transition to Linux Mint, while keeping MacOS for the purpose of Garage Band and/or Atari VCS Development (yep, dabbling in BATARI BASIC). The screen fell off one Saturday and was literally hanging by it's cables. Guess the Adhesive wasn't enough, so It now is held around the borders of the screen with clear packing tape - whichis fine with me. There's also a crack in the screen now, probably from the release, but it's not visible unless you look from the side. So it turns out, APple makes some pretty solid hardware, shame they try to kill it before it's time! |
2014 Dell PowerEdge T610
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An old colleague named Dalius gave me this in late 2019, and it's since become my file server, Plex media server, game server, software server, and general storehouse of various data and things in the house. That said, mostly all it hosts is crap that's not really of any monetary value anyway, and it's highly firewalled from the Internet. I got this because Dalius overheard me talking about wanting to mess with some Enterprise Class Server hardware. Well, accumulating parts from some friends here and there over the years in the I.T. Industry allowed me to max THIS out. 192GB RAM, 2TB RAID, 2x Xeon CPU. It's a monster. I'm running it till it dies. That said, this is where I learned about using CAB Deployment Packages from Dell to install drivers during O/S installation, how to configure and use an iDRAC (though oddly I have to use the 486 or a VirtualBOX host to access it because it's so oooold), and generally, dick around with doing Server things with it. I know it's a monster, it eats electricity like a Semi does diesel (well, half as much, I only keep one PSU connected at a time, LOL), but it does the job, and it does it great, so I can't complain. It does have a botched CentOS Stream install on it as well which requires me to be present when booting the machine. That's fine, it only get's rebooted 4-5 times a year at most anyway, it's a Server. Things get really interesting during our wind-bourne power-outages though. |
HP (Hewlett Packard) EliteBook 8460p  |
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We were scrapping some equipment from a repurposed location at work and I was offered some of the old junk they had pulled from onsite (includign multiple Direct TV modules which I decided it would be in my best interest to pass to prevent adding to an already spread-too-thin number of hobbies). However, while taking out a metal rackmount shelf, I saw that there were some zip ties holding somethign onto the bottom, and not a standalone KVM as the weight suggested. What it ended up being was this HP EliteBook which had been hanging upside down, probably since my tenure at Microsoft was only a year old, because I remembered repairing a lot of these. IT ran and had Windows 10 on it, so I took it home, ripped out the 320GB Spindle, wiped it, put in a faster smaller SSD, and 16GB of RAM I had laying around in a anti-static bag, and put LInux Mint on it....and much to my surprise, the battery holds a charge. I got about an hour and a half out of it the first time I ran it off battery. Right now, I'm waiting for my income tax refund to come in so I Can buy a power supply for it so I can stop mooching off the universal one my Wife's HP G6 has. |
Mid-2010 Mac Mini 4.1
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The Mac Mini was bought at Goodwill for $12 in early 2024. I upgraded the RAM, maxxed out at 16GB, for $32 off of E-bay. The machine also had it's original 320GB HDD ripped out, recouped the cost of the whole machine and then some, and replaced with a 128GB LiteOn SSD. It's loaded with macOS High Sierra 10.13 because that's the last version of MacOS that it will run, and it does not run too well on Linux Mint - just too slow. The computer was being used as a desktop upstairs for awhile, but I wound up moving it down to the garage, it's far more hardy anyway, and far less likely to accumulate the insane amount of dust I bluew out of the iMAC after being down there for about a year or so. At the end of 2024, I upgraded the SSD to 500GB and split install between OS High Sierra 10.13 and LInux Mint for the anti-commercial OpenSource Transition that I do to these Mac devices as they reach commercial EOL and enter OpenSource second-life. Mid-2025 I decided to move it to full-time Linux due to how restrictive it's last MacOS Edition was getting to be (no more store, outdated Safari, requires FireFox ESR for Web Access), so it now has been moved to being a Full-Time Linux Machine. |
