So on this page is me just telling about what machines I use day to day. It's kind-of a revolving door of sorts as people keep throwing me their "old" systems (often far less than 10 years old), and then I keep bringing them back to life as something else. I generally get about 7-10 years out of a computer - laptop or desktop - before I replace it. I'm not very impressed by high horsepower unless it's actually being used to do something interesting or worthwhile. I'm not here to brag about my giant adventures. I'm here to give a bit more of a layman's perspective mixed with my I.T. Support Skills, on how to make these machines last a *stoopid* long time, and get the most out of them as a day-to-day user. Granted, while there is some overlap with the vintage collection, I'm keeping enything pre Core 2 and Pre-Windows 10 out of here.
| PICTURES | SPECS & DESCRIPTION |
2014 Dell Latitude E6440 |
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Specs
This is my "workhorse" of sorts (besides my triple-boot Macintosh), and what about 90% of the site is generally coded on these days (I'm writing this on this laptop as I speak). These days it spends a lot of time being carried around with me. Most of the time I'm running Linux, but I have Windows 10 on it for the sole purpose of gaming (mostly), but I also use it at work some for troubleshooting Vendor laptops or figuring out weird issues with outside networks or things where I don't mind blowing up Windows for experimentation (not a fan of the cloud, but I do use it). For being 9 years old it's surprisingly fast and nimble. You won't see it running Windows 11 anytime soon though, I'll probably be running pure Linux on it in the future, like most of my devices. I'm a huge Linux advocate, though I don't quite advocate their behaviors on internet forums so much. You'll find modern PC's last a really long time with me (between 7-15 years), and usually by the time they are "retired" they are just "relegated" to "vintage" status. |
2015 Apple iMac 21.5" |
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This is my 2nd hand iMac I found snoozing in a corner of my wife's auntie's house, disused. I brought it home and while I could not do much to the hardware, the software-side, I created a Triple Boot Mac to test out the idea of seeing what the best of all three operating systems happens to be. |
2014 Dell PowerEdge T610
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I got interested in servers a few years back and a colleague of mine gave me one he had. I also just happened to land on a bunch of obsolete registered RAM at the time as well. What resorted was the Creeping Net Warehouse/Colassus server. There will be future experiments with this, though right now it sits in storage because we're planning for future use of it in our house as an at-home file server of sorts (and possibly a web host). But right now we're trying to pare down enough to live in a cheaper, nicer apartment complex and I don't want this thing sitting around taking up space. It'll never be obsolete in my household. |
