Old Computers

I've never bought myself a new computer. Through a combination of stubbornness and luck, I've replaced my computer several times, but never bought new.

Old reliable Latitude D600 (same model, but not my computer). Image credit: Miguel Durán under CC BY-SA 2.5 license

My First Computer

Although I had access to the family computer(s) as a child and teen, they were shared. Upon graduating high school and to prepare for college I was gifted a Dell Latitude D600 laptop: my first personal computer. It served me well through college, and I continued to use it (upgrading RAM, minor repairs) for years after.

Switching to desktop

The desktop almost counts as buying myself a new computer, but I like the shock value of saying "never" because technically it wasn't for me. My then-girlfriend (later first wife) replaced her college laptop with a new desktop after we graduated college. I largely ignored it for several years until I could no longer forgive the poor performance of my laptop. My first wife had passed away, and I appropriated her computer. I installed additional RAM to get its performance better (I was upgrading from a 9-year-old high-end computer to a 5-year-old low-end computer). This was then my personal computer for several more years.

Back to laptop

As I struggled with my aging desktop, my mother was getting ready to replace her laptop. For various reasons, she used a gaming laptop which meant that it had pretty good specifications despite being several years old. It ran poorly for no good reason: I did a clean install of Windows 10 (which it had run before) and suddenly it screamed along happily.

Eventually, the computer started slowing again, it was not compatible with Windows 11, and I had to put a bunch of money into preventing it from being a fire hazard (the battery was swelling). I lucked out: my mother (again!) had computer troubles, this time with the computer failing to boot due to corrupted memory.

I was able to re-install the operating system on this new-to-me laptop from a USB drive and so far it's doing well. While I was making all of my changes, I also upgraded it to Windows 11, so my "if you won't give me security updates, I'll just move to Linux" threat to Microsoft has been delayed at least.

Work Computers

I haven't had to replace my computers more often partly because my office would provide me with a frequently-updated machine. Obviuosly I couldn't run games with it, but the need for some basic web-browsing or similar generic uses could be fulfilled by the work computer. Now that I'm between jobs, I don't miss the work computer much, but I really miss the external CD/DVD drive that came with it. When upgrading computers, I needed to borrow it to install my old games from CD!

Conclusions

Most of my computer time is spent web-browsing, doing basic-ish Microsoft Office-type work, or playing old games. I need newer computers more to ensure that they can keep up with operating-system changes than anything else.

I have the ambition of converting one or more of my old computers into network-attached storage and/or a home media server to reduce my reliance on streaming services, but that project struggles to reach the front of my priority list. When that happens, I'll probably splurge the few hundred dollars for an external Blu-Ray drive and start pulling my physical media collection into a personal cloud. But that's a topic for another day.

Anyone else happily hanging on to the trailing edge of computer technology?