the life of a computer

Posted Wednesday, September 01, 2004, at 02:22PM by e;

Kathy's computer died yesterday. She awoke to a blue screen, and then after restarting it just blacked out while she was working on something. I'm pointing my finger at either the motherboard or the video, but seeing as they're one and the same it's a good target. Yesterday I grabbed the drive out and threw it in my roommate's computer to get a couple files off. Now this evening I'm going to run over to the Burbank Fry's and pick up the guts of a new system.

I hate the fact that when a motherboard dies it's so hard to just replace it and keep the same CPU and RAM. Specs are always changing, CPU slot types are changing, and by the time something dies the industry's moved far along to something else.

I think I'm also going to take this opportunity to update my desktop machine. On July 27, 1999, Gospelcom upgraded my machine to a PII 400 with 256MB RAM. That same setup has been in my computer for five years now. The case and power supply are even older, dating back to 1997 (I think... possibly late '96). Here's a history of a piece-meal machine:

• Late '96/Early '97: Gospelcom buys me a PII 200, 64MB RAM, 3.4gig HD. 17" monitor. s3 Virge video card.
• Sometime in '98: Upgraded to 128MB RAM
• 07/03/1999: New video card, a Diamond Viper V550. 16MB, NVidia Riva TNT chipset.
• 07/27/1999: Upgraded to PII 400, 256MB RAM. Had picked up some SCSI drives by this point to bring total HD space to 40gig.
• 09/30/1999: I got my first CD burner. 16x read, 4x burn.
• 09/04/2001: My power supply fan died leading to some fun makeshift computing.
• 02/08/2002: New hard drive: 60gig.
• Summer of 2002: New CD burner to replace my dead one. 40x read, 24x write.
• 12/25/2002: New video card: NVidia GeForce4 with 128MB RAM.
• 06/24/2003: Bought a second monitor.
• 01/11/2004: Power supply fan died and needed to be replaced.
• 01/12/2004: New hard drive, 160gig.
• 01/14/2004: My ancient sound card no longer worked with Linux, so I bought a Soundblaster Live.
• 03/14/2004: My original mouse died. I replaced it with a Microsoft wireless Intellimouse.

I'm not sure exactly how complete that is, but it's close. It's also kind of cool to see how much this blog serves as my collective memory.