how many computers do you own?

[TrevMUN]

Dang, and I thought I had a lot of hardware!

The amount of computers I have has, ironically, dramatically increased since my career required me to move to California and go from room rental to room rental. Despite not having a permanent place to live at the moment! Starting with the machines I've got set up—and yes, I name my computers, haha:

 

Palouser: The big one,  an XP64 rig which handles everything from my excessive browsing habits, to illustration, 3D modeling, animation, and video production, and most of the gaming that I do. She's named for an infamous wind from the state where I was born. This computer's gone through many overhauls over the years. The current configuration is thanks to @XP-x64-Lover discovering XP64 drivers for the SABERTOOTH X99 motherboard.

At the moment, Palouser's got a NZXT Phantom 820 case, an ASUS TUF SABERTOOTH X99 motherboard, an Intel i7-6950X CPU, 128 GB DDR4 3200MHz RAM (as 4 x 16 GB sticks of white Corsair VENGEANCE RGB, 2 x 16 GB VENGEANCE RGB in black, and 2 x 16 GB VENGEANCE RGB PRO sticks Corsair sent as a replacement when I had to RMA the other pair of black VENGEANCE RGB sticks) and an EVGA GeForce GTX TITAN X 126-P4-2992-KR 12GB SC video card. Aside from that Palouser has two 1 TB WD Blue drives, but I've got a Samsung 970 PRO M.2 NVMe SSD I want to use as her OS drive. Just ... haven't set aside time to try and get that set up.

The case is now the oldest thing in Palouser's setup, dating back to 2012 when I had gotten the case specifically because the previous case, an APEVIA X-Dreamer II ATXB4KLW, lacked airflow and was killing my hard drives. For her 2019 overhaul, I went for hardware that's about as good as I can get for an X99 chipset, with the TITAN X being the highest performing card the XP family can use (albeit with some .ini shenanigans).

 

Etesia: My personal laptop, a Lenovo Thinkpad Edge e431 running XP32 Home Edition. She replaced an ASUS Eee PC 1005HAB (more on that later) in 2014; I got her from a custom PC building company, XOTIC PC. Etesia mostly handles tasks on the go, as well as some of my multimedia production work. I named her after the etesian winds in the Mediterranean, since that's an important wind for sailing in the Med and lends itself well to the whole mobile nature of a laptop. XOTIC gave her a custom wrap I designed that resembles Minoan Greek art.

I had specifically sought out a model of laptop which allows the user to swap out the RAM and hard drive easily after what happened to the Eee PC. Such as it is, I've actually had to send Etesia back for repairs multiple times ... and more recently XOTIC's RMA team's work hasn't been great (usually damaging something in the process of fixing something else) so I'll probably have to take matters into my own hands in the future.

When I first got Etesia, she had an Intel i5-3230M CPU with HD 4000 Graphics integrated, 4GB DDR3 1600MHz of RAM, and a Hitachi Travelstar 7K750 500 GB hard drive. She's also got a Matshita BD-RE UJ242 optical drive. For some reason the RMA team swapped out the perfectly-functioning motherboard and CPU for reasons I don't understand, though, which downgraded her CPU to an Intel i3-3120M. They added a second 4 GB DDR3 stick (different manufacturer though, so now she has one each from Corsair and SK Hynix) though, so after they did this I installed the PAE patch for XP 32 so Etesia can at least make use of all 8 GB.

 

Marin: This is actually the first PC my family owned, a Gateway P5-120. I named her after a wind that blows in the Gulf of Lion. Marin's a Windows 95 machine that sports an Intel Pentium 120MHz CPU and I believe 16 MB of RAM. Offhand I forget the type of hard drive she's got. I keep Marin around not only as a memento to halcyon days but also to natively play games and run programs from the 90's that I can't run on other systems. Aside from having the original CD drive swapped out for a DVD-RW drive, Marin's otherwise unmodified. Some day, I'll probably max out her RAM to 128 MB. Maybe find a good 3D acceleration card from the era for her, too, turn her into a real old-school battlestation.

 

Levanter: Back in 2018, Palouser's previous set of hardware started having serious problems. I still don't quite know what the culprit is, but it seems it might be heat stress on the motherboard, making running that hardware for too long without shutting down periodically and letting things cool off untenable. While I was trying to figure this all out, a friend of mine in the area gave me his 2013-vintage gaming PC since he'd been looking for someone in need of a hand-me-down and knew about my hardware woes. He put Windows 10 on there, though I took steps to strip out all the telemetry I could.

This PC's very Corsair-themed:  Corsair Carbide 500R case in black, ASUS P8Z68-V motherboard, Intel i5-2500K CPU, 16 GB (as 4 x 4 GB sticks) of Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1333Mhz RAM with big blue heat spreaders matching the motherboard's look, and an AMD Radeon HD 6950 video card. For storage she's got an OCZ Vertex 3 120 GB SSD and a Seagate Barracuda XT 2 TB HDD. All the Corsair parts and the pure black case inspired me to name her after the Levant wind in the Mediterranean after I found out that "Levanter" was sometimes used as slang for pirates and privateers.

I mostly use Levanter for anything that Palouser and Etesia can't do. For now, that's mostly relegated to downloading updates for my Steam library and handling video conferencing.

 

Ostwind: Palouser's previous setup included an ASUS P5Q-PRO TURBO motherboard with an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU, 4 GB of 4 x 1 GB Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR2 800 mhz memory, and an MSI N560GTX-Ti HAWK video card. Most of that dates back to 2009, although originally this setup had a GIGABYTE GA-X38-DQ6 board and a BFG Tech GeForce 8800GT that were lost due to an annoyingly (un)lucky lightning strike. Initially, when I first made plans to overhaul Palouser (especially once DDR4 RAM was coming out) I was going to use these parts in another computer for a different purpose; I'm no fan of tossing out usable hardware.

The hardware failures that started happening in 2018, though, put to bed any notions I had of using the hardware for anything that would involve long uptimes. Still, the parts work, just that any prolonged use involves memory errors. Rather than throw the parts out (I hate contributing to e-waste) and because I always had a fondness for the Crucial Ballistix Tracer's blinkenlights, in 2019 I bought a cheap Compucase HEC HX300 case and spraypainted it gray and red, then got the old setup installed in that case. The Tracer LEDs look kind of like those that are on the ties worn by Kraftwerk in the 1970s, so I went full in on a paint scheme that resembled their uniform in those days. Red interior, grey exterior with red accents; I might even see about getting the acrylic window replaced with a transparent red one. The Kraftwerk theme is also why I named her "Ostwind," though it doesn't seem like people in Kraftwerk's hometown name a lot of the local winds.

I had a Kingston Digital 120GB SSDNow V300 I'd bought for Palouser's 2019 overhaul, but when I found that Palouser's new setup works as-is with the current OS install on her WD Blues, I repurposed that SSD for the machine I now call Ostwind. Right now, I've been messing with OpenBSD on this machine. I might use Ostwind for anything involving PII, though given the RAM errors that occur from prolonged uptimes that might not be a good idea. We'll see, I suppose.

 

Friagem: Something I wanted to do for a while was dabble in cryptocurrency mining, but not with brand new hardware or any of my main computers. Instead, I wanted to try and use older, inexpensive, second-hand hardware. Back when Fry's Electronics closed, I found out that a liquidation company was handling the sell-off of store fixtures, including decorations, tools, and a bunch of computers and peripherals. I was able to pick up one of the computers used for running a cashier terminal for $25: a late 90's/early 00's beige box case with a Gigabyte F2A68HM-DS2H motherboard with an AMD A8-7650K Radeon R7 APU. For RAM, the machine has two  8 GB as 2 x 4  GB sticks of Corsair Vengeance DDR3 ... unsure of the speed.

Although the PC did have a Patriot Blaze SSD, I've set that aside since I don't really want to get rid of the original Fry's point-of-sale software that was on it. It's kind of like a digital archaeological artifact now. Instead I got a fresh, cheap PNY CS900 120 GB SSD and installed Hive OS on that. I was also able to get, for free, a broken Radeon R9 380 video card off of Craigslist. I figured it'd be worth seeing if I can still find a use for the card and keep it out of the e-waste garbage bin. Turns out the thing's video output is kaput, but it can still crunch numbers just fine. So, in addition to mining hashes, I could use Friagem to fold proteins or help SETI search for intelligent life, too. (Though I don't think I can do that through Hive OS, haha.)

Given the whole "treasure hunting aspect" and the fact that the store where I got her (the San Jose location) is themed after a Mayan temple, that inspired me to name her after seasonal winds from the antarctic that blow in the Amazon. I only run Friagem occasionally, and generally only when the weather is cold and in lieu of running the HVAC. That way, I can save on heating bills. In spite of having only a single video card, Friagem's already mined enough ETC to pay back what I spent to get her going. Of course, it's not every day you find someone giving away a semi-functional video card ...

 

These are all the PCs I've got set up for use, even if only occasionally. In addition to those, I have more here and in storage half the country away. I hung on to (what's left) of the PC my father was going to throw away, as well as the family PC that came after Marin (a Windows 98 machine that has an AMD K6 if I recall) ... I'm fairly sure the Windows 98 machine is toast but some day when I leave California I'm going to see what I can do with it. There's also an HP Pavillion ze5700us laptop I have in storage; used to be my Dad's work laptop until he no longer needed it. There have been times I used it as an emergency fallback, like when my ASUS Eee PC broke and I hadn't yet gotten Etesia from XOTIC, but still needed a laptop for doing college work. I posted about that back in 2014, actually.

I still have that APEVIA X-Dreamer II case in storage, too, and maybe I can put it to use for something that won't require a lot of cooling. (It was the MSI N560GTX-Ti HAWK that was frying my hard drives when Palouser was still using that case.) There was also a Enermax Coenus computer case I got for cheap years ago, which I had planned to use for Palouser's 2009 parts. Now I'll have to think of something ELSE to do with that case; for a number of reasons, it wasn't feasible to get that case for building Ostwind.

Speaking of, when I was looking for options to build Ostwind I had originally thought about just seeing if I could get a cheap used case, maybe one from the 90's. I never found any that would have been feasible, but in the process of trying to find one, I wound up being given a Compaq DeskPro EN (PD1006 if I recall) and a Dell Optiplex GX1, both of them never used. The GX1 was in mint condition, until something tore huge scratches into the top panel when I moved to my next room rental. P***ed me off.

On top of that, before finding out about the liquidation at Fry's this year I had gotten an old banged up NZXT Source 220 case for real cheap. That was originally going to be the basis for a low-cost protein folding/hash crunching PC, but then I discovered the liquidation at Fry's. Maybe in the future if more dirt-cheap or broken but usable hardware turns up, I can put together a second PC like that.

The ASUS Eee PC is actually in a box here with me; back in 2014, I'd run into a hard drive issue and was attempting to take the drive out so I could try and back up the data on it before the drive completely failed. Having never disassembled a netbook before, that turned into a nightmare. Especially when an SMD component snapped off the motherboard and disappeared. For that reason I don't think I can revive that motherboard, at least not by myself. It would take a specialist, I think, to figure out what's missing, get a replacement, and put it on the mobo.

 

Once I finally have a place of my own I'd like to put some of that hardware in storage to good use. For years now, I've had a mind to take the old family Windows 98 machine (if it even works at all) and mod the case into something that you'd see out of vaporwave or Miami's South Beach, then use the machine as a centerpiece and jukebox that plays ambient vaporwave/synthwave music over speakers via Bluetooth. (Why Windows 98 specifically? That's the first Windows OS that supported Bluetooth if I recall, and Windows 98 features heavily in vaporwave motifs.) I might use the Optiplex GX1 instead now that the case had been damaged, but I preferred the idea of converting the generic "beige box."

I'd been thinking about using the Compaq DeskPro as some form of NAS. Someone had done so with a different Pentium II machine using Debian 2.7; I also thought about using something like Kolibri OS, but I don't know if that OS has NAS functionality yet. I also mentioned recently (and I believe in past posts on MSFN) I had wanted to make a router/modem/firewall PC. @jaclaz had suggested a thin client for that. Truth be told, it's what I had originally wanted to do with the parts I used to make Ostwind until they no longer were fit for continuous use. Still, might be fun trying to see if I can throw together a low-power PC of my own. If I ever get a chance to have a home of my own, I'd also thought about installing some kind of smart home network that's not reliant on proprietary products and having a dedicated PC to manage that. Though I'd probably not get too crazy with it, and keep the system separate from the LAN and not accessible remotely for safety reasons.

I've also thought about other purpose-built PCs. Especially due to the shenanigans with Steam no longer supporting XP yet still having lots of games which do run on XP, I'd liked the idea of building a Steam cache server that would let my computers download updates closer to home. ( @i430VX might remember me talking about that on Discord.) I want an excuse to find as many of those old UV reactive transparent computer parts as possible, and a Steam cache server would be a good excuse. I'd probably not actually use a blacklight in such a machine as I understand that they eventually cause UV reactive plastic/acrylic to fog up or go brittle, but a computer whose theme is solely "look as much like a plastic squirt gun as possible in as many colors as possible" would be one heck of a conversation piece.

Aside from that, I've had a lot of interest in the Commodore 64 scene; now that they've got reproduction C64C cases, replica systems like the Ultimate 64 and the  C64 Reloaded Mk2, and the Mechboard keyboard, all that's really missing these days is brand-new C64 keycaps. Perifractic found a solution with Legos, while someone's working on making replacement keycaps. (Originally these were going to have the same double-shot method to making the keys, but the pandemic threw a wrench in those plans.)

 

... Jeez, now that I look back on how much I wrote, I think this might have been overkill.

Edited October 25, 2021 by TrevMUN

[NotHereToPlayGames]

10 hours ago, TrevMUN said:

... Jeez, now that I look back on how much I wrote, I think this might have been overkill.

We'll allow it.  Since you saved the best for last with that C64 Legos keyboard.