What hardware are you using?

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Its funny as Im using my full desktop system with Ryzen 5 5600x most of the time. I use my laptops for Linux but thats about it. The older gen 3 Optiplex systems will bite the dust by the time Win10 support is gone.

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Picked up a video card for my birthday, a Asus Tuf GTX 1660 super oc, which will go in my other pc I use mostly for my older games. Runs a bit hot but only draws 125w so great for the smaller psu Ive got in that system.

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Im continuing to experiment with my Acer Chromebox CXI3 using some of the tips Ive gained from Chris Titus on expanding its capabilities. Just for everyday use and particularly for seniors this is an amazing option which cuts down on the family tech calls.

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I am a sucker for high end lops being sold on eBay by someone who does not really know what they are selling. This seller was honest about it, saying he picked it up at a thrift store and did not know that power adapters are not universal and he had no way to try it out. For $25 I picked up a 2006 17” MBP. It arrived in a box that was totally destroyed by the post office. By some miracle the laptop was in pristine condition.

Very old Mac OSX, could be gotten into by starting in “safe mode”, which brings you up into root. You of course still cannot access user accounts, however as root, you can delete the file “FirstrunDone”, which after a restart allows you to create a new user. Which I did.

I deleted the old users after a quick peek. The earliest file created was in May of 2007, and the newest file created was June of 2007. There were 2 users created. The only files were pictures in a folder titled “Trip to Japan”. I surmise it was purchased so they had a place to dump pictures from their cameras and there were hundreds of pictures. I deleted both users and was left with essentially a fresh install of the original OS.

The upshot for me is I am left with a $2800 laptop that was used for 2 months in 2007 to store pictures of a trip. This is somewhat confirmed by the fact that the battery shows it has 2 cycles on it. The big question is what on earth to do with an exceptionally nice C2D laptop with 2GB RAM and a 150GB hard drive which incidentally has 125GB free. It also has a DVD burner and a 17" 1680X1050 beautiful screen that is very nice for my old eyes.

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Thats a nice find and I love picking up much older hardware in mint condition. I had an extensive older hardware collection including C64/128 and an Apple II to name a few but were lost in a fire. I dont own it any more but I did have a Dell E6400 from 2008. I love seeing the original OS when possible particularly for collecting purposes. The oldest hardware I have presently are my Optiplexes with 3rd gen cpus.

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It came with same OS I was using on my PowerMac G5. I had started Linux before the arrival of PowerMac G5, but when Apple went Intel the prices really fell and I got a used one at a good price. I fire it up a few times a year and like with all my hardware I do backups, so when this laptop arrived, I restored the latest backup from the PM G5. It is like starting right from where I left off. I suppose it is similar to folks that want XP back. It is just comfortable to use something you are very familiar with.

From about 2000 to 2010 Apple laptops, while nice and pretty durable, they were pretty lame on the engineering. This has ~20 screws to remove the hard drive. The hard drive controller is built on an Apple only SATA spec, so not all hard drives will work. For some reason stupid caps were placed on RAM, a 64bit machine that only takes 3GB or RAM is pretty silly. And while the machine is 64bit, it still boots from a 32bit efi. Installing Linux on this is a nightmare.

But hey it is new and shinny. The 17 year old battery has 2 cycles (3 now) and lasts for 5 hours.

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20 screws to remove the hard drive? Thats removing the bottom panel I assume, thats nuts. With my Dells the drive slips in and out from an external bay and uses only two screws.

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Well the machine is 17 years old; in another 6 months it will be eligible to vote. And well you know how messed up Gen Z is This has seventeen screws to remove the bottom, along with two screws to remove the hard drive carrier and there is a final four screws in the drive itself. It is nice when the machines pop open easier, but with machines this old I just open them up, max them out. With this machine I just replaced the spinning drive with and SSD. The RAM was already maxed out (3BG), but it is accessed via a one screw hatch under the battery.

Thinkpads were a real pain to open for a long time. Eventually they started using a single screw cover to pull the hard drive. Recentlly they have moved back to more screws. The T580 has 8 screws to remove the bottom. They are all captive screws, which is nice, but not as nice as a one screw cover.

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Even my newer Latitude laptops only have 8 screws to remove the bottom and my e6440 only has 4 screws. Really liked the ram and hard drive compartments with their own covers back in the day.

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Has the strangest thing happen and its the first time its ever happened to me. My Dell XPS 8940 when booting it, an error came up and it was easy to see the CMOS battery had died completely. This is a newer pc with much newer components so that was a first. Ive had older pcs with bad batteries but even that is rare, but a new system, its literally never happened before.