computer

I wrote previously about my PC which has changed one piece at a time over the years, but now I'm going to write about it again because it changed a bunch. I refer to it The Potato of Theseus for reasons discussed in the prior article which are fairly obvious if you're familiar with the concept.

At this point, everything but some of the storage devices is a relatively recent purchase, and the main storage is all brand new.

I was just wondering to myself how many computers I could think of that I've owned, and maybe if I can remember enough of them I can do something interesting with the info. The idea is to get them into chronological order. This is expected to be a work in progress, I/we will see how much work and how much progress can be achieved. I'm also jotting notes about what I remember about their disposition.

Commodore 16

In the world of electronics, especially PCs, it is fashionable to call an outdated piece of equipment a "potato". My PC absolutely qualifies, but what makes it interesting is that you can trace its descent from a potato several generations older. This is a neat testament to what's possible to do cheaply with AMD stuff since they keep announcing new processors on old sockets. Here's what it's in and what's in it now:

While smirking at CNET's Alfred Ng's response to advertising I browsed down to his tweet about a BSOD on a bus station terminal and thought hey, can I read this well enough to find out what the error is? Yep. It's KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR, which is exactly what it sounds like: an error in restoring a page of memory from the paging file to physical memory. And that's an error which you really should never see again.

For all my life, most of my computers have been hand-me-downs or upgrades. I've built a handful of PCs from scratch, but even most of the ones I built with new processors and motherboards had some hand-me-down parts. But it seems like recently a threshold was crossed where the computers available to just anyone (and not someone who knows "someone") for basically nothing began to be pretty good.

When you're putting together a so-called "Car PC", by which we usually mean a contemporary ATX-derivative computer installed into an automobile, you have a few hurdles to cross. The enclosure, interface, storage devices, and even the power management all become special problems. The power problems can largely be solved through the use of a Wide Input picoPSU, but what about systems outside of a 120W envelope, or systems where you need to switch more than the PC power? The answer is just one typical automotive relay.

Every so often I visit Pricewatch to take a look around at prices. Mostly I've been looking at laptop, desktop, and server prices, with occasional visits past the CPU+Motherboard combo page. One day I stumbled across an ad from Hyper Microsystems for an IBM eServer 325. This was a dual-Opteron 240 1U server with 1GB DDR333 ECC memory and a 120MB ATA disk - for $189. This sounded too good to be true, so I did a little research.