laptop

I've been building my own computers since the late 1980s – the advent of the IBM PC architectures and the ability for 3rd parties to use the architectures made it everything fairly straightforward. As the years blew by, things became more complicated – but it was all manageable. Simple. Straightforward.

The Decades of Change

The floppy drive – the original 5 1/4” of the PCs (but not the original floppy by any stretch) died. It gave birth to the not-so-floppy plastic encased 'floppy'. And all was pretty much the same. Hard drive sizes went from 10 megabyte to 10 gigabyte in fairly short order. The fact that the ASUS eeePC on which I'm writing this is probably more powerful and more physically diminutive than any system during my first 20 years of computing is not lost on me.

The fact that I'm using it now is because the desktop's Gigabyte motherboard has, after 2 years, died. I was actually quite close to simply throwing the system out the second floor window, since I've been keeping it alive with hard drive changes, RAM upgrades and so forth. All of that stuff used to be fun, but now I want to focus on using the computer – not fixing it. I don't even fix computers for money anymore; it's simply not worth it to me. It's... boring. Repetitive. Annoying.