In 1998, I bought my first computer with my own income. The computer I had been using was an old Acer model, which was given as a birthday gift in 1995. But the Dell Dimension L500c, which I named NEMESISVEX in the Windows settings, was the first I bought with a loan I took out from the credit union.
I built many a website with this computer. In 2001, I used it as a web server to deliver Musicwhore.org and various other sites in the Vigilant Media network. Maintaining it got tired — and unreliable for users — so I moved all my sites back to Dreamhost.
When the computer I used as a developement server died in 2005, I bought a new machine — which is also now getting long in the tooth — and moved the Dimension into that role. By then, it was 7 years old and far past its prime. It had only two USB 1.0 slots, and its processor could handle only 512 MB of RAM. Large hard drives of the 120 GB magnitude needed to be partitioned. But I decided to max the machine out as best I could, even installing Windows XP on it!
I created some of the very first Eponymous 4 demos on this machine, before its limitations made it difficult to handle the demands of digital audio. I even wrote a novel with it.
For the last three years, it's served as a Shoutcast server, an FTP server and network buffer between the outside world of the Internets and my primary computer.
Last night, I thoughtlessly installed numerous XP updates. When the machine rebooted, I got a boot error. I tried it again and got the same error again. Huh. At that moment, I knew it was time. I could have fought a brave and valiant fight, rolling back the updates or reinstalling XP. Instead, I switched out the drive with an old one from the Windows 2000 days to see if it would boot up. It did not.
The only work I have on that machine is my web development, and with the numerous hard drive enclosures in my stead, I had little incentive to pump new life in a machine that should have been retired the moment I bought a new computer.
So I shut it down. I put the drive in an enclosure and moved my web sites over to my current desktop. At some point during the vacation, I'm going to wipe the old drive clean and install the factory settings. I will bring that machine back to 1998, then haul it down to the Good of Will. An old 15-inch Sony Triniton will most likely go with it. I want to bring the 14-year-old printer as well, but I don't have a replacement in the budget.
It'll be nice to reclaim some space, but it also means reallocating a number of resources. Relaunch the Shoutcast server? (Unlikely.) Install a newer FTP server? (Very likely.) Reconfigure the firewall? (Depends.) And getting that machine ready for donation is going to eat into studio time.
Still, that machine was a real trooper. And I pushed that thing to do a lot.
Now I want to shop for a new computer.