Nick Keim

The best com­puter I ever owned had a Tyan Tiger 230 dual socket 370 moth­er­board. It had two Intel Pen­tium III proces­sors at 1.0GHz and 384MB of PC133 SDRAM. I don’t remem­ber who built it for me, but it was an amaz­ing machine, faster than any­thing any­one had at col­lege. It came with Win­dows 2000 which was nec­es­sary to sup­port dual proces­sors, a rather nice perk con­sid­er­ing I man­aged to avoid the entire Win­dow ME deba­cle. Another inter­est­ing fea­ture was the DVD-RAM drive which could read and rewrite DVDs and DVD-RAM cartridges.

Over the years I con­tin­u­ally upgraded this machine, ulti­mately end­ing up with 768MB of ram and a Gain­ward FX 5900 Ultra Golden Sam­ple. To upgrade to dual 1.4GHz Tualatin proces­sors I used a socket 370 to socket 370T adapter. With all these upgrades this com­puter absolutely flew. When I finally upgraded to a new desk­top in 2005 I was dis­ap­pointed, it didn’t seem any faster. In it’s final incar­na­tion my trusty dual proces­sor work­horse was run­ning Gen­too 1.4 and was only aban­doned in 2005 because I left for grad school and didn’t want to trans­port my desk­top overseas.

In 2002 my neigh­bor threw out her com­puter and I couldn’t resist, my very own trash picked Bondi-Blue iMac. Because I had bit the upgrade bug I swapped out the orig­i­nal G3 proces­sor board for one sport­ing a 500MHz G4 proces­sor and upgraded the ram to 512MB. The iMac orig­i­nally had MacOS 9.2 but that was swiftly dis­patched in favor of OS X (10.1). The eth­er­net port on this par­tic­u­lar iMac didn’t work (prob­a­bly why it was trashed) but that was eas­ily solved with the addi­tion of a USB wifi adapter.

After I had my fill futz­ing around with the ane­m­i­cally slow iMac I decided to tear it apart and make it a music server for my stereo. I took out all of the required parts and squeezed them into an old Hi-Fi ampli­fier shell. I added a pow­ered USB hub for my wfi adapter and an ATi Remote Won­der as well as allow­ing addi­tional con­nec­tions. In order to get video out from the iMac logic board’s 20 pin con­nec­tor a cus­tom vga adapter was made, this fed into a vga split­ter which allowed an exter­nal mon­i­tor as well as a small LCD dis­play mounted on the face of the server to show visu­al­iza­tions and such. The whole setup turned out pretty good.

I bought my first lap­top in 2004, it was a Fujitsu P1120 8.9″ ultra-portable with resis­tive touch­screen, 256MB of built-in ram and a Trans­meta Cru­soe proces­sor at 800MHz. This was a great lap­top, tons of bat­tery life and was per­fect for loung­ing around surf­ing the web. The only down­side was that the mem­ory was sol­dered on the board and couldn’t be upgraded. Still, when I went to grad­u­ate school the P1120 was the only com­puter I took with me.

Ulti­mately writ­ing my the­sis on a tiny 8.9″ lap­top didn’t turn out to be a long term propo­si­tion so in 2005 I started to pull together pieces for what I thought would be an incred­i­bly fun project and a super fast com­puter. I bought a replace­ment moth­er­board for an HP ZX2000 work­sta­tion from a server sup­ply com­pany and paired it with a 1.5GHz Ita­nium 2 Madi­son proces­sor with 6MB of cache. The G4 in my iMac and the Trans­meta Cru­soe proces­sor in my lap­top turned me onto inter­est­ing proces­sor archi­tec­tures and the Itanium’s EPIC instruc­tion set just seems down­right sexy. I threw in 2GB of ram and an nVidia GeForce 6600GT proces­sor that, while it wasn’t on the list of com­pat­i­ble GPUs, I fig­ured would work regard­less since I planned on using Linux.

After all the parts had been assem­bled I hit the power but­ton and my behe­moth sprung to life… or per­haps sput­tered is a bet­ter descrip­tion. The video on my mon­i­tor was almost illeg­i­ble but I con­vinced myself that I could read the out­put at the EFI boot prompt. Just as I thought I had the right options to boot my Debian instal­la­tion CD a num­ber of beeps sounded and the com­puter uncer­e­mo­ni­ously shut itself off. After some tin­ker­ing and read­ing I con­vinced myself that the prob­lem was a miss­ing LED sta­tus panel so I ordered one and low and behold that wasn’t it. My sec­ond brain-wave focus on a case alarm which I never man­aged to fully track down, ulti­mately I gave up on the project and the moth­er­board and Ita­nium proces­sor sit in a box col­lect­ing dust. I hope to one day revisit it and get it work­ing, but that may be a long time coming.

About the time I grew tired of try­ing to get my Ita­nium work­shop together Sid Meier released Civ­i­liza­tion IV and I sud­denly became in need of a Win­dows desk­top. This would be the first com­puter I build from scratch and fea­tured a hot-off-the-press-for-2006 AMD Opteron 170 dual core 2.0GHz proces­sor. 64-bit com­put­ing has landed! I used the 2GB of ram and GPU orig­i­nally slated for my work­sta­tion and duly became addicted to Civ, much to the detri­ment of my stud­ies I am sure. Even­tu­ally I upgraded my sin­gle 6600GT to dual pas­sively cooled 7300GS GPUs in SLI, not the great­est video cards but the pas­sive cool­ing plus the liq­uid cool­ing setup on my CPU meant that this was the qui­etest PC I’ve ever owned.

Also in 2006 Sony released the PS3 which fea­tured an incred­i­bly inter­est­ing PPC proces­sor called the Cell Broad­band Engine with a generic CPU at 3.2GHz and 8 in-order SIMD Syn­er­gis­tic Pro­cess­ing Ele­ments (SPE) which are sort of like mini proces­sors. The PS3, like the PS2 before it, promised to bring a new video for­mat to main­stream: Blu-Ray HD video. All of this geeky good­ness and the abil­ity to play the lat­est incar­na­tion of Gran Tur­ismo, I was sold. To this day I still use my PS3 to watch Blu-Ray movies, rent videos through Vudu, stream Net­flix, and play the occa­sional video game. All in all I’d say the PS3 is an amaz­ing piece of con­sumer electronics.

In 2008 my trusty Fujitsu P1120 was start­ing to show signs of seri­ous aging and so I decided to replace it. I had become accus­tomed to surf­ing the inter­net with the sty­lus and so I knew my next lap­top also had to have a touch­screen and so I ended up with a Toshiba Portege M700 con­vert­ible tablet. This lap­top had a 12.1″ dual pen and touch enabled screen, an Intel Core 2 Duo T7800 proces­sor (dual core 2.6GHz) and 2GB of ram. The inte­grated Intel graph­ics where noth­ing to write home about but they got the job done. The Toshiba came with Win­dows Vista but I upgraded to Win­dows 7 as soon as it was avail­able, Vista had left a bad taste in my mouth that sort of reminded me of the days of Win­dows ME. In 2010 I upgraded the mem­ory to 4GB and in 2011 I started plan­ning my return to the world of Linux.

At the office they upgraded my work issued lap­top with an SSD and the per­for­mance dif­fer­ence was so astound­ing I became hooked, I des­per­ately sought that level of per­for­mance for my home lap­top. The swap of the mag­netic hard drive for an SSD gave me the excuse I needed to switch to Linux and the switch to Linux gave me more excuses to mess with some inter­est­ing hard­ware. I replaced the inter­nal PCI-E wifi adapter with a Broad­com Crys­tal HD h264 hard­ware decoder and installed Ubuntu 10.10. Now the Toshiba feels like a brand new machine and I’m lov­ing Gnome 3 (I def­i­nitely do not love Unity). The Broad­com Crys­tal HD per­haps wasn’t the smartest addi­tion as not much soft­ware includes sup­port for its abil­i­ties, on the flip side remov­ing the inter­nal Intel wifi card and rely­ing instead on a tiny exter­nal USB wifi adapter upgraded my wire­less capa­bil­i­ties to 802.11N. I also man­aged to solve my extremely frus­trat­ing dropped con­nec­tion prob­lem but I don’t know if I have Linux to thank for that or if I can thank the new wire­less adapter, either way it works out to a bless­ing in disguise.

The Toshiba M700 rep­re­sents the last and cur­rent PC in my some­what long his­tory with com­put­ing. I’m sure at some point I’ll start jonesing for another gad­get fix but for now I’m fairly sat­is­fied with my setup. There are other gad­gets I neglected to men­tion, my 2009 Palm Pre, the HP EX475 Medi­aS­mart Home Server run­ning WHS v1, the SageTV exten­der and HDhome­run which together with the EX475 formed the back­bone of the world’s most com­pli­cated TV setup, the 2011 HP Pre3 that was never offi­cially launched in the US, and the Sun Microsys­tems w2100z dual Opteron work­sta­tion and Boxee Box which form the back­bone of an even more com­pli­cated TV setup than the one I had with SageTV… but those are all sto­ries for another day.