See also: Phones
Computers, desktop and otherwise:
| Name | Model | Born | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blizzard (2nd) | ASRock Z890 Pro / Intel Core Ultra 5 235 | 2025 | In use |
| Midnight | HP EliteBook 840 G4 | ??? | In use |
| Blizzard (1st) | HP 6300 Pro SFF / Intel i3-3220 | 2017 | Spare |
| Sunset | HP compaq nx9000 | ??? | In use |
| Fujitsu | Fujitsu Lifebook T4010D | ??? | In use |
| Frost (1st) | Dell Inspiron 5547 / Intel i7-4510U | ??? | Given away |
| Rain | ASUS K52JT / Intel i5-480M | ??? | Dead |
| Drouth | Dell Latitude C840 | ??? | Dead |
| Snow | Custom / AMD Athlon | ??? | Dead |
| Nameless PC | Custom / AMD Duron | ??? | Dead |
And a whole lot of not-quite-personal machines, the majority of which are in Dunelab.
A lightweight laptop that replaced Rain.
Misc work and occasional World of Warcraft. Replacement for the aging i3-3220 which was really struggling to catch up.
The third desktop.
Frost the 1st was a flimsy Dell Inspiron 5547 that I received as my work laptop; a decently powerful machine in a chassis that bends if you look at it the wrong way, and unusually had only a 100 Mbps Ethernet port.
Rain was an ASUS K52JT (~2010) that was my primary laptop for many years, until it eventually degraded to the point of being unusable (the LCD had started flickering unless I kept pressing down on the bottom bezel). It dual-booted Arch Linux as well as Windows 8.1 (later Windows 10), where it had the stage name Raindows. Now, Rain is only an SSD in my drawer while its chassis collects dust on the shelf.
A second-hand Dell Latitude C840 (~2002) with a really great 1600×1200 LCD (in contrast, the "new" laptop that replaced it eight years later only had 1366×768) and a trackpoint that was arguably better than what ThinkPads have these days. I faintly remember having Windows and Ubuntu on it, but I definitely spent most of my time within Arch Linux.
The second family PC and technically my first actual Linux PC. It ran Windows XP, at one point booting Ubuntu Linux via Wubi (the "Ubuntu in Windows" tool they used to have! which would install Ubuntu into a loop image on the NTFS filesystem and use Grub4dos to boot it).
After the mainboard got fried by a lightning strike, it was replaced with one with a Pentium 4 board (Snow 1.5) which was… more of a space heater than a CPU. Eventually, a while after it became my personal desktop, I turned it into a VirtualBox VM Snowclone on Blizzard – it still takes care of the XP-only flatbed scanner.
This was the first PC I've ever had (or rather, our first family PC). It came with Windows 98 and Windows 2000 pre-installed in a dual-boot setup, and a CRT that did not support EDID (which eventually led to its demise).
At some point, I managed to break the Windows 2000 half and had to learn how to install Windows XP; it took two nights to download the .iso from our ISP's warez site over ADSL. (Yes, our ISP used to have a warez site.)
It had a C-Media audio chip and came with one of those "audio rack"-like control panel apps, and most importantly with a set of "C-Media C3D HRTF Positional Audio Demo" minigames that were probably the only 3D games it could run.
Running a Knoppix live CD on this machine (or its successor, I don't quite remember!) was my first introduction to GNOME and KDE; later I somehow acquired a SuSE live CD that decided to boot at 1600×1200 and lasted about two minutes until it fried the CRT.