Dear The Internet,
Today marks the passing of our near and dear friend, comrade, and confidant: Frankencomputer. Early this morning, I sat Frankencomputer out on the cold, unforgiving sidewalk for the e-waste recycling people to come and pick her up. On the walk to my car, I paused, ever so briefly, to contemplate the life and death of my old friend. As if it were my own life coming to an end, her entire existence passed before my eyes.
Frankencomputer began after I saved up enough money cleaning pools in high school to combine some spare parts with a handful of new ones and build a decent gaming computer. Initially, she had a 20GB hard drive, 256MB of SDR RAM, an AMD Athlon clocked at 1.2 Ghz, and a 64MB Nvidia Geforce 2 Pro. As I earned a bit more money over the years, I would upgrade pretty much everything except the mouse and the hard drive. She lasted for six years before there started to be signs real problems. First, the CPU completely failed and I had to swap in one from a discarded computer that my roommate acquired from work. Next the motherboard went and I had to switch over entirely to an Intel Celeron processor and put the whole thing in a new case. The last thing I bought for her was a wireless network card from a CompUSA that was going under (which seems very appropriate). I used her regularly up until a year ago when I joined the 21st century and got a laptop as my main computer. I actually still have the hard drive because I want to make sure there is nothing on it I want before I get rid of it. All in all, she lasted 7 or so troublesome years before I gave up on her.
The funny part about it is how I actually do feel a little sad to see her go. It’s pretty easy for me to get attached to objects, even things like electronics. I have a pack rat instinct and a sentimental streak that makes it very hard for me to get rid of anything. Tack onto this a hate for wastefulness and you make for a pretty messy closet. Hell, I kept a Nokia flip phone for four years before I took advantage of the free upgrades I’d been passing up. It doesn’t really help that I name these things (I have plans for a future post about the Music Brick, a very out-of-date MP3 player) or that movies like Toy Story have given me empathy for inanimate objects. I’m not totally sure how much of a problem this actually is, but I think getting rid a giant computer that can’t play YouTube videos without slowing to a crawl is probably a step in the right direction.
Pictured above are her last remains.
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