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Showing posts from September, 2010

Eulogy for a PC

This Labor Day weekend I decommissioned my tower PC. If memory serves, I bought it in the summer of 2002, in one last burst of PC hobby hacking before the birth of my first child. It's served me and my growing family well over the years, first as my main machine, later as a media server. But the world has changed, and it doesn't make much sense to keep it running any more. It's been turned off for the last year while I traveled to Taiwan. In that time I've learned to live without it. The specific reasons for decommissioning it now are: It needs a new CMOS battery. It needs a year's worth of Vista service packs and security updates. I don't use the media center feature any more. After a year without a Windows machine I don't want to maintain one any more. It's too noisy and uses too much energy to leave on as a server. The decommissioning process I booted it, and combed through the directories. I carefully copied off all the photos, code pro