Theme Thursday: Technology

Laura's Prestigio, Pentium III, 20G hard disk space, 256 MB RAM, non DVD nor CDRw function, onboard sound, no graphics accelerator, in other words, already obsolete.

The pace of technology sure is going at a break neck speed. I was never really caught up in the computer race when it first began. Unlike my friend who owned a PC before the invention of the hard drive, my first computer was bought when I was round standard 3 and consists of an IBM machine with 2 5.5” disk drives and running DOS (wow for that time being able to transfer files between two media was considered breakthrough). For a VGA showing 3 colours, playing cats and dig dug was like another world back then! My next upgrade wasn’t until form 3 when my dad promised me a computer after my PMR was done with and so I was the proud owner of a Pentium com. So eager was I to own one since the gaming revolution was starting to heat up, I already bought my first two CD games (my first actual game played was Dune II), Blizzard’s Warcraft II and Command and Conquer even before the actual ownership of the com 5 months in the near future. It was great until it too became obsolete.

From then on the pace of hardware upgrade has forced me to upgrade to a Pentium II machine with 10G of hard drive space, CD-ROM, internet and a mouse to play ever more hardware demanding games. This was later upgraded to an AMD K6-2 machine with a CDRW writer and a graphic accelerator. The stretch between my first com and the next to this one has leapt exponentially. Then it soon grew outdated as well and ever more games could not function on it and thus in university after just less than 2 years I was forced to buy an Athlon system 1.6Gb system with 30G hard disk space. Less than a year later comes the urge to get a laptop for the portability and because of my discovery of the digital photography revolution, I needed something that could travel!

Even now my Efio 2BOO system is feeling the age, oh its fine with windows and assignments but games, no no. Running Generals taxes the system and slows it to a crawl and if too many resource guzzling applications are running concurrently (Adobe, BitTorrent, picture viewer, Winamp etc) well a snail could overtake it. New models are coming out with better systems and lower price brackets but I surrender as I cannot keep up with the constant product turnover.

Now every one of my computers can be considered obsolete, and what suggestions do I give for making these pieces of junk useful again?

1) Encase components in clear plastic and use as paper weights, call it modern art if you will.
2) Dismantle and weld the parts together to make a modern sculpture.
3) Put a table cloth across an old casing and voila you’ve got a table stand to put nice objects de art onto.
4) Sell them to another even more blur person who hasn’t realize the technological revolution has bypass them and get some cash back.
5) Keep everything in mothballs and stash them somewhere in your attic, who knows in a hundred years they’ll be antiques and you profit.
6) Contact Martha Stewart (oh right she’s in jail) and ask for tips to turn it into something that spice up your home.
7) Dump them to a third world country that can’t even afford to get near what you have now.
8) Keep the old com handy, you never know if you can use a chip or diode as a spare part for other computers, salvage, salvage, salvage.
9) Throw them off the window and yell profanities aloud and hope you don’t get sued for hitting someone walking below.
10) Dump it to the trash and let it peacefully go to the computer heaven.
11) Do nothing and just abandon them in a corner and lavish your brand new souped up machine the attention it requires.

Now I’m craving for an even more powerful machine, better processing chip, more RAM, Centrino, fire wire port, DVD-RW drive, Wi-fi capabilities and more hard drive space, is that just too demanding?