Goodbye Erwin, hello Syd

For the last eight years my desktop computer at home has been a Dell Precision 400 workstation.  I bought him in the summer of 1998 at the Dell Factory Outlet store, in the days when they had a bricks-and-mortar factory outlet on Research Boulevard.  I bought it principally because I wanted a desktop running Windows NT 4.0, which I needed very badly to learn something about, and the Precision, a high-end workstation meant for engineers and draftsmen and such, was the only system in stock that day that had NT installed on it.  Because every system needs a name, for network ID if for nothing else, I called it Erwin after the AI from User Friendly.

Erwin was a fairly hot-shit box for his day, with a 300MHz PII processor and an open socket to install a second one, 128 MB RAM, and SCSI drives throughout (4GB hard drive, and I don’t remember what the optical drive was any more).  Probably that’s why he lasted as long as he did, ’cos he had more upgrade potential than most.  Over the years I dropped in a second 300 MHz processor, another 128 meg of RAM, a second 11GB hard drive, and then a 36GB drive when the 4GB finally died on me.  He also got an upgrade to Windows 2000 when it came out.  In all, he was a good workhorse system.  His only crank was that the SCSI hard drives and cooling fans, running at the high speeds they did, were way WAY WAY noisy.

But as is so often true, the world moved on and Erwin didn’t. He got more sluggish with new releases of applications and more background processes, spent lots more time writing data into the swap file, and generally behaved like a geriatric.  I saw more and more clearly that we weren’t going to Work Out in the long term, but the question of finding money to leave him for a new system kept me with him.

Then my annual performance review came along, with both a respectable raise and semi-annual bonus, and they arrived not long after a coupon good for fifteen percent off reconditioned systems and monitors through the Factory Outlet. I started looking, and soon found a system that looked a nice fit for us.  Half an hour and $661 later it was bought, and two days after that it was delivered. I owned an OptiPlex GX620 in a medium desktop (Neo) chassis, with a 3GHz Hyper-Threading P4 processor (translation:  one processor that behaves as though it’s two), 1GB of RAM, an 80GB SATA hard drive, a 24X combination DVD/CDRW drive, and a 17” flat-panel monitor that is MILES brighter than the Erwin’s CRT.  I cut corners on the video card since I won’t be running games on it, and don’t need very high graphics performance.  Its case height and footprint are both lots smaller than Erwin’s (he was rather a chunky kind of box).

I spent Thursday night through Saturday getting the new system set up and configured (that’s what I was doing when I knocked down the shelves), and today I did the official cut-over.  Erwin has been retired and I’m writing this on his replacement, Syd (also a character from UF).  Despite his vastly superior performance, Syd’s so much quieter than Erwin that I can barely hear him when he’s switched on.  I think I’m gonna enjoy having him.