PC Collector

I collect computers like some people collects stamps. Except stamps don't require as much maintenance.

There is a box in the basement which contains all the old motherboards of all the old computers I've ever owned since 1992. I counted them. There are eleven. Eleven dead motherboards since 1992. And there are eight working computers scattered throughout the house in various states of functionality. That's a total of nineteen computers in the last fourteen years. On average, 1.73 computers per year.

My collection does not include the old TRS-80 which was purchased by myself and Marc Montoni back in 1983 or so, the computer we "shared" while in college. That is, he got it one semester and I got it the other. Which is the only way we could actually share it, since he was back in Virginia and I was in St. Louis. Nor does it include the Commodore 128 which I purchased from Sears when I lived on Long Island, circa 1986. Nor does it include the Compaq PC XT clone I bought in 1989 (for $900). All of those old relics have long since disappeared.

Oddly enough, I still have the original 8080A microprocessor chip I picked up out of the Clearance Bin at Radio Shack back in 1979, the one that formed the basis for my first homebrew computer project. I saved the chip but tossed the hand-wired circuit card.

And I still have the original Z-80 microprocessor I picked up while in college, and the 1K RAM chip which together formed my first really functional computer (the one with the fancy front-panel switches and the LED blinky-blinky lights).

Perhaps I should start a museum.

One of my back-burner projects is to go through the stack of old motherboards and mount them in wooden frames and hang them up on the office walls. With little gold labels depicting their Model Number and Years Used. And perhaps their Cause of Death.

In the meantime, the rest of these computers are being put back to work after a long rest, now that the office is sufficiently in shape to be used.

The oldest machine has an AMD K6-based motherboard running at 300 megaHertz, with 32 megs of RAM. It still runs Windows 98, but it doesn't do much of anything other than IP forwarding for my local network, sharing the DSL connection to the Internet with the rest of the computers. Right now it's using the FreeProxy program, but eventually it'll be running Linux. Once I figure out how to set up Linux to do the network sharing.

The next slowest, what the kids call "the medium machine", is a genuine Asus Pentium II motherboard running at 450 mHz, with 64 megs of RAM. It used to be the premium machine for video and audio editing, so it has the sound card and the ATI All-In-Wonder TV tuner card. It comes in handy for watching the news while working in the office. Plus the kids have some games loaded on it, so occasionally if the other machines are busy, they can play Civilization II or Age of Empires or something like that.

The "fast" machine is an Asus 2.6 Gigahertz Pentium 4 motherboard. It's got lots of fancy bells and whistles on it, like built-in gigabit Ethernet and RAID and serial ATA, and it's been the biggest pain in the butt to work with. We've had it now for about a year, and it took me forever to get it set up right. At first I couldn't figure out how to get it to recognize the hard drives correctly, if there was more than one installed. And it never did recognize the DVD drive (but that was probably due to an internal failure on the part of the DVD drive).

The BIOS is not easy to work with, and the documentation is pathetic. Either that, or I'm just a moron who can't understand it. In any event, it always takes me several tries to get the BIOS right when adding new components. Next time, I'm going shopping for a less-complicated motherboard -- if they make those anymore.

There are two "slow" machines, Dell GPX1 systems I got for $40 each at the used computer store, that run at 350 megahertz or so. They're not fast, but they're relatively solid, and generally reliable. Cheryl uses one for her work, and I have the other one down in the office as my Ubuntu Linux machine.

The maintenance on these machines consists mostly of replacing or repairing fans. When the fans start making too much noise, I pull them out, oil them up, and put them back in, and they're generally good for another six months or so. The worst ones are the hard drive fans in the removable trays. Why they put fans in the removable trays, I don't know - but they're tiny and cheap and pressed up tight against the hard drives, so it's no wonder they wear out faster. But still they respond well to a bit of lubrication.

Occasionally something else gives out, like a CD drive. We've lost two of those in the last three or four months. One actually burned out, with a blackened and smoking chip (a power regulator, I believe). The other one's motor controller went bad and it wasn't able to get to the correct rotational speed. It was a simple matter then to go down to the used computer store and nab a couple used CD drives for $10 each.

There are also two old laptops sitting around. One is an ancient Toshiba TX1200 with a black-and-white display; the other is a Compaq 75 megaHertz with VGA. The Toshiba has an 80 megabyte hard drive that is going bad, and the Compaq (which survived three or four trips to Denmark) has lost one of the metal hinges for the display. They are going to need some serious repair. The Toshiba has a special BIOS that does not recognize non-Toshiba hard drives (and even then, only recognizes either the 40 or the 80 megabyte drives); and the Compaq needs a new case. Neither of them have working batteries anymore. I rebuilt the battery a few years ago for the Compaq using those 1600 millamp-hour NiMH batteries from Radio Shack, but since moving to Michigan haven't used it at all and so took all the batteries out to use in cameras and things. Eventually I'm going to take the whole thing apart and remount it in something else, something with a standard power supply. Maybe something like these beautiful wooden cases.

In the meantime, I've got to figure out a way to get off Windows and run only Linux on all these machines. Except the one we use for gaming. Why can't they make cool games that run on Linux?