notebirthday
I’d just like to take a minute to say “Happy Birthday” to… a computer.
I took delivery of my Compaq Presario 2815EA four years ago today, and it’s turned out to be the best piece of computer hardware I have ever owned. It was among the last to be released by Compaq, the company, before the merger with Hewlett Packard was finalised, though it was made by LG in South Korea. There were a few teething troubles, and I sent it back for service after a few weeks. Any attempts to use a USB 2.0 device caused it to crash, and it wasn’t software. It came back from service with a new system board and a new hard drive, which the engineer replaced because the old one was noisy. (I hadn’t noticed.)
It spent most of the four years running Windows XP Professional, but for the last six months it’s been running Ubuntu Linux exclusively, without problems. That first 30GB drive lasted over three years before failing; I replaced it with an equally old 30GB drive that I had lying around, which lasted another few months.
Now it’s running with a 6GB drive I have had lying around since some time in 1999. Not fast, but reliable, and more than enough space for Linux. I have an external 80GB disk that I use for archives, that I take to and from work and back up regularly. Now I have Internet access at home, I’m finding that I don’t need that many applications installed on the system.
Still, I was rather pleased to see that Google Earth version 4 is out for Linux, and I just installed it. Nice and fast on this old machine, so let’s call it a birthday present, shall we? Here’s to another year.
