I feel like writing about my personal computing history a bit, as short as it may be.

The first computer I ever used was a Dell Dimension desktop from around 2002-2003. It was the family computer for a really long time. When my brother and I started playing Runescape our dad had to put a timer on the computer that would force us to take turns on the computer. When we ran out of time the screen would slowly start filling up with red blocks until we couldn’t see or click anything anymore. The hard days of having only one computer in the house.

Around 2006 my dad got tired of sharing and got his own desktop. He left the old Dell Dimension for my brother and I to use and fight over.

A year later, 2007, I had applied to a high school program that also had a laptop program within it. I got into it, forcing my parents into getting me my own laptop! I got the Lenovo T60P laptop.

  • 2GB RAM
  • Intel Core Duo processer at 2GHz
  • 256MB ATI Mobility FireGL V5200
  • 120GB HDD
  • 15" display
  • Fingerprint reader!!!! (still something a lot of laptops don’t have. Even most new phones have one now. Laptops need to catch up in this area)

It came with Windows Vista (and was promptly upgraded to Windows 7 once it came out!). Awesome specs for a 2007 laptop.

I used the T60P for all of high school and for the first three years of university. I used this laptop from May 2007 until July 2015. I had put both Windows and Ubuntu (and some other flavours of linux too) on it. Over that eight year period the laptop got horribly slow. I decided to replace the hard drive with a brand new 250GB SSD. That really brought some new life to the laptop. It was like I took five years off of it!

In 2010 I also got to build my own desktop! I ended up not using it all that much (portability is very important to me so laptop desktop) over the years but I do give it some love every so often. I’ve used it mainly for video editing or PC video games as it handled those much better than my T60P. The T60P was at a point where playing Minecraft on it would cause it to overheat and shut down… so for gaming, desktop > laptop. Anything CPU intensive was done on the desktop.

By 2014-2015 the T60P was at the end of its usefulness. Playing videos on it caused it to really heat up and battery life was at best 2.5hrs. It was only good for viewing web pages and text editing. After eight years I decided to get a new laptop.

My primary computing device is now a mid-2014 MacBook Pro. After eight years with a 2.5hr battery life and being unable to play videos I love this computer! The specs are:

  • 2.2GHz Intel Core i7
  • 16GB of DDR3 RAM
  • 256GB flash storage
  • 15.4" retina display
  • 8 hour battery life

This laptop feels and is such a beast compared to the old laptop I was using. I didn’t have much choice when it came to what laptop had as I bought it refurbished. I honestly can’t tell it’s refurbished, it felt and looked brand new when I took it out of the box. If you want to save a couple hundred dollars definitely buy refurbished Apple products from Apple.

My old T60P is now running as an Ubuntu server and sitting in the basement. I’m using it as a personal git server for my friends and I to use. It actually makes a good server because in the case of any power outage it has a built-in backup power supply!

That’s my personal computing history so far! A MacBook Pro, T60P laptop as a server, and a desktop that’s currently collecting dust. I don’t know what to do with all this computing power at the moment. The desktop may become another server in the future if I have a need for a second server.