My Computers
Current Computers
I have three major systems that I interact with on a daily basis, my laptop, my desktop tower and my server.
Laptop
My laptop is a silver Hewlett Packard 15-dy2 model with 12 GiB of DDR4 RAM, 256 GiB of hard drive space and an Intel i5-1135G7 with Iris Xe Graphics. This laptop has been serving me well but it has a few critical issues that are troublesome to me.
The keyboard was the part of the machine that gave me the most troubles. Firstly, there exists some sort of hardware issue with in the firmware of it that makes it, at least under Linux, stop responding for 1-15 seconds whenever the system is lifted from sleep or rebooted. I have searched high and low for any software cause of this to no avail. I am pretty sure that it is a hardware issue on the keyboard. This is pretty annoying, especially because this laptop is constantly being cycled through sleep mode due to school, but once it wakes up, it does not affect productivity. Secondly, HP made the keyboard a non-standard size which takes some getting used to at first, for two weeks after I got it I mistyped nearly every word, once I figured it out though it wasn't a problem. Finally, the printing on the keys is extremely difficult to see and there is no keyboard backlight. This isn't a problem for the alphabetic keys on the keyboard as I a can touch type, but it is a big issue for areas like the number keys and function keys which I am not as familiar with.
Other than the keyboard the battery and screen are also not how I would like them. The screen is a touch screen with a glossy finish. Normally this would be mostly fine but it is compounded by the fact that the battery on the laptop is also abysmal. The only way that I can get the system to last an entire day away from power is to turn the brightness to nearly zero and set power governors so aggressive that the CPU base clock drops from 4.2 GHz down to 400 MHz. The system functions fine for web browsing in this state, which is what I mostly use it for when it is on battery but god forbid I try to run a compile job or something. I fear for what would happen.
The single redeeming factor of this computer is the price. I forgot how much it cost but I remember walking past it inside Microcenter and wondering how they got so much computer for so cheap. Originally, my dad bought it (at my recommendation) for himself, but I came about it afterward because my dad switched to an older Dell and I got this system.
Desktop
My desktop is a custom tower built with an AMD Ryzen 3700X, 16 GiB of DDR4 Corsair Vengeance RAM, a 1 TiB Inland SSD, and a MSI Ventus 2x over clocked NVidia RTX 3060 Ti. It runs mainline Arch GNU/Linux and I only break it occasionally running strange kernel modules and stuff. On the whole, no complaints.
Car
There is a Lenovo ThinkPag Yoga 16 with a broken keyboard mounted in the "tablet" position in my car for vehicle profiling an analysis with my automotive predictive maintenance project (see my projects page for more details.
Server
My servers are made up of a cluser of five various e-wasted Cisco security appliances. Together they have over 47 TiB of storage (raw, less with RAID), 1 TiB of RAM and 12 CPUs. One of them runs Void Linux. It runs my webserver and proxies incoming network traffic, the rest run ProxMox instances that run a variety of different web applications and persistent services like games servers for my friends and I. This is all very overkill, but all of it was e-waste on fire sale so it cost close to nothing. Below is a photo of five of the servers in a rack I built for them
Past Computers
In the past I commonly used a variety of systems, mostly laptops, to get my work done.
Retired Laptop
Before I switched to my HP mentioned above I used to use a Dell Inspiron 14 5447 with 8 GiB of DDR3 RAM and the Intel HD iGPU. It ran Gentoo GNU/Linux and I used this machine to death. So many things were broken on it by the end of its life that basically the only things that worked were the display, the power plug, the trackpad/keyboard, WiFi and two USB ports. All of the other ports were broken, so was Bluetooth. I completely sticker-bombed every surface on it. At some point one of the screen hinges broke, so I fabricated a metal plate to go on one corner and ran some bolts through the chassis to keep it from breaking further. It went on like that for over a year. Eventually the hinge began to break further and I wanted it to still be in a kind of usable state as a show piece so I retired the computer. That PC was a tank, it booted up every day for nearly 10 years and served me well through all of it. Long live.
Windows Laptop
For a few years I also owned a laptop that exclusively ran Windows for its whole life. It was a Dell Inspiron 15 7577 with an Intel Core i7-7700HQ, a NVidia GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q, 16 GiB of DDR4 RAM, a 256 GiB OEM SSD and a 1 TiB hard drive. The main reason for the upgrade from this system to my tower was the thermal issues it was suffering from. I don't know if the thermal compound on the GPU went bad or something but it got to the point where if you would start a game or something the GPU would immediately hit 100C and throttle down to nothing. Instead of spending a ton of time trying to fix it I gave the computer to my mom, who was in the market for a new laptop, and upgraded to my tower.
First Laptop
The first laptop I ever owned was an IBM ThinkPad T42p. It had an Intel Pentium M clocked at 2.0 GHz (I think), 1 GiB of ram, and a 150 GiB hard drive. Originally it ran Windows XP and it is the machine responsible for getting me into computing. More recently it has run different versions of Puppy Linux and served as a nice backup PC, despite having issues with some boot issues on basically every modern OS.
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed reading about the various computer systems I have used over time. Thanks for reading!
Thanks for reading!
~ sckzor