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This Old Computer

Sure, lots of people claim to have pretty old computers in their homes. But many of those folks actually have a fairly late-model computer that they use for their main day-to-day tasks, and just keep those old computers around for kicks. Our main computers, on the other hand, really are old - relatively speaking. I really started thinking about this when I saw that RAM for our laptop had showed up on Apple’s clearance hot deals page. So here’s a look at our old-but-still-kicking computers:

• PowerBook G3/400 Pismo. Manufactured in August 2000, purchased by me in January 2001.

The Pismo has had numerous upgrades and replacements over the years: a new power adapter, new LiIon batteries, new power/sound board, maxed out RAM, upgraded hard drive. I think the hard drive may be on its last legs, but I still have one month left in its three year warranty. I’d love to replace the Pismo with a newer PowerBook or iBook, but I’m not about to take on an additional $1000+ in debt right now. Not when we’re trying (successfully) to pay down our debt. Besides, we (Becky mostly) get a lot of use out of it. Becky uses it to play a mean game of Freecell at Pogo.com.

• PowerMac G4/450 Sawtooth. Manufactured in December 1999, purchased by me in September 2003.

The Sawtooth is doing pretty well. I’d like to pop in more RAM and a CPU upgrade at some point, but overall it’s a workhorse, and the G4 with AltiVec still has lots of life left in it. It’s got a decent graphics card (nVidia GeForce4 MX) which helps out with Quartz rendering in Mac OS X. This is the machine I mainly use at home.

• HP Pavillion 6730. Purchased some time between 1998 and 1999.

The Pavillion, well… it is used when we need Microsoft Word for some reason, and occasionally I boot it up to make sure it still works, but other than that, it is left alone.