Episode: 2097
Title: HPR2097: New Toys
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2097/hpr2097.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 14:16:44

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Hello HPR listeners, this is Tony Hughes speaking from Blackpool in the United Kingdom.
I did a show a few weeks ago about my Geek Bag but didn't talk about the desktop pieces
I used and as I've just upgraded to a new used PC I thought I would tell you the story
of my desktop pieces over the years. I was a late comment to the world of personal computing
and been at school in the late 60s and early 70s when we hadn't even got calculators. If
you were lucky to be able to work out the interest of it you may have had use of the slide
rule. Even after calculators started to be more widely used I had a lecturer at college
while studying marine engineering. It was so good with the slide rule and mental calculation
he could and would often work out equations far faster than those of us using a calculator.
I first came across my first IBM clone PC back at college in 1987 while studying a control
systems course. This was an Intel 286 PC which the college ran CAD CAM software on and
we used it to learn how to create engineering drawings electronically. This would be the
last time I had a computer until the early 90s when by then I'd change career and become
a registered nurse. I was working in a residential home and we had access to a Windows 3XX PC
which I would use to create templates of the clinical paperwork we used for record keeping.
On that time I met my wife to be and she needed a PC for the university course she was on so
we obtained a used Intel 386 PC from a friend and upgraded the RAM from one megabyte to four megabyte
which cost nearly half the price we paid for the PC. This was £120 which back in 1993 was a good
junky cash. It was a time when there was a world shortage of RAM and offices were actually getting
burgled just for the memory of the office PCs. While we had this PC in the house it didn't much
interest me at the time. This was pre-internet days for the average user. We weren't online at work
and the word processing software was DOS based and I hated using it so we'd do the odd things I
needed at work during my break. Move forward five years and Windows 95 had taken over the world
and there was this wonderful new OS called Windows 98 starting to appear in the shops. In September
1998 I went back to do a nursing degree in my especially stereo practice and found that we were
required to submit all our coursework in word process format no long hand written assignments this time
around so I decided that I would invest in a new home PC. There were a couple of big box PC
retailers in the UK at the time that advertised heavily in the press and on TV and I chose to go
to one of those and bought a PC with the following specification. It was a Pentium 2 350 CPU 128
Mega RAM which had actually agreed to upgrade from 64 Mega RAM. A 6 gig hard disk drive, 56K
modem and a DVD ROM. It also came bundled with a scanner, inkjet printer and software included MS
for small business. All that for the grand total of 1400 quid which at the time was about a
month's take home pay so I had to pay for it with a flexible friend. For those of you too young
that means credit card. I also signed up for an AOL account to access the internet over the 56K
modem. Dog slow now but at the time was the only affordable way for us mere mortals could afford
home internet access. I remember it could take a minute or two to render my bank's website when
I started online banking back in 2001 and it was using and that was using compression software to
reduce the bandwidth. I used that PC to write all my college work and with the help of a couple of
friends started to tinker with the PC, getting a 120 zip drive for it and later adding a CD re-write
drive for storing documents and photos that scanned and later taken with my digital camera.
By 2002 the PC was starting to get a bit longer in the tooth and I decided it was time for an
upgrade. I had a PC built for me by a local shop with a Pentium 4 2.5GHz processor, 40GHz drive
and 512 megabyte of RAM which I later upgraded to 2GB. It also had a CD re-write drive and again
I later upgraded this to a DVD re-write drive. This PC cost me half of what I paid for the P2
for years previously and was to be the last PC I bought new. All the PCs including laptops I've
owned since this PC have been secondhand, some given by family or friends, some built from parts
from Freestyle or Freagle and lately PCs are bought at a local computer auction in the north
west of the UK. The title of this podcast is New Toys and so to the juicy bit. My desktop for
last six years has been a Lenovo Think Centre 7373 Core 2 Duo PC with a 2.6GHz CPU 250GB SSD
and upgrade from the 160GB HDD it came with and 12GB of RAM also an upgrade from the 4GB it came with.
That required a BIOS flash to get the motherboard to support up to 16GB. This rig has served me well
but lately I found it starting to feel it's age and taking a long time to do things I now do
regularly such as video and photo editing, audio editing for podcasts such as HVR and using virtual
PCs in virtual box so I decided it was time to look around for an upgrade. As usual I was not in
the market for a new PC I could afford one but I didn't like splashing the cash unnecessarily.
As look would have it the monthly auction catalog included a HPE Compact Elite
8300 i7 Micro Tower. I checked out the specs and like what I read. So on Monday the 1st of August
I took a trip to the auction and as would look would have it I became the proud owner of the said
PC for the princely sum of £212.80. Hammer price was £190 but it was commissioned to play.
The full spec of the PC is i7 3.4GHz CPU on the 22nm architecture. It's got 4 cores but with 8 threads
came with 8GB RAM and the bundleboard supports up to 32GB RAM and it came with a 500GB hard drive
and a DVD writer and card reader for SD cards etc. It also came with a Windows 7 Pro COA on the box
put no installed OS because the auction they always white the OS and they white the hard drive
and they always come with no installed software. So I put Linux Mint 18 on it which took me about
10 minutes to install and another 30 or so minutes to complete the updates and install
other software that I use over and above the base install. It boots in just over a minute
which is only slightly slower than the old PC that had an SSD in it so I guess it will boot
mega fast with an SSD upgrade which is on the cards after a return from holiday as may
be an upgrade to the RAM. I've already used some RAM from the old PC to increase it to 12GB
but I need some matching 8GB RAM modules to go up to 16GB or higher. Well that charts my PC
hardware journey over the last 20 odd years or so. It's amazing to think that one of my Raspberry
Pi 3's I own has more processing power than most of the hardware I've had up to the core
2Gero in 2010. That's progress for you. So it's telling you to sign off from this HBR
podcast. Hope to see you soon. Bye!
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