Even though I tried to keep my computers running as long as possible, I've had quite a few in the past years. Here I have a few pictures and some infos for the more important ones...
This was my first PC, with amazing two 5 1/4 inch floppies and CGA graphics and a tiny monitor. Bought it second hand in "west" Berlin for 1200 DM (and sold it again a few years later for 200 DM). Well worth it. However, only had CGA graphics and a black-white screen, so I had an increasingly hard time tracking down CGA-versions of all the games. Also, Amiga and even C64 looked way better back then (but the PC stayed!).
This was at least a computer! VGA graphics and later a Soundblaster card, this was already great for gaming, until DOOM and Descent came out.
Faster, better design (the Colani design sucked big time) ... one computer I had a long time and basically changed everything from floppies, hard disks, graphics cards and soundcards, and finally also the board and processor to an 486 DX2-80.
A cheap, but surprisingly fast and nice laptop (my first Laptop - never bought a regular PC since then, only workstations for simulations at work). It had a mobile Intel processor (with SpeedStep functionality) in it. Used to take it everywhere, also on my longer bike rides with my Triumph Tiger from Dresden to Leuven and back. After the infamous "Buechersturz" (where it was buried under a lot of heavy books) it just wasn't the same. The screen died and so did the notebook...
After my old laptop became a victim of the great "Buechersturz" in Dresden I got a Targa Visionary Laptop (from Lidl). This had an AMD processor, 512 Mb DDR333 RAM, the ATI Mobility Radeon 9000-Grafikkarte and a 60 GB hard drive.
For the Targa, I wrote a small tutorial for setting up Linux on the Targa in german. With the latest SuSE Linux that I tried the laptop with, it was fully supported and didn't need any extra tweaking. So the tutorial is only kept here for historical reasons.
The cooling design wasn't that great and while translating a linux kernel in Leuven (which took quite a bit of time back then) the mainboard smoked. But thanks to warrenty, a few weeks later it was like new.
When I left for America, the notebook was with me until in 2006 I got a grant-in-aid stipend and could really look for something special. At first, I wanted an Alienware, but then....
My currentnext notebook - really fast, excellent design... Seems installing Linux on it requires a bit more manual labor (pretty much as for the Targa Visionary right after it was out).
At the time it was extremely fast, definitely a unique design (including the interior, with the heatpipe showing up like a gun at the airport screening resulting in quite a few raised eyebrows :-)
Notice the slightly curved keyboard! The rubber-like surface felt great back then but with time got softer and quite a bit sticky.
First thing to notice - the constantly spinning fan. The speed of the laptop, however, was awesome!
After all, I wrote my dissertation on it, developed most of the DELPHIN 5 software and ran lots and lots
of simulations on it. Back then, it was way faster than any machine of my colleagues (including my professor's).
And the dedicated graphics card allowed me to play most games at the time at decent framerates (including Need for Speed Most Wanted).
The laptop came with Windows XP 64 preinstalled, which wasn't really any better than the 32-bit variant
and caused quite a few compatibility problems. So back to Windows XP for daily work and gaming.
First attempts at getting dual boot to work were done with OpenSuse 10.1. The first time it booted, the screen
started to look like in flames buring from within - horribly scared I shut down machine. Of course, this was just
a driver issue (could be avoided with kernel patches, manual graphics driver installation and quite a few
tweaks here and there).
With every Linux version support was getting better, and most of the hardware was/is supported very well. WLAN remained an issue for some time so I collected some notes from my openSuse 11 installation:
Preparation:
install_bcm43xx_firmwareto install the firmware drivers.
Now start ndiswrapper from within your drivers directory
ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5a.inf modprobe ndiswrapperTo diagnose, whether it worked or not, use any of the following commands and read the output:
ndiswrapper -l lsmod dmesg iwconfig
Save the configuration for later use:
ndiswrapper -m
Now you can configure the network connection with NetworkManager. You may have to reboot once to get this working.
For people with interest on doing manual upgrades on any of the the Acer Ferrari 4000 series, here's the service manual that covers changing the hard drive, upgrading the memory and general dissassemling/fixing of the Acer, I've got the repair manual somewhere.
Once back in Germany, the Acer was getting a bit too slow, or other machines were getting faster. Also, for software
development, a bit more speed would have been nice.
This time I looked for a laptop that would run Linux without much hassle, since I was doing quite a bit of development
on Linux already. Choice fell on a Thinkpad - the W520 being the workhorse-version with a decent keyboard:
The laptop was rock solid - and quite heavy with a huge power supply 'brick'. Still, the dedicated NVidia Quadro 2000M card, in combination with the Core i7-2820QM CPU make a good team - for work and a relaxing game once in a while.
The thinkpad had actually most of the fancy stuff - including think-light (didn't use it much) and finger print reader (doesn't work on Linux)
and quite a bit of other stuff. Only problem is the DVD caddy drive - broke after the second year and a second-hand replacement drive also broke not too longer afterwards.
I bought a 2,5'' harddrive caddy as replacement and have since an additional hardrive (exchange disk) with me.
All in all, this is a great notebook which will last for another few years (I'm writing this in 2019, but I guess the notebook is good for another 5 years at least).
Indeed, running Linux (in dual boot) works like a charm. When the laptop was brand new, I started with Ubuntu 12.04 and was amazed how well things worked (still a bit tweaking needed with the nvidia drivers, but all in all no problems). Since 14.04 and at latest with 16.04 the laptop is really well supported (except the finger print stuff) and runs flawlessly.
But 7 years later, carrying the laptop around (with its huge power supply) is rather annoying, so I was first looking into something smaller (T470s with 14'' screen and WQHD resolution), but that turned out to be too small to work on. Also, the screen resolution on the tiny display really doesn't work with many applications, so that was no good.
Still, the W520 is still a pretty useful and fast workstation laptop around, and sufficient for pretty much everything (school and work related). And given the wealth of awesome pre-2016 games on the market, you'll be surprise how well the Quadro 1000M and 2000M nvidia cards still are. I like especially the awesome keyboard and the ThinkLight - not a keyboard backlight, but a built-in flashlight that allows reading books/papers in dark environments. If you can get your hands on one (priced currently (April 2021) still about 400€), you may need these Lenovo W520 Windows 7 Pro/Linux install notes.
So, the next one is a Thinkpad workstation laptop again, yet with a consumer graphics card (NVidia GTX 1050). The CPU is a Intel Core i7-8750H CPU @ 2.20GHz (hexa core) and with m.2 NMVe SSDs life is fast, indeed.
As always, with brand new hardware, getting Linux to install and play together with Windows is not so easy. I've summarized my setup in this article: Lenovo X1 Extreme and Ubuntu 18.04.