Nad/Computers

My first computer was a $200 VZ-200 which I got in about 1983. It had 8KBytes of RAM, a ROM based operating system and a Z80 CPU running at 1MHz. Its video resolution was 128x64 pixels with four colours.

A couple of years later I upgraded to a VZ-300 for about $300. This one had 16K of RAM and ran at 3.54MHz!

Next in about 1987 I got a BBC master which was a 65C102 CPU (16 bit 6502 series) running at 4.77MHz, it was over $1000 and had a graphics resolution of 160x256 with 16 colours, or 640x256 with two colours.

Then in 1989 my parents got me a serious computer for almost $3000! the Acorn Archimedes A3000 - this computer had serious grunt! a RISC chip running at 8MHz - equivalent to a 40MHz 386 chip, and 1MB of RAM which I upgraded a couple of years later to 4MB (at a cost of $700). I also bought my first hard drive for this computer which was a 120MB SCSI drive for $1000.

In 1997 I moved reluctantly to the world of PC's starting with a no-name 75MHz Pentium and then ending with a 266MHz AMD K6 before moving to laptops in 1999.

My first laptop was a Compaq Armada 1700 which had a 233MHz Pentium-II chip, 32MB RAM, a 5GB hard drive and a 1024x768 TFT colour screen. These machines retailed for over $10,000!!! I got mine at almost half price at $5500 for a special dealer promotion.

I kept this trusty machine for 3 years until it was stolen in 2002 from out of our car at which time I replaced it with a similar model for $480 second-hand off TradeMe, a Compaq Armada E700 which was a 450MHz Pentium-III with a 12GB hard drive and 128MB RAM.

In 2005 I got a Toshiba Satellite A10 for $1650, it was a 2200MHz Celeron with 256MB RAM and 30GB hard disk. In 2006 I replaced the hard-drive with a 160GB and installed Ubuntu 6.04 on this machine which ran very well.

After my good experience running Linux on Toshiba I decided to stick with them for my next laptop and got a Satellite A210 for $1100. Big mistake! this is the most Linux unfriendly machine I've ever had and it turned me off Toshiba for ever!!! After wrestling with incompatibilities for a couple of months I flicked it on TradeMe for just under $900.

I then decided to change to Dell since they had a reputation for being very Linux friendly. I got a second-hand Dell XPS M1330 which ran Linux perfectly and I was very happy with. It was $1350 second-hand and had a 320GB hard-drive, 4GB of RAM a 2.4GHz Core2 Duo CPU and a 1280x800 screen.

My most recent computer which I've just ordered new from Dell for $1000 is an Inspiron 13z which is a 2200MHz Core i3 CPU, 4GB of RAM and a 320GB hard-drive.