This is going to sound utter shit
But it's be my PC. Not the monitor or the accoutrements, but the system box. Now please allow me to explain.

I grew up in the 1980s, and at a time when (without knocking them) my parents' chosen careers had been struck from the record. We had some hard times. If you've never waited yearning in January for the gas meter to be emptied and the back-adjustment to be calculated you'll have a rough time understanding this.

After picking a couple of a-levels up at college I didn't really see the point of continuing on an academic career and took a few years off, to bum around on crap jobs and see where the winds blew me.

It all went to shit, I couldn't afford the upkeep on the car I was driving and I accrued a shitload of fines. It caught up with me, and in 1994 I was sentenced to a few weeks in a local jail.

While I was there there was a choice that was pretty much forced on me - I could interact with the protochavs there and discard the things I believed were important, or I could ignore the taunts and aggression of the losers I was blocked with and just deal. Being an antisocial twat I decided on the latter.

To reiterate - I had been born of a working-class family whose aspirations had been pissed away by the current government; I'd then had a number of years of subsistence living before my short sharp shock.

A few weeks after my release I discovered the doyen of computers - the 386. The extent that the machinery had moved on from my days of pissing about with pascal on a prime minicomputer for my a-levels floored me. I knew then and there what I wanted to do with my life.

In those days, there wasn't quite the same hobbyist PC-builder market there is now. PC cases were filled with shrapnel and evil; any change was more customarily performed via manipulation of dip switches or jumpers rather than BIOS screens. Notwithstanding, I upgraded a couple of 386s to one 486 (Cyrix 486-133) and a Pentium, and was given the castoffs for my trouble.

Being on the dole it took me an age to put together the £30 for a case and the £90 for a 14" CRT monitor, but I eventually managed it. It took more blithering and obsequious attitude, but I finally got on the rungs back into work and worth.

In the 14-years or so since I built that machine, it's been with me. It's been upgraded countless times - sometimes the mainboard and processor; sometimes new discs; occasionally new optical burners (I had an expensive SCSI habit in the late 90s). But that machine has been constant to me for that entire length of time.

When my ex left me, that machine was there - reminding me that I was still able to do something. When my grandparents and the last of my parents died, I still had evidence that some things could endure - and that I could assemble them. During all of the low days when I feel battered down by the general shitness of the world I look at my fifteen year-old box and am reminded that I still have some power to affect the chaos around me.

And it is for this reason that I would exert my all to retrieve my PC from a burning house. No customised dell box could provide the same experience, ever.
(_(_(_(_(_(_(_(_(_ =o.o=, Fri 9 May 2008, 23:53, 5 replies)

"No customised dell box could provide the same experience, ever."
most likely cause it would be causing the fire.

I wish I had the ability/knowledge to do that - my desktop is quite old, but the only thing I have done (and known how to) was change the USB (1.1 to 2.0 upgrade) and put in extra RAM
(bamboozled Can hear you getting fatter, Sat 10 May 2008, 1:25, closed)

Me PC is the Frankenstein of comps
I'm amazed it's still alive the way I chucked it together. I've got the dvd drives balancing in the case for starters lol

Nice story btw :)
( Jeccius Steam Borderlands 2 junkie, Sat 10 May 2008, 8:46, closed)

Gets A Click
For a variety of reasons. But the main one is the (out of context) quote:

"I look at my fifteen year-old box "

Ticket to Hull please!

Cheers
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Sat 10 May 2008, 17:12, closed)

* Click from me *
I've had my current box for 8 years. Upgraded nearly every bit. At one stage, I even had a frankenstein PSU which was created from the outside of one PSU in the insides of another PSU (airflow problems - the knackered PSU had it's holes in the right place).
( mistaspakkaman and the inedible shifting caterpillars, Mon 12 May 2008, 13:35, closed)

Amen brother
Amen brother
I had the same thing for years, but then I moved abroad, took the machine with me, and swore to god that would be the first and last time i ever did that. So now I've got a Dell XPS laptop; it's 1000x more convenient, but I miss the adhoc days of the tower.

Incidentally, the longest surviving piece of the machine was the floppy disk drive which lived on for about 13 years.
( slippery doctore, Mon 12 May 2008, 16:09, closed)