I was given a stack of laptops by a friend who had been collecting them for some time. The stack contains several very cool and vintage laptops, and some of which that have interesting and rare software on them from days past, so he asked me to image the hard disks. No problem, I thought.
In this stack of hard disks, there was also a handful of... For lack of better words, garbage laptops from the 2000s. They were nothing spectacular, some with Pentiums, some with Core 2 Duos, one even with a dual core AMD chip. One in particular stood out to me, and it was this HP Pavilion DV4:
I love photography. I love technology. But sometimes, I think that the former gets overwhelming, due to the latter. Feature creep has been slowly causing me to be less interested in the art, and I believe that knowing that I can take thousands of photos and simply scroll through to find "good" shots kills a lot of the art for me. I want to find something that will force me to breathe, to think, and to concentrate again on what I want to create, and not just snap endless photos and hope that the moment came and went.
Sure, film photography is cool, and a lot of photographers move towards this medium when they want to limit themselves, to challenge their creativity. I have done film photography, and I have my favorite cameras I like to shoot with, like my Pentax ME.
But I wanted to do something just as (or potentially more) limiting, and a little easier to access my finished photos. I have home lab chemicals, but developing and scanning is time consuming. There has to be another way...
Picture this: It's the mid-2000s. Your buddy works for an IT company handling installs for enterprises, and you've got an in for cheap, sometimes second-hand computer hardware. Your buddy tells you about this new barebones Asus system that they've been using in schools. It's only $110, it comes with the case, motherboard, CPU, CD-ROM drive, a 3.5" floppy for compatibility (It's the mid-2000s, after all) and all you have to do is add some RAM and a hard disk. That's great, you think, pulling the trigger immediately.
Meet the Asus Terminator C3:
Now, my example isn't the cleanest, I'll admit, but it's been in storage for a very long time. I acquired this from a thrift store sometime around 2015, and I've only recently gotten it to post and played with it, so today I want to set it up as if it were the mid-2000s and I will take you all through the journey.
Hey everyone! :) Welcome to my website!
I decided to start this blog to talk about my vintage computer collection and other old technology stuff. I hope you enjoy that kind of thing! If you do, definitely check back regularly and I'll have new things posted for you to check out. If you follow me on Bluesky, I'll post things there occasionally as well, but in-depth write-ups and my ramblings will be posted here.
Some things coming up are some retrospectives on some old hardware I have, attempts to use old hardware in the modern day, and other fun adventures with outdated technology that most people will not have experienced.
If any of this sounds like your cup of tea, I'll see you again soon!
