I ordered it in December 2000. It arrived in 2001. It was nearly top-of-the-line at the time. I wasn't willing to pay another $100 to get a 1 GHz processor, but I did pony up for the GeForce 2 Ultra. It could run any game at any resolution I wanted. I named it "HAL 9000" because that seemed like the most badass name that a computer could have.
Sometime around 2002 or 2003, I added more RAM. I was doing more programming than gaming by then, but the difference was still noticeable.
In Fall 2005, the main hard drive failed. I used the replacement as an excuse to install Windows XP rather than Windows Me. I can't remember if it was then or shortly thereafter, but somewhere around that time, I changed the name to "Dinosaur" in recognition of the machine's advanced age.
Near the end of 2007, possibly on the seventh anniversary of the machine's ordering, I replaced Windows XP with Ubuntu Linux.
In 2008, I bought a new laptop. I still kept the old machine around, but even web browsing had become a chore on it, so it fell out of use.
In 2009, I put Windows back on it so that I would have a native Windows environment available. I bought a wireless dongle and got a couple uses out of it. Most notably, I used it to register my cable modem with Comcast the following year when running the installer from a VM on my laptop turned out not to work.
Sometime in Summer or Fall 2010, the sound card failed. Changing PCI slots and removing the Ethernet card did not help. I don't know why I thought it might help, but I tried it anyway. Prior to that time, the only components that had failed were drives of various sorts. Perhaps it really is confirmation bias this time, but I still regard Dell as a company that has proven itself capable of building a reliable computer when it really wants to.
In 2011, after my most recent move, it began failing the POST. I still kept it around, thinking that I might eventually look up the POST beep codes and fix the problem. Given that the sound card was dead, the power supply jack was so loose that I could kill the power to the machine just by bumping the case, and the GPU fan was making clicking noises, though, I eventually realized that I would have to replace nearly everything. Thesues's ship would never be quite the same.
On Sunday, I took it and the monitor that I'd bought for it to Best Buy to be recycled. It was just a computer.
Happy birthday to me.
