The King of Retro
When people find out I am a “professional software and web developer”, I have no doubt that they anticipate my house being filled with the latest technology – that my computer will be some sort of overclocked monster, that I'll have a nuclear powered tablet connected to everything, and that my phone will run some kind of prototype operating system that nobody has seen yet.
They would be a long way from the truth. So far in fact, that they might not even be in the same universe, let alone the same continent.
My desktop computer is a Dell Inspiron 530. It was bought in 2007 after our previous desktop computer's motherboard failed. It has the cheapest NVidia graphics card in it (circa 2007), and the hard drive from a Western Digital MyBook, after it's original hard drive died one day a few years ago. It has 3Gb RAM – the maximum the motherboard will allow – a lot back in 2007. In it's lifetime it has run Windows Vista, Windows 7, Ubuntu Linux, Elementary OS, Linux Mint, SuSE Linux,Debian Linux, and most recently Window 10.The monitor attached to the computer was bought a year ago to replace an ageing Dell monitor that had begun to fail. The keyboard and mouse are original – both stock Dell server peripherals (the Dell server keyboards are brilliant).
I don't really have a laptop of my own any more. I still have a little Netbook – an ASUS 1005PX EEE PC, bought in about 2009. It has a 7” screen, and a pretty good keyboard. It's slow and clunky, but somehow keeps going. In it's lifetime it has been installed with Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Ubuntu Linux, Elementary OS, Chrome OS, and most recently Windows 10. It's just about fast enough to play videos, but usually just gets used to write blog posts, and browse the web.
I don't have any fancy tablets – but I do have two Kindles – a Kindle Fire 7 HD, and the most basic 7th generation Kindle (a birthday present thisyear). I have been continually surprised by the Kindle Fire HD – for my purposes (watching movies, reading books, etc), it works perfectly. I have been tempted to root it in the past and install stock Android on it, but cannot see the point. It just works. The normal Kindle stays in my bag, and travels all over the place with me. It's a life-saver when on long train journeys, or sitting in hotel rooms hundreds of miles from home.
Over the last decade I have had all the major phones – several iPhones, several Android phones, and have ended up recently with a Microsoft Lumia 640 Windows phone. It's basic, and it doesn't have the range of apps that it's competitors have, but it is fast, reliable, and lasts for several days on a charge. I've had the ridiculously expensive battery gobbling phablets in the past – it was entirely my choice tonot carry around a monster phone.
So there you have it. Nothing spectacular in my computing armoury at all. The funny thing is what the rest of the family has. The kids have an iPad, our eldest daughter has a Macbook, and my other half has a stonking 15” laptop that had been retired from developer use where I work (8Gb memory, I5 processor, etc – it's a monster). I get none of these nice toys.
While shopping for stationary for our eldest daughter this morning, I found myself looking at Windows 10 tablets – which seemed to cost about a third of the price of an Apple iPad, and began wondering if one of them may lie in my future. Perhaps I'll wait, and see what happens over the next few months.