Before I built my first PC in 2011, I knew that I was interested in computers but didnt really have an idea of how they worked internally or what they could really do. I tried my best to scratch the surface but wouldnt break through until years later. Of course, like any kid at this point in their life, I thought I knew quite a bit. When upgrading from the old hand-me-down laptop that I got from my mom a few years before, which i think was a relatively early celeron-powered compaq unit that had a tough time running windows xp, much less anything on top of it, I knew i wanted two things out of my computing experience. First, I wanted some extra power to play games. I didnt know exactly what this meant at the time, but I did know that it meant higher clock speeds and probably a graphics accelerator (ooh). Second, I wanted to be able to take a machine around with me. These ideas were incongruent in my budget at the time, which was that of a 13-year old with no job. I knew that in order to do this I was going to need two machines, and both of them would have to be cheap.
I researched for weeks to make this work. I had a lead on an old dell dimension XPS gen 2 from my uncle, which was a sweet xp machine with an ATI 9800xt in it and I think a gig of ram, which was as much as I needed in the beginning. This was the DDR days two, a gig would get you further than one might expect. I think later on I did end up installing a second gig of RAM in that machine for some games (I think the most complex game I played at the time was Spore), but that isnt the subject of this article. I lost track of that machine a long time ago, whether I sold it or gave it away is neither here nor there. The important part was the subject of most of the research: a companion for the desktop from a new class of devices just hitting the market: netbooks.
If you are on this page you should definitely understand what a netbook is: these were a class of subnotebooks powered by Intel's then-new Atom platform, a single-core low power platform designed to drive a new world of mobile devices. They had 9-12 inch screens, low memory, low disk space, and, for the time, plenty of battery life, especially on an extended battery. These tiny laptops flooded the market after ASUS broke the levee with their Eee PC lineup, and if you were anything like me at the time, you were excited. This was a real laptop, albeit not particularly powerful, that could fit in a kid's backpack with all your books, had enough battery for the whole day, and was almost at the point where you could save up for it doing yard chores around your neighborhood. This was the device to get.
So I got over to best buy, circuit city, costco, wherever I could go, to test these machines out. They were largely all the same of course, but that didnt stop the young zekeshredder from finding the minute differences in each one, searching for the best machine for my use case (whatever exactly that was). I actually remember a salesman at costco pretty vehemently encouraging me not to buy one because the performance was bad or something like that. To be honest I bet the margins on these low-cost machines were probably really low, so I suppose it makes sense, but it wasnt entirely disingenuous. When I did end up making my decision I chose a chocolate brown Acer Aspire One AOA150 with 512MB of ram and a 160GB 5400rpm hard disk. I remember being so excited about it, and I did really enjoy it in the beginning. The salesman's caution about performance was very valid though. It became clear to be fairly quickly that this was not a fast machine, but I had my desktop so I was not worried. I was able to get by with both machines very well for years.
As the performance problem got worse with time I turned the aspire one into a testbench for various internet focused linux distros. I remember trying an early version of chromeos on it, Jolicloud, mobilin, and others. Eventually I ended up upgrading my portable setup to a smartphone, and the machine ended up sitting for some time, but I could never bring myself to get rid of it. You never forget your first I guess.
Fast-forward about 10 years and I find myself pulling the machine out yet again, this time with a project in mind. I have long been of the opinion that if a device has an open system bus in it, and that bus is documented, that device can never be truly obsolete. Even if the machine in question is 15 years old and wasn't fast when it was new, it can still be made to work with modern networks and some tools can be used to keep it very much online.
Gets you thinking, doesn't it?
Its time to unleash this thing. At some point I already put an SSD in it to replace that 5400rpm shitdrive that was the real performance bottleneck in the system and upgraded to 1.5GB of RAM. I want more connectivity though, something that I can truly take with me anywhere and that could potentially replace all of my portable devices for short stints. My plan for the device is as follows, and I will document the progress on it here as it comes along, with date codes for my reference:
I'll keep you updated on progress, some has already been made. More to come...