11/26/2025

My tech fleet as of 2025

Been feeling proud of my tech fleet recently. I may move houses soon so I wanted to post this here before things change a bunch in my life.

THE DESK

Where the magic happens.

As you can tell from these pictures, I love 8BitDo's stuff. Their controllers and keyboards have so many great features.

And if you want to know more about the PC tower at my desk:

I found this PC for stupid cheap at a used electronics store and threw a different PSU and a new(er) GPU into it. If you want to know how far that's gotten me, my brother bought me Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 for my for my birthday recently and it's been running fine on this guy at medium settings. What a steal!!

OTHER COMPUTERS

No one cares about some old Dell tower. Now it's time for the good stuff.

My Apple PowerBook Pismo (PowerBook3,1) with period-accurate 40 GB spinning disk storage, 1 GB of RAM and the original charger. Currently just has Mac OS 9.2.2 on it, though I've run Tiger on it before. Probably my favorite "classic" computer in my collection. Long live PowerPC!

Other computers I can't be bothered to photograph now:

• Apple MacBook Pro A1211. Got this one because it's the last of this aluminum body type with the highest CPU power. I bought it "dead" off eBay and all it needed was a new internal drive, so I put a 256 GB SSD in it and it works like a champ. 3 GB RAM (aftermarket upgrade). Running OSX Lion. My favorite thing to do on it is play casual-type games like Marble Blast or Plants vs. Zombies on it. For some reason these sorts of games just scream "early 2000s Mac" to me, so this is where I play them hehe.
• Dell Latitude 3390 2-in-1. I was skeptical of the folding/convertible laptop for a while, but this laptop changed my mind. It's nothing mind-blowing technologically, but its lightweight feel and touchscreen make it very versatile. I used it for a while with its pre-installed Windows 11, but I put EndeavourOS onto this guy as well. Its CPU is a bit older so some internet things can run slowly, but of course it does just about anything else (apart from heavy gaming) perfectly fine.
• Dell Latitude E5270. This laptop isn't anything to write home about, but the story of how I got it is great. I took a bunch of stuff to this computer recycling place near me and perhaps due to the sheer amount of stuff I brought, he wanted to give me something for free since I said I was looking to buy something also. So I picked out this laptop. Though by the end of this exchange, he got my word that I would post a good review for him on Google Maps (I did). So I guess I was bribed. Unfortunately for this laptop, it's stuck being one of my Windows 11 dogs for the very very very few edge cases of things I want to do with real Windows on real hardware. (Like messing with Windows 98 drivers and installers, fun fun fun...)
• Dell Inspiron 6000 / 700m / PP07S? For some reason I'm finding like 3 different names for this guy online. It's a tiny laptop I got just for running Windows XP every once and while. It's not very powerful at all, but I somehow ended up buying this one for cheap from eBay and it has roughly an hour of battery life on a full charge and really good wi-fi capabilities built-in. And a DVD drive. All in such a small computer, the screen's probably just 12" or so. But it definitely works for a round or two of Touhou 6.
• HP EliteBook 1050 G1. Decently powerful computer for its day, I bought this to be my main PC a while back and it did quite well for a while. It stopped turning on for no discernable reason and it was put into storage, but when I pulled it back out to give it one last chance, it came back on. Since it's just powerful enough for light modern gaming (I played Persona 3 Reload on this just fine!), I keep Windows 11 on it to run games that refuse to work well on my main gaming tower. (Either due to hardware needs or network needs - the wireless network connection in my room at my current place sucks even with wi-fi extenders and whatnot. So I just hop on this laptop and move next to the router since my main PC tower stays in my bedroom. The wireless router is on the other side of our house, in a roommate's room...) It has a discrete GTX 1050 GPU in it, so games work well on it all things considered!
• Random HP laptop #1. Ah, "random," who am I kidding? This was my high school laptop that I got because I hoped to game on its hybrid AMD CPU/GPU abomination. Back in the day I was getting a cool 15 FPS in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, but doggone it, it got the job done. In its heyday it was running Windows 8. *shudder*
• Random HP laptop #2. I seriously don't know where this one came from, it just showed up in my closet one day I think. Its marketing materials and stickers advertise it running Windows 7, so I want to turn it into a Windows 7 machine at some point, but recently it had Linux Mint put onto it to try and use it as my "JOJO2K Weather Tunes" viewer. Until I realized it didn't have the video output I needed for my string of video converters hooked up to my CRT TV as shown in the second picture above. Whoopsiesssss
• Apple MacBook (MacBook2,1 - 2006). Our family's first MacBook. Somehow it has stayed in our possession this long. I would give the exact model number, but it's rubbed off and uh... you can't click anything on it anymore. I'm not saying the trackpad is broken - even with an external mouse, I can't click on anything. But it still boots... very... slowly. Which is impressive in its own right. If I remember I think we put more RAM in it at some point, maybe 2 GB of RAM or something. Originally it was white, but I think its official color today might be listed as "Scuffed Off-white."

IN MEMORIAM

As in the rest of life, all good computers must come to an end one way or another. May these computers rest in peace.

• Apple iMac G3 400 FW. Got two of these iMacs at a really good price from Facebook Marketplace, one working, the other not. The one that was working lasted for about 6 months before its CRT display gave out. Seeing it flicker more and more often was tragedy in slow motion. Some people can repair these, but I wasn't about to risk electrocution by getting into the nitty gritty of this model of iMac. In exchange for some Apple-compatible PCMCIA cards, I gave these iMacs to a guy at VCFSW. Roughly 25 years of service, what a trooper... long live PowerPC.


Of course, it wasn't going to die before accessing jojo2k.com (my old site layout is pictured here).

• Apple PowerBook G3 "Kanga." Picked up this bad boy at VCFSW 2025 - seller said it wasn't booting. Its battery was horrendous, but another charger allowed it to boot into what seemed to be a completely original configuration/install of Mac OS 9. The browser's history went all the way back to like 2003 when it was accessing then-live sites just like any other computer. I gave it a much needed tear-down and bath with contact cleaner, stuck another (still dead) battery in it since the old one had, uh, seen better days. The real apple (ha) of my eye in classic Apple laptops was the Pismo though, so I sold this one to fund buying the Pismo I have now. Hope you're having fun out there, Kanga! Long live PowerPC.


This model of PowerBook was a lot of fun, but there's no way I could tolerate the layout of its arrow keys. What was Apple thinking???????

And from all the times I've installed and re-installed Mac OS 9, I have to have this image somewhere on my website. This is probably the funniest line of text ever put into an operating system. No, Apple, I don't think anyone was ready for the internet.

Now at this point you might be asking, "why so many different computers?"