I've always had Laura. Well, okay, not really, but her current incarnation is the latest in a line of “primary” computers I've had since my P100, the first computer that was really mine, though I wasn't into naming my computers at the time. You know, it's funny, I've had only four different wallpapers the whole time I've had her—each an image of a female character from a Final Fantasy game (or the movie in the case of the latest), each kept for multiple years—and I can remember each of them perfectly. (Well, okay, now that I discovered the joys of using different wallpaper on each desktop, there are more.) The reason for the name I gave her is one of those funny coincidences. My last year of high school, near the end, there was a week when it seemed like every female I encountered was named Laura, although no one of particular importance to me had that name. It occurred to me later on, when a friend had mentioned the naming of computers which had gotten me thinking about it, and so was Laura christened.
Laura's come a long way in terms of hardware. Let me list some of the old stuff she's not using any more first—a P100 processor, then a k6 200, then a k6-2 300, then a Duron 800. She had 1G, 2G and 6G drives, all of which had head crashes (what can I say, I'm just a lucky guy.) She's had a couple of shitty knockoff sound cards, a Hercules Thriller 3d video card (based on the Rendition Verite V2200 chipset) which did its job at the time, various mice and keyboards. She had a 14" monitor which got all cracked to hell in the mail—fortunately I wasn't using it any more at the time anyway. She had the 8x CD-ROM drive that's in Ragnar now at one point. She had a modem which I probably still own but which is currently as useful to her as a doornail. Laura's video card was a Matrox G200, then a G400. One item of which I was particularly proud, in a perverse fashion, was a genuine Sound Blaster 16 Plug-n-Play sound card.
Enough of that old, depressing stuff—I'm actually pretty happy with her current hardware. She's in a pretty sturdy ATX case (the first one I've ever owned; I always used AT before) with a 300W power supply. She's an Athlon XP 2400+ (2000 MHz) with 1024M of PC2100 DDR RAM (but video memory is shared, so not all of that is available) and an Intel Corp. 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100] (according to lspci). Laura is now equipped with TV capabilities through a Hauppage WinTV-Go, and though you'd think from the name that their Linux support would suck, they actually got a special thanks in the Linux BTTV (read: standard computer TV chipset) driver for providing specs. She has a standard 3.5" floppy drive and a beautiful Toshiba SD-R1102 combo DVD/CD-RW (8x8x32x8) drive which was a Christmas present from my mom. In addition, there is an external DVD burner in a Firewire enclosure which she uses. Her primary hard drive is a 200G Seagate which I paid a ridiculous amount for because it has fluid dynamic bearings, but which should as a result also be much more reliable and quieter. She also has a 120G Maxtor for backup only. (I've had enough head crashes in my life to justify this. Trust me.) Her keyboard is a thin, low-key-travel one I bought from Newegg. The little black ones (of which I now have two), while cute, are too unreliable to be useful for much of anything. For a pointing device I now have a five-button (plus wheel; I only actually use 3 buttons right now, though) Macally optical trackball (hey, with HID devices, who cares what kind of system it was designed for?). She has a beautiful Gravis gamepad I could no longer live without due to my ability to control XMMS with it. Her monitor is a Viewsonic Trinitron running at 1280x960 nicely (maybe higher, but that's what it's set to now).
Laura ran SuSE Linux for about 2 years, but she's now running Mandrake Linux, which I hope to keep for a while, with KDE3 as a desktop environment (components of KDE compose the vast majority of what I actually interact with on Laura on a daily basis, so I figured they deserve a mention.)
Laura also runs a VNC server, in which I run GNOME (hey, I figure I might as well keep up with both desktops) for those times when Cygwin on Robert just isn't good enough or I need to access files on her from the 'net. With broadband, VNC is very bearable, if sometimes a bit poky, though I'm very curious as to what the next generation of remote desktop software will bring—a lot of caching that should be possible isn't done yet by VNC.
In the past Laura has run Windows 98 and Windows 2000. I'll never know just how much of Win98's lack of stability was due to its general crappiness and how much was due to the bad RAM I had at the time. I can say that Windows 2000 was pretty stable for me, and mostly did what I needed to do, though there are certainly niceties to Linux (being able to ssh in and do stuff on Laura remotely for one thing; being able to get the source for just about everything I run and poke around with it if I feel like for another).
I use Laura for several purposes: as a data store (desktop hard drives are still a lot larger than laptop ones) and jukebox while I'm at home, as my development server for the websites I work on, as a print server and the computer to hook my scanner up to, and as a general data processing machine (due to being the fastest of my computers by a good bit). Lately I've been using Laura more via ssh than locally, which is odd.
I've always envisioned that if Laura were a human being, she'd be around 20 years old, incredibly gorgeous, and equally bitchy. She's also not quite all there—while the upgrade from Win98 to Win2k helped, and that from Win2k to Linux helped even more, she does still suffer from occasional random weirdness I can't understand. Laura's favorite color is definitely purple (I can't explain this; however, I've grown to like it quite a bit too, though originally I was pretty apathetic about it). I don't know if we'd get along in real life; she wouldn't be the kind of person I'd be likely to work up the nerve to talk to, and I doubt she'd ever even think of me.
Kenn Hamm
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Last modified: Sun Aug 29 10:55:42 2004