After 10 years of being built, penguin1, the first machine I built 10 years has been fully decommissioned and destined to the scrapyard. It was the first computer I had during my initial foray into computer science. This rig took much abuse from my variety of experiments and I almost blew out the motherboard several times only to find it was fine after the experiments.

This is a toast to my old desktop which went through 6 years of constant service before its retirement from active service in 2008 when I replaced it with BLUTYPHOON. Starting off with Windows XP when it entered service in 2002, it has gone through many operating systems including but not limited to: Windows, MacOS X (Hackintosh), Linux (Fedora, Mandrake/Mandriva, SuSE Linux (pre-Novell and current), Slackware, Gentoo, Ubuntu and etc.), FreeBSD and NetBSD. It has saw many upgrades as well. It was fitted with two hard drives and my first experience with sound cards as well. There were many great memories with this system. Surprisingly, all this was only powered by a 300W power supply!

The one thing though that I didn't like about my rig was the use of Pentium 4. It was highly inefficient and drew a lot of power. It only used a bit lkess than an dual core as its TDP was 61.5W. Dual cores these days uses only about 65W (to drop when 22nm processes come in). Though, I have to give credit for the machine for surviving this long with only one fault which occurred after the system was decommissioned where the IDE controller on the motherboard was failing.

So as the system has been sent to the scrapyard, there will always be parts of it remaining. I have salvaged the RAM, graphics card and its main hard drive from the system. 

System Specifications at Time of Decommission

One thing of note is that the system has actually survived two generations as BLUTYPHOON is going to go through a second overhaul and would essentially be a completely new computer by end of 2012 if it all goes well. So let's take a moment to reflect on such a great computer.