On Computer Necromancy

This blog post is part of the Agora Road Travelogue for April 2024

What’s my daily driver? I could be tempted to answer that my smartphone, an iPhone 13, is. However. It has been years since the last time I used a single device for every single purpose. The last time I did was when I was seventeen years old and used my PC, a custom made computer that served as the family machine until my sister moved to a laptop and then I inherited, to chat with strangers on the Internet. I downloaded music on there and listened to it on my iPod shuffle second generation. I couldn’t download movies because my Internet connection was too slow, and also I didn’t speak a single bit of English, language in which it is easier to find pirated content. I downloaded tons of anime, though. Back then, anime fansubs were prolific in the Spanish-speaking Web and video compression was just good enough so as to allow for single episodes to be around 100 megabytes, which I could store tons of in my 80 gigabytes hard drive. I talked with my friends on MSN Messenger and with strangers, some of which would later become friends, on forums.

Why am I talking about all of this? Well, besides simple nostalgia, I want to make perfectly clear that it has been a while since the last time I had a “daily driver”, a single device that serves me for everything I would like to do. I don’t use my smartphone quite as much as others. I use it mainly for WhatsApp, platform in which I keep up to date with my circle of friends, and to consume media. Lately, and shamefully, that media has been a lot of YouTube Shorts. For any other thing, I use my PC, a computer I build myself and that runs Ubuntu 20.04. I use that machine to browse the web, code my personal projects, keep track of my finances and, again, watch videos and consume media. Then there is my work computer, a ThinkPad I previously used as my personal laptop but I started using as my work device after the computer my company sent me broke for the second time.

This situation left me at a loss for a personal laptop to use whenever I needed a screen bigger than that of my smartphone but that also presents the comfort of being used while lying on bed. Given that I, reasonably, didn’t want to use the same computer in which I worked to talk to strangers on the Internet, I resurrected an old computer I had which I stopped using because I smashed its screen after losing a thrilling game of diep.io (yeah, I got all worked up for a “.io” game). Its battery was also not in a good condition after leaving it plugged in for days while downloading ginormous torrents during college. I would just leave my computer leeching in my dorm while I was at school. So, it needed some maintenance if I wanted to make of it my, dare I say, “daily driver”, or a device which could serve me for any purpose I wanted.

So I bought the pieces from MercadoLibre, sort of a Latin American Amazon, and with the help of a screwdriver I started digging into this machine to give it a second life. And, it worked! Now all of sudden, having only paid around 200 bucks, I was left with a brand new machine… or so I thought. Turns out, modern operating systems are very taxing on older hardware. My machine was struggling to run Ubuntu, although I don’t remember whether I was trying to run the 20.04 or the 22.04 version, So I decided to go full nostalgia and install the OS I used to run on it back then, Windows 8.1. And I was amazed at how well it ran. It was like buying a brand new machine out of a store. It ran everything I needed it to run quite well, specifically LibreOffice to write my blog posts, including this very same piece, and Steam to run some retro games, ranging from Metal Slug to Fallout 4.

I was amazed by the amount of usability I still could get from a machine that was so old. If memory serves, this laptop was at least 8 years old, which would classify it as an obsolete machine. And yet, there I was using it to write my blog entries and game a little. The enjoyment I got from reviving this old machine was so much that I decided to go even further and refurbish my first laptop. A machine that was at least 10 years old, which I stopped using due to a hard drive failure which at the time I didn’t know how to repair. So, I bought some RAM on the internet, an SSD and a back cover (I destroyed the original one trying to get out the hard drive without a screwdriver) and assembled it into a working computer. Again, such old hardware proved to be to archaic enough to run newer operating systems, so I opted to run Xubuntu on it, a lightweight version of Ubuntu, and it worked wonderfully. I use that machine to watch the occasional video when I want to remember what it was to browse YouTube 10 years back.

So now I have two perfectly working machines after having paid only a negligible amount compared to what would have cost me to buy a new computer. Not only that, but I also have the satisfaction of having repaired them myself, which helped boost my confidence in my technical abilities. It is because of these reasons that I encourage you to refurbish your old computers instead of mindlessly hoping into the cycle of buying new machines with planned obsolescence every two or three years. Working on an older piece of hardware, while it might feel kinda clunky at the beginning, is a great way to liberate oneself from the hands of big tech companies that aim to keep us eternally consuming their products. Not only that, but it is also good for the environment given that you are giving a second life to what would otherwise become e-waste. That’s the reason why I encourage you to do the same and resurrect your old computers as your daily drivers.