Lore: The Craptop Forges On
My first proper laptop was an Alienware M17x R2. It was glorious, we spent nearly a full $800 on it used (probably not a great deal, even at the time). It ran games I wanted to play, and was actually usable for things like game dev and 3D modelling.
It had an i5 and a discrete AMD GPU. I learned that there were models with two GPUs in them. So I bought an extra on ebay and tried to install it. I got a black screen and gave up. That old mGPU is still in a box somewhere. It was an involved procedure and I was pretty crushed to have wasted all the time and money. Worth the shot though!
I lugged it to and from campus for the first year or so. Online I saw it referred to not as a laptop but as a “Desktop Replacement”, which was appropriate given what a PITA it was to carry around. It was upwards of 10 lb, had a power cable that was completely falling apart, and a rubber dome keyboard that was starting to lose keys.
At some point I inherited my mums 2014 macbook pro. That’ll get its own Lore post hopefully. Anyhow the craptop went into retirement.
Not a very restful retirement though. I doubt it sat around longer than a few days before I had Batocera running on it. I plugged it into the TV and left it on. I lived in a house with 3-4 other guys through the rest of college. That craptop didn’t sleep for a wink of those years.
We all pitched in for a set of cheap wireless controllers. We explored massive catalogues of old games. The majority were terrible, but a golden few were timeless. We played enough n64 Mario Golf to drive anyone to madness. One of the guys beat Ghosts and Ghouls on there. I consider surviving that gruelling process the machine’s crowing achievement.
In addition to emulation I ran Kodi. One of the guys had a pretty extensive library of movies, anime, books all on an external hard drive. I remember watching Ghost in The Shell on there, a few Schwarzenegger movies, and the original Evil Dead movies.
Eventually I moved in with my partner, where the craptop continued to serve. I ran homebridge, AdGuard, Tailscale, and it stayed on under my TV stand for another year or so.
One day the lights stopped responding via homebridge, and I couldn’t ssh in. I pulled it out from under the TV stand and opened the lid. I was greeted by a beautiful dump of random GPU memory on screen. All green and purple with bits of what used to be a working Ubuntu DE. I figured it was just that, some strange fluke with the GPU that trickled into the rest of the system, maybe a kernel panic, I wasn’t sure. I tried re-installing ubuntu fresh, I tried a different SSD, all the same result; it was fried.
So I made a “farewell” video of it on my phone, like anyone would for an object that served them so well, and sent the silicon back into the earth (assuming it ended up in landfill, I recycled it properly but who knows how effective that is).
So ended the legacy of the original craptop. From playing modern games to making games to playing old games to watching movies to running my home automation, it ran like a champ for almost 8 years, with hardly any rest, and a tinkering owner who stuffed more alibaba SSDs in it than was probably good for it.
Rest well craptop, here ye be ever immortalized on a little webpage of your own ❤️.