You are hereby honorably discharged from active duty!

Before I go into my main topic of conversation today, I need to tell y'all a bit about something else first.

As you all know (yes, I know for certain you do *peers*), I recently returned from my trip to lovely Sweden where I spent 8 heavenly days with the love of my life. Of course, 8 days wasn't nearly enough.... Because of work, I had to leave her behind far earlier than either of us had wanted. On the bright side, we'll be together again in a few weeks when we go on holiday! Sweden is awesome by the way, I can't wait to go back again and explore the landscape some more with my sweet. Being away from her is slightly depressing but at least I get to see her every day and just seeing what she types or hearing her voice over Skype lights up my day.

On to the other topic; in a few months time, one of my more prized earthly possessions is turning 7! That's a number you don't come across often anymore these days, especially when it concerns appliances. Maybe for good reason as well.
I'm talking about my formerly amazing supercomputer, the Dell Dimension 8400. The first computer I ever owned myself and only the second one in this household (yeah, we got into this whole new fad around 2002). I worked hard for it, I held a job for the good part of a year to afford it and I happily splurged in the neighborhood of 1k to have it assembled and sent to me.

Fully customized, at least as far a Dell goes, with all the stuff 'I' wanted on it, all for myself. It has a staggering 1gb RAM and 150gb hard-disk in it :O And, brace yourselves, an actual functioning floppy-disk drive! Yes, very impressive, well...7 years ago at least. I added a bit more RAM inbetween but in the past few months it's started to show it's age.

Randomly crashing programs, not being able to have several high-demand programs open, start-up issues, etc. Don't get me wrong, in these 7 years it has only ever actually crashed once and that was my own fault as well. Dell desktops are as reliable as they come. And I don't need to mention the fact I have avoided the whole Windows Vista thing by only having the incredibly stable Windows XP available at the time.

But now it's time to start saying goodbye to my trusty machine. It's seen an amazingly long run and it'll be retired with the dignity it deserves very shortly, to be replaced by a certifiable monster desktop (flat-screen omg omg!).
Especially after experiencing computer awesomeness in the form of playing on my beloved's PC, I came to realize I can't put it off much longer. I'm backing up all my important files on the external hard-drive I got a while back and making sure I'm fully prepared to switch. It'll be tough, getting to know the ins and outs of my plaything all over again, but I'm sure it'll serve me as well as this one has.

So, farewell my old friend. I've known you longer than most people around me today but you will never be forgotten!


Dell Dimension 8400, April 2005 - February 2012