sudo shutdown now

… and the fan stopped and the blue LEDs faded, little did I know it would be for the last time…

Eight years ago I bought my PC, at the time it was a beast of a machine, for those that are interested it was a whopping 1gig of RAM, an AMD64 CPU, and a GEFORCE graphics card. An awesome PC, it’s had three operating systems and multiple uses, from a desktop work station to a gaming rig, and a pretty awesome one at that, until finally running as an Ubuntu desktop and server machine.

I bought it just after leaving my job at EMCC as a development workstation for my new role working at home.

The only real downside, and one of the precipitating factors leading to failure, was the fan. It was loud, when running it sounded like an aircraft taking off and was audible throughout the upstairs in my house.

It was the smell that hit me first, warm silicon doesn’t smell great. During our current heat wave one of the PC’s fans failed. The upstairs of my house were filled with the smell of hot silicon, the processor alone was reporting 85c!

It was definitely time to turn it off. It is sad to say good bye to the old boy, but it’s definitely time. For a PC it was a grand old age. It’s had an awesome innings. That PC has seen me get married, move jobs more times than I want to recount, move country, and had the arrival of two children. Its most recent job was as a photo repository, mini workstation, and it was converting some children’s DVDs to play on our AppleTV.

The King is dead, long live the King
The time has come to start the construction on a new machine, and for the first time since I was 1996 I’ve decided to build my own machine. Hopefully a much quieter one. If I’m lucky this one will also last me eight years.

Let’s just hope nothing has happened to the memories currently locked away on the old boy’s hard drives.