Alright, this has been a long time coming and may well be a good project to start on. I'm just shy of 3 years out of college and currently using my die-hard but nearly dead zd8000 HP Pavillion laptop from the end of high school.
No need to bring out the number line to start counting on - that makes it a 7 years young laptop. What an excellent long-living gift from my Grandfather. However, make no mistake, its still going but its anything from strong: The battery is fried so it must always be on AC, effectively making it a minature desktop; The CD drive is dead, making PXE or network booting the only way to install operating systems; It is incapable of running windows! There was (I think) a motherboard-fail that jacked up the onboard video which windows can't bear, leaving a jumbled mess of a screen whenever windows is booted; Old-ass BIOS, no USB booting for this sucker which is terrible news for a Linux junkie (still a humble newb, but wannabe junkie still); No hardware virtualization support, apparently the CPUs with support came out just months after I got my laptop.
Ok, so its old but it still runs Fedora 14 like a champ, so why abandon this classic comp? If all the reasons above weren't enough (they weren't), when the HP started choking on all the java and flash that seems to be written into every webpage these days, it was over. Sites like Pandora and 9gag were killing it and even tomshardware could cause a crash. So after 7 years of fufilling all my computing needs, it finally has become functionally obsolete...Thank God!
I've been itching to build a computer again since I watched my friend build herself a fine machine a couple months back and now with this excellent excuse (opportunity) I can finally build another desktop!
