If you've seen the many work in progress photos from my Art Desk (or really just most any photo where I'm not just shooting down at the desktop) over the years, you've seen the monitor looming over my little NVIDIA tablet. You might have also noticed it's not on in many of my recent shots. Well... there's a reason for that. It's old, slow and more than a little temperamental.
I decided to take steps to fix that a bit.
I picked up a super cheap SSD and an adapter to fit it to the older laptop IDE cable in the system. It's... mostly functioning, but it's serving its purpose for now. That purpose? Being an easier way for me to reference things without having to use my tablet all the time. If I'm streaming something, I have to make a choice: Watch the chat or look stuff up. This is an easy enough choice when I'm going off the top of my head or I'm not streaming anything. Less so when I'm actively looking through my old comics or designs while working on camera.
I say it's mostly functional right now 'cause it is old tech. A later model x86 Pentium 4 system from Dell rocking 1.5gigs of DDR RAM and a sticker proudly stating it's built for Windows XP. Which I put on it. And quickly locked down 'cause it's 2021 and no one should be putting a system running WinXP online without knowing the risks. -.-
No lie... it's fun using the old OS again. Feels like home. An odd thing to say but it's true. Installed, it barely pushes 50 active processes at a time - a far cry from the 187 (yeah... really) processes my trimmed and modded Win10 system runs. Or the nearly 5gigs of RAM it eats on idle before I open anything.
Bonus: On an SSD, WinXP runs silly fast. It was always a snappy system after a fresh install but this? It runs Fast. Fast like "This is How I Remember It Despite Knowing It Was NEVER This Fast" fast. Thing runs at the speed of Nostalgia. = )
And now I have to fix it randomly forgetting that the NT OS Kernel exists again.
Oh well... This is the "Fun" of old tech. Is it a pain to chase problems like these? Yeah. Is it something that I still like doing despite it being a pain? Honestly, yes. To a certain extent, I like fixing stuff like this up and giving it new life again. Not that I could replace it. The newer stuff I've been waiting on the price to fall is still pretty high for a unit that'll be almost exclusively for flipping through artwork and sometimes used to watch videos. Back into the repair mines I go!
Remember: Stay Safe. Wear a Mask. Get vaccinated if you can.
'Till next time! = )
*Poof*
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