In fall of 2004, I was hired for my second post-doctoral position. The new position came with some perks, including about a $12,000 per year bump in salary. Flush with enough money to actually buy some luxury items, I decided to get myself a new desktop personal computer for video gaming as well as for doing work (but let me be honest: work was the secondary purpose). With the help of a friend, I went to a site I’d used before and loved for customization: Cyberpower PC. I customized a machine with a 256 MB nVidia 6800 GT graphics card, 1 GB of RAM, and a nice new Pentium-4 3.1 GHz processor. The friend kindly threw in a monitor on his own dime. At the time he claimed he had some sort of a “coupon” for it, but I’ve always suspected he just bought it for me as a gift. He did this because I had a price limit for computer + monitor, and his advice had caused me to spend the entire limit on just the computer. When I started talking about backing down on the specs to afford a monitor, suddenly he mentioned this “coupon.” I have no doubt that he generously did this because he wanted me to have the better system.
The computer was amazing to me when it arrived. So much faster and slicker and better than my old 1 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 128 MB vid card system, this new system was 3x as fast, had twice as much memory, and twice as much video power. The games I was playing at the time — Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes — looked so much better with the graphics cranked up, if not to max, at least to “pretty high.”
Now, I came up in a lab that had lots of machines, most of them Suns with unix on them or PCs with linux (shortly after linux first came out). Under those systems, networked machines had to be named, and at the time the names had to be 8 characters or less. Our lab usually had some sort of a theme to its computers — such as all marine biology invertebrate names (after all, it was a marine biology lab). Finding ones under 8 characters was hard but not impossible. Following this tradition, I’ve named my computers ever since. The old machine being replaced was named “Thunderbird” (which violates the 8-character limit, but such a limit doesn’t exist anymore), mostly because its CPU was an AMD Athlon chip that had been code-named, you guessed it, “Thunderbird.” Since that was a bird, I decided to stick with the bird theme, and I named the new P4-3.1 GHz powerhouse “Kestrel.”
Kestrel was a good, strong, solid machine. It certainly had its issues over time. Eventually 1 GB of RAM was just not enough, so I bought another GB, doubling the memory. That’s how much it has right now. The graphics card started causing artifacts and glitches in 2006, and I had to replace it (upgrading to a 7800 GS, which is about all my motherboard can take). At about the same time (and I eventually came to believe, possibly causing the vid card problem), the 425 watt PSU started showing power spikes and dips, and I had to replace that with a 500 watt PSU (my friend of the free monitor sent me one of his “replacement” ones that he had never used by “didn’t need” anymore — another pure gift, I suspect).
However, since that replacement, since 2006, Kestrel, just having passed its 6th birthday in March of this year, has never given me a day of trouble. The thing has been an absolute rock. And really, upgrading one component and replacing two, in over six years of heavy use, is pretty darn good.
Kestrel has been a trooper. He’s run all sorts of games for me, including Company of Heroes, City of Heroes, Spore, Sims 2 and 3 (though 3 was rough for him), Lord of the Rings Online, Battle for Middle Earth II, Knights of the Old Republic I and II, Empire Earth II, World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, Need for Speed, Vanguard, and a host of others. It has run Matlab models for me. It has run Perl models and statistics for me. It has surfed a bazillion websites. All this with hardly a crash, lockup, or even hiccup, other than the 2006 hardware issues. Kestrel has been one hell of a trooper.
But, as with any computer, Kestrel has long been showing his age. He doesn’t really have enough RAM or processing power to upgrade to Windows 7. His fan starts to whine in protest when the virus scanner is running. And since the holidays, his onboard battery has died, meaning I now have to input the date and time into the computer every time it boots. And so, it has become time to put Kestrel out to pasture.
I’m going to miss this computer (I’m composing this final post in his honor, using Kestrel right now, in fact). He’s been a gameday player. If he were a human being, I’d call him “the man.” But it is time to move on, and I’ve ordered a new gaming rig from Cyberpower, which should be here in a few weeks. The computer that is Kestrel will not be thrown out — other than its motherboard battery, it is still functional, and I come from a lab where you never throw out a computer that can be salvaged. They are always good for something.
This one will have its hard drive wiped, like erasing the memory of a Star Wars droid, and, perhaps fittingly in this Easter season, will be resurrected with the linux system. It will find a home in my lab, where it will be used as an extra workstation for doing some of the less processor-intensive steps of my lab’s computer work. As a linux machine it will get a new name — one of the birds or other animals from the marsh area I study when I do field work, perhaps. And it will live on until its major components die.
But Kestrel, the Windows XP gaming computer, will be no more after this week. And so I bid it a fond farewell, and thank it for its faithful service. I can only hope I get half as many hours out of my next machine, which will be named after another bird. And I will post on that, when I receive it.
So long, Kestrel. Thanks for the many fond memories.
