Jack of Harts

I’ve been a techie all my life. I came by it honestly. I wanted to play with computers but couldn’t afford to have other people maintain my computers, so I learned to maintain and upgrade them myself. To keep them going long after others would have left them to die. And my computers do not spend their days in other people’s computer shops.

My current network of computers are all very old by modern standards. Not one of them was built in this decade, and my favored old laptop that I have written many stories on and have burned through three keyboards with was built in 2010. Yes. Some of my computers predate the teens. And not a one of them can “upgrade” to Windows 11, so I’m stuck running Windows 10.

I’m so sad about that. If you listen closely, you may hear me crying.

Ah… but no need for that.

I recently upgraded three of my computers with new RAM. Taking two of them from 16 GBs to 32, and one of them from 8 GBs to 32. The old classic DDR3 RAM is rather cheap today, and a good old school 2GB Geforce video card can make them scream rather well. I know that isn’t powerful enough to play front line mega games now, but they can do anything I care about. And if I want to play big games, that is what Xbox is for. 🙂

But I have to say… those three computers running on 32 GBs of RAM are really feeling frisky now compared to before. They were starting to get a bit long in the tooth. Now they are ready for a new day. So I have some long awaited surgery planned for the other two computers. They will get new RAM soon as well, and one will get a new motherboard she has needed for a long time, and a better video card as well. That poor girl has been limping along for a while after part of her motherboard burned out. Once that upgrade is done, she’ll really scream. By my standards at least. Two of the machines being upgraded are even production machines I use for Jack of Harts, so guess what? I get to use Jack of Harts money to pay for those upgrades.

What can I say? I love being able to get new performance out of old machines to keep them useful today.