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Project Machines

 Hunter - Lumia 950 black  (2016.04)
Hunter was an amazing phone with a beautiful OS and a phenomenal Zeiss-lens camera.
I had a habit of placing the phone display down on the desk in my office and one day, the camera focussed the bright sunlight coming through the window and melted the glue that held the camera unit together.
I disassembled it, cleaned it up and put it back together as best I could but the camera never focussed correctly after that.

I replaced it with another 950 and I use it as my everyday phone even now.

Rain - PC Specialist Vortex III / Clevo P150EM  (2013.4 - 2023.10)

i7 3630QM  16GB  Radeon HD 7970M  1TB Momentus XT, 1TB Scorpio Blue  1080p matte 95% gamut Rain was a wonderful machine that performed brilliantly for far longer than anyone would have reasonably expected.
It had a beautiful keyboard and display and its design was remarkably understated.
It had a second hard disk installed by the OEM in the bay that was intended for the optical drive, which gave it internal storage redundancy. In 2020, its storage devices were upgraded from a Seagate hybrid XT and a 1TB conventional spindle to a WD Blue SSD and a 2TB spindle, which gave it enough storage to last it the rest of its life. In its last year of operation, its GPU started having problems. Eventually I bought a replacement machine and Rain struggled on just long enough for it to arrive before it died completely.

 Crystal  (2012.4)
Crystal has undergone so many upgrades in its long life, that the only original part of the machine is the OCZ ZT 650W PSU.

The machine started out with a Sharkoon T9 chassis with blue illumination and interior but was rebuilt in 2018 in a black Aerocool DS200 windowed chassis for noise reduction and better cable management for the hard disks.
It originally inherited Akina's Antec Veris front panel, but with the DS200 having only two front bays, it now uses a Rii i25 air mouse/keyboard/remote.

Not very long after that, the mainboard (specifically its memory controller) began to massively overheat and the Crosshair V Formula, along with the Phenom II X6 1045T and 16GB Vengeance Blue had to be replaced with a ROG Stryx, a Ryzen 7 1700 and some lighty-up Corsair DIMMs.
Originally, it had an Antec Kuhler 620, and then a Corsair H80i V2 liquid CPU cooler, but I found that the Ryzen 1700 runs cool and quietly on its stock fan and heatsink.

In 2020, it had an WD M2 drive added for the OS, replacing its 2.5" SSD: mostly to free up SATA ports and reduce wiring mess in the chassis.
At the same time, it was given a Pioneer Blu-ray drive. Before that, it went through a surprising number of Asus and Sony optical drives.
It has had a wide range of hard disks: gradually increasing in size to the point where it currently has 2x 6TB and 1x 8TB WD Blues for 'archival purposes'.

In 2025, the XFX Radeon HD 7870 DD GPU started really heating up.  It looked that the heatsink had separated from the chip when the thermal paste dried out.
It should've been possible to fix, but I replaced it with a Sapphire Radeon 6500 XT which is a tiny ITX card that's very efficient does twice the numbers of the old 7870.

Juliet - Lenovo Flex 10  (2015.2)
This was a really handy machine. It was absolutely tiny with a 10" touch display and weighed about 1KG.
It had a useful range of ports and took a 2.5" laptop hard disk, which meant, for an ultra-portable, it had a lot of storage.
The 320GB HDD was replaced with a 500GB SSD. The Celeron N2840 was sluggish under Windows 10, but with only 4GB of RAM, it ran Photoshop surprisingly well.
It also had a very usable keyboard, which made it great for DOS and other retro gaming.
It was also extremely inexpensive, which meant that it could be taken and used in places where you wouldn't take a performance laptop.

There was a point when the machine wasn't being used and I sold it, which is a decision that I sometimes regret.

Project Machines

Hunter - Lumia 950 black  (2016.04)

Crystal  (2012.4)

Phenom II X6 1045T  Crosshair V Formula  16GB Vengeance Blue  XFX Radeon HD 7870 DD Black  2TB F4, 2TB WD20EARX, 4TB Deskstar, 6TB WD60EZRX  Aerocool DS200 Black Window Edition  OCZ ZT 650W  Corsair H80i V2

Retired/KIA

Rain - PC Specialist Vortex III / Clevo P150EM  (2013.4 - 2023.10)

i7 3630QM  16GB  Radeon HD 7970M  1TB Momentus XT, 1TB Scorpio Blue  1080p matte 95% gamut
Status: KIA - Graphics system failure

Klan - Dell XPS m1730  (2011.3 - 2013.3)

X9000  8GB  2x 8800M GTX  2x WD 250GB 7200rpm (RAID 0)  1200p TrueLife display
This was an amazing machine that I picked up for almost nothing through a Dell reseller. It was a great gaming laptop for its time. It was absolutely gigantic and everything on it lit up like a Coca-Cola Christmas truck. It came with Windows 7 x64 Ultimate Edition, which was a beautiful OS. Sadly, the machine wasn't long-lived. It developed a problem with its graphics adapter and could no longer be reflowed. Replacing the GPU in this laptop means removing absolutely everything from the chassis (including the mainboard, keyboard, and even display), which made it seem like too costly and risky a procedure.

Akina - Time Platina  (2004.4-2012.4)

64_3200+  K8N-E Deluxe  1GB  HiS HD4670  160GB Momentus 7200.2, 320GB T166, 1TB Barracuda 7200.12 Prior to that, it had an Antec Veris Premier front panel, which made the machine a great media centre.

Rangiku - Rock X770 / Clevo M570RU  (2007.8 - 2012.4)

T7700  2GB  GeForce Go 7950 GTX  500GB 7200.4 G-Force  1200p X-Glass

Katie - Time Ultima 800-7  (2000 - 2006)

Athlon 800  MS-6167  256 MB  RIVA TNT2 64  30GB  SB Live 1024