Computers

On this page I'll discuss my history with computers and all the computers I've used, just for the heck of it. Click on any image for a full-size version should you so desire.

Current Computers

Late 2006 17-inch iMac

This is my current main desktop at college and maybe my favourite? It's at least tied with the HP Omni with Windows 7. Some people on my street were giving away this computer and a 20-inch white iMac from the same year for free, so my amazing mum picked them up for me! This is apparently the lowest-end white iMac---so low-end it was an education-only model, as attested to by the fact that the previous owner was a teacher who left all her files on here. But nonetheless, this computer runs well on XP as well as on OS X Lion!

I wasn't really feeling OS X on this computer for some reason, and I luuuurrve XP, so I decided to dual-boot with XP! Which was harder than it should have been. This Mac should support XP, but for some reason updating to Lion removes support for XP and Vista from Boot Camp. (And I don't think this model supports Win7, so Boot Camp users were kind of sent up a creek, but I digress.) So I had to do it the hard way---firstly, burning an XP CD, which wasn't too bad, but then, as I don't own a DVD of OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard, I had to figure out some way to download the drivers. I tried to burn my own DVD of Leopard, but it was too big for my measly single-layer DVDs, and anyhow everything took ages to download and the Internet Archive temp-banned me for downloading to much. Eventually, I found an ISO with only the Boot Camp drivers, partitioned the drive, installed XP and the drivers, and the rest is history!

This computer works pretty dang well on XP! I have a Web browser, e-mail, IM, an RSS reader and Office 2007 (still the prettiest version), and plenty of computer games and stuff from back in the day! I'm a Windows Pinball addict, and I've also been playing a lot of Peggle recently. Overall, this computer is (most of the time) a complete joy to use. I love its Frutiger Aero physical aesthetic, which honestly combines even better with Windows XP (with the Royale theme) than Windows 7. It was kind of slow for a while due to AVG antivirus, but I replaced that with Panda Dome free antivirus and it's noticably quite a bit faster!

One of the only things that's annoying on here is my school e-mail, which refuses to run in Firefox forks because it (falsely) detects Flash Player, so I had to download Supermium for that account. Also, since this computer is so low-end and has really crappy graphics, it won't run Minecraft (even with Optifine) at any good frame rate, and so I have to resort to playing Bedrock on my Switch---it's a bummer, especially after I spent like a week staying up late to try and get it to work, but oh well---what did I really expect?

2019 13-inch MacBook Air

This is my main laptop, which I mostly use for taking to school. I got it back in December 2019, when, after a saga of cheap laptops that y'all will read about later on, my family and I decided to actually invest in a computer for once in the hopes that it would last a while, and it has. Currently, I've had it for four and a half years, and it's still going strong! The only complaint is that the fan is a bit trigger-happy, though to be fair, that seems to be a problem with all Intel Macs as far as I can see.

Anyways, you can see on the back that I let my inner white girl out (which wasn't hard, since I am a white girl) and decided to start sticking stickers (and bits of paper I printed out - thanks, Pinterest! I really am a white girl, lol) on the back, including formerly (before I redecorated) an Apple sticker for the white Mac logo aesthetic. (RIP glowing Mac logo, gone but never forgotten.) And of course, I have my purple case, which, coupled with the stickers, makes it actually colourful and fun, and (shocker) not painfully boring at best like modern laptops!

And increasing its longevity, instead of buying a new computer when I got tired of the Mac OS, I was thankfully able to install Windows 10 on it since it's an Intel Mac! Take that, Apple Silicon! And so far, Windows works as well as Windows 10 can on this laptop. I never actually bought a license, so it nags at me to activate, plus telemetry, a bad interface, etc., make it a sub-optimal experience, and so honestly, I switched back to the Mac OS, but no matter what, this gets the job done. I am considering switching to a beefed-up 2010 white MacBook or 2012 MacBook Pro if I can find one, but if not, this computer will still do the job whenever I need a laptop, although unfortunately the battery does seem to be declining---I'm starting to not have enough battery life in this to go all day without charging. Also, the computer kind of semi-shuts down whenever I close the lid for longer amounts of time? It's quite odd.

Anyways, it's great for my (admittedly small) daily workload and still runs quicker than my 5-year-old little cousin. (I thought my HP PC below ran quickly on Windows 7 by starting up in less than a minute---I can be booted up and logged into Windows 10 on this MacBook in 30 seconds!) So so far, it seems that spending $1000 or so on a computer compared to $300 or $400 actually does make a difference. Who woulda thunk it?

2014 HP Stream 11

This was the first computer I ever owned! When I was 9, I had some desire to own a MacBook Air, but when my parents were like "fat chance", I decided to ask for a cheap laptop instead. (And I guess, in a roundabout way, that did get me a MacBook Air!) You can see how much of an Apple fanatic I was at this time by the logo I cut out and taped on the back. Speaking of the back, that tape in the corner is from a time in 6th grade when my Chromebook was in repair, so I brought the HP to school, and dropped it, and had to tape that bit back on. The bezel also kinda popped off, so I had to press it back on like I was making ravioli. And speaking of Chromebooks, this was marketed as a "Chromebook killer" in its day. It was basically a mid-2010s netbook, with low-end hardware that can't do much beyond Web surfing, a fun yet cheap design, and a cheap price tag.

Anyways, I found out about this one, my grandma found this for me on as a special deal on QVC (for less then $100, I believe, so you can tell it's very fancy) and got it for me. I remember being kind of upset because shortly after, it was replaced with a new version, that came in purple (my favourite colour, can you tell from my site?) and had Windows 10. Anyways, this had its share of problems (for a while it would overheat and shut off after about 10 minutes of use, so I had to reinstall Windows), but by some miracle or something, it survived almost five years, including a year and a half-ish as my school laptop. And somehow, at one point I managed to run Minecraft on this thing, though, of course, it wasn't exactly... good? And the storage was so small that I had to keep an SD card permanently in at all times when I used it for school, because it was always full, but I think it at least deserves some credit for somehow lasting five years. And the keyboard wasn't bad either---much better than my Dell laptop and maybe even my MacBook! Also, fun fact: this laptop is where I made this Neocities account! Though by the time I started actually working on my site, this laptop had been retired for almost a year.

Recently, I took it out of retirement for the occasional browse instead of using my MacBook Air, because, as crazy as it is to say it, Windows 8's interface is better than the modern Mac interface. Now, now, hold the tomatoes! At least in Windows 8, Microsoft didn't meddle around with the desktop, besides the whole start menu thing and changing the theme---with a third-party start menu, it was basically Windows 7 with a skin and a little quirk here and there. It's really not that bad! I ended up bringing this up to college and I use it to surf forums and whatnot from time to time! It even connects to my college's Wi-Fi (except in my dorm, which is 5Ghz-only) despite not running Windows 10 or 11! It's a cute little computer and I really like it. :)

Previous computers

2011 HP Omni 220

This was my main desktop for quite a while! I scored this at a rummage sale for $20, but when I got it home I found out that not only had the previous owner upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10 (the Windows 7 OEM sticker being a reason I bought the PC) but that he hadn't wiped the drive and his multiple browsers were all filled with some (from the titles, especially gross) X-rated bookmarks---specifically, according to the bookmark manager, over a thousand. So I wiped the drive to hopefully clean not only the PC's drive, but its poor soul, and reinstalled Windows 7. It's a much nicer (and need I add prettier?) user experience than any modern OS, so now it's my main computer for use at home! Minecraft Beta 1.6.6 even runs well on here with OptiFine, despite the lowly Pentium, and the specs are more than enough for my basic use even in 2024. It's tied with my white iMac for the most enjoyable computer experience I've had in a long time! I especially enjoy Windows 7's Aero look, gadgets and libraries.

Sadly, I didn't end up taking this PC to college---my dad would've had an aneurysm if I had taken anything with Windows 7 to college. The joke's on him, though, since I ended up taking a computer running Windows XP eventually... but that's that. This wouldn't have fit on my dorm desk anyways, and I think I've realized that I honestly even prefer Windows XP to Windows 7, although I like both OSes---I just like the vibes that come along with XP better. I feel like it's just somewhat of a more enjoyable experience, with less possibility for and emphasis on social media. Not to say that 7 had much of that, but modern Windows 7 survival guides often seem to be about how to use it just like you would a Windows 11 PC for Instagram, Twitter and the like. (By the way---just because Firefox no longer provides update for Windows 7 doesn't make it impossible to use safely, like I've actually seen someone suggesting on their site. But I digress.) Maybe down the line, I'll switch back to 7, but for now it's XP for me!

2017 21-inch iMac

So this is my former main desktop, a 2017 iMac that I got back in summer 2018, so I've been using it for almost six years! It's still holding up pretty well for the most part, at least for all that I need to do with it. It does get a little slow sometimes when I'm editing videos in iMovie, but that's probably because I always have a crap tonne of stuff open at the same time. (Yes, I'm the dreaded Web browser tab hoarder, and also a program hoarder.) Also, it takes a little while to "warm up" when it starts up. Maybe something's wrong with the Fusion Drive? But I digress.

But overall, it's still pretty much as fast as when I got it. It'll still probably last me until university (not too much longer now in April 2024!) for my more demanding tasks or for when I'm home on breaks, and after that who knows. I do plan to use the HP desktop primarily, though. Some people hate this generation of iMac's bezels and "chin", but honestly, I've never been bothered about bezels, and I find the chin pretty useful for keeping sticky notes, as you can see from the photos, though I am starting to use the Stickies program more instead. Anyways, I do have it dual-booted with Windows 10, which runs pretty decently, and if there was space in my dorm (and isn't it oxymoronic, don't you think?) I might well have chosen to take this to college---but alas! I guess it's more efficient to just have one computer anyways.

2018 Dell Inspiron something-or-other

And this is where we hit the cheapos. For 7th grade, my parents and I decided that I needed a new laptop to handle the poweer-hungry tasks of word processing, watching YouTube and the occasional Minecraft session, so we turned to this Dell thingie, which flips around to become a tablet, which was neat, though not particularly useful. And since it had Windows 10 and a spinning hard drive, it was a joy to use! Yeah, this thing was slow as crap, and I had to reinstall Windows at least once because it blue-screened me in the middle of class. Which was, of course, because of those lovely automatic Windows updates. Yeah, this thing helped turn me off Windows, at least for a while. Maybe I'll go back if you can disable updates. Actually, aside from the update problem, Windows 10 worked pretty decently for everything I needed it to do.

And what's more, at one point the keyboard, which already wasn't the best (it was more cramped than I was after typing on it), crapped out, and half of the home row stopped working entirely, which couldn't be fixed or diagnosed by any tool I could find. Ironic how I had a lot of trouble on a normal laptop keyboard and none on the much-maligned MacBook butterfly keyboard... This did have that thingie where it flips back into a tablet, which is pretty cool in theory, I guess, but not really practical and generally, at least for me, kind of pointless. Plus, because of that spinning HDD, Windows was pretty slow to switch between laptop and tablet mode. Anyways, partway through 7th grade I switched back to my HP Stream full-time. And speaking of...

Lenovo Chromebook N22

This was my school-assigned Chromebook in sixth grade, and oh boy, was it a piece of crap! I have fond memories of playing Run 3 on this thing in class, not-so-fond memories of getting chewed out for doing so, and very unfond memories of this thing's keyboard crapping out (apparently due to some ribbon cable coming undone) so much to the point that the school just gave me another Chromebook, which was an HP instead. This Chromebook did have a handle built-in, though, which was pretty cool, though it was kind of flimsy and felt kind of like it was about to break. That handle reminded me of the G3 iBooks, which I always wanted, even though they wouldn't have been of much use to me. But yeah, this Chromebook was Crap, with a capital C which rhymes with P which stands for pool.

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B

This was my Raspberry Pi! It still works and all as far as I know, but I haven't turned it on in ages so I don't know for sure. Anyways, I always loved playing around with this thing! When I was young, I was obsessed with Scratch, so I used that all the time, and would play around in the Pi version of Minecraft, which was actually really cool despite its limitations if you think about it, since it was so rare and was based off of an old, old version of Minecraft PE!

Anyways, I also remember trying to run desktop programmes on this and succeeding more than you'd think a $35 computer should be able to! Although of course, I wouldn't recommend making this your main PC. Anyways, it was a really cool computer and I commend the Raspberry Pi Foundation for trying to increase computer literacy and all. Although I wish they would've kept LXDE as an option instead of just their Pixel desktop, although that is a nice enough desktop.

Computers I used that weren't exactly mine

Toshiba Satellite

This is the old family computer from when I was young, and now my parents use it for taxes and stuff. This computer didn't have the Internet, so I was limited to playing games and faffing about in Windows, which might be where I started liking computers so much! I remember when I was eight or so, I would spend afternoons on here writing little stories, which were never that good, but probably kickstarted my current affinity for writing! I remember writing a story about my science class's pet rabbit, where apparently she saved someone from choking by throwing a carrot in their mouth? Somebody should've taught baby Lizzie the Heimlich.

I also remember keeping a diary on it (which had a whopping three entries overall) where I said I "had a huge crush" on some girl I met once. Looking back, I think I just really wanted to be her friend. I was a sad child who thought I was a straight boy, not a straight girl.

And we had a few educational CD-ROM games, too. We had at least one version of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, and a few others. For some reason, I vividly remember this Clifford the Big Red Dog game where you could go to different parts of the little town where the show took place, and you could go to this old couple's lawn and they'd sometimes ask you to get them ice cream. I don't know why elementary school Lizzie found being an errand boy so amusing, but she did! And of course, you can't forget Bejeweled! I loved that game SO much, and honestly still kinda do.

Anyways, this was a pretty dang good computer, and I'm surprised that it's held up for twenty years, given all that it's been through. I mean, I once spilt milk on it somehow, and it survived! (Though the USB number pad didn't. RIP...) And it's useful to write on when I'm sick of being distracted by the Net, though Microsoft Office is annoying to get a hang of.

For a link to my iStash page, about my Apple collection specifically, click here!

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