The Machine: Fujitsu Siemens 933MHz

In early 2001 I found myself holed up in a furnished apartment in the fashionable Sachsenhausen district of Frankfurt, Germany. It had a bed, a desk, a bathroom, a kitchenette, a small TV, and little else to keep an immigrant entertained after a day's work was done.

The local watering holes soon got boring, I needed something tangible to do after-hours.

On the evening of 20-02-2001 I forked out 2499.00 Deutschmarks for an off-the-shelf PC bundle at the Saturn electronics store that used to be at the Zeil in uptown Frankfurt.

The bundle included a Scott "772 Economy Line" 17-inch monitor, a Lexmark Z12 inkjet printer, and a PC with the following specifications:

· Fujitsu Siemens desktop tower (designation unknown)
· Intel PIII / 933MHz CPU
· 128MB RAM
· 30GB hard drive
· 1.44MB floppy drive
· 52x CD-ROM
· 32MB AGP VGA card (type forgotten)
· Windows Millennium Edition (pre-installed, with rescue discs)

Although this PC was a reasonably serious machine, I declared it all but near-useless the moment it got started up back in my little apartment: WinME was in German, and there was no way to change language. Even some of the keys were in the wrong places -- alas, the keyboard was also German!

My future wife mailed me (at some expense) one of my old and proper US-layout keyboards from South Africa, and I was soon able to begin using the machine properly. It was retrofitted with trusty old Windows 95 (English) and the Dysan CRW-1622 CD-burner that I had brought along too. Several long nights were spent with the exciting task of ripping my CD collection to MP3. Thrilling!

After we moved into our final place of residence, this machine became the main workhorse for a number of years. During its history it was outfitted with an extra 128MB RAM (back in 2002 a total of 256MB was memory aplenty), an extra 8GB hard drive, a Creative Labs SB PCI512 sound card, a set of Cambridge Soundworks speakers, and an LG DVD/CD-RW combo drive.

The printer hardly got used and spent most of its life in the original box.

Effortless, but useless

Paired with a Dell Optiplex GX1 (running an English version of Windows ME), this faithful constellation remained in place until late 2007 when the whole lot was replaced, upgraded or refunctioned.

The Dell GX1 was given away in June 2008, the Lexmark printer found a new owner in April 2009.

Between December 2007 and April 2009 this machine then served as the workstation for my major Tape2MP3 conversion project. The 19-inch monitor on the left (co-incidentally also branded Fujitsu Siemens) was courtesy of a colleague who would've otherwise thrown it out.

Kilohertz to Megabyte conversion station

After that task was completed the PC just stood around for a while. I eventually restored it to its original (as-bought) configuration, re-installed the German version of WinME, and stashed it away.

On 17-12-2012 a guy came along to collect it -- for use as spare parts.

The end.