Jack and Jens, two desktop computers

Unless it's some funky gaming rig, your desktop computer is probably a rather mundane device.

You buy/build it, you use it, you may upgrade parts of it, and it goes through untold OS and software updates before the inevitable hardware failure that makes it economically unviable to repair and keep going as your main productivity machine. The cycle repeats with its replacement running the latest operating system.

Then there are the "other" machines that are functional but kept for spares or testing purposes.

Here's the story of two such computers whose fates ultimately converged.

Jack the Ripper

This bland mini-tower PC came into my possession on 06-06-2008 after our neighbour literally put it out on the curb for a reason I could never understand. When I brought it inside and started it up, what I found was a fully-functioning 3GHz Pentium 4 and an unregistered copy of Windows XP. There was nothing else wrong with it. In fact, it had quite similar specifications to my main machine which I had upgraded the previous year.

A very typical PC for the time, it was relegated to the rank of just another device in my arsenal of spares. At one point it was traded to a colleague for another to set up as a multimedia PC -- but that never bore fruit and the swap was reverted.

In 2014 the PC earned the "Jack the Ripper" moniker when it was set up as the workhorse for my VHS digitisation project. A year later it was used for another round of cassette digitisation. I don't remember having used it for anything significant since.

Jack sat and waited in the basement for something to do.

Jens the Ripper

This PC was the pride and joy of a work colleague who did most of his Linux development work on it. Then came 2013, a tumultuous year in which the company moved from one city to another. Our department was in complete disarray. The colleague, however, did not want to relocate. Many tools and hardware became homeless. Some of it was abandoned, some of it was transported to the new office we didn't secure yet, some of it went into storage, and some of it was transported along with my own personal belongings when we moved house. It was chaos.

I have no idea where this Tarox-branded machine was stored but do know that it was on 08-01-2016 when it went into my service as "Jens the Ripper" with a fresh Linux Cinnamon installation. It's evident that at some point the power supply had to be replaced. Jens found new purpose in ripping CDs and DVDs on a number of projects and then spent the last few years in the basement next to his taller colleague Jack with similar specifications.

The end

We're now well into November 2023. My main machine had recently died.

While rebuilding it I figured that I may as well get another one to replace Jack and Jens. This called for a return into the depths of the basement where I dug out every assortment of spare parts that I could install into these machines. The mission, specifically, was to fit every last ATA/IDE device I had left and get rid of them as a lot. Jack even had a floppy drive installed!

Every channel used, every slot filled.

It's time to place these two orphans into someone else's care via Kleinanzeigen. Kthnxbye!