John's Computer

In a previous post, we gave you a look at our sexy game development computers that preorders have helped us buy. Today I thought it was time for me to reveal my high-end rig as well.

This is a picture of my desk situated in the kitchen of the room Jeff and I are in. The centerpiece is my Dell XPS laptop with a Pentium 4 3.4 GHz Processor, 1 Gig of ram, and an ATI Mobility Radeon 9800 with 256 Megs of VRAM that allows me to run my main screen at a resolution of 1920 by 1200. She weighs in at about 15 pounds and is 3 inches thick so I've always referred to her as my portable desktop. Five years ago this baby was the biggest baddest gaming laptop in existence.

John's Faithful Computer

Time has taken its toll though. Moore's law has turned my laptop into a hulking neanderthal. Her battery life has fallen from an out of the box peak of fifty minutes to zero. Whenever she gets unplugged, she can't even run her internal clock and has to be told the time and date on the next start up. I have Silverfish's Overgrowth Logo selected as my desktop pattern but my computer tends to display a plain blue background instead. You can see that her "delete" and "enter" keys have fallen off so I've switched over to using an external keyboard.

She doesn't complain much though (as long as I clean the dust out of her fan ports once in a while). I'll usually have five or six chat programs running with dual monitors and I can still use Photoshop, edit videos and play the Alphas without any trouble. Because my role has me focusing on PR, business development and customer service instead of direct coding or asset creation for Overgrowth, this is all I really need.

What do you guys think of my setup? Does anybody have a computer older than mine that is still alive and kicking?