Tags: Journal

Okay, for clarification: I have not found the spesific individual laptop that I owned as a child. That poor thing is probably rotting in a landfill somewhere. What I have figured out is the exact model and color I used to have. I don't currently have this laptop in my physical possession either, I'm just excited that I now know what this stupid fucking thing is called now lmao.

With that clarification off of my chest: earlier I was watching LGR's HP Mini 1000 Retrospective Video on YouTube. I don't know how long it will take me to write or post this, so just know I watched the video shortly after it was uploaded. Anyways, watching it awoke an ancient memory inside of me. I had a computer like that - and it wasn't just any computer. It was my first computer, a hand-me-down from mom.

Now, it wasn't an HP Mini. No, the HP Mini had too many fancy bells and whistles that my laptop didn't have. In fact, I didn't think my laptop was an HP at all. But it was a flavor of netbook.

And so began a search that didn't take as long as I thought it would LMAO.

I initially remembered very little about my first laptop. It was, like all netbooks at the time, tiny. Microscopic, even. It was also pink, and it ran Windows XP. I'm sure it was a great laptop when my mom was the one using it, but by the time it was given to me the latest version of Windows was Windows 8. I was unable to do most of the things I wanted a laptop for on this little old lady of a computer, which is probably why I so quickly forgot about it despite it being my first laptop.

... If you were curious, I chose the chess pieces as my icon.

Side tangent, my second laptop - which I actually had around the same time as this pink one - was a significantly larger Mac Book of some sort. I have no idea which version it could possibly be, because it was made after they all started to look identical. It was also a hand-me-down, this time from a friend, and its OS was also too old for it to even open YouTube at the time I owned it. I think it was a newer OS than XP though. I haven't owned an Apple product since that one.

It took a few tries to get the right key words, because I guess they still make netbooks? But I found that "windows xp netbook" got me the results I wanted. After scrolling though the image results for a bit, I saw a laptop that looked very familiar. I suspected it might be the one I was looking for, just the wrong color, so I put in the brand name in place of the word "windows" to see what I would get.

And. Uh. Yeah pretty quickly I found my laptop.

The Acer Aspire One Netbook A110X. Strawberry Creme flavored (legal note: don't eat these). It had a whole one gigabyte of RAM, if you were LUCKY, and a 8.9 inch display. Again, this thing was microscopic. I think my current laptop is small, and it has 13.3 inch screen. I also think of it as a potato with its 4GB RAM, but maybe I'm just salty that most modern 3D games don't run on it like. At all.

One thing that shocked me while researching was the apparent fact that this little old lady was released in 2009??? And like, look, I know what LGR's thumbnail literally says. But I think my sense of time is just completely warped by all the big events in my life, COVID included. I just feel like mom had always had this little pink thing, but I guess not. And earlier I mentioned Windows 8 being the newest version by the time I got it, like it was some big deal, but no. Windows 8 came out in like 2012.

So just know that it wasn't until 2013 or 2014 when I got it. Meaning that this dinky little laptop was potentially 4 to 5 years old by the time I got it. Running an OS that was well over a decade old. It could have been running Windows 7, except not really because it literally wasn't powerful enough to.

I am very nostalgic for this little old lady of a laptop, but good god it's hardly a wonder I forgot about it.

Looking back, though, if I had known of some sort of free Word alternative for XP (as I don't think Libre Office or Open Office had XP versions; correct me if I'm wrong) then I think I would have used it a lot more. At the time, I mainly wanted to watch YouTube and be online, which the laptop couldn't do. The browser was too out of date for most sites to run on and the OS was too out of date for the browser to be able to update. But I've always been a creative writer. If I had some sort of writing program on that thing, I would have written so many terrible stories. And they would have been wonderful.

In fact, I have proof of this. Which I won't share, thank you very much. When I was a kid, I used to edit the Pikmin Fanon a lot. And I did it mostly with this laptop. I made shitty MS paint drawings and edits of my original pikmin, characters, enemies, and areas. I wrote up plots and gameplay ideas and all sorts of things. I was no dbout a huge annoyance in the IRC frog chat thing they had at the time (I am so sorry to the people who were moderators when I was let loose onto the site). And it all happened on that laptop. Well, my laptop, but it was that model.

No I am not telling you my old fucking username. I would die of embarrassment.

A small part of me wants to get one of these just to have, but I don't know what I'd do with it afterwords. With computers, given how expensive they are, I just feel as if I need to use it to justify the purchase. Even if that purpose is being a backup in case my current one dies on me (as is the case for my other laptop, which doesn't see much use... And was kind of a panic buy when this one got water damage. This thing should not be alive. It is a zombie. I don't know how it is holding on). At the same time though... Baby's first laptop! The novelty of using Windows XP again!

Idk. I'll keep it in mind, I suppose. For now, back to my Lenovo ThinkPad that I certainly have much more appreciation for now. Give it up for computer the fifth!!!

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Some extra research credits go to The Gadgeteer's 2009 review of this laptop and to Notebook Check's 2009 review of this laptop. And, of course, our lord and savior Wikipedia. All had a lot of useful information that I pulled from. The two reviews were particularly intresting; the Gadgeteer is written from the perspective of a general use author, while the Notebook Check is much more techy in their approach, leading to very different perspectives on the laptop. I just think that's really intresting. And god, does the Gadgeteer article immediately remind you that this was 2009.