The primary force in my conquest of the world will be my faithful computer army:
The battleplans
For a full list of the battleplans I’ve made, see the computers category of articles.
The army
Penelope
The front-line warrior: Penelope has been my main workstation since 2001. This machine has seen a lot of upgrades over the years. For a full timeline, see here.
Thunderflare
The support unit: Thunderflare is my primary fileserver. Much younger than Penelope and less often upgraded, this machine is built for reliability and power-efficiency.
Scarlett
The public relations officer: Scarlett is my home-theater PC. Built to be quiet and cool, Scarlett features as few fans as possible and is optimized for video and audio tasks.
Fallen warriors
Marvin
The fast scout: Marvin has been the code-name for the laptops I have used over the years, starting with my first ever machine, a Compaq LTE Lite, with a 25MHz AMD 386 CPU and 6MB of RAM. Several others followed, and were used till their deaths.
Aylee
Bootcamp: Aylee was my first desktop machine. A hand-me-down from a friend, it was a Compaq Pressario with a 166MHz Pentium Pro CPU. It was used for a little over a year, and tweaked a bit during that time, such as replacing the CD-ROM drive for a faster model and swapping the modem for a network card. Doing that gave me the incentive to build Penelope. Aylee was handed down to my sister, but died gloriously a few months later. Even replacing some ICs on the mainboard could not revive her.