That silly PinePhone of mine could barely do anything right, so I tossed it in favour of my nearly 20 year old PC I used as a kid. The same one I that made me discover Newgrounds for the first time, where I saw the birth of YouTube, and caught tons of viruses on the web from Flash game websites.

This thing is special because instead of using a couple small fans, it would rather use one massive fan to cool the entire thing. This machine's heat sink would normally be a huge block of copper fins that would make the PC think it's a jet engine, but mine came with a different heatsink made from aluminum that keeps the machine quite quiet, and doesn't even rev-up under massive loads.

It was the perfect candidate for my new setup! But it wasn't powerful enough to run your run of the mill version of Linux like Manjaro or Ubuntu, so I installed Arch on this bad boy and made it lightweight and stylish.

Got myself a sweet triple monitor setup by tagging-along this old PC and my laptop. And what even cooler is the old PC's mouse & keyboard is shared across both of these computers using an app called Barrier. My laptop can even control some apps too using SSH, so I can offload apps to the old Dell PC and give my laptop more juice while I draw. And because I also have full access to that old PCs files, I've also turned it into a NAS, and I plan to keep a third backup of my files on this thing.

Although this old PC isn't as powerful as my laptop that doesn't mean it can't still pack a punch. This thing can play HD content no problem, can emulate PS1 games flawlessly, and it even has a way better sound card than my laptop. It does struggle a bit running browsing some bigger websites on Firefox, but I just use my laptop for those. (in a way it punishes me for getting distracted online)

Now the only big complication I had with this machine was that I have no Wi-Fi card for it and the router was in the other room...but I did have this spare router with me, so I rigged both routers to communicate with each-other, and used a Powerline-ethernet adapter so that I could put the spare router in my little office and have an all wired internet setup for both computers. (it also bumped the transfer speed from 2MBps to 10MBps...god these routers suck)

Ain't technology grand!

See you next time! I've got an experimental drawing coming soon. It's nothing too new, but it's the first time I'm doing this mixed media sort of thing, so it will be interesting.