I've decided to write out my computer history so I can look back and reference a few years down the line...  I doubt anyone will read the entire thing, its more for me anyway.

My first two computers were an Epson and an IBM PS/2; we got them at the same time from my mom’s friend.  Though the PS/2 had color (unlike the Epson) and was generally more advanced, the Epson was the computer that got used, because it had software, games, and MS Word.  This is where I learned DOS.  I spent years with that machine trying everything I could.  Programming batch scripts, learning QBASIC...  The PS/2 didn't get used much at all.  When you don't have Internet, and a computer that can only read single density floppies, there's not much to do.  There was a golf game I had on a single density floppy, but that’s about it.  I still have the Epson in my closet in Hopkins.  The Epson had a Microsoft Bus Mouse though a card I added, and an awesome driver that allowed the mouse to work with doskey and use mouse movements as keyboard buttons in games that didn't support the mouse. The PS/2's fate is less certain, I believe I may have given it to Colton.

Some time after this I got a Toshiba "Laptop" if you could call it that.  It's huge and didn't even offer the option of running on battery.  It had a Monochrome yellow LCD.  I had a number of games on it, many from The Learning Company, but sadly the hard drive crashed at my friend Justin's house during a party in like 6th grade, and where do you get a hard drive for an ancient laptop?  It though is almost identical to Jeff's laptop, which "Save Mel Gibson's Testicles" the amazing text adventure, was written on.

On vacation I went to a garage sale where they had a "Mattel Aquarius” which is a hard-drive-less computer which ran Microsoft Quick-Basic as a kind of pseudo operating system, and by hooking it to a audio cassette tape recorder you could load and save programs to audio cassette tapes, which was somewhat weird.

After these, I got a 386 clone, which ran Windows 3.11 For Workgroups.  Ah the age before Internet.  I used to use Hyper-terminal with my friend Todd to send files.  I being the pack rat that I am still have hundreds of pictures I drew in MS Paint on this machine, I should post some next time I'm in town.  I played Warcraft 2, Megatron, Lands of Lore and Doom on this machine, of which are still some of my all time favorite games.   Warcraft 2 and Megatron featured direct dial up game-play, so I often would play these games with Todd on into the night.  He always pwn3d me.  I believe this may have been one of the machines I sold Franson a stack of; I'll get more into this later...

After this my uncle set us up with a 486 with 16mb of ram, running Windows 95.  This was a big step forward. It was on this machine I first discovered mp3's, with Todd having sent me several via Hyper-terminal.  It should also be noted, this was my first computer with a CD-ROM drive.  For some time, we had Juno email (not internet, dial up email) for $3 a month.  I could send and receive text based emails, and thought it was the most amazing thing ever.  A while later we got worked into this beta trial for a device called "US West TV" which was Internet for your TV kind of thing.  I being the cunning child I was caught the phone number, username, and password and entered them into Dial Up Networking in windows and viola it worked! I had Internet via this until nearly a year after US West went out of business.  My uncle later installed Windows 98 on it insisting that it would be an improvement, it wasn't, and it completely killed the performance of the already ancient machine.  Also, this machine crashed more hard drives than any other computer I have ever owned.  I believe we went through like 5, if a modern machine did this I would stop using it.  I am quite certain I gave or sold this machine to Colton.

While the 486 was my main machine, I bought a 3 foot tall tower containing Pentium 1 with 32mb of ram at a garage sale.  This became where I spent most of my time as I kept it in my bedroom, and it replaced the Epson, which had been in my room for some time.  I ran Windows 95 on this until the day the hard drive crashed while Zach was using it. 

Misc. Computers:  I slowly ended up with a large stack of computers in my bedroom, few with any redeeming value.  One of the most notable had a 5 1/4" hard drive, which I still have in a box of hard drives about 10 feet from me right now.  I had and still have a number of misc. 286 laptops, a 386 laptop that ran windows 95, and a few more esoteric machines such as a "Family Computer,” no, its not anintendo famicom, drat.  I purchased a Packard Bell Pentium 2 from Jeff for $20, and a few days later traded it to Andy for a PATA Controller Card.  I had another Packard Bell, a Pentium 1 with 24mb of ram, it was my sister’s machine, and we coaxed Windows 98 into it, my mother insisted we give it to my aunt, w ho ended up having no use for it.  I also had an IBM PS/1, whose keyboard and mouse I still have and is my favorite keyboard to this day due to its small size and clickyness, [update 1] It was intereresting in the fact that the power suply for the machine was in the monitor, and the monitor connected to the ps/1 via a propriatary connector.  Also, I have a Pentium 4 laptop with a broken screen and an 8 gig hard drive I bought from Nick Miller. 

Current Computers:

In 9th grade my family got a Micron PC with an AMD1000 (128mb of ram, later upgraded to 256) that was back when AMD's numbers represented the actual MHz of the processor.   This machine came preloaded with Windows ME, which was hell on earth.  It needed to be reinstalled monthly.  Windows 2k was a godsend, though I didn't have drivers for my sound card for several months after installing it, so I dual booted for a while.    This is the machine where I gained my love for Quake 3 and Urban Terror (quake 3 mod), which I have played regularly on every machine I have since owned.  A few years back I installed XP on this and it has been running stably for years. It is a rock. The only thing I'd even concider changing right now is a nosiy fan.

In the end of tenth grade I got a Pentium 4, a scratch and dent VPR Matrix for a deal at Best Buy (link), its still one of my favorite looking cases, armed with a Geforce 2, 80 gig hard drive and 256mb of ram (Later upgraded to 768) and loaded with Windows XP (this was my first experience with Windows XP).  This machine went through more upgrades than any other machine I ever owned.  This is the machine the PATA controller I traded a Packard Bell for went into.  Originally it had a CD-RW and a DVD-ROM drive.  I added a DVD+-RW drive without removing the other two, allowing me to make two copies of a CD at once, useful at LAN parties. Also I added two hard drives, one 80 gig and one 160 gigs.  This was my main machine up until January of this year when I went to turn the computer on and I heard the death toll "click click click click" coming from one the hard drives and it refused to boot. None of the drives have since refused to be bad, but the problem I now discovered lay in the PATA controller I added.  It was time for a new machine anyway, it being 4(?) years old.  The 160gb drive from this machine is in an encasement and used externally now.  This machine is currently sitting in the corner in my bedroom, but I play to get it working some time soon.

My current laptop, a Dell D600 Pentium M 1.8ghz (512mb) is a rare find.  Very few were manufactured with a 1.8ghz processor, most with a 1.6, check eBay, I bet you won't find a 1.8ghz.  It being a Pentium M automatically slows the processor to what's needed for your current task, and the speed can be seen dynamically, often getting down to 255 MHz.  This made it not a great machine for gaming as it could take a moment for the speed to kick in, but did me well through College.  It was affected by the recent Dell battery recall, and I was impressed by the quick response, receiving my replacement battery literally 2 days after going to the replacement site.  The hard drive does get hot, which is directly under the left wrist pad, which can be a little obnoxious at times, but other than that I love this computer.  It also has gigabyte Ethernet, which is a definite plus.

My current PC is a PowerSpec 9200 (link), pretty much stock at the moment.  AMD64 X2 (Dual Core) 4200+, 1 gig of ram, Geforce6600 PCI-e with SLI upgrade option. 2x200 Sata Raid 0 400gig, dual layer DVD burner, gigabyte Ethernet, etc.  Its treated me well, though it won't boot without a ps2 keyboard hooked up, and my current keyboard is USB, so at the moment I've got a ps2 keyboard sitting next to my tower plugged in.  I've got dual 19" CRT's hooked to it, as I had the Tower before it.  I love dual monitor, and find it hard to live without it.

My latest addition is a Mac Mini, which is a bit of a change for me having always been anti-mac.  Its actually what I'm writing this on right now and have been spending most of my time on lately...  Its an Intel Core Duo 1.66ghz, 2 gigs of ram, 80gig Sata, etc. I've been liking OSX, though there are definitely things I miss from windows, such as the Task bar, my mac friends hate me for it, but I loathe the dock.  I hate Expose even more.  Cal me crazy but I want to go right to the window I want.  Not just the program I want, the specific window, with a single click.  Alt-Tab on Macs also only switches applications, you can use alt-tilde to switch windows within an app after you get the app you want, but its still a pain.  I spoke more on the topic of getting a Mac in an earlier post...

I just realized I completely neglected to mention the server.  My server is a Pentium II Sony Viao running Windows 2k, IIS, PHP, MySQL, FTP, Etc.  It has 96 megs of ram, the absolute minimum to run Windows 2000.  Jeff recieved the Viao for building one of his brothers friends a computer, and I convinved him to give it go me under the guise that I would be hosting Oasisband.net on it.  That never came about because we got served by my friend on a T3, but thats neither here nor there.  I remember back in the day we had trouble scronging up the 96 megs of ram, and then Windows 2k didn't like the cd rom drive, so I ended up having to replace the CD Rom drive...  That thing is a pain to take apart.  Thankfully Joel actually had instructions for taking apart Sony Viao's which came in very handy.  The images you are seeing on this page are hosted on my Sony Viao which runs non stop.

Well I believe this ends a post that may be my longest... ended up far longer than I expected...

Also, note, more images to be added when I take some photos...

What've I been up to you ask? It's been a while since my last post, so here's a quick summing up. I graduated from Brown College with my associate's degree, maintaining a 4.0 GPA.

I went on a trip to Iowa with my parents last week. Heres a photo of my sister, mother and I in Iowa.

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I also have acquired a Mac Mini (Dual Core 1.66ghz, 80gb, 2gig) and despite being among some of the most hardcore windows users, ie: I write freakin' parameter taking batch files (people say I'd prefer Linux, I disagree) I have been quite enjoying Mac OSX, though it is a very different experience from windows. They are both very good systems, though work differently. If you go into Mac OS not expecting things to be different you’re going to hate it. It’s a completely ideology change, more so than what shines through merely on the surface. I believe Mac users hate PC’s merely because they don’t realize the ideology change and the same goes for PC users hating Macs.

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Here follows a couple images from me playing with OSX in no particular order.

Well now for what seems to have become a nearly monthly update of the life of Jesse Donat. As you can see I've changed the title of my Live Journal. Should I change the color scheme? I've had this for a while, and it' nice but I need change. As many of you know already from my nearly constant pestering, I've changed Oasisband.net. I've put a lot of work into the site recently, and am preparing to roll out an updated movies page as well, even considering redoing the database, again, which is a lot more work than I really want to do, but it would allow for a very improved user experience.

I've come to a realization. Every year after daylight savings time I become horribly depressed for a period of a few weeks. Check my first entry; it was on Apr. 16th, 2004. That's practically two years ago today. As crazy as it sounds, I think it's the extra sunlight. Whereas some people get depressed from lack of sun during the winter, I think I actually suffer from the reverse. When I signed up for live journal two years ago it was because I just did not feel right and needed a place to just write down some crap. Well that mysteries solved.

What else is up? On the school kind of thing I graduate after this term ends like June 26th, if all goes as planed Valedictorian none the less. What I do after I graduate with my Associates degree, damned if I know. For this quarter I was supposed to get an internship. Joel, the gracious host of our Oasisband.net actually offered me one and I am taking him up on it, which should be interesting to get some semi-professional coding experience. This quarter I was set up to have two classes on Monday / Wednesday and one class Tuesday / Thursday, but the decision was made to move the third class to Monday / Wednesday, so at the moment I have two days of class each week with a four day weekend. Talk about a light load, especially compared to last quarter where every day I was getting at least one, sometimes two very complicated assignments. Last term ended up being the toughest yet, and I had doubts about maintaining my 4.0 but Forshizzle assured me I would, and I did.

Also, if you havn't played Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, you should. It will blow your mind. It is one of the greatest games I have played in quite a long time. But be forewarned, it is very addictive. The first weekend I played it I started at like 9 am Friday straight through until Sunday at 4 pm, with a break on Saturday as Andrew Gross stopped by with Forshizzle and we went to Chipolet. Also, I have a myspace account setup now, its lame, almost as lame as MySpace is in general. http://www.myspace.com/donatj Well, that is about all I can think to write at the moment.