The old box

If Mayuri's seven year old PC is shouting "retirement retirement", my ten year old PC is wheezing "respirator respirator". It cost Rs. 53000/- back then; I could buy a cool laptop with that kind of money now. It's cranium is an AT cabinet, the technology of which was in it's autumn even back then. It's cerebrum is a Pentium III 500MHz which was the state of the art intelligence in 1999. It's bus speed was 133MHz and when I told my friends about the 128Mb SDRAM (100MHz), they drooled (of course, back then). My 15" CRT monitor was bigger than most 14" owned by my peers. I'm talking about the time when the price of a SONY CD-writer drive was 21000/- (yes twenty one thousand rupees). Of course I didn't own one. The hard-disc was an 8GB monster and the cute little niche for the Floopy Drive added a to the beauty of the metal-plastic box. Windows98 was the talk of the time and was marked improvement over Windows95. I fiddled a lot with my comp; opened the box up every now and then to clean it and/or add remove components. I installed and removed various linuxs, Windows 2000, Millenium (the most shitty one) and finally XP (relief at last). The comp went with me to Patiala and stayed there for two years till I completed MSc in 2005. It came back with me and is still serving me well. The upgrades include a second hand 40GB HD that I bought from my friend (he wanted to get rid of it for he was upgrading to a 160GB), a CD writer and a LAN card. Of these 10 years, I've run it without a UPS for almost 5 years and during this period it has bypassed the proper shutdown system innumerable times, with the electricity department snuffing it's life out time and again. Since it refused to die, I rewarded it with a battery replacement of the UPS. Oh I just recalled, this torture did take its toll with the SMPS blowing out one day. The one for AT cabinet was not available so the engineer installed a second-hand repaired SMPS. It roars when started, I've been unable to find the reason so I've just learned to live with it...anyway it becomes silent after 3-4 minutes of running.
The only thing that hasn't gone totally obsolete in this system is the ARTIS 4.1 sound system which are still serving me boomingly well. Well actually nothing's wrong with the computer either. It runs perfectly well and resonable quick with Windows XP, maybe because the only programs I use are MS-WORD, MS-POWERPOINT and media player. So maybe it's not the computer that's wheezing...maybe it's I who's looking down upon it. The fact is that if any of the component malfunctions or is rendered irreparable, it would translate to an expensive or impossible repair (part unavailability).
Anyway it's a world where smaller is better, so a lappie would definitely make me happy. Daddy, it's my 30th B'day and err... Ahem!! I think I know what you're gonna gift me...and NO NO I do not want a bride!!