ScuzzBlog: Diaries April 2026
Entry 2nd April 2026: Post 1: Retro-Mania - Shock of the old - Win7 survivability.
Retro-Mania - Shock of the old - Win7 survivability.
This time of year has generally been the period I do a deep clean
and get ready for the warmer seasons. It is a time to put all the
stuff away that has built up over the winter cold and to prepare
for new adventures in the brighter days. This year has been no
different and I even treated myself to a new Hoover.
My thoughts at this time take me back to the dark days of Dec 2016
when the last of my cats died on Christmas Eve. Sad as it was it
gave me the opportunity to turn the house upside down, clean from
top to bottom and to unpack all my tubs and catalogue all I have.
It took three months to pile all my stuff into collections of like
kit. I was moving stuff endlessly as I cleared rooms to clean. In
the end I had this untidy collection of piled retro stuff that
looked more like a jumble sale clearance than my home.
Sadly it was at this time that the Win7 computer fell over and I
purchased the Win10 machine. I did not give up on the HP Win7 and
I very successfully replaced the NVIDIA graphics card and rebuilt
the operating system. And she still works to this day. Otherwise
I wouldn't be writing this blog. She has been the best computer
I have ever owned. Purchased in February 2011 and still running
today.
Back to that Retro-Mania. Anyhoo with all the stuff piled up I
decided to take a batch of pics of the chaos and feature on a post
on Amiga Org. You should have read the reactions I got. The pics
were a shocker and took a few folk by surprise. It was intentionally
produced to get the reaction to get folk use to reading my scuzzblog
diaries as opposed to reading my blogs on the Yahoo Group.
The transition worked and today I get like over a 1000 visits a day.
The chaos didn't last very long as I returned to some semblance of
normality with kit packed in tubs and computers stored in their
boxes in a more ordered fashion. Everything is generally under
cover of dust sheets, though I still retain a modest number of
active computers for reference purposes. Often in blogs you will
hear me moan about not being able to retrieve items cus they are
in deep store, and that has to be the maintained status. I cannot
risk constantly recovering kit for the fear of damaging other items.
It is a fact of life when collecting that you live in a museum
store for the most part, aware of what you have but for the most
part just out of reach.
And so the 'shocking' images of the untidy piles of kit that was
April 2017, some nine years ago, are a distant memory, and not one
that I would like to reproduce. I often think of maybe thinning the
collection but then I struggle to think of anything I could let go
of. I love it all. What is more is that all my computers from my
first ZX81 up to this last Win11 junk are still working. I just
have never had the heart to give up on any of them.
That Win7 machine that I am using right now creating this blog is
a HPE-495uk running Windows 7 Home Premium. She has an Intel Core
i7 CPU 870 at 2.93GHz 2.93 GHz with 8GB RAM and a 64-bit OS. I
have replaced the NVIDIA graphics card twice.
In a world that really creates far too much redundant hardware just
for the sake of selling more produce to feed mouths it is very
comforting to maintain for as long as possible products that are
deserved of the extended period of life. There is fundamentally
nothing wrong with this HP Win7 machine, other than the hard drive
being full and the OS refusing to work with some products cus of
update issues. For the most part I still love using the Win7
computer. It is still my preferred weapon of choice when it comes
to updating the website. But then I still use my XP computer, it
is running also every day as it controls my network hub to other
machines I link through to around the house. Mainly I use the
Win10 for general activities and Warcraft, the Win7 for site work,
the Amiga 1200 in here with the Squirrel to test disks and create
ADF files, then two XP machines and a Win98 machine for Amiga
disk management, and cataloguing the large Amiga repository.
I see no reason to change my patterns of behavior. I love all of
my computers and I would have them all on if I had the space.
Anyhoo I better get back to the cleaning so I can get back to the
important stuff of mucking around with my hobby.
Happy days !!
Retro-Mania - Shock of the old - Win7 survivability.
The chaos that was April 2017
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