I can't afford to upgrade often, or if I can I can only afford little bits, so I drive my hardware into the ground. I used a 68030 Macintosh paired with a 486DX2 PC until 1999, I used a 450 mhz Pentium II, 320 MB RAM, with Windows 98 until 2005. Then I got an Athlon 64 2.2ghz and 1GB RAM, and I'm still using it now. I've only upgraded with an extra 512 MB of RAM and a very cheap video card to get off the onboard graphics, as well as a second hard drive (200GB) that I didn't pay for because I pulled it from a dead P4 I received. It looks like I'll be using this thing until at least 2011 due to my financial situation, when I'd like to finally plunge and get something nice. Lucky for me that it still works kinda well for its age due to decent upkeep, although it's starting to fall behind for anything that needs decent performance, like games.

I named my first external hard drive "Flying Toaster" due to its portability and my love of the old After Dark screensavers... it died of severe overheating, what a coincidence. I named its replacement "Not A Toaster"... so far so good. As for my computers, I have a couple random names but no common theme and definitely no effect on their performance. My main one is called Kefka after the Final Fantasy VI character. I have an old Gateway named Moo and a Dell from 2003 that is named Powerhouse because it is somehow STILL able to play new games on reasonable settings. My old 486 is named Senior Citizen and my equally old Mac is named Crapple because it is very slow and useless. I used to name ALL my hard drives, but then I stopped. I had on my old Pentium 2 setup a 12 gig named Dust Bunny and a 40 gig named Death Star. I should get back into naming!