User:Jarredwalton

I qualify in almost every regard as a computer geek. I started geeking out at the ripe old age of five with the Magnavox and later Colecovision game consoles (and probably Atari and some others as well). By the age of 10, I had a Commodore 128 and had started typing in BASIC programs from books. I didn't have a clue what I was writing, and it would some times take days, but it was a lot of fun in a warped sort of way. My dad got an IBM XT when I was about 11, and soon after upgraded to the amazingly fast 8 MHz IBM AT. Ahhhh, the good old days of monochrome graphics....

By the time I was 16, I worked all summer and saved up $1500 to blow on my very own 286/12 MHz with a whopping 2 MB of RAM and a 40 MB hard drive, only to find out a few months later that I needed a 386 in order to play Wing Commander in all its glory. I upgraded to a 386/33 MHz not long after (and sold my "archaic" 286 to some unwitting person for the same price I bought it for). Then I upgraded to an amazing 8 MB of RAM in the hopes of playing Strike Commander properly. (I failed.) From there, I went to a 486/33 with 8 MB of RAM, then a 486 DX2/66 with 16 MB of RAM, followed by a Pentium 120 with 16 and then 32 MB of RAM....

At this point, I started earning enough money that one PC was no longer enough. I had Cyrix 586 and 686 PCs - that sucked - AMD K5s and K6s and K6-2s - never tried a K6-III - and of course the Intel chips. The Intel systems were always my primary PC, since they were invariably faster. I also got into overclocking with those. My Pentium MMX 200 ran at 250 MHz on my Abit IC5H with the 430HX chipset and 256 MB of RAM. Then I went through two Celeron 300A CPUs, since one would only overclock to 375 while the retail CPU would run 464 MHz. I took my BX motherboards (Abit BH6 and BE6-II) all the way up to 800 MHz before switching to an 815E motherboard (when my BE6-II failed due to leaking capacitors).

Around this time, I got married, so my "play money" decreased, and I had to limp along on a P3/Celeron A system running at 1.47 GHz for almost three years, going from a GeForce 256 SDR to a GeForce 2 GTS to a GeForce 4 Ti4200. My wife is now working as a car salesperson, so I finally have more play money again. I upgraded in March 2004 to an Athlon XP 2500+ OEM, because I had a couple extra heatsinks sitting around. That was a mistake I recently rectified by spending the extra money on an XP 2500+ Mobile chip and Zalman heatsink/fan, which now overclocks much better.

In other areas of my life, I studied Computer Science at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah before moving on to other pursuits. My passion for computer hardware eventually led to my becoming an editor for the tech website AnandTech (http://www.anandtech.com) in August 2004. That's a story in and of itself. I was basically "recruited" by Kristopher Kubicki. The reality is that I happened to send a rather detailed email about CPU code names and features to Kris on a whim, asking for a shout out if he used the material in an article. Instead, he asked me to give writing a shot and I put together the CPU Cheatsheet article, followed by a couple others. It was well received, and eventually led to Anand Shimpi offering me a contract. I now focus primarily on Buyer's Guides and Small form factor reviews along with various other articles including technology roadmaps.

Going back to my "computer biography," things really got out of hand with my joining the AnandTech team. I now have more hardware than I really know what to do with, but that's better than not having enough. My current system is running an Athlon 64 3200+ on an MSI K8N Neo Platinum with 2x512MB Mushkin PC3500 2-3-3-6 1T RAM. Graphics are provided by a Leadtek 6800GT. Refer to my article list for other hardware I likely have in my possession, however.

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