(My fourth-grade teacher also acquired some Windows 2000 Compaq desktops for her classroom, which were still quite usable at the time.) The school continued to use Windows XP far beyond the time my parents purchased our family’s first new computer – a HP Pavilion running Windows Vista.Ī pair of Nobilus desktop computers, running Windows XP, identical to the ones from our computer lab in elementary school. Two computers, featuring the same Nobilus towers and monitors, were moved into classrooms around the time I was in fourth grade. Surprisingly, those Nobilus computers – along with Windows XP – were used by the school all the way until I moved away in 2010. They were also the first computer I actually got to see the inside of, as well, as I watched a technician replace a motherboard. I can remember using Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 to create a presentation about the Liberty Bell, which required me to use the internet (I believe ask.com was the search engine we used at the time) for research and gathering graphics. While those machines didn’t provide me with my first taste in computing (we had a Gateway 2000 x486 running Windows 3.11 before), they did provide me with my first taste of the internet. The original Nobilis desktops had been replaced with newer Dell OptiPlex machines, which were still running Windows XP. A photo of my elementary school’s computer lab, c.