Your oldest actively used computer kit

Khannie

Let's define actively used as used once a month at least. So what is your oldest actively used computer kit?

I'm typing this on a (approximately) 10 year old laptop that actually has a floppy drive in it! :eek:

It's actually a grand little piece of kit for what I want it to do (mostly browsing): 1.6GHz pentium M (P4 type), 1G of ram (upgraded), 80G HDD, has wifi (added), USB 1 (ha!). I have ubuntu 8.04 installed on it because the graphics drivers from that era work really well with it. To be honest, I'm delighted with it and have no intentions of retiring it any time soon.

So what's your oldest? (may be ridiculously modern)

unkel

Had something of similar vintage but retired it recently. It was actually a laptop with the whole screen area ripped off. Bought it here on boards for €80 (it would have been worth at least €500 with the screen on at the time). I was the first to offer asking price so the seller (who admitted he had fecked the whole thing against a wall in a rage :eek:) had to let it go to me. Bargain

Most of my stuff is old. Laptop about 7 years old. PC nearly 5 years old and work netbook nearly 5 years old too. All still working very well with the latest OS and software too

dreamers75

I on the other end of the scale

I5/7970/ssd/16gb ram

Kids pc is E6850 4gb 6870

Her laptop is an I3.

We have nothing old here

GreenWolfe

I have a 4 year old Thinkpad, it's almost as small as a netbook so it's handy for travelling.

Peregrine

My desktop is over 6 years old, still useful though. Pentium D 3.3GHz, 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD and an old Nvidia card. Still runs on stock XP dual booting with Windows 8 preview

And I've a laptop that's over 5 years old, I forgot what the processor was now. All I remember was it had 1GB RAM with Vista (disastrous combination :eek:) and some crappy 2007 Intel Mobile graphics. Utterly useless but with a combination that bad, of course it is.

They're both actively used, especially the desktop but I'm mostly on mobile now.

the_syco

Have a laptop next to my bed. Used to watch series with it whilst in bed, but the iPhone is now used.

The laptop needs a PCMCIA card to connect to the network, as the inbuilt one can only connect to WEP. It has 256MB's of PC100 RAM, and a 40GB HDD. It came with an external CD-ROM drive (not a burner) and a floppy disk drive.

It was good at the time, but I'll probably hook a IDE to SDHC adapter and but from that; should be a lot quicker. Would probably place it on a wall, and use it for basic web-browsing.

200motels

I on occasions use my old e machines desktop that's just nearly 10 years old and it runs smoothly, it has windows Xp pro, Intel pentium 4, 2gb of ram and two hard drives which were added a few years back,.

U_Fig

i'm not quite sure how old it is or it's exact name but i have an IBM that has a whopping 16kb of ram and runs dos 1.0 i think it's from 1981...still powers on and works. it's years older than me..

the oldest currently active thing i have is only 3 years old laptop nothing much i had a 10 year old desktop running DSL but i gave it to a charity recently

Feelgood

In my current role, I'm the admin for a Tru64 and AS400 server. Both are circa 97-98. Both operating systems have a very 90s feel to them.

sink

At home my oldest computer regularly used computer is my gaming desktop and it will be 2 years old in April. My iPhone 4S is the second oldest if you class that as a computer and I would have bought that around September 2011. I bought a new HTPC new server and new iPad in the last year.

At work I use machines 5-6 years old everyday.

Victor

Laptop - 3 years.
External hard drive (it may have developed the click of death) - 3 years.
Digital camera - 3 years.
Phone (it has MMS messaging!) - 6 years.
Desktop - I haven't used in several months - 13 years (Win98SE)
My first CD player - 2 years :pac:

Duggy747

Oldest machine I have is an old Medion from 2005. Pure workhorse that still runs perfect despite it's covered in a shade of green from mould. I have it in the shop to test software out on, had to put old reliable Betsy to good use. :pac:

After that it's a Creative Zen W and Buffalo 1TB external hard drive. Both purchased Xmas 2007 and still running fine. The Zen's hard drive died once but I replaced that, had to wait a while since the zif drive prices were crazy at the time, couple of hundred quid for a low size one. The old iPod kept those prices high.

My Nexus has relegated the Zen to me though, despite it giving me years of entertainment and saving my sanity on long journeys, was handy to bring to people's houses and hook it up to their TVs. I treated it well, not a mark on the screen.

I see people are still selling them on Ebay for about €400 for a 30GB model :eek:

Oh, and a CD/RW drive I bought about 10 or more years ago. Sits in the parent's PC now after the Gateway popped it's clogs :P

Amalgam

Main Desktop PC is an AMD Barton CPU on an old VIA KT600 motherboard. I think the last bios update is from 2004, but I think I've had this a bit longer.

Every other device in the house is more powerful\newer, with Windows Vista, Linux Mint and Windows 7, but I am stuck in an XP rut, for everyday work.

I just need browsing\printing\light graphical work and stable optical media burning. (PATA required)

I have a Casio CD printer from about 2000, attached to the above PC. Still printing perfectly.

Dravokivich

Have a laptop from 7 years ago with an AMD Sempron cpu that my girlfriend has "borrowed" off me. Still works quite well with XP Media Centre edition.

My main PC is coming up to 4 years old now. Although the age doesn't hurt as much with the quad core cpu, as much as it does with the DDR2 ram

Got a couple of other pc's knocking about that are older, but don't use'em too much at the moment.

Dale Parish

The oldest thing I still use is my IBM XT -


I have a 5150 which I am restoring but I don't use it yet..

Tango One

I use an old unix machine in my job dating from about 94. I've never seen it. It's not in the same office as me. I'm told it's the size of the coke machine and looks like something out of a 1960 scfi movie.

Adyx

Duggy747 wrote: »

Oldest machine I have is an old Medion from 2005. Pure workhorse that still runs perfect despite it's covered in a shade of green from mould. I have it in the shop to test software out on, had to put old reliable Betsy to good use. :pac:

After that it's a Creative Zen W and Buffalo 1TB external hard drive. Both purchased Xmas 2007 and still running fine. The Zen's hard drive died once but I replaced that, had to wait a while since the zif drive prices were crazy at the time, couple of hundred quid for a low size one. The old iPod kept those prices high.

My Nexus has relegated the Zen to me though, despite it giving me years of entertainment and saving my sanity on long journeys, was handy to bring to people's houses and hook it up to their TVs. I treated it well, not a mark on the screen.

I see people are still selling them on Ebay for about €400 for a 30GB model :eek:

Oh, and a CD/RW drive I bought about 10 or more years ago. Sits in the parent's PC now after the Gateway popped it's clogs :P

Seriously? I know mine was over €300 new. It's certainly kept it's value, although I have had to replace the slider/button thing and the screen. Other than that I still regularly use my Asus eeePC 701. In fact I have 2. One is the original version that came with Xandros and the other the slightly later one that had WinXP. Both upgraded to 1GB Ram. the screen on the original doesn't work any more but at one stage I had modded it with a touchscreen and built in Bluetooth adapter.

riclad

I have a zen nano,plus 1gig music player , works off aaa batterys, my
zen 2gig player is dead ,doesnt charge up or show up as device when i plug it in to any pc.

i just use the nano when my android phone battery is low,or to transfer files when i,m fixing a pc.
Some companys use old pcs, cos they relay on old programs to carry out certain functions
or acess data, that is not easy acessed or compatible with modern software,
eg some banks still use windows 2000 servers.
Sometimes they only way to get data onto a pc is via usb,or cdr ,if certain drivers are missing or not installed.

ED E

HP Pavillion A110 - From 2003, used as a media PC until recently.

Laptop is 6yrs~ old, battery is knackered but still use it almost daily. Upgraded Vostro 1000, 2GB, Win7Pro, 2Ghz Dual (Turion64), 500GB drive, 1150 Express.

The aul fellas laptop is ancient, some old Acer unit, 1.6 Single, probably about 03 too.

Have some older kit around, but none thats been powered on in a while.

Edit: Cant embed due to the URL parser being a thick.

sunbeam

I'm currently using a 2005 Dell Inspiron 6000 as my main computer. It has a bluetooth indicator, but I never bothered to actually get bluetooth installed when I ordered it as I had no idea what it was.

Upgraded the ram from 512mb to 2GB last year and now use Voyager Linux 12.04 (Xubuntu respin) as my operating system. It runs excellently apart from the battery which only lasts about 10 minutes.

cookie1977

I have a an Dell XPS M1210 from 2006 (I know, not that old) running win 7 pro (which I'll upgrade to 8 when my wifes not looking). Nice looking device and still zippy. It's got 2GB ram and an intel core 2 duo T7200 (2.0 GHZ). I got it with the intel graphics card rather than the Nvidia which burnt out a lot of them.

Capt'n Midnight

riclad wrote: »

Sometimes they only way to get data onto a pc is via usb,or cdr ,if certain drivers are missing or not installed.

If you have a serial port and mode.com on one machine you can (eventually) get files to / from it.


MODE COM1:2400,n,8,1,p
CTTY COM1


INTERSVR /RCOPY


Nothing too old in use now , cleaned out a win98 desktop with a K7 cpu a while back

BostonB

Dell dual Xeon from 2003/4 at work. Used every other day. We've some old servers though that are from the 1990's still in daily use.

Lovely Bloke

I use an Acer 5610 Laptop, with the screen removed. It is permanently connected to my TV, and wired for Ethernet. Wireless mouse and keyboard attached.

It dual boots WinXP and Linux Mint 14.

Use it to access the various TV Players (RTE, BBC, Ch4, ITV, Sky), it's basically turned my TV into a smart TV.

Spotify runs on it, Netflix etc.

Newest piece of kit I own is the WD TV Live box, awesome thing.

I've just gotten a Samsung 840 250gb SSD for my other laptop, which has 8gb Ram in it.

the wife uses a 2 year old Samsung Netbook, and has a Kindle Fire too.

BostonB

Can you not get the players on the WD TV Live box?

Duggy747

Adyx wrote: »

Seriously? I know mine was over €300 new. It's certainly kept it's value, although I have had to replace the slider/button thing and the screen.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Mp3-Player-Zen-Vision-W-30gb-Creative-Price-for-1-/390463022078?pt=UK_Sound_Vision_Other&hash=item5ae968e3fe

Roughly €450 for a brand new one. That's even more than what I paid for my 60gb model 5 years ago.

BostonB

Duggy747 wrote: »

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Mp3-Player-Zen-Vision-W-30gb-Creative-Price-for-1-/390463022078?pt=UK_Sound_Vision_Other&hash=item5ae968e3fe

Roughly €450 for a brand new one. That's even more than what I paid for my 60gb model 5 years ago.

That seems a little nuts.

Dingatron

At work we've still a few NT 4.0 industrial devices still working away and dating back to around 2000. They'll be replaced this year.

D

Kind of a cheat here:

486 SX with 16MB of RAM (upgraded from 8)
No idea how old it is, but when I was at my parent's place this Christmas I played some Tyrian and Blackthorne. It was sitting in the sitting room covered in a cloth.

Nforce

A few oldies still in use here..

Alienware Area-51m 766

Alienware Sentia 223

Both in as new condition despite being 9-10 years old

Dell Dimension 4550 desktop (upgraded cpu,ram,os and gpu) about 9 years old and chugging along
Sony Vaio VGC-M1 (8 years old upgraded cpu and ram and replaced the psu a few months ago!)

About 5 more desktops (latest being i7 2600k powered, with dual SSD's)
and a few notebooks/android tablets.

yoyo

Have an old Dell 9400 that I reckon is around 7 years old now. Use it when over in the parents house, apart from a RAM upgrade (1-2gb) its been working great ever since, bit slow nowadays but I suppose that's to be expected. Its a dual core pentium chip (cant remember version) and GMA Intel GPU.
Only recently retired my trusty Q6600 which must be over 5 years since I got it at this stage, another fantastic chip/wasn't it one of the first quad core Intels?

Nick

Victor

D wrote: »

Kind of a cheat here:

486 SX with 16MB of RAM (upgraded from 8)
No idea how old it is, but when I was at my parent's place this Christmas I played some Tyrian and Blackthorne. It was sitting in the sitting room covered in a cloth.

The spec would date it to about 1993-4. We bought a 33MHz Pentium in 1994 with 8MB RAM.

Dale Parish

Dingatron wrote: »

At work we've still a few NT 4.0 industrial devices still working away and dating back to around 2000. They'll be replaced this year.

Sell them to meeeeee :pac:

Khannie

yoyo wrote: »

Only recently retired my trusty Q6600 which must be over 5 years since I got it at this stage, another fantastic chip/wasn't it one of the first quad core Intels?

It was in the first batch of quad cores they produced (along with the Q6700 iirc). I am still using mine and have no intention of upgrading it for some time yet. It can clock to 3GHz, though I have it running at stock as I have no need.

yoyo

Khannie wrote: »

It was in the first batch of quad cores they produced (along with the Q6700 iirc). I am still using mine and have no intention of upgrading it for some time yet. It can clock to 3GHz, though I have it running at stock as I have no need.

Wanted to go the SSD route so wanted a SATA3 chipset. Had to change board, CPU and RAM as a result . Mine was the earlier of the batches, not as good an overclocker I remember. Don't worry though rebuilt the machine as I have spare PSUs lying around so I still use it for various data recovery/backing up etc. tasks if someone gives me a laptop or whatever in to be fixed. Dead right though it's still a beast although the i5 I have now is also a beast, considerably faster at encoding video

Nick

demanufactured

Nforce wrote: »

A few oldies still in use here..

Alienware Area-51m 766

Alienware Sentia 223

Both in as new condition despite being 9-10 years old

Dell Dimension 4550 desktop (upgraded cpu,ram,os and gpu) about 9 years old and chugging along
Sony Vaio VGC-M1 (8 years old upgraded cpu and ram and replaced the psu a few months ago!)

About 5 more desktops (latest being i7 2600k powered, with dual SSD's)
and a few notebooks/android tablets.

I probably know the people who built your alienware machines.....the missus worked there till they closed up.

Defiler Of The Coffin

Up to a few months ago we had a old Compaq Tower PC that dated from 2003. It had originally shipped with Windows 2000 and 512GB RAM I believe. CPU was a 3GHz P4. I upgraded the RAM to 2GB and installed Win XP. It wasn't much use in the end, the internet crawled on it and occasionally it would freeze. Was still in general use though, had the printer hooked up to it and there was always someone who needed something printed. It's been recently replaced with a refurbished Dell corporate machine, great little thing!

We have a Linksys WRT54GL which we use as an internet gateway. Not entirely sure when it was manufactured but I know that particular model dates from 2006. I have a couple of wireless access points and an Xbox connected to its LAN ports, it functions as the DHCP server for the entire house. I've been told that it's particularly sought after because of the ease of which DD-WRT can be installed on it. I have it installed myself and the wealth of functionality it gives you compared to the stock firmware has to be seen to be believed. Linksys should go the Buffalo route and ditch their own firmware in favour of it.

Dale Parish

Actually it turns out my Apple //c has an older datestamp than my IBM...

ED E

Khannie wrote: »

It was in the first batch of quad cores they produced (along with the Q6700 iirc). I am still using mine and have no intention of upgrading it for some time yet. It can clock to 3GHz, though I have it running at stock as I have no need.

3? Most do 3.6 easy, 4 with a good board!

My main rig atm:

Amprodude

I have a Dell optiplex pc dating back to 1996, still works but have it stored in a press. It had a intel pentium I processor 133mhz, 6GB harddrive. Cant remember how much RAM it had. It had windows 95 as its OS. Ancient piece of equipment at this stage.

I have a fujistu scaleo desktop that was bought back in september 2004. Its over 8 years old and still going and always on for hours nearly every day. It has a 2.66 ghz celeron D processor, 1 GB of ram which was upgraded in 2008 from 256MB, Intel GMA graphics and 30GB HDD. Its running on xp and still working fine. I use it to download crap and testing other stuff and programs i download like a virtual machine. Big difference to that and my two laptops i have which are both brand new and high spec.

The next oldest thing i have is a dell printer all in one bought in 2006 but has very little printing done so there should be another 10 years left in it. I have two external iomega hd drives one bought in Dec 2006 and the other in Dec 2007. My logitech speakers were bought in Jan 2007.

Everything else i have is post 2011

13spanner

Our home computer is a Dell Dimension 2400, which replaced the Windows 95 that was there previously

Squeaky the Squirrel

Original Gameboy, I use it to play Tetris when I'm over at my friends pauls place doing the business.

melekalikimaka

Cyrix 6x86 PR-166-based system with 16Mb RAM, 1Gb hard drive and 14-inch monitor, just for command and conquer and cm2 97/98

0ph0rce0

Typing on this as we speak

yoyo

13spanner wrote: »

Our home computer is a Dell Dimension 2400, which replaced the Windows 95 that was there previously

Father had one of those 2400s alright down in the holiday home. Remember playing Vice City on it . One of the worst case designs ever where the USB ports hid under the flap, lost many USB keys in college forgetting about them when the flap stopped staying up.

Nick

10-10-20

I think that I can whop you all with this beast...

My photo server is a Dell Precision 410 workstation, which was last powered on only 2 days ago.
Bought in 1998, running 2x 450MHz Pentium II, 440BX chipset, with 768MB of memory, running Windows 2000 (SP4). It came with 2x 9GB UW SCSI hard-drives, but is now fitted with 2x 1TB and 1x 500GB SATA drives on a PCI SATA controller. It also has a gigabit NIC and a USB-2.0 card installed.
It's perfect as a backup target. Oh - and it has been spay-painted metallic green!

The kids' laptop is nearly as bad, it's an Inspiron D600 from 2002, Pentium M 1.6GHz with 512MB of memory running Linux Mint (mainly for watching Peppa Pig and surfing)...

What do I win?

trout

I have been using the same IBM Model M "clicky" keyboard since 1988.

It's a little grubby now, but I cannot get the same speed/accuracy on any other keyboard.

I have some spare Model M keyboards from the early 90's ... just in case.

Defiler Of The Coffin

10-10-20 wrote: »

What do I win?

An Atari Jaguar

Capt'n Midnight

trout wrote: »

I have been using the same IBM Model M "clicky" keyboard since 1988.

*envy*

Jijsaw

My good old Windows 95, first computer my parents had and they gave it to me to use

Dale Parish

trout wrote: »

I have been using the same IBM Model M "clicky" keyboard since 1988.

It's a little grubby now, but I cannot get the same speed/accuracy on any other keyboard.

I have some spare Model M keyboards from the early 90's ... just in case.

Have one too but it's the U.S. edition :mad: