How old is your
home PC?
Let's do a contest of who's got the oldest
working (as in
used every day)
home PC.
Mine turned 6 years old exactly this month of Oct 2001.
It's an original Pentium 133. Although I bought it with less hardware than I have now, it now has 96MB of RAM and 3 hard drives: two 1.6MB, and one 2.1MB.
When I bought it in 1995, I ordered all the "extras" that would make it run the fastest possible: EDO RAM, VRAM (Video RAM) for the video card which also was extra, and pipelined-burst cache memory (256K) versus the cheaper and slower cache memory of the time.
It ran fast for a long time in part because I
do not have any of those
garbage programs running in the background that don't do anything useful and instead steal CPU cycles and take up memory.
An indication of those are the number of icons you have on the system tray at the bottom right of your screen (Windows).
I do use a relatively stable OS: Windows NT4, SP6A. Will not install 2000 for resources reasons.
It was in this PC that I taught myself HTML4, CSS, JavaScript and then (drum roll...)
JAVA! The JDK runs just fine integrated with TextPad for the editing, compiling and execution of java source files.
Only in the last year has my home PC begun showing it's age.
Programs that are noticeably slower: Internet Explorer 5.5, HomeSite 4.5 (HTML authoring tool), Netbeans 3.2 Java
IDE (VERY slow).
I also notice now more than ever, Web sites with pages charged with FLASH, animated GIFs and yes, there are still many Java
applets out there that we don't even know run on our PCs bringing us joy without the risks of Microsoft's Active-X components.
A year ago I got DSL and it seemed like my PC gained new life with the corresponding increase in Internet bandwidth. I postponed buying a new one then.
Now by December I want a new one (don't you think I deserve a Medal of some kind for waiting this long while earning decent money as a Java programmer

?)
I will not buy a new one until I solve, at least on paper, the problem of
transferring everything that I have on this PC, to the new one.
This, because I have in this PC stuff that goes back to 1992 which I transferred from two computers since, this one being the third to hold that information, and I don't want to lose it.
Yes, I have had a tape backup since day one but I need a better way.
The solution seems to be to find a PARALLEL or SERIAL port CD-RW that can record CD-R too (of course) and save everything I want on to those, and then when I get the new PC, transfer the files to it. Of course I wand DVD and CD-RW capability in the new PC.
My mission now is to find an external CD-RW drive with parallel or serial port capabilities
I hope they still make them!