Desktops forum: Poll: How old is your current main computer?

Still runs fine for what I do....which isn't much of anything worthwhile.

We love AMD converts. Ah, ha, ha! Nice rig you built though, better yet that you scavenged parts from the old box.

Old box:
P 3.0, 2G RAM, 2x WD raptors, ATI vid, XP Pro, Office Pro

New box:
dual quad core Xeon 2.0, 4G RAM, 2x WD raptor, 1x 160G HD, Quadro NVS 285, XP Pro, Office Pro.

First thing to go in the new box will be the video. Should upgrade to a Quadro FX.

I'm a college kid. This is the laptop I got from my boarding school 2 years ago. Can't really afford to replace it and it runs Ubuntu fine. I would want to switch more if I gamed, but I do not.

You reformat every two months? How much do you have in your HD? I should think if you have much of anything you'd lose stuff that didn't re-load properly.

Seriously, why? Conventional hard drives only get so many good reformats. They are like CD/DVD-RW. You only get to erase it a certain number of times before its no good. Have you ever tried using something like CCleaner? Or how Disk Cleanup and Disk Defrag? I know reformatting keeps the thing fast, but every time you have to reload all your games, programs, and other apps (unless you have complete hard drive backup images). Now I use CCleaner and Revo Uninstaller. These clean out all the junk and remove any unused programs at my discretion without leftover registry entries. Keeps my Vista x64 PC running as quickly as the day I built it. I run Intel Core2Duo E7200 at 2.53 GHz, 4 gigs of DDR2 at 667 MHz, GeForce graphics card, and a 250 GB SATA II hard drive. Ultimately, what you do is your choice, but the above programs/suggestions may make your computing life a little easier.

Main machine is Win XP/Pro SP3 I had built in Feb'08: Indel Core 2 Quad 6600, eVGA nFource 780i MB, 2x2GB PC-6400 RAM, nVidia GeForce video with 512MB, SLI capable, pair of WD Raptor X's in RAID-1 for sys/programs; pair of WD Caviar 500GB in RAID-1 for data, Cooler Master case + PS; Floppy; modem, DVD. Have a ~7 year old HP laptop ... adequate because I require so little of it. Also an old Compaq driven by Linux/Ubuntu and a Mac PowerPC G4 with OS-X 10.4. Do web development on the XP/Pro machine, use the others to check web compatibility and to play with. New machine can be overclocked and the socket will take several CPU upgrades. Waiting for Windows 7 to spring for 64-bit computing. As is, am pleased with configurations.

The computer was built by a custom house in new york, and has a Q6600 quad processor, 4 gig of ram and 3 internal hard drives. I had windows Vista installed and Microsoft Office Small Business. I have also added tons of other things too. I use Pinnacle Studio 10 on it, and it is really a pleasure to do video editing with a quad processor and 4 gig of ram. It works smooth as silk. I also have Nero 8 installed too. I use Firefox 3 with Thunderbird 2. Also have Adobe Reader, Irfanview, Picasa 3, Hypersnap 6 which is a windows capture program, also i tunes and quick time. I have three other browser including IE7 which I never use. I use Zone Alarm and AVG 8 both free programs for security. There are also several other support type programs installed. Best computer that I have ever owned. Spared no expense to have what I wanted. I also have Memeo as a back up program for my 750 Western Digital Free Agent drive. I also have a nice array of Vista gadget programs sitting on the right side of my 24" wide screen Samsung Monitor.

I am not ashamed to say I have three six year old desktops with Windows XP as OS.

After tweaking similarly aged PCs owned by friends & neighbors, I learned that it is a matter of optimizing one's PC that he gets the best out of it. Even six-year old PCs can come to life like new if the proper tweaks, software & hardware, are made. A friend of mine had a Windows Vista but because he knew little found himself complaining his PC is slow. When I did the usual tweaking I do, I found out he could not achieve the speeds that his PC had because he did not take good care of it.

Some of the software I have tried that worked includes ATF Cleaner, CCleaner, nCleaner and Tune Up Utilities.

The computer I use most of the time (and the one I am using right now) is a Gateway laptop that I got in July for $400 off the regular price. It has a Core 2 Duo T5600, and 3 GB of PC2-5300 DDR2, running Vista Home Premium. I hated Vista until I got this unit. The fact that it came with Service Pack 1 helped (I still refuse to touch 64-bit Vista), as does this machine's power.

I have two other computers of my own, one of which came with Vista Home Premium, and the other with Home Basic. Both of them are now running XP Pro, because I couldn't stand the performance and instability. Even downloading SP1 fixed nothing; it doesn't seem to do any good unless it comes pre-installed. One is 2 years old, and the other about 1 year old.

built amd athlon 2400+, 768 mb pc2100, 200 gb total hd and a vision tek radeon oc 1300xge 512 mb graphics card. sony 4x dvd r/rw. win xp and is about 6 years old.

wife has a compaq 4000 series. Celeron 1300, 512 mb ram, win xp 40 gb hard drive w/cd/rw. It has a 128 mb ati graphics card. once you get past the 5 min. boot up, it runs well and never has had a problem. about 7 years old.

3 months ago decided to see what i could assemble for under 400. so after about month of comparing prices, specs and looking for free shipping on parts from newegg and computergeeks.com heres what came up with for 394.00.
600 watt power supply
Biostar am740g m2+ motherboard with onboard nvidia graphics
Amd Phenom 8450 2.1 triple core
4gig of OCZ platinum
Seagate 320gig sata HD
LG DVD sata Burner secure disk
and Leadtek tv2000 expert pci tv tuner/video capture card
Saved money on case because had emachines black and silver micro atx laying around.
Not bad for under 400. Definitely better than off the shelf system for same price.

I decided with the advent of walking talking grandchildren, I needed something I could do video editing on as well as work so I built a relative monster.
Started with am intel DX38BT Motherboard, combined that with 4g of DDR3 Memoryand q6600 cpu added a pair of ATI 3800`s in Crossfire, added a pvr 3000 video/tv card and 2 300g HDD`S and dual dvd drives with a memory card reader, all in Chakra case. Put the whole thing together with 2 Asus pw19 Monitors(The most sexy looking monitors in my opinion ever) and just for good measure and good looks a DiNovo Edge Keyboard and an MX revolution Mouse.
The black beauty runs on vista ultimate sp1, and I have never had any problems with it.I would also imagine that unless it gets stolen this machine will see me well through the next windows os, with the possible exception of upgrading the cpu to a q900 series.

It's a Toshiba Satellite A200-S01 acquired in January - 2.2GHz C2D, 2GB DDR2-667, 2x160GB drives, HD-ROM/DL burner, a/b/g Wifi, 512MB HD-2600 mobile video chipset, and thoroughly exorcised of Vista - XP SP3 with help from DriverPacks.net and nLite.

Battery life is...rather pitiful when compared to the iBook I refurbished - granted the iBook used no more than 45W at full power, the C2D CPU uses that much power itself - but I got it because of it's gaming ability.

Go ahead and laugh. I have a six-year-old Dell Dimension 2300 with an Intel Celeron 1.8 GHz processor and Windows XP. I still have a 3.5" floppy drive (do they still make those? Do people even *use* them anymore?), but I haven't used it in ages. The only upgrades I've made to it are adding 1 GB RAM to the memory, and an external DVD-RW drive. The thing still chugs along pretty well, but I'm thinking of upgrading very soon, once finances to do so become more available.