"Walter Bright" <newshou...@digitalmars.com> wrote in message news:gj6mld$294...@digitalmars.com... > John Reimer wrote: >> Incidentally, I'm still using my Compaq Presario X1000 laptop (Pentium M >> 1.4 GHz) which is probably close to 6 years old now. I've updated >> certain aspects of it and fixed it a couple of times. Amazingly it keeps >> running... and performs quite well for my needs. > > As my main machine, I use a P4 at 1.6 GHz, 512 Mb ram. I'm not sure how > old it is, but when the power supply failed and I went to the nerd store > to replace it, the guy said "I haven't seen one of these power supply > configurations in years!" He sent me to the local pc recycler, where I got > one out of a bin for $10. >
Now that I don't feel like I'd be laughed out of the discussion in a flurry of posts involving words like "archaic": Mine's a: - 1.7 GHz Celeron (was a 1.2GHz AMD K6-2 for a long time, but I bought this CPU/MB off someone for about $25, seems to be about the same performance though (makes sense, Celerons are notoriously low on cache, or at least were last I checked)). - 1 GB RAM (Only reason I upgraded from 512MB was I had a job that needed MS's bloated .NET era SQL Sever client), - Graphics card that's pixel shader v1 (was a pre-pixel-shader GeForceMX 2 for a long time, only upgraded because I found this one for about $40 and wanted to play around with pixel shaders). - The motherboard's USB is v1.x - 21" CRT I got from a CompUSA store-closing for $25. (Funny thing is, this was made years ago and goes higher than HD resolution and has no native resolution, good contrast, no ghosting, no realistic risk of burn-in, and zero frames of "image processing" delay. Silly people and their hundreds/thousands-of-dollars LCD/Plasma/DLP HDTVs ;) ) I can't hang it on the wall, but what do I care? My desk's big enough. So, yea, about on par with you two. (Although I do have damn near a TB of HD space and still crave more...yea, I'm a packrat.) The only thing about it that I feel is insufficient is the number of PCI ports (it's one of those reduced-size motherboards...in a non-reduced-size case), but I'm still getting by. I do some occasional video processing/editing, 3D stuff (mainly to learn it), and gaming (but nothing like Gears of War or Halo or anything like that, besides I prefer to game on a living-room console). If I were to get really serious about any of those things, I would probably want a new system, but I don't do enough of them to really justify it. I would kind of like the convenience of a laptop (mine's dead), but the only reason I'd be interested in the fancier CPUs on that is for the reduced heat/power consumption. Speaking of laptops, if anyone hears about a company that makes quality laptops with an actual built-in trackball, let me know. I can't stand those awful touchpads or IBM's "nubs", and dragging around a real trackball in addition to power cord, etc, starts taking away from the whole "portability" thing. One other funny anecdote about "newer/trendier is not always better": I've been recruited by a friend of my mom to replace/supplement her small business's wireless network with a wired one. And now I'll stop rambling ;)