How many old school systems still in use today? Post yours!

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garage1217

garage1217

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Apr 25, 2011
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Well I guess mine is not super old school, but pushing 9 years now and still in use daily! Definitely getting my moneys worth out of it as I spent top dollar back in the day / was all the latest and greatest. It was quite a little beast back then. It's larger brother which was on overclockers.com at the time in the #3 spot was dismantled and sold off but had similar specs / heavily overclocked with an asus a7n8x if anyone remembers that dream board lol

Specs of my soon to be retired shuttle built circa 2003 / almost 9 years old and still surfing the net.
- Shuttle SN41G2 N-force 2 board
- AMD Athlon 3200+ / 400fsb
- 2gb corsair XMS
- ATI 9800 Pro
- Old raptor drive, cannot even remember the size... have to check that. Like 36gb or something like that. Was first
available! Was in a raid 0 setup but had to remove the second after some issues with the raid card.
- WD 500gb storage drive
- Was watercooled for a bit but the little shuttle board just could not handle much past stock settings so removed the
koolance system and stuck with the stock cooler.
- Has had windows 2000, XP and now running on vista... Do not think I will bother putting 7 on it as I think it is about
time for an upgrade when my new work laptop smokes it in every way and it is nothing special at all "dell e6420"

No idea how long this little guy will keep running as it is almost totally stock / as it was 9 years ago with original PSU. Used daily for an hour or two for business / surfing. Hard to imagine this much time has gone by.

So that is the story of my old school pc, what is yours?
 
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Pretty much snap with you Garage:

Athon XP 2800+ Barton
Abit NF-7 nforce 2 mobo
GeForce 6800GT
1Gig Corsair XMS pc2700
80 Gig Maxtor ATA133 drive
8.4 Gig Fujitsu ATA66 drive (from a 1998 win 98 machine!)

But I am cheating a little - this was a recent rebuild of a 2003 machine that had spent a couple of years in storage, in order to return to some old school games (DOS!) with a win98 + winXP dual boot machine (my main machine is on Windows 7 Pro).

The 6800GT is an ebay upgrade from the original GeForce3Ti200 I still have, got a lot of use out of that, enough for the fan to die and be replaced!

Oh and I actually still have the bits for a K6-2 500 MHz machine with a Voodoo2. Not sure it all works now though.....
 
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I think I can win with oldest still operating machine:

1982 Kaypro 4 "Luggable" PC. 9-inch 80x24 green monochrome screen, 2x 394K 5.25 inch Floppy drives. Runs a Z-80 at 1.2 MHz, 64KB of RAM, runs CP/M. It has an external 2400-baud modem around somewhere, but that I don't use anymore.

 
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Nice old systems guys :) I totally forgot about the TI series vid cards haha! I had a few versions of those. Also for screwysqrl, I am speaking more along the lines of systems still in use / used daily or at least weekly. I think we all have a few real dinosaurs laying around like my old tape drive texas instruments keyboard pc that used a tape a drive! And I am talking about an actual cassette tape lol While it still works, it is not usable really usable at all for anything other than the few programs it had.

And I was starting to wonder if I was the only old school builder left :)
 
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I switch cables between the two machines depending on what games I'm currently playing and sometimes the old Athlon XP stays hooked up for a week and gets used for everything, having up to date software like Office 2010 etc, and it does everything beautifully (except playing Crysis on max, lol).

I have to say, and this is entirely subjective, but it almost seems like Win XP likes to run on a fast single core more than a slower dual core - since XP was never written for multi-core processors perhaps? Certainly my machine runs smoother than a Core2Duo (2.2 GHz) WinXP laptop I have here at work, although it may be less loaded with software!

nForce2 mobos rock. 😍

 
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I have to agree. 2000 and xp seem blazing fast to me on my old athlon but just so so on my newer multi core systems when I tried them out. Then I try to run a newer os on my old system and since there are no good drivers for the mobo or video card since they are legacy now... it just runs... ok. Ah well still getting my moneys worth out of my old turd. Have my eye on a new setup late this year. Love doing virtual builds on newegg without having to shell out cash lol. Trying to hold off my purchase until Windows 8 comes out. Will do another mini ATX build with decent specs. Will stick with AMD / ATI. Looking at an MSI board however this time around as the specs on their mini atx board look great... It is model number 890GXM-G65.

 
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Well I'm trying to upgrade right now, but my currently running PC is seven years old with an AMD Athalon 64 single core and a NVIDIA GT 9600 graphics card (that was an upgrade actually, a hand me down from someone else about two years ago). It's a dinosaur with only 250 GB of HDD space. I can't remember what the Motherboard is, but it's too old for a dual core upgrade. It's slow, slow, slow somedays, but that's probably because I've maxed out my HD.

It actually runs Dragon Age (on min specs), but struggles with cut scenes in ME2, and hates too much internet video for some reason. :)
 
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Not sure if this matches your category and i don't use it anymore but here it is:

CPU: AMD Athlon 2.0Ghz
Mobo:MSI KM266 Pro
Graphics: 64mb MSI FX 5200
Ram: 512mb
OS: windows 2000
HD: some 80g thing
 
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Win by unanimous decision! :lol:
 
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I still occasionally use a Gateway I purchased in 1997 with Windows 95, 300 MHz Pentium 2, 128 MB Ram, 2 GB HDD, AGP Riva TNT 32 MB video, floppy, and 100MB Zip drive. And I still have the 90 pound 19 inch Sony Trinitron monitor that I bought for about $1000 back then. The RAM was upgraded from the original 64 MB and the video was upgraded from the original ATI board that had 4 MB RAM.

I replaced it in 2004 with an HP with Windows XP Pro, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD, and an AGP Nvidia 7600 GS. It has been upgraded from the original 512 MB RAM and low tier ATI card. This is the machine I use daily. I have 2.5 TB of external drives I use for extra storage.

I just built a new PC and am troubleshooting it, it will replace the HP as my main PC once I get one issue resolved.

I have older PCs but they are unused: I have an Amiga 4000 that has a bad motherboard, an Amiga 3000 with a bad power supply, and an Amiga 1000 that I purchased in 1986 that now sits in it's original (but somewhat beat up) box waiting to become a valuable antique. And I still have the Epson 9-pin, the 50 MB HDD, and the 1200 baud US Robotics modem that I bought for the A1000.
 
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Its' nice to see all these beautiful old-school systems. Here is the rig that I’m using at this very moment, built in the fall of 2004:

Motherboard: Asus A8V (rev 1.02)
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 (ClawHammer)
HSF: Thermalright XP-120 heatpipe and Panaflo L1A Fan (68.9CFM)
Memory: 2 x 512Mb Corsair TWINX XMS 3200XL
Video: BFG 6800 Ultra OC
Hard Drives: 2 x Western Digital Caviar 1200 (120Gb, 7200RPM, SATA)
DVD: Sony DRU-530A DVD/CD RW
Sound: Audigy 2 Gamer (PCI slot 4)
Case: Antec P160 Mid-tower
PSU: OCZ PowerStream 520W
OS: Windows XP Professional

It’s still a good machine, but I’ve been missing PC gaming so most(*) of the parts for my new Intel Core i7 2600K/Asus GeForce GTX 580 DirectCU II machine are literally sitting in a box beside me. I normally update rigs every three or four years, but I missed the last cycle because I was working in a remote (fly-in) community in northern Canada where all I could bring was a (decent) laptop.

(*) Still waiting on the memory kit and the cooler fans.
 
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