My best is a Pentium M 740 on a desktop MSi Speedster board, 1 GB of DDR2 and windows XP at the moment.It has a geforce 6800 graphics on PCI-E. It is doing fine for now, but I do kinda miss my core2quad that is out on loan(probably permanently).
It is a lot better than the Celeron D 2.4 I was using a few months ago on a semi-permanent basis though! 🤣
Funny as I will spend money on retro gear but will not buy a new system for daliy use. Ridiculous I know!
And yes, this is my everyday system, first port of call for all tasks.

Best,
Chris.

BSA Starfire wrote:

My best is a Pentium M 740 on a desktop MSi Speedster board, 1 GB of DDR2 and windows XP at the moment.It has a geforce 6800 gra […]
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My best is a Pentium M 740 on a desktop MSi Speedster board, 1 GB of DDR2 and windows XP at the moment.It has a geforce 6800 graphics on PCI-E. It is doing fine for now, but I do kinda miss my core2quad that is out on loan(probably permanently).
It is a lot better than the Celeron D 2.4 I was using a few months ago on a semi-permanent basis though! 🤣
Funny as I will spend money on retro gear but will not but a new system for daliy use. Ridiculous I know!
Best,
Chris.

No ridiculous at all. That's the point of the thread when new hardware simply is no more interesting, like people driving very expensive 60's cars . 😁
By the way I win, using K62+ 500,384MB and 9x/ME. 😁

Cool, my second best is a Cyrix 6x86 MII 333 running windows ME, it fact I have two pretty simialar builds with same chip & OS onr ALi & ATi, other is SiS & Matrox. My only moderish device is a iPhone 3GS, but by todays standards that is ancient history too.

BSA Starfire wrote:

Cool, my second best is a Cyrix 6x86 MII 333 running windows ME, it fact I have two pretty simialar builds with same chip & OS onr ALi & ATi, other is SiS & Matrox. My only moderish device is a iPhone 3GS, but by todays standards that is ancient history too.

Nice! I wanted to make a cyrix build too. Nowday my second is a 386DX-40 but a bit difficult for everyday tasks. 😁 A system I would love to use as main pc is a Slot based first-gen Athlon. I hope to build one with those giant heatsinks. 😎
I used in past a lot of Atom based hardware and found them great considering speed->power required. Not comparable to ARM hardware but still great considering "new" os's like seven or xp.

My next build is going to be a socket A and Duron "Spitfire" 650MHz, always reckoned these were one of the best CPU's of the era but now much under appreciated. They were best speed vs. cost by a country mile back in the day. that and I have 4 of them sat here for the last few years un-used to it's time! 🤣

BSA Starfire wrote:

My next build is going to be a socket A and Duron "Spitfire" 650MHz, always reckoned these were one of the best CPU's of the era but now much under appreciated. They were best speed vs. cost by a country mile back in the day. that and I have 4 of them sat here for the last few years un-used to it's time! 🤣

I had the 750Mhz version in those days and I agree, for the price it was like night and day compared to the K6-2 550 standard. I could easily feel the difference anywhere on the os or games.
The Athlon slot 1000Mhz is one I'd like now but also a K6-3+ 500 and up (not overclocked) system. The K6-2+ is great but still not enough compared to the original K6-3.

In late 2000 we had a Compaq P4 willamette(not sure on speed, suspect it was 1.4/1.5, replaced my old Macintosh Quadra 800 or maybe 7100, know we had PPC in office but the 68k's hung about for near a decade) from work with a new fancy HP laserjet & a home made Duron 650mhz on VIA with a really cheap AGP S3 card, I think it was a TRIO3D/2X(well it came out of my pocket!), I could never tell much difference between the two(plowing away on word 6 for hours a day!). The Compaq was in south facing room and Duron in north, so I used to migrate with the sun! 🤣
I think it was 2007 before I replaced that Duron with a new shiny Mac Mini core duo & that was only because collegues were all OSX this OSX that.

😁

After tried the early 64bit cpu I switched to notebook since those times, Pentium M and Atom's. But I always felt notebook being a bit fragile on keyboards, heat and battery. Not to mention vintage notebooks.. So vintage desktops are the one for me at least the PCI/AGP era, I never loved the whole pciexpress generation, maybe I'm old.

Not super keen on PCI-E myself, this happened to be the fastest desktop board I had to hand and my ONLY PCI-E video card. It has been good as gold though despite being crammed into a old packard bell P4 case I found on side of road! 🤣

My only pciex vga was a x1800xl on a dual agp pciex mobo but i bought it too late for the games i had so my last high end card. The 9500 L shaped ram was the last i liked!

Way back in 2006 I attempted to use a Pentium II machine as a daily machine. I thought it would be a neat little experiment. I lasted about 2 weeks. Windows 98 was just driving me bonkers.

These days, my use of older computers is limited to Win9x/DOS/console/home-computer gaming and experimentation. I don't even have a dedicated XP/DX9 gaming rig anymore (just one year ago, I had two machines dedicated to running XP era games!) Turns out that my 4.5GHz 4930K running Win7 is more compatible with DX9 and even DX8 games than I had originally thought! And it loads and runs those games so freakin fast that I can't imagine going back to anything slower.

Don't get me wrong--I still love collecting older hardware. Whenever I see anything remotely interesting being thrown away, I take it home and usually keep it. Experimenting with older gear and pushing it to the limit is always very fun. My collection of old hardware and software is bigger than it's ever been and I will continue growing it. I usually fire up my 98/DOS machine (Tualeron-1400, V3-3000, two sound cards--the whole shebang) once a week to engage in some serious old-school gaming. It's even connected to the internet! I'm not too concerned about malware--none of that stuff affects Win98.

But my computers that see daily use are always going to be modern systems. Using a Pentium II as a main PC was an enormous pain in the ass back in 2006; I doubt it would be any better today.

I actually do a lot of writing on my vintage box. Turn off the lights, turn down the brightness and make it orange-tinted, and write.
I free-write there and then pull the files in plaintext off to edit.