I think one of the most important points is to cover basic needs first. There are currently no operational computers in my study (taken all the monitors out so I can put in shelves), but one of my first actions was to cut and fit a shelf to put the modern printer on. My main desktop is BSD Unix, so ideally I'd get things working in that.

However, the dirty secret is that if I want to print and scan Right Now, I'm going to boot up Windows on the laptop, connect to the wireless printer, and use that. It Just Works(TM).

In the future it'll all be working under Unix, I'll be connecting a 25 pin SCSI scanner to my retro box, scanning using OS/2 (mainly for the lols, I suspect, but it's nice to use ImpOS/2 to scan with), and using an oldish HP Laserjet 4000 on a network print queue for B&W printing. Until then, use what works.

I also spend so much time in a browser that on occasion I've wondered why the Unix window manager shortcut keys aren't working, only to realise I'm using not just Firefox, but Firefox under Windows..

Ive been kind of burnt out of retro pc as well and back into retro console gaming and trying to run scart, thats whole new pain in the ass.

Heres the systems ill be keeping

System 1)Win98SE, 1.4GHz celeron, intel 440bx, 512MB RAM, 120GB HDD, radeon 9550. I may swap out win98 for ME cause i dont care to ever use dos mod.
System 2)Winxp, Dell Dimension 4700, 3.8GHz P4, 4GB RAM, HD4650, 1tb HDD
System 3)Win8.1, fx8350, RX470, 16GB RAM, 120GB SSD + 3TB HDD

Anonymous Coward wrote:

The only thing I'm tired of is going on eBay and not being able to find what I want. Compared to what it used to be the selection seriously sucks. We're scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Funny how things change in 10 years. Ebay used to be where people sold their used junk for a few extra bucks, now it is full of mostly full time e-waste sellers that don't have much vintage gear. I think most of the cool stuff is in collections or recycled.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

The only thing I'm tired of is going on eBay and not being able to find what I want. Compared to what it used to be the selection seriously sucks. We're scraping the bottom of the barrel.

This is my biggest problem. Ive had countless projects that I started and lost interest before I could complete them because it just takes so damn long to find certain components and not have to sell a kidney to get them.

I thought I also lost interest for a while but no.. it's just having too many parts and stuff that will probably never get used is what gets me. I used to collect mechanical keyboards, before that it was mostly 8-bit micros and of last 4-5 years it's retro PC stuff.

Now I can finally see a pattern here. I usually start obsessing over something and just keep hoarding stuff related to that. At one point I believe I owned around 50-60 mechanical keyboards! I still keep a small collection of Speccy/C64/CPC tapes as well as boxed PC games and the most prized keyboards. I also have lots and lots of PC hardware. But to get back on topic, my pattern is to hoard and hoard until I get disinterested after a few years. I also noticed that 95% of the stuff ends up unused which is kind of a shame.

That's why I've been trying to sell or give away as much of the stuff as possible for the past 7-8 months. It's going slowly but I'm getting there. I will also have to decide which retro PCs I want to keep.

Yep that's basically what I do also, I get an idea in my head, hoard a bunch of junk and then regret it later. 🤣