First post, by gerry
To follow on from 'could you build a pc right now' i'd be interested in how many working computers you have right now
by working i mean you can plug in power, input & output devices and it will boot up without serious errors
a prize and pristine new laptop is a working computer, an old pentium with just enough to boot, an empty hdd and no OS as yet is also a working computer
i've just counted, i have 20 ! quite a silly number really, many of them hover around the P3/P4 era too, lots of similar PCs, about a third are laptops. Glad i can pack them away well enough not to take up too much space!
its a number i'm neither proud nor ashamed of, just the accumulation of cast offs, gifts and very cheap finds over years and years. if it works, or can be made to work fairly quickly, i keep it. they're no use to anyone else, too old, too fragile and hardware is very much at budget end, no cool graphics cards
not a pre-pentium among them (and i actually regret letting go of the 3 slightly unreliable 486s i once had and a cyrix, some laptops and an old p75) I'd have more if i had never moved or cleared out!
(btw, we should include non x86 computers too, some people have all kinds of interesting stuff)