Zenith 286LP Plus. It's my irc system on mostly 24/7. Runs MS Dos5, Windows 3.1 and te PIRCH16 IRC Client.

Me and my wife are both running 775 systems. They are both based on the EVGA Nforce 680i with a C2D E8600 with 8 gigs of DDR2-1066 and 1050 TI's with ssd and PCI-e to nvme adapters with WD Black 500 gig nvme drives. They perform all of our daily tasks with ease.

I recently upgraded my old rig: Re: What is your everyday driver ?

The oldest non-retro-gaming system that I use daily is my file server. That thing runs 24/7 and is comprised of:

-Pentium M 755 @ 2.66GHz
-MSI Speedster i915 chipset motherboard
-2GB DDR2-533
-36TB of storage hooked up to a PCIe SATA RAID wedged into the x16 slot.

However, that system will be retiring in a few months, as I plan to upgrade my home network to 10GbE.

Would adding a 10gig card makes sense just curious

Would be my Thinkpad T61p from 2007. Still a great laptop!

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-05-25, 20:19:

Would adding a 10gig card makes sense just curious

Nope, the machine's just too old for 10GbE. The chipset and motherboard are from around 2005, so it only has two PCIe slots, one of which is being used by the RAID controller. The remaining slots are an x1 PCIe (gen 1) and a couple of conventional PCI, both of which are too slow for 10GbE.

Plus, the single core Pentium M CPU itself isn't fast enough to kick out those network packets at a 10 Gb/s rate. It's been an absolutely solid machine in the 14 or so years that I've used it as a file server, but to make the jump to 10Gb ethernet I'm just going to need a lot more CPU and bus throughput.

Makes sence to me and it's what I figured. I was just thinking of it as a stop gap solution. Any plans for that beast once it's file serving duties are finished?

Shoot, my 1995 NEC Versa V/50 sees a lot of work for a 90's PC....just this past year.....

- Sandbox for Ransomware notes for observation
- Test outside-LAN connectivity for an external FTP Server, found out they had wrong info given
- Write scripts for Imaging/New Hire Setups (with less distraction)
- Fetch files and resources outside the network for work-needs, ie break websites that don't like LInks then nab the resources
- Penetration/Security testing of potentially insecure resources (so we can lock em' down)

Heck, my M/75 and DX4 Desktop do e-mail and posts on this forum from time to time too using FLMAIL and LInks periodically. I also do Facebook through Windows 95 on those same machines using a highly tuned and modified install of RetroZilla. Mind you this IS with TLS and SSL modern protocols and old ones disabled. Plus the DX4 desktop does DAW work - that's right, a 486 DX4-100 doing multitrack digital audio in Cakewalk 5 - a lot of which can be moved over to BandLab or a bigger DAW if I run out of resources (Thought that's more for giggles usually than serious use case).

Seems in my house, 486 is still not fully obsolete yet, late era Pentium on up is still modern for most things except e-commerce - I won't use anything but modern Linux with modern security for that at this point.

My oldest machine in almost daily use is my P1 133 MHz non-MMX, DOS + w3.11 jukebox machine. The AWE32 in there sounds so much better than any other PC/onboard soundcard i own so i prefer this thing for playing demoscene/tracker music (mod, xm, s3m, etc) and also for listening to various online radio streams (mainly scenesat and quantum radio @TQW BBS).

Aside from various other retro machines i turn on every now and then my main PC is still a socket 775 Core2 Quad (Xeon version, one of the rare ones that just work in that socket).
Most people will probably consider this old and outdated by now...

I built this machine back in 2007 and since then it has received various upgrades, most of them when i got some hardware for free that was better than mine. I used to have a geforce 8800 gts, that one died after 3 years of use, then got a radeon 6850 which i've used until ~2 years ago. That was then replaced by a radeon 6950 i got for free, and shortly after a borrowed a RX 570 from a friend which i still have (and considering the insane hw prices i'll probably cling to the thing for as long as possible 😁)

The hardware is *almost* maxed out, 8 GB DDR2 is all the board can take, and the final upgrade will be a modded socket 771 Xeon but that'll need some fiddling extra microcode into the bios and i'm not willing to do this while i still depend on this machine for daily use.

Also interesting: Originally i used 2x 160GB IDE HDDs from my old PC, in RAID-0 via a PCI RAID card to boot XP (yay for slipping in the driver via floppy). Added a bunch of SATA HDDs over the years, installed some linuxes and a win8.1 on those alongside of that XP, and the latest addition was a NVME SSD that came from an i7 notebook that served for 5 years but died earlier than it had any right to.
Because the original win8.1 was installed in BIOS mode and the BIOS doesn't support NVME *at all*, I had to slap an extra SATA SSD in there that holds Clover (a bootloader from the hackintosh scene that can emulate an EFI on machines that don't have one) and use that with a bunch of extra EFI modules to boot the win8.1 on the NVME SSD (in EFI mode). It's crazy fast considering it was never meant to have that but the hacks required to get this working are kinda nasty.

Basically i just kept adding to the thing and most of the old stuff is still in there. The mainboard has stayed but cpu/gpu/ram changed over time. It's also been in a state of permanent overclock since day 1 so i'm amazed it lasted this long.

So umm... it's all a gigantic mess and there's a ton of OSes on the thing and i've lost track of which disks hold which partitions, etc. Hope that the thing holds on just a little bit longer until the crazy hw prices drop and i can finally get something new and start from a clean slate.
If you've played Factorio, this is basically the essence of Factorio in hardware form.

vetz wrote on 2021-05-25, 20:46:

Would be my Thinkpad T61p from 2007. Still a great laptop!

Oh yes, Thinkpads are great - I'm writing this post on a T60 with WinXP SP3 POSReady using New Moon 27 as browser, it's in daily use. Reminds me of repairing my T43p and T60p.

Also have a socket 754 AMD Athlon 64 (Venice) on a ABIT KV8 Pro-3rd Eye running Windows XP SP3 POSReady.

kind regards
soggi

Oldest and jankiest in "daily" use, though probably more like 4 or 5 times a week, is an Acer 1.6ghz Turion X2 laptop that fried all it's legacy i/o, so has a USB PCMCIA card and a keeb and rodent plugged into that. Running linux... the screen is nice... it's the workshop web lookup hack. I got that one for the grand price of free... as I did another more regular daily surfer laptop, Tosh A200 that has a C2D class in it, and had just a mechanically busted keyboard, so that's got a compact external one sitting on it too. That does alright still really for it's age. Then the semi regular DosBox donkey is a CeleronM with XP, that has the right shape screen, and manages about P100ish... I paid a whole $20 for it, because I thought I recognised it as a fast PentiumM model, but when I got it home nope... it could maybe take an upgrade... but mostly the story of my clunker laptops is they'd be a nice machine worth over a hundred bucks if only you spent $200 in new parts.

My oldest machine I use daily for modern tasks is a HP T5740 thin client running Debian 9 and Pi-Hole, it runs 24/7.
It's specs: Intel Atom N270; 1GB RAM; 2GB SSD. It should be around 12 years old.

if daily can be extended to 'regularly' then for online i have a couple of core duos of conroe vintage still fine for modern tasks

otherwise i don't have vintage daily machines, i tend to rotate one into regular use for a while depending on what I'm focussed on

nice thread, I've enjoyed reading others posts detailing what they do with older computers

I forgot to add my son's socket A system.
It's fairly well equipped
Athlon Thunderbird @1.2 GHz
1.5Gigs PC 133 ram
Abit KT7A-RAID
GeForce 4 MX460
Sound Blaster X-Fi fatality
Ultra X-Connect 500 watt psu
Pci sata card
500 gig WD Black harddrive
DVD rw drive
Coolermaster Centurion 5 case

He plays a lot of my and my wife's old school/educational games as well as doing a bunch of actual school work on it.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-05-25, 21:50:

Makes sence to me and it's what I figured. I was just thinking of it as a stop gap solution. Any plans for that beast once it's file serving duties are finished?

Not currently. Once it's finished as a server, I'll probably be shelving the CPU and board, at least for a while.

Back in 2007 when Core 2 was the new hotness, Pentium M-on-Desktop motherboards were dirt cheap on ebay, so I bought two MSI Speedster i915 boards. The second one is currently running a Pentium M @ 2.72GHz, GTX 260 video card, and XP Media Center 2005. It's housed in a SFF cube and sits next to my older consoles. Hooked up to a 34" 1080i CRT TV, it kinda serves as the gaming/media PC that I always wanted back in 2004-2005. 😀

Very nice. The Pentium M is a great cpu

A pentium 3/650 running windows 98
Actually it's a 866/133 running on a BX board so 650
That system has been together for a loooooooooooooooong time