I buit my XP SFF rig for dedicated retro gaming a couple of years ago and to be honest I do a lot of day to day tasks on it instead of booting my more modern Windows 11 build. I just use last MyPal build, and 99% of sites work perfectly, even YouTube and GitHub. Only lately I see a trend to block me saying "you browser is not supported" but probably most a forced disclaimer than a technical limitation.

^^
If that machine is considered retro/vintage, then I haven't been daily driving much else at home for the last 16 years. Probably the last time I did anything "productive" here was when I still had to go to school, which must have been a little over a decade ago or so.

I use my PowerMac quad G5 to create D-VHS dubs of some of my favourite flicks. Is this a productive use of old hardware? Well, it keeps my D-VHS deck fed and keeps me from buying pricey D-Theatre tapes off of eBay, so... I guess?

For most transfers, I even let the four mighty PowerPC cores handle the video conversion! Why not, right? The Mac's connected to the network, so if my source file is 1080p, I can just grab the movie off of my file server and convert the 264 stream into a 1080i MPEG-2 TS right there on the G5. However, if the source is 4K, then I do the 2160p HDR -> 1080i SDR conversion on my main computer* before shuttling it over to the PowerMac for D-VHS transfer.

*which is multiple orders of magnitude faster than the G5 at transcoding. So why not use the modern computer for all transcodes? Well, something just feels incredibly right about encoding high def video on a 2005 workstation-class machine before watching it on a 2005 high def CRT TV. This entire setup would've been absolute, bleeding-edge insanity 20 years ago! Oh, and my main computer doesn't have FireWire. Even if it did, I'm fairly certain Windows hasn't supported 1394 since the Vista or 7 days.

I'm doing like maps to serval games here, from Wolf3D to Unreal Engine 1. Visual Basic 6 helped by ChatGPT, other ai's and more projects I cant tell.

Most of my old machines are still used for things other than games, though thats not to say they are not also used for games in some cases.
I would say I have very few machines that are only used for games in fact.

I recently bought Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS for instance to see what its like to run my household accounts from one of those old machines.

I have to say there isnt a lot of difference between that and on Windows 10 really.

Not sure if considered vintage but my Micro ATX XP machine dual boots into Linux, and I use that for web browsing,watching videos, and producing Libre Office documents.

Specs are:
- i7 3770k
- 8Gb RAM
- GTX 750 Ti Low Profile.

RetroPCCupboard wrote on Yesterday, 20:00:

Not sure if considered vintage but my Micro ATX XP machine dual boots into Linux, and I use that for web browsing,watching video […]
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Not sure if considered vintage but my Micro ATX XP machine dual boots into Linux, and I use that for web browsing,watching videos, and producing Libre Office documents.

Specs are:
- i7 3770k
- 8Gb RAM
- GTX 750 Ti Low Profile.

The attachment 20250107_210344.jpg is no longer available

those specs i consider "modern" and good for linux, nice to be able to dual boot like that. Nice pic anyway, and array of books suggests productive things related to programming might happen here?

gerry wrote on Today, 10:52:

Nice pic anyway, and array of books suggests productive things related to programming might happen here?

Not as much as I would like. I am learning assembly right now. I would like to try making some games. Starting with the very limited 8088 processor first, as I think MS DOS programming is a good starting point. I would like to try to make something like Chuckie Egg that runs on this processor.