Post your beater computers!

[drewdle]

Everybody has one, or has had one at one point. The desktop that's been around since the stone age. The laptop that weighs fifteen pounds, can be used as a wrecking ball, and gets 20 minutes battery life. You know the stuff. Technology that just refuses to die, or that we have to keep grudgingly using. You're either amazed, or frustrated, that it still works.

My present beast? An IBM ThinkCentre with a P4 2.8Ghz, 1Gb of memory (maxed out), and two hard drives shoehorned into it. Oh, and a low-profile Nvidia 6200 card. Cost me $50. Manufactured in January 2003. And being used right now to surf the internet, play music, and check email, thanks to the magic of Ubuntu.

Anyone else wanna post about their technological doorstops?

[H u nn Y]

LOL, I have one, I just have to find it, and when I do I'll take a picture of it and post it on here. XD

[Alloud]

My Windows 3.X PC (killer for DOOM, Disney and Lucasarts games), Windows 98 PC (forgotten the specs) and my Toshiba Satellite laptop running windows 95 have all made their way to the junkyard a long time ago xD

Compared to my desktop though, my current 6-year-old laptop is ancient history; 1.6GHz Centrino Duo, 2GB DDR2 @ 266MHz (Maximum amount, got it with 1GB) and the dreaded Intel 945GM which refuses to play games even from the last console generation at playable framerates, if at all. Only use it now for MSN, IRC, Facebook, light browsing, and school. d:

[Zen]

Beater computer? you mean the pile of 6+ cases that I need to scrap and recycle?

Right now I have an old laptop with a completely smashed screen running as a remote workstation and data host, and working on finding an IDE drive to revive my other workstation machine.

The laptop is a Toshiba 2 GHz with 512 MB of ram and badly needing more
The workstation is an old 1.6 GHz box with a gig of RAM

[WildEye]

My oldest is a Thinkpad 390e laptop (gotta love the nipple on thinkpads  ;D) with A PII, 64MBs of RAM and a few gigabytes of harddisk space. Works flawlessly with Windows 95, in fact it runs fine now and battery is good - hope so for ~$2500 original cost.

Desktop wise an old throw-a-away from a school when they were upgrading which was my first computer, came with a PII (500Mhz?), and a fancy ATi Rage Pro with 8Mbs of video RAM. I remember flash games were fairly laggy on it.  :-\

and the dreaded Intel 945GM which refuses to play games even from the last console generation at playable framerates

I had that one on a newer laptop for quite some time, they did not even enable hardware transforming and lighting messing up games that could otherwise run fine.

[Alloud]

Yeah, dat lack of Hw TnL ;-;
With the magic of 3D analyze and/or modded drivers and Sw TnL on Windows 7 it was still possible to get some of those games running (even Crysis), just never at a desireable/playable FPS. xD

[Tai]

I had a Toshiba 5200/100 laptop with a serial 3 button trackball Logitech mouse and Win 3.1 loaded.



Here is a link to the full specs.

[Coal Silvermuzzle]

 Hmmmmm, where to start ... anyone want to play around with pascal programming? I still have my Commodore  Super Pet, monitor, floppy drive and keyboard in one. I think I still have the 2 external floppy drive unit for it.

There is also the TI-99 4a computer with the external expansion box, with hard drive, 16KB or is it 32KB memory card, a plug in speech synthesizer and the game/programming cartridges. There were some fun and interesting games and programs on that one.

I still have my Commodore 64, with it's keyboard/processor unit, external drive unit and monitor. The monitor has a big ding in the screen, from when someone hit it with a ball peen hammer (we won't get into that story). Man that sucker is tough.

My Timex Sinclair, think i still have that one tucked away somewhere.

Then the good old Osborn suit case, now was that a 3 inch or a 5 inch CRT monitor built in? Floppy drive, that could be expanded to 2, mine only had the one, the spot for the other drive had a neat feature. Instead of just the face plate to cover the expansion slot, I had the in-set case that would allow me to store my floppies. now how much did that weigh again, 20 or 30 pounds, well at least it felt like it.

There is also my assortment of IBM desk tops. 8088's, 286's, 386's and 486's from the days when you will never need more the 640KB ... Hmmmm I wonder who came up with that number ... my computer now has 6GB of memory, 750GB internal drive and a 2TB external drive. Guess he was wrong!

Any of you techno geeks need some MFF drives?

Now the piece de resistance, I had to scrap this one, just couldn't set up the over 10 tons of air conditioning! A Sperry Univac (yes I had one) ... what can I say ... I like my computers and still collect some of them.   

[Slyther]

My dad kept around some really old stuff and only within the last few years has started taking it to the landfill. Saw a really old laptop that he had, my guess is early 90's. He told me of an add he remembers seeing as well, something about a few MB's of RAM being more than you'll ever need. I remember playing Dune when I was like 5 or 6, can't remember what the machine I played it on was though.

As for my old computer personally? It's about 6 years old now I guess, 80 GB drive, Geforce 7800 (One of the games I installed recently listed my exact card as the minimum card ^.=.^), 2 GB's RAM, dual core AMD CPU.

New computer's a complete beast though, will easily last the 4 years I have the warranty for.

[EmoFox]

I dunno how old my current computer. I got it from JestersKing, who in turn got it from his dad back in '07, who in turn recieved it from the place he was working at, and I dont know how long he had it/his work had it. It's a dell optiplex 270, I think? P4 2.66 ghz, 3 gb ram. 2 hard-drives, which I put in; an 80 gb, and a 200 gb, both IDE, and both from other frankenputers. and an ATI Radeon X1650. I can play Sims 3 comfortably, but I need to get a new computer for Diablo 3, :F

[mediar]

I tossed my old crap about a year ago. Our mediacentre is a PoS Median pc from bestbuy. Shoved a random ide HD and the modded a low profile video card (straightened the mounting bracket) to for the micro atx case. Works ok.. can do 720p ok.

[Kithop]

Old computers we have, or old computers we still actually use? ;)

Oldest I have are a Coleco Adam and an old Toshiba XT-based laptop.  No hard drive (that was an option), but it has dual floppy disk drives.  Double-density floppy disk drives, so I think 640KB or 720KB (not the 1.44MB of the later High-density drives). I think I have a disk for DOS 5 for it, and some simple card and golf games.  Blue-on-beige monochrome LCD. :D

The Coleco Adam (beefed up computer version of the ColecoVision) is freaking amazing, though - it has a cassette drive.. exactly like the audio cassettes you'd have in a Walkman or old boombox, but they had programs on them.  Came with a Buck Rogers game that was basically StarFox in sprite graphics, and QuickBASIC for writing your own programs.  Had a cartridge slot for ColecoVision games, too, and we have a cart for a '2010' game where you have to control an electrical spark, fixing burnt out/busted circuits all over the ship before it crashes into the sun. :D

[drewdle]

Old computers we have, or old computers we still actually use? ;)

Oldest I have are a Coleco Adam and an old Toshiba XT-based laptop.  No hard drive (that was an option), but it has dual floppy disk drives.  Double-density floppy disk drives, so I think 640KB or 720KB (not the 1.44MB of the later High-density drives). I think I have a disk for DOS 5 for it, and some simple card and golf games.  Blue-on-beige monochrome LCD. :D

The Coleco Adam (beefed up computer version of the ColecoVision) is freaking amazing, though - it has a cassette drive.. exactly like the audio cassettes you'd have in a Walkman or old boombox, but they had programs on them.  Came with a Buck Rogers game that was basically StarFox in sprite graphics, and QuickBASIC for writing your own programs.  Had a cartridge slot for ColecoVision games, too, and we have a cart for a '2010' game where you have to control an electrical spark, fixing burnt out/busted circuits all over the ship before it crashes into the sun. :D

I can't top that. However, my first computer was a Primax (Canadian company out of Ottawa that built custom machines for the federal government) 386/33 with 16Mb of memory, running DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11. My dad flipped his shit when I changed the wallpaper because he felt that messing around in the Control Panel might break the computer.  ;D

My current laptop isn't exactly a beater, but with the rate that people replace perfectly good technology I figured it's worth mentioning. It's a Lenovo T61, with Core2Duo T7200 (2.0Ghz), 3Gb of memory, and a 320Gb hard drive. It's three and a half years old, but runs like it's brand new. Running Ubuntu 11.10 as an OS.

Yeah I'm a Linux nerd. :)

[Drake Wingfire]

Oh god its gonna take me an hour to post this... (I got a main computer quad core, and a main laptop core I3 that I use daily) aside that...

I got the "music laptop" that sits in the bedroom hooked to a 2.1 set of speakers, I use it solely to play music when I go to bed, or 2 Sense XD
Specs: 1.6ghz P4, 40gb IDE HDD, 512MB RAM

and then I have a netbook
Specs: 1.6ghz Intel Atom, 2gb RAM, 500gb SATA HDD

Then I got a fat lappy that was my main one till I got my I3
Specs: 2.4ghz AMD Athlon 3500+, 2gb RAM, 160GB IDE HDD

Also got a "Media system" which is a old desktop hooked to a large home theater speaker system and a 32" TV
Specs: 2.0Gghz AMD Athlon Dual core, 3gb RAM, 2x 500GB SATA HDDs and a Nvidia 8800GT 512MB video card

then there is my micro junker, a very early 2000's netbook
Specs: 400mhz Intel Pentium, 256mb RAM, 12GB IDE HDD

Aaaaand.... I have 3 other old crap laptops, all ranging 1.6 - 2.0ghz CPUs, 512mb - 1GB ram and 40-80GB HDDs

....I think that's all of em.

[drewdle]

Oh god its gonna take me an hour to post this... (I got a main computer quad core, and a main laptop core I3 that I use daily) aside that...

I got the "music laptop" that sits in the bedroom hooked to a 2.1 set of speakers, I use it solely to play music when I go to bed, or 2 Sense XD
Specs: 1.6ghz P4, 40gb IDE HDD, 512MB RAM

and then I have a netbook
Specs: 1.6ghz Intel Atom, 2gb RAM, 500gb SATA HDD

Then I got a fat lappy that was my main one till I got my I3
Specs: 2.4ghz AMD Athlon 3500+, 2gb RAM, 160GB IDE HDD

Also got a "Media system" which is a old desktop hooked to a large home theater speaker system and a 32" TV
Specs: 2.0Gghz AMD Athlon Dual core, 3gb RAM, 2x 500GB SATA HDDs and a Nvidia 8800GT 512MB video card

then there is my micro junker, a very early 2000's netbook
Specs: 400mhz Intel Pentium, 256mb RAM, 12GB IDE HDD

Aaaaand.... I have 3 other old crap laptops, all ranging 1.6 - 2.0ghz CPUs, 512mb - 1GB ram and 40-80GB HDDs

....I think that's all of em.

Nice collection! Way to get the old machines working for you. You never mentioned OS, though; are all Windows? Some of those would make good Linux boxes.  :)