I have an: Support for an Intel® Pentium® 4 Extreme Edition processor in an mPGA478 socket with a 800 MHz system bus Support for an Intel® Pentium® 4 processor in an mPGA478 socket with a 533/800 MHz system bus How long do you think I can get by with this system?

Until you can't do what it is you do with the computer. There is no time line. I have a 700MHz SlotA Athlon system still running. All it is used for is email and browsing. You can do that with even less power than that. The real issue is support for the OS (operating system). If that is WinXP with SP3 you may be able to run past 2013.

If the electronics never experience any kind of power surge or physical abuse, such as water damage or something, then they can easily last for decades. I have a IBM Thinkpad 755c from 1994 which still works fine. It is severly limited by current standards, but it will still do e-mail, chat, and browse the Internet in text mode without any problem. Typically the first things to fail on any computer is the hard drive or the power supply. Which is why you should always maintain backups of any data you have on the hard drive which you consider important.

I agree. My 755C is on daily. Main machine is a 2800+ Barton and bedroom "multimedia machine" is a 2400+ TBred. I don't buy games until they're under 10 bucks and I'm good to go for Far Cry, C&C Generals, MoHaa, Age of Empires III, CoD, etc. It'll likely remain this way until I have the insatiable desire to play Call of Duty 8 or Doom 12. Skip

I have a Socket 939 an Athlon 64 X2 4400+ system and it still does everything I need it to do and then some. Sure it's not highend like it used to be, but with some upgrades over the years like going from 2gb to 4gb of ram and going from a Geforce 7900GT to recently upgrading to a 9600GT, i'm set for at least a couple more years. If it's broke, then blow that sucka up!

found 4 identical P2 computers on the way to the library one Saturday,a few years back. plain white desktop boxes, with shuttle hot 637 boards and P2 300. the boards had 4 ram slots and agp slot, manufactured in 1996 or 1997. on one, Max'd the ram at 512mb, installed a 64mb graphics card & 20 gig HD, then installed XP. My sister-in-law is still running it, kids and all. Next time I need to reinstall windows, I'll set-up a dual boot with some version of linux. larry

If you already have or install a high-end graphics card and blu-ray disk drive, you can even watch Blu-ray movies with your current system and make it a media center. Regards SuatCINI