...Old computers, i.e., ones that have made it thus far in one piece, just seem to want to go on forever, and ever... and ever?! I'll give you an example. Back in my childhood [I'm 18 the now] I had a 486 given to me, when I was like, 10. It was probably the mid to late 90's, so yeah, about 10 years old I would've been. Now, in all honesty, it was pretty knackered when it was given to me. But it had a sound card! So I could play Duke Nukem. I had that machine up until around 2003. And it just.wouldn't.die. And in all fairness, I was not the most careful of kids. I borked the OS multiple times, teh thing would get too hot to touch after a while, and it was just generally a hunk of crap. But it just didn't die, until eventually I got rid of it. I have two really old machines just now. A Macintosh Performa 450 from 1993, and a Tosh 486 from probably a similar time. Both are lovely machines. The Macintosh in particular never ceases to amaze me. I got it from our old friend with system 7.1P, the OEM OS. Yeah, it still had it's OEM OS on it THIRTEEN years from its purchase date, and it worked flawlessly. I upgrade it to system 7.5.3 anywho. So one day I was bored and thought, let's see how tough the Macintosh really is... so I gutted it. Took it all out of its casing and ran it, in pieces, on my desk. Brilliant, it worked perfectly. So I decided hey? what if I were to accidentally remove the data cable from the hard drive as the machine were running... did that, and it froze during boot. Plugged the hard drive back in and guess what. THE MACHINE RESUMES BOOTING!! ...I decided that I had met my match, put the machine together again and it still happily serves me for nostalgia whenever I fire it up. It still has MS Word 5.1 from years gone by and Aldus Pagemaker too. My Tosh 486 hasn't been subjected to such abuse, and I doubt I would, but it runs like a champ, stablest machine I've ever set eyes on too. My current workhorse, a Medion MIM2080 [came with XP, but ran badly so I put 2000 on it!] is 2 years old, but I have a feeling it will just keep going as well... Sorry for the long boredom post but I'm just wondering... does anyone find that the older the machine is, the tougher it seems to be? :) Medion MIM 2080 Toshiba T2130CT Macintosh Performa 450 All working wonderfully.

Well, yeah. But manfactuers got a LOT more money for those old machines as well. They could afford to built them that tough. I have several old machines as well, and a lot of old parts that still work fine. However, here's an example; I have a IBM Thinkpad 775c that I brought almost 6 years ago for $25. The guy actually found it in a dumpster, after replacing the CMOS battery it still runs fine. When that computer was new in 1994, somebody paid over $4000 for it. That old piece of crap 486 your talking about probably sold new for around $2000, without a monitor or even a CDROM. No, they don't make 'em like they used to, but let's be thankful we don't have to pay what we used to either!

Way back when, companies actually tried to make quality, long lasting products. Now all they care about is MONEY! Yeah, the products are cheap, but at the cost of quality! A good example is VCR's. My father owns a JVC VCR he bought in 1984. To this day, it still works perfectly. 2 or 3 years ago, mom bought a new VCR, and it lasted for less than 6 months before breaking. She bought another one, a different brand. Same thing after a year. She then bought a VCR/DVD combo of a different brand. It still works a year later, but it likes to eat tapes. To make matters worse, there are still 10 or so companies that still make VCR's (Magnavox, Sylvania, and Citizen, to name a few.) but the mechanical parts and the user interface are all made by the same company. I found this out because I found that all 3 VCR's that we went through all had the same interface, they all made the exact same noice when injecting and ejecting a tape, and they were all incredibly slow rewinding. I got a Citizen VCR for christmas back in 2000. It was 90 dollars from Wal*Mart. It has been a great VCR and to this day still works. (Although I lost the remote, lol!) Just my 2 cents, -Trent "If at first you don't succeed, skydiving may not be for you." -Our tour guide at Fenway Park in Boston, MA.

Lol @ piece of crap 486. It isn't a piece of crap, and it's a laptop, tyvm. :) Medion MIM 2080 Toshiba T2130CT Macintosh Performa 450 All working wonderfully.

Still running my C64 from the 80's and a selection of Amiga's from the mid 80's early 90's. Great machines, all of them! MOS 6510 rockin @ 1MHz!!!

Ahh the Amiga days -- I still have fond memories of Workbench 1.2 :) Oh and Superfrog was the best damn game on there ever! Also have an old Sinclair Spectrum 48k (the one with the rubber keyboard) and it works like a charm too. I actually remember my first program too lol -- although I think every kid did this and went wow at some point :P 10 PRINT "MY SPECTRUM RULES" 20 GOT 10 RUN The best part was getting into binary and user defined graphics! Very fond memories and many a sleepless night (mostly waiting for Chucky Egg 2 to load up - god that game wasted so many months of my life!)...

I used to do that kind of thing on the C64's they had running at places like K-mart, something along the lines of: 10 PRINT "KMART SUCKS!!!!" 20 GOTO 10 RUN Chucky Egg 2!!! I couldn't even finish number 1 :-o Coffee...The true life blood of the IT Industry!