Tom Austin wrote:
> Who runs an old PC at home as their main PC.
> 

I suppose this desktop is old, or at least aging, in the sense that I 
used to replace my computer every 18 months or so and this one has been 
around since early '02.  It is an Athlon 64 3500+ @ 2.2Gh and 2Gb ram
It came with XP 2002 and SP2 I believe. It has an ASUS mobo. My initial 
configuration had problems until I replaced the ATI card with nVidia. 
I've added an external hd, cd burner, and dvd player.  I also replaced 
the Powersource. It does what I need.*  (I still have my Mitsubishi 
Diamond Plus 70 monitor that I bought when I replaced my 200Mh with a 
400 back near the beginning of time.  The AMD 650 that this 3500+ 
replaced is still sitting under the desk.  It was such a reliable 
machine that I am superstitious about parting with it.  There are also a 
couple of laptops of that vintage around soemwhere too.)

One reason I have not replaced the desktop is that with a growing family 
the better leverage has been with adding newer laptops and peripherals 
to our home.  I just got a refurbished hp, AMD Turion (Dual, I think?) w 
2gb ram, running Vista, as a second computer to support my wife's 
growing internet use. That one has a dvd burner. That with a colour 
printer and my wife is happy. My daughter, currently in hs, has a little 
Compaq Presario, Turion, XP, w a useless 384Mb of ram, which she LOVES. 
Fine with me. My son, away at college, has an hp Pavillion, Turion, 1.8 
Gh, 1Gb ram, XP.  All three laptop purchases were the low-priced, 
pre-built, buyer-bait at the time.

I was stubbornly using the little 'dual' modem that Verizon initially 
provided to connect the desktop and my daughter's laptop to the 
internet.  Dual means that it provides both an ethernet and usb port. 
So I was using it as a two-port 'router' with a ethernet cable running 
over to my daughter's room.  Of course verizon techs would always 
lecture me on how I shouldn't do that but I liked it because there was 
no 'network'.  Each computer thought it was solely connected to the 
verizon server.  With the third computer I finally had to buy a wireless 
router and setup a 'network'  Outcome has been mixed.  While my fears 
that it would be a support pain in the neck were well founded, it 
generally has been easier to do than was the worst of my fears.

* The only limitation is heavy POV renders, media, isosurfaces, etc, but 
I don't think even the newer crop of processors is going to change that 
much.  If I can wait 20 minutes I can wait an hour, it's the difference 
between 2 mins and 20 minutes that changes creative behavior.

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