My Mom (87 years old, running her own e-business) has a 550 MHz Via C3 that works flawlessly. It doesn't crunch, and it also draws very little power. It's perfect for her.

At work (a graphic-art trade shop) I’m using a 733-MHz G4 Mac (“Clockwork” / PowerMac 3,4)—which has been crunching 24/365 since about 2004—and it’s still perfectly capable of doing everything I need, at a reasonable speed, except opening proprietary-format documents requiring a more recent application version than its OS supports. Most of our other systems (server, RIP, &c.) are ten-year-old 400-MHz machines.

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My first computer that I used was a BBC model B one, it had 32k memory and had to use a casette tape machine to upload programs. then I got an external drive that you could pit the old 5.25 inch floppys in. Then got an Acorn Archimedes, forgot what it had, this was in the UK think it was 1982 when I started using one, well it got my younger brother interested now he is a software engineer who has just been made redundant again due to the recesssion over here

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Well lets face it.

Most of us hanging around the forums are oldskool geeks and me included too.
Judging of the comments just in this thread :)
Purely love it.

Kind regards Vyper

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Addicted to SETI crunching!
Founder of GPU Users Group

As far as I am concerned, P3 and C2 are just fine hardware. I blame M$ for bloating Windows with each release.

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you are right:) Sometimes I feel like that picking up the latest tech gadget is obslete before I get to the front of the store for checkout.
Anyway your Q6600 overclocked is still quite a good performer. If you want to bubble upe to the higher ranks, just replace your video cards with a couple of fast CUDA cards. Your Q6600 should be able to feed them quite nicely as well as doing their own thing.

Cheers

Pilot

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When we finally figure it all out, all the rules will change and we can start all over again.

The first machine I used was vintage 1960's technology: it ran at a thundering 500 KHz.

Later, I worked for Burroughs, and was on the design team for the Burroughs A3.

There was a tremendous amount of pressure to get the machine launched, even to the point where we used some pretty expensive technologies to build the initial boards.

Why?

Because a year after release, the price had to go down 20%, and another 20% the year after. Each day of delay lowered the price when the machine was introduced.

... and that has pretty much been true for the entire history of computing: today's killer machine is tomorrows mid-range, and next years' recyclable.

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