At 05:17 PM 9/9/2001 -0400, you wrote:
>Good point, but I don't do it to save electricity.  If IBM did a 5-year
>study, the study lasted longer than most people keep their computers. In 5
>years this computer will be a modern day 286 along with all the peripherals.

Well, I am viewing this on a 5 year old high end 17 inch IIyama Vision
Master Pro 9017E that I paid $700.00 for in August of 1996. It is sitting
next to my very high end 10 month old, 22 inch Mitsubishi 2040u monitor and
the picture is almost as good, and sometimes seems better. I am hoping to
continue using the IIyama for another 5 years! I also own a really crummy
14 inch SVGA monitor that came with a AST 486 Advantage Pro I purchased in
1993. I wouldn't want to use that monitor in windows for any lengthy
viewing, but it still functions adequately on my diagnostic bench in the
garage.

Hard drives never really become completely obsolescent. Storage is storage,
and even a small one can function as a big floppy in a mobile drive bay. My
old 486, which has a 500 meg Maxtor IDE drive running NT4 SP6a with
ZoneAlarm Pro and Sygate, runs as a backup NAT server for my Netgear RT314
router /switch. And it does a very good job!

A old 286 AT case too old to be useful ? There is a company that now sells
motherboards that will support a 1.2 GB AMD Duron in a AT case
http://www.amamax.com/812lmr1.html. I noticed this because I also have a
old 233 MMX in a Tomcat IIII motherboard running in a original IBM 286
desktop case with an original 200 watt PS. It runs as my answering machine
using Talkworks Pro 3.0 and as a network scan manger for my SCSI scanner.


Rode
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