I don’t normally keep my old Windows machines because, well, they’re just old Windows machines. There’s nothing really special about most old Windows machines as they tend to be either as cheap as possible, or life support for some video card that cost as much as the rest of the system…
But there is one more that I’ve held on to since I purchased it in February of 2007…
This is a Dell XPS M1710, and while I purchased it for work as a development machine, it mostly did duty as my World of Warcraft LAN party rig for a couple of years.
This was pretty spendy – around $3000 if I recall; it was the top-end configuration with a 2Ghz Core2Duo CPU, a gig of RAM, a Geforce Go 7950 GTX, a 17-inch 1920×1200 display, and Windows Vista Ultimate.
By the time it was retired in 2017 it was maxed out on RAM (4 gigs), had a 7200 RPM 500G HD in it, and Windows 7 ultimate… And had a dead battery…
One of the reasons I used this machine at work for a decade was the number of ports; it’s loaded with pretty much every port you can imagine… 6 USB2, Dual PCMCIA card, SD card, Firewire, VGA, DVI, gigabit ethernet, modem, A/B/G Wifi… And all of these are without dongles! The ports are all useful in various ways to an IT professional, so I continued to use the machine for work whenever Windows was needed for a long time.
These days it still gets pulled out on occasion when I need Windows 7 for something, like turning some old ISO into a bootable USB or opening some old archive. But otherwise it’s just another conversation piece from a bygone computing era.
Listening to "College Dreams" by Marvel83'