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How many computers have you went through?
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themadhippy:
After the spectrum-c16-memotch days
386 -25 with a whooping 1 Mb of ram and 40M hard drive
HP 486DX 75
And then triggers broom kicked in
cyrix instead 86 p166
AMD something or other,used the case, psu and drives from above.
core2 6600  just the floppy drive and card reader made it over  from the above
At this  point i realised the constant upgrade cycle of graphics card/psu/ram just to play the latest games was a waste of money and switched to an xbox for gaming.
my current main machine, I5 6500 still using the same card reader
 pentium gold 6405 for the workbench using the hard drive from the 6600

Also along the way theres also been a compaq 486 laptop ,an elonex netbook, a dell netbook  and a 286 salvaged from a skip.
 The longest lasting piece of kit is my trusty microsoft track ball
Infraviolet:
When one comes round to trying Linux one finds that the rate at which one needs to upgrade hardware massively decreases, you get your system working and if things slow down its easy to reinstall or update the OS to the next LTS version. So nice to get away from the way that, in the Windows ecosystem, each new OS from M$ is used as an excuse to make you spend again for new hardware when your old is still perfectly adequate. Running Linux daily on a laptop I've been using since 2014, have reinstalled OS several times (I use Timeshift to make a copy with all key programs already installed so I can revert to that easily) and have had to swap HDD once, but otherwise system going strong and performing as well as when new (actually performing better because it had Windows on when brand new).
Veteran68:
LOL I don't think I could possibly count them. I've been both programming and building computers for about 40 years, going back to the early 80's when the first mass-market home PC's hit the market. I haven't bought a pre-built desktop computer since the early 90's (a Gateway 2000 486 tower). Instead I build all of my own desktops and servers for personal use, and tend to upgrade/rebuild them every 2-4 years. At any given time I usually have about a half dozen computers in-use around me.

Right now as I look around my home office/lab I see 2 desktops (one Windows, one Linux), 4 servers (Linux), one Windows laptop, one Mac Mini, and two Macbook Pros. These aren't counting the surplus/retired laptops stacked on a shelf, the broken down laptop on my repair bench, nor my work computers. These will evolve and rotate out over the months and years, and I've never bothered trying to track them. It would be an interesting mental exercise, now that I think of it!
gnuarm:
My current Lenovo laptop is actually my favorite, and that's after having a Lenovo laptop two computers back, that was absolute crap!  It only lasted a year and worked horribly then!  I swore I'd never have another Lenovo.  LOL

My requirements include a 17" screeen (poor eyesight) and a full size keyboard.  What I mean by that, is the keys have to be full size, including the arrow keys!

So many keyboards now shrink the arrow keys to half height making them hard to use (for me anyway).  They also often shrink the numeric keypad keys to around 2/3 width, which is a bit strange as they have an inch of laptop on either side of the keys.  It doesn't interfere with my usage, so I don't sweat that.  But the arrow keys are a hard "no" if they are half size keys. 

Lenovo has taken themselves out of the running for my next laptop.  They are down to a single 17" model, which uses a cell phone like touch pad in the numeric keypad position.  How the hell can you touch type on a touch screen???  IDIOTS!!!

I will say, I'm sorry I didn't buy two of these.  Then I'd have a spare for when this one craps out.
hans:
I think I went through around 4-5 desktops and 2 laptops since 2000.

I upgrade desktops every 4-5 years or so.
First was a P3 450MHz, then a Athlon XP 2100+, Q6600, 3570K and now on a 3900X.
RAM usually quadruples each time. 256MB on my first machine, 16GB on the 3570K, and "only" 32GB on the 3900X as fast DDR4 was expensive back in 2019 (bought it at launch).
The Q6600 machine was also the first machine with a SSD in 2010. The infamous OCZ Vertex 2 120GB, that costed me 270 euros or so back then. It was crazy quick. I still use this SSD in my 3570K system as a HTPC.

Since the 3900X I don't see much point in "cheaping" out on PCs. I spend (a lot) of my quality time behind them, and waiting on a slow machine is a pure waste of my time. Especially once I realized that I am okay with spending 2k+/yr on travel as a box made of metal filled with dinosaur liquids, that I only use out of necessity, and preferably spend less than 3-4hrs/week in.

With that in mind I rather be in front of the pack rather than sitting out on an ancient machine for as long as possible. If I were to build a PC now, I would probably go for something like a Zen 4 Ryzen 9, 64GB of RAM, and a fast choice of 2-4TB SSD.  But right now for me there is no point; the 3900X doesn't bottleneck anything yet.
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