> From: Jerome H. Fine > just how thin is the ice that I am skating on for system (a)? > ... > if the motherboard in system (b) is not too old at 7 years and 30,000 > hours
One data point for you: I have a whole flock of old HP desktops (actually, minitowers) from the late 90's (not sure of the exact date, but I _think_ they were released before Windows 98 came out) which I'm still running. (They've been upgraded with the PowerLeap iP3/T CPU insert with 1.4MHz Celerons, and Promise IDE controllers to run faster disks.) Although I laid in spare motherboards, CPU chips, etc so far the only problems I've had are that one of the iP3/T's died, and a mouse port died (easy to work around, using a USB mouse). Of course, these are HP machines, and relatively well engineered, so I can't extrapolate to other brands, but... Noel