I have, since my first machine in 2004, owned 2 other complete systems:
- a Dell Inspiron desktop Core 2 Duo (Conroe) system boasting 2GB RAM and 160GB HDD
- a power-hungry and underperfoming Pentium 4 Prescott system (3.06GHz/1GB RAM)
I currently primarily use the old P4 and it's still pretty decent at 2.66GHz and 0.5GB of RAM. It also sports a DVD-Writer and 250GB HDD, all SATA. The other systems are used by those close to me for one reason or another.
The Dell Inspiron is my most recent machine. It got 3-year warranty on it (which was quite a surprise) so I'm not touching its insides. This system currently dual-boots with Windows XP which a relative of mine uses for music production, a task he claims FLOSS can't satisfactorily fulfill.
I should note the other systems I use at work:
- An HP Core 2 Duo Conroe 1.86GHz/1GB RAM desktop, my primary workhorse for building Debian, which dual-boots with Windows XP since it actually is a shared machine for those I work with in the area (about a dozen people), and of course a bit over-powered for what is claimed to be an 'email-checking' and 'printing' machine. I just manage to find time in-between these email/printing sessions to have it do the grunt-work.
- a recently-acquired Pentium M 1.7GHz/500MB RAM HP/Compaq laptop which provides quite decent performance too and a claimed battery life of 2+ hrs. This system also dual-boots with Windows XP since nearly all that we need at work uses it. It's also the system where I do software/programming study and miscellaneous reading on since it's the only system at work I have exclusive access to. [expansion/update]
I've neglected to mention the other 2 systems I'm not interested in, which I use at work for some work tasks, both Windows-based (and going as far back as Windows 98!), and both under-powered but pretty well-suited to their specific tasks (except that I still have to use micro-floppy diskettes), and also uniteresting because they aren't running my favorite operating system, Debian.
That's 6 systems in total all running Debian, 3 of which dual-boot with Windows XP, 1 dual-booting with Windows Vista (the Core 2 laptop), and 2 (including my primary system, mt first) purely Debian. Of these, the only one with internet access is the desktop HP system at work actually, mainly because web-access in SA isn't nearly as affordable as I'd like.