My Dell Dimension 3000 will be 4 years old in March and somehow I’m still doing quite nicely, thank you, with 512MB of RAM. :eek:
With two adults and two kids (one toddler, one preschooler) we actively use:
One work laptop (Lenovo T61) for me.
One IBM T41 laptop for the Mrs.
One eMachines desktop (bought more than 2 years ago, and it was refurbished then) for video editing and kids stuff.
One ancient Compaq Armada M3000 running Ubuntu 8.04 to play kids songs for my preschooler and surf PBSKids.org.
Then in the basement, I’ve got connected to my KVM switch:
A Server for my wife’s website and music file sharing.
A Pentium II system running Smoothwall as my router.
A Frankenstein P4 system that I run Bittorrents from, and remotely control.
An IBM R51 laptop that has a bad screen (blew out three inverters trying to fix it) on a docking station. Haven’t figured out what to do with it yet.
A quick mental inventory of our one-bedroom apartment arrives at a total of 8: :o
1 pokey old Pentium IV running FreeBSD/pfSense as a Firewall/Router/Proxy Server
1 AMD Quad-core desktop running Windows Vista Ultimate (My main computer) This is on a corner desk in the livingroom, with the TV set up as a dual display for watching DivX movies or console/arcade emulation.
1 HP laptop w/ Core Duo processor running Windows Vista Business (my work laptop, goes with me practically everywhere.)
1 Acer laptop with some flavour of AMD processor running Vista Home Basic (my wife’s main computer.)
1 Dell Server running Windows Server 2003 and VMWare Server for a virtualized replica of my employer’s corporate network and database. (This machine also serves as a file server for my home network.)
1 relatively pokey computer of forgotten provenance hooked up to the little 19" LCD TV in our bedroom, which serves as a DVD player and plays DivX movies streamed from the file server. I think this has been used twice since October.
2 low-end PCs in various states of nearly-working, which I’ve promised my wife I will get up and running and unload via Craigslist any day now.
Acer laptop, downgraded to XP. Used for email and surfing, sometimes hooked up to the stereo in the bedroom when playing music, sometimes hooked up to the television in the bedroom when watching videos via XBMC. Also controls other things on the network via VNC or web interface.
Dell desktop in a back bedroom, along with the router and printer. It has 1.5TB of storage and acts as my server. Also does the majority of the downloading, as well as some DVD authoring and whatever print jobs I might need.
Netgear EVA8000 sat under the television in the front room and hooked up to a 5:1 surround system. Streams video, photos and audio from my network and podcasts off the internet.
Recently retired is an old HP desktop that used to live in the frontroom. Hooked up to the stereo, it looked after my music and handled podcast downloads. Sat in the kitchen at the moment. It might stay there as a kitchen computer, might go into a cupboard or the pantry to be a server.
Also in use are two PDAs. Mainly for listening to music or watching videos when out and about.
Got a couple of unused boxes. One’s an old Compaq lappy with no screen that’s sat under the bed. Keep meaning to use that as the basis for a MAME cabinet, but never quite get around to start tinkering.
The other is an old Compaq workstation. That might end up being another server or kitchen computer, but pretty much only gets powered up if I fancy faffing about with Linux. Something which happens about once a year.
I have two laptops (a mini Dell and a Tablet), there is a laptop in the kitchen, I’m currently on the workstation in the living room, we have a file/media server and a small 486 based filewall in the network room, my daughter has a new Mac in her room, I have three for the recording studio - soon to be four.
All of these computers are used daily in one way or another except the recording studio computers (the studio building is currently under construction at the moment).
I also have two other complete systems which are doing nothing.
So,. 12.
I also own my own dedicated web server which is located in a datacenter. Even though it is for personal use (my websites) I’m not going to include it because it isn’t really a household device.
I think I could build at least 3 other systems out of parts I have around the house.