Weekend Open Forum: What legacy hardware do you still use?

[Shawn Knight]

Many of us have heard the saying about hardware being outdated as soon as you buy it. It can be rather frustrating to purchase a brand new setup with your hard earned money only to have something else launch a month later that’s faster or better, but that’s just how the hardware game is played.

The good news is that your “old” hardware is still very usable and likely will be for quite some time. But sooner or later, hardware of all type will reach that dreaded end-of-life stage; that is, if it survives that long.

Things like the 3.5-inch floppy drive, a PS/2 mouse or keyboard, PCI cards and 56k modems – all of these were cutting edge at one point but Father Time has since caught up to them. Heck, one could even argue that the optical drive isn’t a necessity anymore as evident by a number of notebooks and Ultrabooks shipping sans DVD drive.

With this week’s open forum, we would like to hear if any of you still use legacy hardware on a daily basis. Whether it’s one of the technologies listed above or something completely different, if it’s outdated we want to know!

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https://www.techspot.com/news/48555-weekend-open-forum-what-legacy-hardware-do-you-still-use.html

 

[Lurker101]

PS/2 mouse with ball

 

[Lurker101]

Actually, would still regularly using a Commodore Amiga A600 count?

 

[oldikes]

the oldest piece of PC tech in use in my house is a phenom 1.

Probably is my hp vf15, but it works all the same anyway.

 

[Wendig0]

I have a dot matrix printer that still gets used regularly, other than that all my tech is up to date.

 

[mailpup]

I have an HP inkjet printer with a parallel port connection I still use. I also have a floppy drive installed in all my PCs along with a PS/2 mouse and keyboard. I even have a zip drive in one of my active PCs.

 

[TomSEA]

My rig is pretty cutting edge, but I still have both a blu-ray and regular dvd burner installed. The regular dvd will go away with my next build and it remains to be seen how long the blu-ray will hold out.

 

[Mister_K]

PS1/PS2.

Oldest piece of tech, hard to tell without going through the garage/loft cleaning but most likely my PS1. In my PC, I guess the DDR2 ram :3

 

[Guest]

A BluRay Drive... -_-

 

[davislane1]

I still use a 3D interface to control my workstation. Upgrading to a current generation bio-neural hybrid as soon as I can get the cash together though.

 

[davislane1]

Damn! Posted to the wrong time period. Please disregard...

 

[scumbag]

I've got an Audigy 2 ZS soundcard in my PC
The reason I still use it is the very beautiful & functional front bay with loads of inputs & outputs.

 

[PC nerd]

I've got a 99MHz Pentium single core processor with 128MB DDR RAM, a GeForce 6200e AGP graphics card and a 16GB hard drive.

I am Badman?

Also got a computer with Athlon 4400+ 2.3GHz Brisbane, 2GB DDR2 800MHz, GeForce 8500GT and a 300GB hard drive. But that's not particularly old.

Current is Phenom 955 OC 3.8GHz, 8GB 1600MHz DDR3, Sapphire 6850 1GB OC 980/4680MHz and a Samsung 830 64GB SSD.

 

[Tgard]

I still use my PS2 Microsoft Natural Keyboard (1997 or 8 maybe). Works great and it's what I am used to. One system has a PS2 trackball, DDR2 and still has a floppy drive that hasn't been used in years.

I have used and transferred my SoundBlaster X-Fi Platinum Fatality-Live Drive PCI, to the last 3 systems I have built. Still works great but airflow sucks with the Live Drive.

Not to long ago I ditched a SCSI card and 1GB SCSI drive that I always used for a swap drive and temporary drive. Worked great for working with editing graphics and really was pretty fast to have all my temporary files, caches, swap files and using it as a working directory for everything that needed a working temporary directory. ie. media conversion etc.

 

[techanswers1]

I use a first gen icore 5 450m laptop form HP that is uses a vga output for a projector that needs a hdmi output not a vga so vga port is obsolete and needs to be out of all laptops with digital support (except for companies)

 

[Guest]

Three legacy pieces of hardware I use quite frequently:

1. Logitech TrackMan Marble: the best trackball ever!
2. Plusdeck 2C: internal audio cassette deck to record cassettes into the computer. Is the same size as a CD drive, is built in on my desktop computer. Works great!
3. Cuecat: actually, a reworked Cuecat scanner that scans barcodes for computer input. Sits on top of my desktop computer and is used whenever I need to!

 

[Technochicken]

I use a 12 year old PS/2 keyboard, and up until recently a 12 year old 15" LCD as my third monitor.

 

[Guest]

I still have an Apple iie floating around that gets used occasionally along with a plethora of legacy equipment from the late 80s. We even have a "laptop" that is about 6 inches thick with a 7-8 inch screen on it.

 

[Guest]

A working athlon xp 2000+ with 256 mb ram and radeon 9600 xt.

 

[Guest]

Well something I use daily would be my keyboard with is AT keyboard and I have an adaptor to PS/2.

Fairly regular I have an Amstrad CPC464 sitting on my desk next to me complete with greenscreen awesomeness of the GT64 Monitor

 

[Guest]

- Cyrix PR200 desktop. 166MHz and 96MB of EDO RAM in all of its glory.
- PS/2 mice (some optical and some ball) and keyboards. There was a serial port mouse on the Cyris that sadly died a couple months back and got replaced by a USB mouse.
- 52x CD-ROM drive
- HP DeskJet 940c printer hooked up via parallel port. Has a USB cable, though. Printer still runs strong.
- 5.25" floppy drive, though I probably should be backing my media up.

 

[killeriii]

My WHS is powered by a pentium 4 socket 478.

 

[dmill89]

Every PC I have still has a 3.5" floppy drive. I rarely use them but they are cheap so why not, they do come in handy every now and then (small files, BIOS updates, etc.) . I also still have a track ball on my main rig (I've always preferred trackballs to standard mice). My old (now retired) server has a 5.25" floppy and a DDS tape drive in it. I've still got a K6-2 500mhz system that I use for DOS programs every now and then.

 

[Guest]

I still have an old Dell running Win98se with a Pentium 133mhz, 64MB EDO Ram, 2.5GB hdd, 10/100 Nic, 3.5" floppy, and most importantly... 5.25" floppy. It's used primarily when I have a customer that has 5.25" disks that need data pulled off.

 

[hitech0101]

LG dvd rom yup its only a dvd rom cannot even burn dvds.