Is everyone's home PC just an internet and gaming machine?

Mines used for Internet, Gaming and video editing.

I find games cheaper on PC and always prefer keyboard and Mouse over game controllers.
 
SexyGreyFox said:
In 88/89 I had 4mb and I swopped my mate for 16meg plus £400.
He said he didn't need that much memory :)
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He must have been listening to Bill Gates. I will admit it was an exercise and a half to allocate memory in DOS, if you did not look after the lower 640kb, the high memory was pretty useless. A very few programs ran large memory well. Config.sys and autoexec.bat were your friends. Before I discovered Linux anyway.
 
- regular video calls on Skype (since well before the pandemic)
- shopping
- gaming
- watching videos and streams on YouTube
- casting to my TV
- life admin incl. recipes
- listening to music
- writing music
- storage of my photos and looking at them / reminiscing
- collaborations with friends (Google Drive) and family (Dropbox)
- using my computer to troubleshoot other computers

This computer is in the kitchen and I'm always on it if I'm in. My monitor has 4 inputs and so my work's laptop is plugged into this monitor too as I'm still home-working. The keyboard and mouse has bluetooth and can support up to 3 devices, so it acts as a KVM for these 2 computers.
 
Watching films/TV shows, playing games, internet browsing, youtube/streams, ****posting on here and work. In that order.
 
Hagar said:
He must have been listening to Bill Gates. I will admit it was an exercise and a half to allocate memory in DOS, if you did not look after the lower 640kb, the high memory was pretty useless. A very few programs ran large memory well. Config.sys and autoexec.bat were your friends. Before I discovered Linux anyway.
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I was telling a young lad on Wednesday who thought he was skilled at building PCs how we had only 640k to work with and had to open a DOS text editor and write stuff in the config.sys and autoexec.bat.
How we had 3x different hard drives - RLL, MFM and SCSI and how cards had IQ numbers on them and you had to make sure the little black block went on the right one.
I said a dog could build a PC now.
 
Ah yes, the good old days of having different config.sys and autoexec.bat files to run different games.
 
And scsi had fast and ultrafast, maybe more, all had to have the correct IDE card as an interface. All hardware had a memory address and an IRQ assigned at boot and any clashes meant that it did not boot.

In addition there was no or very limited internet, just big thick books written by Peter Norton and friends on 'The IBM PC compatible' and 'Build your own PC' averaging a thousand pages in length.

Fun days :)

EDIT scsi ultra and wide ultra, versions 1 and 2.
 
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I have multiple computers at home. They are all water-cooled and have crap cpus and decent second-hand gpus such as 1070s or 1080s. They are used for folding@home to hopefully cure Cancer, Alzheimer's, COVID, etc. Has cost me a fortune in electricity although I have now stopped them all having earnt my ten billionth point putting me 142nd in the all-time donor contribution.

Unfortunately energy costs have now hit hard and they are all turned off except one I use for work.
 
Game occasionally, edit + export videos of said gaming even less frequently. Mostly just gets used to watch YouTube and Amazon Prime though, which I could equally do via the built in apps on my TV, but I prefer the interface (+no ad blocker for YouTube!) :p

2nd PC in sig hasn't been turned on in well over a year....my 'server' get's quite a bit of use though, running VMs for work related learning (I wfh)
 
time wise it is mostly a bitcoin miner. (actually Eth miner but am paid in BTC)

however its primary purpose is gaming, with a bit of web browsing and some video watching.
 
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