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

Lysander · 13 May 2022 at 13:17

BowdonUK said:
Eventually we'll all just have a terminal with a screen, keyboard, and mouse.

It'll be like the old Unix days.

Why would you need a mouse for a Unix terminal?

You don't need a mouse for Dunnet

dan958 · 13 May 2022 at 13:30

General internet browsing, voice chats, gaming, and video editing.

ED209 · 13 May 2022 at 13:52

Mines used for Internet, Gaming and video editing.

I find games cheaper on PC and always prefer keyboard and Mouse over game controllers.

SexyGreyFox · 13 May 2022 at 14:06

Hagar said:
I upgraded my 286 from 1mb to 2mb I remember, the upgrade cost me something like £75 in 1991.

In 88/89 I had 4mb and I swopped my mate for 16meg plus £400.
He said he didn't need that much memory

Hagar · 13 May 2022 at 14:27

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

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.

Pawnless Endgame · 13 May 2022 at 16:37

- 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.

Raikiri · 13 May 2022 at 16:47

Watching films/TV shows, playing games, internet browsing, youtube/streams, ****posting on here and work. In that order.

SexyGreyFox · 13 May 2022 at 17:30

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.

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.

Hades · 13 May 2022 at 17:40

Ah yes, the good old days of having different config.sys and autoexec.bat files to run different games.

Hagar · 13 May 2022 at 17:43

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.

Deleted member 77746 · 13 May 2022 at 17:43

Bit of everything.

Gerard · 13 May 2022 at 18:25

Central porn distribution and fapping hub :cool:

Stu999 · 13 May 2022 at 19:11

Gerard said:
Central porn distribution and fapping hub

No hamsters?

Gerard · 13 May 2022 at 19:25

Stu999 said:
No hamsters?

They have their own....enclosure. :eek:

uber soldat · 13 May 2022 at 20:07

Stu999 said:
No hamsters?

Fapping hamsters? :eek:

MikeTimbers · 16 May 2022 at 21:55

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.

savagesam117 · 16 May 2022 at 21:56

I game on occasion and use it to play music. Otherwise it sits there looking pretty

TrojanWhore · 17 May 2022 at 10:27

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!)

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)

bigmike20vt · 17 May 2022 at 10:33

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.

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

Capodecina