My 11 year old PC is still running perfectly. PII 450MHz, 512MB ram, 32MB nVidia GPU.. etc.

At the time this was the highest spec I could get. Purchased in 1998 for some mad amount like £3000 because I also bought a 21" monitor for design work with it. I'm just imagining the amazing PC I could build these days with the same money.

What it does show is how robust computer hardware seemed to be back then. That PC still has the original motherboard, CPU, Ram (plus extra) and PSU. If this had been a more recent PC I would have expected the PSU to fail by now, and possibly the motherboard too. They have become that much more likely to fail.

Unlike Steve though, this PC hasn't been my main system for many years. Too slow and out of date to run any current games or software, and most emulators would now struggle. But it did serve me well as my main PC for about 4 years before I built my next PC in 2002 with an Athlon XP.

It was upgraded a lot since the orginal purchase, but last year I realised I hadn't used it much in recent times so I stripped it back and returned it to nearly its original setup. Installed Windows 98se back on it and it is now being used a retro dos/win9x box.