How old is your primary desktop's oldest working component?

[Sandy Bridge]

Simple, how old is your desktop's oldest working component?  Do you always build brand new, or do you carry over components, and if so what has survived the longest?

 

For me, the oldest component is an internal floppy drive from 1995.  It still reads floppies just like it's the '90s!  It'll probably get carried forward to my AM5 rebuild whenever that happens, thanks to a floppy-to-USB-header adapter I bought a few years ago.

 

It did have a nearly 20 year vacation, however, so the oldest parts in terms of time connected to a power supply are my mobo, CPU, case, oldest fan, and oldest hard drive, which all date from 2011.  The SMART stats tell me that hard drive has 8.5 years of power-on hours.  Don't worry, it's a backup drive, and there are cold-storage backups of that backup!

 

Anyone else rocking some reliable vintage hardware in their main rig?  I know there's got to be someone on the forum who bought a PCI expansion card in 1997 that's still working today!

[Aaron44126]

I'm a laptop guy these days, but I do have some old USB stuff still hooked up.  Still hooked up to my USB hub at my desk is an Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive, which I bought in early 2008 (literally a few weeks before HD-DVD died as a standard).  I bought it because I wanted to be able to play both HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies, and I was purchasing a new laptop with a Blu-ray drive built in.  (That laptop was my Inspiron 1720, which marked my transition from a desktop to a laptop as my daily driver.)  I do occasionally use this drive to rip DVDs to Plex.

 

Oh, I also have a USB 3.5" floppy drive hooked up to the same hub, which originally belonged to my wife (before I met her), which she bought in 2003 to go with her new laptop that did not have a floppy drive built-in.  I rarely use it but it has come in handy a few times to rescue some data that other family members had on floppy disks.  (Still having an A: floppy drive listed on my current Windows system is kind of fun, ha.)

 

I did a hardware purge a few years ago so I don't have much left in the way of old desktop hardware, but I still have a GeForce4 Ti 4600 graphics card (AGP) sitting in a drawer; I bought in 2002 when it was the best graphics card that you could buy ... the price for a top-of-the-line gaming GPU back then was around $300 USD.

[kojack]

Both my current systems were purchased in 2020. So 3 for both of them. 

[ryan]

my main rig is below. i have a 3060 hooked up but the cpu bottleneck is pretty bad

 

Harwell Dekatron

 

This is the Harwell Dekatron, also known as the Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computation or the WITCH computer. It was built in 1951, which makes it the oldest working digital computer in the world.

[Sandy Bridge]

Ah, HD-DVD.  I had a friend who bought that same XBox 360 HD-DVD drive a few weeks after HD-DVD died as a standard.  They went on sale cheap, $50 I think, and he reckoned he could buy the discs pretty cheaply too, which turned out to be true.  I thought about doing the same but there weren't quite enough films out on HD-DVD that I wanted to buy.

[K4sum1]

Well there are two possibilities. I have an internal 5.25 Blu-ray drive from 2009 or 2010. I have a much more modern one but it was being a bit finicky, and the older one looks better imo.

The second possibility is old PS/2 HP KB/M. I only have one PS/2 port so it's either or for what I have plugged in, but I always have one or the other plugged in. I'm not sure when exactly they were made, but I think 2005 or earlier. The mouse is a ball mouse btw.

 

Outside of main components I have a iPod 5.5 hooked up to my PC most of the time.

[ryan]

16gb jumpdrive from 2012