Advice Requested on Life Expectancy of a PC Windows System

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Jerome H. Fine

    > just how thin is the ice that I am skating on for system (a)?
    > ...
    > if the motherboard in system (b) is not too old at 7 years and 30,000
    > hours

One data point for you: I have a whole flock of old HP desktops (actually,
minitowers) from the late 90's (not sure of the exact date, but I _think_
they were released before Windows 98 came out) which I'm still running.
(They've been upgraded with the PowerLeap iP3/T CPU insert with 1.4MHz
Celerons, and Promise IDE controllers to run faster disks.)

Although I laid in spare motherboards, CPU chips, etc so far the only
problems I've had are that one of the iP3/T's died, and a mouse port died
(easy to work around, using a USB mouse). Of course, these are HP machines,
and relatively well engineered, so I can't extrapolate to other brands, but...

	Noel