My family tends to be a bunch of pack rats, and we've been hoarding a bunch of old computer parts over the years. We're doing a big clean-up to reclaim some space, which means some equipment will probably have to go.

This afternoon I went through and did a quick test of all the PCs and monitors. I'd been told that most of the old stuff back there was busted or at least on the blink, but I was surprised to find most of it in pretty good nick. The CRT monitors were a bit worse for wear (although one is really quite good), but apart for a couple of dodgy CD drives all the PCs work fine. I'm now wondering if it's worth keeping some, and if so, which ones and for what?

The oldest computer has a 486 DX 33Mhz CPU with a whopping 8 Mb of RAM. I'm sure it runs Doom quite well. It runs surprisingly well, and the computer case feels like it's made out of armour plating.

There's a whole bunch of Pentiums and Pentium knock-off Cyrixes, all around 100 to 200 Mhz and all running Windows 95. It's hard to tell which of these is the best. A few of these have busted drives, but there's enough parts to swap a few over.

The fastest computer in storage is a Pentium II 400 Mhz, which is new enough to be running Windows 98. I'm debating about whether to keep this one as a test machine, but I think the specs might be a little too low. It does have DirectX 8.1 on it which really isn't that bad for the sort of stuff I'll be making. The graphics card is a Nvidia Riva TNT. 2D games mightn't need that much in terms of graphical grunt though, although I have some ideas that might push the poly count.

I'll probably keep the CRT monitor that appears to be in good shape, as they're hard to find these days. However I'm up in the air about the computers. A Windows 95 machine might be nice to the run old Windows games that can't be emulated in DOSBox and aren't compatible with Windows XP or Vista, but that's about all. Same with the Pentium II running Win 98: I expect most of the time it'll just be gathering dust. Hmmm.