I lost a lot of my early gear when I moved interstate 15 years ago, I had some gear that was almost as old as I am, but unfortunately I had to find another home for them. I regret a few of them going out of my reach.

As to laptops and other computers. I was thinking other tech that just keeps on ticking, clocks, etc but i can sort of play this game..
Some of the gear I have kept since my move are as follows:

* A Dell CPx Pentium 233 laptop that I keep in storage, it's handy to have something with a real serial port and it gets dragged out whenever I need a terminal.
* A Sony C1 series Picturebooks. I had wanted one of these for YEARS since i saw them new in the shop and I ended up getting one (a PCG-C1XS) for a fraction of the original price.
* The same can be said about the Toshiba Libretto, I liked those and picked up a Libretto 50 a couple of years ago. Again at a fraction of the original retail cost.

I have some slightly obscure hardware floating about that I've kept "just because". My oldest two are a Sparcstation 5 which is sitting in the garage in storage with the Dell Cpx and a Sparcstation 20 that still works, but as it's old and rather noisy it has been retired from service and now serves as a stand to keep my desptop pc & NAS from sitting directly on the carpet next to my desk. I used to have a Sparcstation2, but I gave it away when I decided to cut down on the crap a bit.
Some not-as-old but equally obscure gear is my IBM PC 365, my Dec Alphastation 500/500 as well as a Sun Ultra 5...

My wife was given a PJammer alarm clock in the mid 80's and it's still going strong today. It was in storage for a couple of years but we dug it out five years ago and it's been beside our bed ever since.

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Yeah I know I'm flogging this horse, but I hope this helps. I got laughed at a bit for considering it, many jeers of "why bother? just get a ssd" but I'm happy, very happy.

If you've a spare 3.5 slot then consider investing in a Silverstone hddboost plus the largest ssd you can afford. Then make sure you keep the drive optimised with all system files to the start of the drive.

I can confirm that they seem to work reasonably well.

Further to this, the highpoint controller can either be configured to act as a caching only drive, which leaves your initial drive intact and only clones it. Or you can specify that it actively contains the ONLY copy of the indexed data. I believe this is called performance mode. I've not tested the latter as although I like the speed boost SSD's can give, I just don't trust them enough, given their usual/immediate mode of failure, whereas barring a catastrophic head crash you usually get a chance to notice a platter drive's problem and recover your data.

See my above post. The highpoint controller initially just indexes everything it can in the order it finds it on the drive (I wasn't able to determine if it was alphabetical or in order it was on the disk from start to end) and through a utility you can get the controller to only index specific directories and individual files that you deem worthy of caching.I definitely noticed a performance boost, not as good as it could be, but a lot better than it was with the drive by itself.

The hddboost unit on the other hand is pure mirroring of the platter drive until it hits the end of the SSD. Boot times are improved, as are general file accesses, but nowhere near as efficiently as if it was a pure SSD. I've not done a drive mirror comparison to see if that is an improvement again or not.

So they both do a similar job, just a little bit differently. I've happily kept both in my computer for over a year and I see no need to change this anytime in the near future.

I have my primary (1.5tb) drive connected to a 128gb ssd via a Silverstone "hddboost" unit. What this does is clone the first 128gb of your hard drive to the SSD. What you do then is to keep your hard drive defragmented with the OS and program files organised towards the beginning(cached) segment of the drive. When you do this make sure you put your page file to another drive so it and it's continual changes do not get cached to the drive. The bonus of this is that it is seamless, If I have the SSD die I can just replace it and off it goes and keeps working, if i decide I don't want it anymore then I just bypass it and the Windows install keeps working without missing a beat (I've confirmed that this is the case out of curiosity)

  Once you've got all your programs installed and have everything running it seems to keep ticking along quite nicely and provides a performance boost around midway between using a SSD and a platter drive by itself. Now this doesn't help you if you are one of those sorts that just cannot keep well enough alone and continually tinker with your system as changes will have to be re-cached and the boost will be negligible until it has gone and re-cached that first segment of the drive.

I've also got a slightly different system set up for my Steam games drive. Namely a Highpoint 1220 caching controller along with another 128gb SSD. I initially bought this second system to use for my boot drive but as it turned out to be such a massive pain in the ass to set up I ended up giving up and buying the Silverstone device and relegating this to caching my games drive to see how it would go performance wise. After some initial positive results many months ago I kept it on my system as it did improve things noticeably.

Oh and for those that care for such things, other specs for that system include 12gig of ram and an i5 3570, so I wasn't just upgrading one subsystem to the detriment of others.

And MH370 was spotted on the moon!

The answer I would have gone with is if you wanted to keep the same desk was to use a KVM and have things separated. Others suggested Clever VM ideas which I think are pretty neat. However you're right. There's no separation of systems in case things go to crap on one and you need to use another pc as a plan-b or you need to quickly interrupt your recording session to do something on the Dev environment for whatever reason (say you received an inane phone call at 9 at night from someone you've been waiting all week to hear from, etc)..

In any case there has to be some form of partitioning between the systems, be it physical or logical. One system configured to do all will find more limits than dedicated equipment/systems for each specific task

This is a quite clever answer. Thankyou. I'm not the asker (obviously) but still found this answer quite educational, especially when I read up on it a bit more afterwards. I'm surprised I hadn't heard of these kinds of vm's before.

Fantastic, That'll be nice and handy for me at least once in the future.

Thankyou.

In some places yes.

Firstly I'll agree with you on one thing, some people whom are parents, SHOULDN"T be. Unfortunately parental licensing or beating the dickheadedness out of someone are both things that aren't legal anywhere I know of. Just because some people are hopeless at being alive (and consequently being parents) doesn't mean that everyone should be tarred with the same brush. Some of us actually TRY to be good parents and try to lead by example to our children as opposed to just auto-piloting through and hoping things turn out ok on the other side..

Sometimes no matter what you do to guide or educate your children and how well behaved a child is otherwise, a kid is just going to off the deep end and just make a God awful racket regardless of where they are and you can't do a damn thing about it. That is aside from trying to parent that behaviour out of them, either at the time or afterwards. While all this is going on you still have to live a day to day life, you can't exactly go locking kids in the basement (a-la Fritzl) until they are old enough to not be an inconvenience to others.

All I can say is thank-you for not contributing to the gene pool.

Welcome to Australia.

Ten years ago I could get away with saying "thank Fuck I don't live in Victoria". Now New South Wales is equally as bad.