Here's a recently acquired oldie. A Dell Latitude C640. Boasting 2.0 ghz of CPU, 1 gig of ram, a new WiFi card and a 40 gig hard drive.

A friend gave it to me for free so I decided to fix it up and give it new parts and a brand new install of windows 2000 professional SP4.

I just love Dell laptops, they're so easy to work on. Between us, Sammi and I have three Latitude E6430's. Two have core i5 processors, the 3rd is an i7. The two i5 machines run Fedora Linux, the i7 has Win10. Personally I loathe Windoze, but I have some specialist software that won't run under Wine on Linux, so I have to put up with it, although fortunately not often..! They all have the add-on boards for mobile broadband, as well, just put a SIM card in and away you go, means we don't have to use public wifi with all its security problems if we go away.

Windows 2000 (SP3 at that point) was my OS before i moved to Linux in 2003. As far as Windows goes, 2000 XP and Server 2003 were the best of the lot

One of my laptops is a Dell Inspiron 1300 from 2006. It came with no OS (at big discount since it was "old stock" in the shop), and initially was mom's with Windows 2000 SP4 + Ubuntu with Gnome 2.x. In 2009 it became mine and got installed with Arch Linux (that was a period i was in Arch, but nowadays i am back in Gentoo) and KDE 4.x. I don't use it much anymore nowadays but it is in full working order with no wear or faults. I have only upgraded the RAM since it was new

It is buil well and works very well with Celeron M, 1GB RAM (upgraded from 256 it came with), and 40GB IDE HD which is probably 5400 rpm

My other favorite laptop model is Thinkpad X/T/R series, from the Core 2 era so T60/61/400. I don't really care for newer computers from the Core i generations



Public wifi is not a concern as long as you only use secure communication (for just web surfing this comes down to - are the websites you visit https and not http) and your computer is secure in general

Public wifi is not a concern as long as you only use secure communication (for just web surfing this comes down to - are the websites you visit https and not http) and your computer is secure in general

Public wifi sites are still too insecure. There are ways and means to sniff out what people are doing on them, irrespective of what type of website you're visiting. No way would I do online banking on one, for example.

I have a pay-as-you-go SIM card ("Three Data Reward" for anyone in the UK who's interested) that gives me 4G access for 1p a megabyte, with no monthly rental charge, I also get 200MB free a month, which is more than enough to quickly check emails and stuff when away for a few days. It just sits in the laptop and can be used anywhere there's a phone signal.

Public wifi is not a concern as long as you only use secure communication (for just web surfing this comes down to - are the websites you visit https and not http) and your computer is secure in general

As Ria says, public wifi is a concern to us, especially the open ones. They can easily be spoofed by a hacker setting up his device as a hotspot and then he can gain access to your machine if using snooping software.  

I've also just realised that the hacker can get the password for the wifi network of wherever he is, and create a network with a very similar name. Then he can try and get access to people's machines who think they're logging on to a secure network.

I still use windows 98 with some patience this site still works (Admins don't change it please )

Give the designed in security of your computer (assuming it is the Linux one) and web protocols (https) some credit

There is no way to gain access from public wifi into anyone's computer, not anymore than over the internet to anyone's computer connected directly to the internet. Computers don't just accept random guests from outside unless specifically configured to do so

The data that can be sniffed is what you explicitly transmit or receive. Be it you going to your bank account : it can be sniffed that "you" (a mac address) acessed "bank" (www.bank.com). It can be seen how much information you exchanged, so maybe an attacker can guess from that what pages on the bank website you visited. Everything else is encrypted well enough to keep out a random attacker, who does not own a big server farm to use to crack it

Faking an SSID - That can happen. But what is the difference between real "guest wifi" vs fake "guest wifi" ?

Free public wifi usually does not use passwords. If you don't expect to be asked for a password simply don't enter a password...

Faking websites you visit means faking a certificate, which then will fail the certificate check in your browser. Unless you click specifically to "continue anyway" you are not going to end up on a fake bank website

Well you can use public wifi if you like, Ash. I'll play it safe, the mobile broadband is built into the laptop and costs a minimal amount to run.

I've been looking at YouTube, and I think that this qualifies as an old computer.!! 

I’ve got an ORIGINAL Compaq luggable PC that I’ve had for years that I think the power supply went out on a few years back since it won’t power on anymore. I’ll GIVE it to someone if they want it as long as it gets a good home. I’ve got the original MS DOS 5 1/4 disk for it too so if the power supply is fixed there is an os. However the HDD board was thrown out years back since the drive died (dumb mistake) otherwise it has everything and is in decent shape for its age.

Wow, now there's a find if there ever was one..! That would be worth serious money to a collector of such things. No use to me and in any case getting it here would cost a small fortune, but someone out there will want it.

I don't really collect old computers, but I tecycle the hardware like RAM memories, hard drives, modules for other computers to make them work. If the computer is working I keep it. 

I collect and repair hardware from Pentium 4 and Core 2 Duo generation, this is the sort of hardware that is widely accessible, well made and can run well modern Linux systems. I have a few parts for the Core ix generations, but they are generally not as good quality as the socket 775 stuff

I have a few old computers like for example a 2003 Dell Dimension 4550 running Windows XP and is in perfect shape and a Compaq Presario CQ5110Y from 2009 running Windows 7 and both are very nice computers to use and the older one is super fast for it's time.