How long will Amigas last?

[Darrin]

I picked up a PET and a dual floppy drive unit for it a couple of months ago.  The PET worked perfectly and the floppy drive needed a quick head cleaning.  I'm sure they'll still be working in another 10 years.

The biggest threat to the life of an Amiga (battery aside) is the user poking around in places he doesn't need to be.  

[Darrin]

Those drives may be belt driven. The belts will eventually wear out or get brittle, but little else will break down.
I still have an old Timex Sinclair computer from 1979 that works. That's the oldest machine I currently have.

I just added a PETdisk (SD Card based floppy emulator) to the system.  I need to get around to doing a review of it for the Commodore Free magazine.  Nice bit of kit.  Acts as a giant floppy drive (more like a hard drive as far as the PET is concerned) and stores your data as files on a FAT32 formatted MicroSD card.  Can be configured as device 8, 9, 10 or 11 and has a pass through connector for other devices.

[Darrin]

My oldest computer is a homebrew z80 from late '76/early '77.  A friend and I built it as a project for a university class.  It still works.  We made it deluxe for '76, two 5.25 floppies and 64K of ram.  Scarfed the keyboard off an old dead univac terminal....

I'm glad computered came self assembled later otherwise I'd still be trying to assemble a VIC-20.  My soldering skills suck.  

[Darrin]

Seriously, change all the caps in your Spectrum, and the 7805 regulator while you're at it, and see what the display looked like when it was new!

Considering that most people were using Spectrums on 20" second hand ex-rental TV sets manufactured in the 1970s, a blurred, fuzzy and flickering display is what most of them got when their machines were new.  Aging caps just help to retain the effect.  

(I used my C64 on a back & white portable TV for years as our only colour TV was in the living room)