# What got you started with PC's? Tell your story.



## Recon-UK (Sep 6, 2016)

Not sure if this will pass as a "club" but it don't feel right anywhere else, i suppose this would be a tell your story club.

So i spent my childhood and almost all my teen years on games consoles... they were awesome and never regret it at all.

Around 2005 i think? i went to a mates mates house and he had a PC with Black Hawk Down on it, and i asked if i could have a go and obviously they were all cool with that.

Loaded up online... i was EXTREMELY bad at it and well had to get used to KB+M but one thing is that it felt natural and i absolutely loved the feel of the controls even though i had to look where to put my fingers on the KB lol.



Fast forward to around 2008, i started buying PC magazines (PC Gamer, Custom PC, PC Pro & PC Format ) i believe one of those is actually Bit Tech.

Anyway one of the issues i think in late 2009 was what really got me into PC's, it had a content disc with demo's for games and video's, it also had 1 video that taught me very well how to build a computer and i would use that for my first 2 builds as reference and it became natural after 2 attempts.

Here is that video, this was uploaded in 2012 to Youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_mAjwf3j7g

With all of those magazines i read and read and read i built up a massive amount of knowledge just from reading those magazines, just how low you can scale and how high you can scale with hardware.

In 2009 i would build my very first PC and it was not for myself. I was in the Army at the time and was maiing a bit of money and had not seen my bro for like 4 years prior.

It had a Core i7 920.
6GB DDR3 i think 1333mhz?
Some nice EVGA X58 board not quite sure what it was.
2x GTX 285 SLi
Coolermaster Cosmos.

A awesome for the time DELL 1920x1080 monitor, again i apologize i can't remember the model but it was IPS.


This was a greeting gift from me when i met up with him as i knew he was big into gadgets and stuff and loved video games like me.


In 2009 i would go on to build my own system and it was a Pentium Dual Core 930 with a X1550... could barely play anything but was my tinkering machine, i learnt what thermal paste was with that PC, as well i used toothpaste and it did not work so great. Got her to 3.6ghz but liked to BSOD enough.

I then moved to AMD and got a Athlon II x4 640 and it was a great CPU paired it with a HD 4670 and was gaming in a cheapo TV with about 768P for max res lol but it played ARMA II nicely on ok settings 
It had a cheap ECS board and 4GB of ram so it was not going to be overclocked and i ended up giving it away to a good friend in the forces.

I then built another rig, this would have an AM2+ Foxconn board and one of the older Phenom chips.

Foxconn A7DA-S
I can't remember the intricate parts so forgive me, i re-bought a 4670 again since the one before served me so well.

I sold that and then built another PC, by this time it is 2010, yeah i built a lot in a short time but it was my way of learning and i loved every minute of it.

Phenom II 955 BE.
MSI 790FX-GD70
4GB DDR3 Kingston no name 1600mhz
ATi 5770 1GB from Sapphire
Gigabyte Odin 450 watt PSU.

The GPU came DOA and i sold it for 3 quarters the price lol, i then got a second hand 9800GTX+ and played on it for a long time, played BFBC2 all sorts, it was a great GPU!

Here is a pic from my old PhotoBucket account lol.

I was trying everything out i was exploring what i could do with a PC, emulation etc etc...

http://i915.photobucket.com/albums/ac356/amd655/desk.png
http://i915.photobucket.com/albums/ac356/amd655/Untitled.png
http://i915.photobucket.com/albums/ac356/amd655/Untitled.png?1473190542558&1473190543035

http://i915.photobucket.com/albums/ac356/amd655/desk.png?1473190542558&1473190543035

Then i heard that the Radeon 4870 was faster, got a 512MB Gainward Golden Sample... turned out it ran worse than the 512MB 9800GTX+ i had for unknown reasons and decided to wait until Nvidia dropped the GeForce DX 11 GPU's to see how it all pans out.


GTX 400 series released and all was said, i watched the arguments back and forth for both AMD and Nvidia, by that time the 500 series came out, and it was not long after the 400 series were out the gate that Nvidia answered with the 580.

I snapped up a brand new Gainward GeForce GTX 480 brand spanking new for the time for 180 GBP which was an insane deal, at that time the 5870 was not on offer and was 220 GBP it was a no brainer however i ended up buying a Corsair TX 650 to power it.

I stuck with the GTX 480 for 4 years until it eventually died, in 2011 i upgradeed from the Phenom II to Sandy Bridge with a i5 2500k, 8GB Gskill Ripjaws X 1600, MSI P67A-GD53 and a 1000 watt PSU because i wanted to SLi another 480.

This is how it ended up.

http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/1253/12539083/2375609-6630113054-2ebet.jpg


At the time i was thrashing most people, even single GPU benchmarks i was putting up huge scores next to GTX 570's and 580's, i was able to push a single card way further too as you can see below.

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/5654604

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/details/v8m2x

I enjoyed being an enthusiast overclocker and benchmarker for a while with both the AMD and intel systems.


Here are my results on Tom's Hardware for the insane CPU overclocks.

I am 384-BiT

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...18FHDWQLeVn95ml-XL-FsbY/pub?hl=es&output=html

Old thread.

http://forum.overclock3d.net/archive/index.php/t-45446.html

I had some of the fastest kit on air cooling going, and was proud of it at the time but ehh time moves on.

I sold one of the 480's and the original card eventually died, so i replaced it with a used Radeon 5850 which i actually benchmarked a bit but obviously was no where close to the class of the GTX 480.

In 2013 my GF passed away which sent me into a downward spiral of just staying at my PC for like 2 years, it just kept my mind happy because i enjoyed it and for that i took a massive hit financially. I had to sell off my Sandy system, i got over it and well things looked up, i still had the AMD system and gamed on it which at the time was updated with a Radeon 7770 which died after a years use lol, but i played CSGO on that for hours. Replaced that with a cheap GTX 580 and that PC is still running fine to this day with the original overclocks.

I now have the system in my signature.

Some video's of my older systems.

Sandy with the 480.




















These the Sandy system with the 5850.


























Phenom II + Radeon 7770.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ7ALuJ7VjU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S6Usjwphm4


Phenom II + GTX 580.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fws6OQsEhwc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMwyI6uWfP0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxBrV4oz9ek



I hope you enjoyed the read, i think i did pretty well to be honest and learnt a hell of a lot from trial and error than word of mouth 


Also i can't embed more than 5 pieces of media sorry for the odd looking post.


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## Seba_82 (Sep 6, 2016)

Very good and long post , my native language is Spanish so I do not know if I can express myself as naturally as you but I will be as brief as possible , my grandfather bought me my first computer at age 9 was a 486 DX2 , a few months the disarmament entirely and turned to assemble using only a manual that I got from a house of computer science, these mothers were configured via jumper. Then I had a Duron 800 .. Athlon xp ... and others who today do not remember . At the age of 17 years I did my PC Technician course , summarizing ... I have today 33 years and never think to leave this wonderful world of PC gamer.

I hope my English is not entirely horrible, thanks jajajaj google translator. see you!


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## Recon-UK (Sep 6, 2016)

Seba_82 said:


> Very good and long post , my native language is Spanish so I do not know if I can express myself as naturally as you but I will be as brief as possible , my grandfather bought me my first computer at age 9 was a 486 DX2 , a few months the disarmament entirely and turned to assemble using only a manual that I got from a house of computer science, these mothers were configured via jumper. Then I had a Duron 800 .. Athlon xp ... and others who today do not remember . At the age of 17 years I did my PC Technician course , summarizing ... I have today 33 years and never think to leave this wonderful world of PC gamer.
> 
> I hope my English is not entirely horrible, thanks jajajaj google translator. see you!



Thanks for your post, wow DX 486 that's way earlier than me


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## silentbogo (Sep 6, 2016)

I did not have a personal PC until I went to college.

My first experience was also with an old 486 at my mom's work. It ran DOS and had such excellent games as DOOM, Tetris, Prince of Persia... and Sexonix )))
At approximately the same time my granpa opened a workshop in the basement of a local university, where they had to clear out a giant storage filled with spare parts for some very antique 2-nd gen. transistor computer.

Then, at 5th grade, I regressed to soviet-made Corvette-86 (it ran on an equivalent of Intel i8080A) at the school computer lab. There I learned BASIC and first saw an 8" floppy and a humongous printer-sized external floppy drive.


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## erocker (Sep 6, 2016)

Dad bought me a Commodore VIC 20 sometime in the early 80's where it was "super cool" to code on.. Until I bought game cartridges and have been a "PC" gamer ever since.... Then a Commodore 64, some weird stuff like a Coleco ADAM, then I believe an IBM PC jr. where I spent hours playing a very slow loading Kings Quest. Then we bought a 386sx which I suppose would be the first "modern" PC. IBM COMPATABLE!!! I was hooked, then got a better 386, 486sx, dx, dx2, up to a Pentium III. Though there was a time as a teenager when I owned a PS2 and used it often. It was most likely the drugs and booze. Then around 2004 I built an AMD Athlon sytem with an unlocked ATi 9800SE and played nothing but Unreal Tournament 2k4. Now I have the PC that's the size of a large 90's CRT television and my actual television collects dust.


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## P4-630 (Sep 6, 2016)

My first own computer was a Casio casiopeia e100 palm top (bought it in 1999-2000 or so, when I was in Bangkok), (I was traveling a lot at that time) it had windows CE 2.11 on it.





I decided to buy a compact flash modem for it and had a dial up internet provider and I was able to send/receive emails on my own device everywhere I went in Thailand.
In 2003 I bought a packard bell laptop when I was back in Europe for a while, later on back in Bangkok and it had overheating problems, sold it and then I decided to buy a Acer desktop PC with Pentium 4-630, ATi X300, I wasn't traveling much anymore and had a fixed place, replaced the graphics card with a ATi x1600pro , then I bought a XFX 6800GS XXX , had it for a very short time and bought a ATi x1600xt, then upgraded to a Powercolor X1950PRO, which was a great card, and running very cool.
Had used the Acer a few years and decided to build my own PC, first I used the Acer case, bought a mATX motherboard with a intel e2200, did a little overclocking and it was fun.
Only a few months later I ditched the Acer case and bought a Lian Li case with GB ATX motherboard with intel e7200 and bought a HD3870, after a while upgraded to HD4870.
Then I needed to travel again and shipped the desktop to my parents in Europe and bought a few laptops for myself again after that.
I'm currently live in Europe again and since I have my own apartment now (March 2016), I decided to build my current Skylake desktop PC.


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## Recon-UK (Sep 6, 2016)

P4-630 said:


> My first own computer was a Casio casiopeia e100 palm top (bought it in 2000-2001 or so, when I was in Bangkok), (I was traveling a lot at that time) it had windows CE 2.11 on it.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



I love the story thanks for sharing, i did notice that you may have gone through more hardware than me lol.


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## blobster21 (Sep 6, 2016)

What got me started was *cough* all those erotic gif images *cough* i used to buy, download on the minitel network, and collect on floppy disks.

Almost the same year, my father bought me a compaq Presario (Fr 13.000 !! / Pentium 90 / 800Mb HDD / 16MB SIMM memory / windows 3.11)

Internet was not a big thing at that time (the premises with The Microsoft Network), and my 33,6K olitec modem was barely enough to browse and harvest all those alt.binaries.pictures.erotica newsgroups 

Still they managed to keep me "busy" for a while, and i got to learn a thing or 2 in the process 

edit : who said horny monkey !?


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## Sasqui (Sep 6, 2016)

Was laid off from an engineering job in October of 1990 ... went out and spent $3,000 on a 386/25 with 64KB mainboard cache and 4MB of RAM.  Read the entire DOS manual before opening the box, fired it up and was writing .BAT files out of the gate, even wrote a crude GUI to launch programs.

That purchase helped get me a job in the CAD industry, the company I started with 3 months later even bought me a math co-processor so I could run AutoCAD at home.  I left that company in late 1991... it was swallowed up by Autodesk in 1996 and I returned in 1998, working in the same building I left 7-8 years earlier.  Been through more PC's than I can remember.


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## Kursah (Sep 6, 2016)

My first experience beyond Apple IIe's in elementary school in the early 90's and late 80's was my grandparent's PC, which had Doom on it...I only got to use it when I visited which was mostly during Summer. It had Doom and eventually X-Wing and Tie Fighter to keep their remaining live-in kids entertained, otherwise it was a CAD PC. Well a series of PC's, but the one that was most fun was the one with the turbo button to go from 8MHz to 33MHz and a nifty front panel LCD that displayed that. 

In 1995 my parents bought a Packard Bell (  ) with a Pentium 100, 1GB hard drive, 56k modem, 8MB RAM and Windows 95. I had to learn and teach my family how to use it at the same time, as up to that point my experience was DOS and Windows 3.x.  So much has and hasn't changed in the last 20-30 years of computing, it has been a fun ride and now in a sysadmin-style arena I have really been enjoying my time with technology.

Eventually my old man and I decided around 1999 to build our own PC's, after he bought a partially parted-out Pentium 3 rig that needed RAM, a hard drive, and a power supply. That turned out to be one helluva system and my first overclocking experience! Had an S3 Trio 64v+ graphics card iirc, what wasn't very good...but allowed us to play some games. 

I was always into tinkering with PC's, just kept after it. Building for friends, family, local businesses, etc. Eventually deciding to change my career as a GM line tech to leave that, go to college to earn an IT Network Administrator degree and pursue a career opportunity for a local MSP. Couldn't be happier.


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## Sasqui (Sep 6, 2016)

Kursah said:


> My first experience beyond Apple IIe's in elementary school in the early 90's and late 80's was my grandparent's PC



I forgot about the Apple IIE that my Dad borrowed from a colleague for a summer (technically it wasn't mine).  I wrote a lunar lander program in basic... that was only fast enough to play when I used a machine language compiler to convert it   I tried to write a Pac Man clone but that was beyond my capabilities at the time!


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## Ebo (Sep 6, 2016)

My first computer was a Intel Pentium II running at 266Mhz, 4GB harddrive, S3 Virge GFX and 4GB SD ram back in 1997. 
I didnt want it, but my first wife wanted one, so to shut her up I bourght it for her.

After i bourght a Pentium III 480 Mhz(I not sure, mabye 460Mhz), 8GB harddrive, Voodoo II GFX card and 8 gb SD ram1998/99.

Had a AMD Athlon 1800 XP that clocked like a dream on an Abit NF8 MB(awsome), ATI 8500 GFX

Athlon 64 754 pins after with 9700 pro GFX  all watercooled, then a Opteron machine 939 pins.

Q6600 C2Q Intel machine, and it worked llike a charm.

Got a AMD FX-8120, simply because i couldnt understand why people said they were so bad, so I had to try it out.

Now Im running a Intel I7-5820K, and thats a bad a$$.


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## IceScreamer (Sep 6, 2016)

We didn't really have money for a computer when I was growing up and the first computer was given to us when I was around 7 years old, around 2002, and it broke down a month in. 
Up until I was 16 I didn't own any computer, and the school gave me a computer as a prize, something about a drawing class. It was a cheap prebuilt, Celeron E4300, 2GB RAM, integrated GPU, but it was my first "real" PC, I remember playing New Vegas and Secret of monkey island on it, everything on low. I got interested in computers then and swapped parts, bought a C2D E8400, Radeon HD6770, OCZ 550w PSU and some more RAM and it served me really well. 
After selling that PC and saving some more money I built a new PC myself (the one in my specs), part by part. Most of the parts I bought were used and it serves me well today. Since then I became, for better or worse, the "tech guy" of the family. I don't think I'll be changing this configuration for a while (except for that damn GPU cooler) but I love building PC for others.


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## Recon-UK (Sep 6, 2016)

IceScreamer said:


> We didn't really have money for a computer when I was growing up and the first computer was given to us when I was around 7 years old, around 2002, and it broke down a month in.
> Up until I was 16 I didn't own any computer, and the school gave me a computer as a prize, something about a drawing class. It was a cheap prebuilt, Celeron E4300, 2GB RAM, integrated GPU, but it was my first "real" PC, I remember playing New Vegas and Secret of monkey island on it, everything on low. I got interested in computers then and swapped parts, bought a C2D E8400, Radeon HD6770, OCZ 550w PSU and some more RAM and it served me really well.
> After selling that PC and saving some more money I built a new PC myself (the one in my specs), part by part. Most of the parts I bought were used and it serves me well today. Since then I became, for better or worse, the "tech guy" of the family. I don't think I'll be changing this configuration for a while (except for that damn GPU cooler) *but I love building PC for others*.



Right there with ya it's a very satisfying hobby


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## yotano211 (Sep 6, 2016)

The thing that got me started with PCs was when my mom bought me a Nintendo with Mario Brothers and duck hunt when I was 9 in 1989. Since then I always wanted a PC for the games but nobody bought me one until I bought one. 

I have a love affair with laptops.

My first desktop was in 1999 when I bought a Pentium 3 450mhz (on those big socket 1), it had 8gb HD, 64mb of memory (later upgraded that to 128mb) and I cant remember the graphics card. I had to buy it myself since my parents never bought me a computer, I was 18 at that time. That computer lasted me for a good 5-6 years. I upgraded the processor to a 550mhz, I took it from my sister's boyfriend at that time and switched it for the 450mhz in my. I just wanted something a little faster and didnt have much money. He never knew anyways.

After leaving the Navy, I really didnt do much on the computer front. I did buy an e-machine, I dont even remember the specs on that thing. I was the worst computer I have ever bought. I only remember it had a 80gb HD. I was able to play some games on it for the entire year I had it. I think the motherboard gave out so I stripped it for parts to sell.

Next after that I finally built my own desktop for the 1st time. I loved doing it even though it took me 2 days. It had a AMD Athlon 64 3500+ 160gb HD, I forgot the graphics card but it was a mid range ATI card. That was the 1st computer that ran Boinc with it. I tried to uprade it to a dual core AMD 64 3600 x2 and a Nvidia 8800GT but the graphics card fried the motherboard. I think I didnt install the extra power connector to the gpu. It was fried after the 3rd time starting the computer up. But by that time I already bought my 1st laptop, a Sager 2090 that was much faster. This was around 2005.

After that, lets see, that laptop lasted me a good 3 years, then I bought a gateway 6860fx with a intel T5550 running at a slow 1.8ghz, I upgraded that to a t7500 at 2.2 and later to a t8300 at 2.4 and lower temps and Nvidia 8800m gts. This laptop was truly my 1st gaming laptop but not my last. I loved that laptop so much, still think about it today. It was such an awesome overclocker, the graphics card was able to do 25% on the core and 35% on the memory. I replaced it since the power circuit board gave out. It was in 2008.

It was replaced with a Asus g73jh that I really hated the track pad in it. Overall I hated this machine, I had problems with drivers, with the track pad, too many to list. The biggest thing is the nightmare to clean it. I had to *disassemble*  entire thing to clean the vents out. It was a 45min job. That laptop was sold to my ex that she still had today. This was in 2011.

After this I went with a Alienware m17x. I bought used for $550, it was one of my best deals ever. My first laptop that had Nvidia sli graphics card (260m sli) and that weighed over 10lb. Overall I liked this laptop. I was able to overclock the cpu (q9000) from 2.0 to 2.2 in the Bios. I had that one for 2 years and sold it for the $650 on Craigslist.

I then went for another used Alienware, the m18x r2. I dont know where to start with this laptop. I had a 3920xm in it overclocked to 4.5ghz but normally kept it at 4.3 AMD mobile 7970 xfire. Towards the end of owning this "thing" I had 6.25tb of storage in it. 3 2tb spinner HDs and 256gb 1 msata HD. I weighed over 13lb and the 2.5lb 330w power supply. The motherboard fried so I stripped it down and sold it for parts.  I owned it for 2 years.

Today I have the laptop in my system specs and its still going strong. I have had it for around 1.5 years now. I might sell it for something newer and much lighter. Maybe something with a Nvidia 1070 in a 17 inch laptop and I will go  with Clevo/sager again.

I have owned some HP elitebook laptops for my business but I dont really count those. Today I do my business work on Clevo w230ss laptop. Its able to play games on med to high settings when I am not at home. I wont replace it for a few years.


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## Recon-UK (Sep 6, 2016)

yotano211 said:


> I have a love affair with laptops.
> 
> My first desktop was in 1999 when I bought a Pentium 3 450mhz (on those big socket 1), it had 8gb HD, 64mb of memory (later upgraded that to 128mb) and I cant remember the graphics card. I had to buy it myself since my parents never bought me a computer, I was 18 at that time. That computer lasted me for a good 5-6 years. I upgraded the processor to a 550mhz, I took it from my sister's boyfriend at that time and switched it for the 450mhz in my. I just wanted something a little faster and didnt have much money. He never knew anyways.
> 
> ...



You have had some pretty awesome notebooks. Thumbs up


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## yotano211 (Sep 7, 2016)

Recon-UK said:


> You have had some pretty awesome notebooks. Thumbs up


I dont buy most of my laptops brand new, I usually buy them within 3-6 months. When I had HP elitebooks, I usually got them when they where 1 year old, elitebook's normally come with 3 year warranty. I would get them from ebay for a cheap price considering the warranty they have. Specs wise they are "ok" but business class warranty is above anything in the consumer world.


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## Mussels (Sep 7, 2016)

my dad had a PC he used for 'work' and he had a few demo games on it from floppies.

back then family would *buy* game demos thinking they were full games as birthday presents and such, and i'd struggle horribly to play them as a little kid.

oldest one i remember was the original prince of persia (full game) (1989, i was about 5) and making it all the way to where you meet your reflection - but i couldnt read so i didnt have the manual to tell me the trick to beat it 


edit: From memory (i was 5, so i'm remembering the PC when it was retired - might have a few changed specs)

486 dx2 66MHz (googled it, this was definitely an upgrade. might have been a 386 or plain 486 at this time)
8MB EDO ram (4x2MB sticks iirc)
4.3GB Quantum fireball hard drive (this ended up in my first PC, a pentium 90)
16KB? Graphics card. I've still got it in the shed for nostalgia, has upgradeable memory chips.
DOS with some kind of mouse GUI shell - it effectively let you put like 9 shortcuts on a screen to click and launch programs/games.
5 1/4" floppy
2x  3.5" floppies
14" 1024x768 fishbowl CRT monitor
about 10 broken joysticks thanks to me
A partridge in a pear tree


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## Jetster (Sep 7, 2016)

In 1990 my friends dad got a new PC for his work. Gave me his old 8088 IBM PC I soon realized I could play games on it. Also learned DOS and would often crash the system and reinstall everything. Bought Falcon 3.0 and California Games. Later got another freebee a Super 286 and started buying Shareware from a local PC shop. I still have most of it. Downloaded porn from BBS sites pre WWW. It would take 10 min to get one picture. Then a 386, 486 DX 4 120, then a Pentium 90, Then my first build was a AMD K6 2-350


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## ThE_MaD_ShOt (Sep 7, 2016)

I will make this short and sweet. Unreal tournament.


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## Recon-UK (Sep 7, 2016)

Jetster said:


> In 1990 my friends dad got a new PC for his work. Gave me his old 8088 IBM PC I soon realized I could play games on it. Also learned DOS and would often crash the system and reinstall everything. Bought Falcon 3.0 and California Games. Later got another freebee a Super 286 and started buying Shareware from a local PC shop. I still have most of it. Downloaded porn from BBS sites pre WWW. It would take 10 min to get one picture. Then a 386, 486 DX 4 120, then a Pentium 90, Then my first build was a AMD K6 2-350




Wayyyyy back when i was about 10 years old or so before i went into care my dad had a computer that took massive sized floppies, it had a beige colour with a green screen, and everything was done by command line, the floppy disks were programs / games.

I played the flight one where you control a triangle shaped ship/ aircraft and i can't remember much else if it had guns on it or it was just flying it, it was a side scroller of sorts anyway.

Never knew what machine that was.

I also left that out as it never influenced me with PC's.


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## Mussels (Sep 7, 2016)

Recon-UK said:


> Wayyyyy back when i was about 10 years old or so before i went into care my dad had a computer that took massive sized floppies, it had a beige colour with a green screen, and everything was done by command line, the floppy disks were programs / games.
> 
> I played the flight one where you control a triangle shaped ship/ aircraft and i can't remember much else if it had guns on it or it was just flying it, it was a side scroller of sorts anyway.
> 
> ...



sounds like asteroid (or one of its numerous clones)


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## Jetster (Sep 7, 2016)

Recon-UK said:


> Wayyyyy back when i was about 10 years old or so before i went into care my dad had a computer that took massive sized floppies, it had a beige colour with a green screen, and everything was done by command line, the floppy disks were programs / games.
> 
> I played the flight one where you control a triangle shaped ship/ aircraft and i can't remember much else if it had guns on it or it was just flying it, it was a side scroller of sorts anyway.
> 
> ...




Setting up a DOS system is fun. I did one for a son about 10 years ago. There are GUI program so you don't have to use just the command line but you have to program everything. No plug n play Its quite complicated. Not like today. Even when I started there were 3.5 floppy but 5.25 large floppy's were still around.


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## Recon-UK (Sep 7, 2016)

Mussels said:


> sounds like asteroid (or one of its numerous clones)



I think they were 5 1/4 Floppy size, all i know is they were abnormally large even for the year 2000 or so lol.


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## biffzinker (Sep 7, 2016)

Apple IIe in elementary school back in Michigan. Later Macintosh Plus, SE-SE/30, LC II & III IIsi in middle school. Bought a Performa 577 with money I earned at part-time job working at one of the high schools in Anchorage during summer break. Replaced the Performa 577 with a PowerComputing PowerBase 240.

Learned of the games available of the PC side ended up buying my first pre-built OEM system with a Pentium 233 MHz (don't remember the rest of the specs.) Added in a 3Dfx Voodoo bumped the RAM, and overclocked the Pentium MMX from 233 MHz to 304 MHz. Afterwards did my first custom build with a AMD K6-III 450 MHz overclocked to 550 MHz with 128 MB of SDRAM (later added 128 MB), and a Diamond Viper 770 TNT2 Ultra.


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## Recon-UK (Sep 7, 2016)

I think i found it, if not extremely similar, the keyboard definitely has a curly wire.


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## yotano211 (Sep 7, 2016)

Recon-UK said:


> I think they were 5 1/4 Floppy size, all i know is they were abnormally large even for the year 2000 or so lol.


Maybe it was a zip drive. Those zip drives really never replaced those floppy drives.

I had a zip drive so that I can download porn from the library and take it back home with me. My only reason that I bought a zip drive.

wow I am remembering so much of my past.


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## Recon-UK (Sep 7, 2016)

yotano211 said:


> Maybe it was a zip drive. Those zip drives really never replaced those floppy drives.



No i am 100% of how it looked it's just a bit fuzzy lol, it was an all in one type computer with it's own green monitor and a curly wired keyboard but since there is a few like that it's hard ti pinpoint.


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## Mussels (Sep 7, 2016)

oh and what got me interested in overclocking was a turbo button on that 486dX2 - i could use it to make some games run at double speed, and others to run at half speed. It was basically a cheat mode for some of the harder, newer games.

Along came my pentium 90, which still had the button on the case - but it didn't do anything. Altavista/yahoo searches led me to the DIP switches on the motherboard and a 10Mhz overclock to 100Mhz...


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## yotano211 (Sep 7, 2016)

Recon-UK said:


> No i am 100% of how it looked it's just a bit fuzzy lol, it was an all in one type computer with it's own green monitor and a curly wired keyboard but since there is a few like that it's hard ti pinpoint.


oh ok, on my 1st computer I did a a 3.5 inch floppy. Never used it.


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## yotano211 (Sep 7, 2016)

Mussels said:


> oh and what got me interested in overclocking was a turbo button on that 486dX2 - i could use it to make some games run at double speed, and others to run at half speed. It was basically a cheat mode for some of the harder, newer games.
> 
> Along came my pentium 90, which still had the button on the case - but it didn't do anything. Altavista/yahoo searches led me to the DIP switches on the motherboard and a 10Mhz overclock to 100Mhz...


I had a business class in high school had those computers, back in 1998. I dont know the specs but I do remember the turbo button and that it made the fans go faster.


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## broken pixel (Sep 7, 2016)

Enter & Compute Gazette magazines.


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## neatfeatguy (Sep 7, 2016)

I really enjoyed computers and games since I can remember. Gamed on the Commodore 64 and Atari 2600 when I was little. I remember constantly bugging my mom (I was 3 or maybe 4 at the time) to play Hunt the Wumpus on the Commodore 64....we'd play it almost daily, even though I know my mom was disgusted with playing the game.

On then to the NES when I was 6 - I think my dad thought him and mom "taking a break" and him living away from home for a bit, the NES was a good present for his two older boys.

Time moves on and we moved to a new city when I was 8. Moved away from all my friends and family that literally lived down the street and some family that lived a few blocks away. My mom got a new computer, but I was too young to know what it all entailed for hardware. I simply remember the Windows 2 or 2.1 and the 14.4k modem we had. I also remember all the floppy discs and games: Duke Nukem and Commander Keen - I played the crap out of these games.

I was on the computer so much, I taught myself how to use the modem and get online (Prodigy and Genie baby!) I found MUD games on those two online services. My mom eventually saw the phone bill and realized I had been getting online. She had to change the password for access - though I figured it out again. She also became very mad when I figured out how to change everything around in Windows. I set it up how I liked looking at it. Eventually she refused to let me use the computer and I had to enjoy my gaming on the NES.

Time goes on and my use of the computer is limited. SNES and Sega Genesis comes out, along with the GameBoy. When I was 11, my parents finally divorced.  Three years pass and then game along WarCraft - my friend that lived next door, he had a better computer and we played the game whenever his parents weren't home. I became self taught in DOS by this point.

A few months later my younger brother and I moved states with mom and soon to be step-dad. He used computers a lot and his computer was twice as good as the one we still had from when I was 8. I remember it having a Pentium 133 (if memory serves me correctly) in it. So once again, I moved and left all my friends and family behind. I only had my younger brother and my mom and my soon to be step-dad - all other family lived a state over (older brother, dad, grandparents, etc....). I knew no one so I was left to my imagination, consoles and the PC. A few months after we moved, my step dad purchased a Pentium II 366 computer. It came with a crap ton of software on floppy 5.25" and 3.5" floppy discs. The computer had 4 specific games that I absolutely fell in love with:

Relentless: Twinsen's Adventure
Star Wars: Tie Fighter
Doom (it also had a disc with a ton of levels)
Mechwarrior 2

These games (and along with a ton of other floppy disc games that I can't recall the names of) kept me entertained a lot. This was also the time AOL had started becoming very popular. It was the online service that came pre-installed on computers so that's what learned to use. The new 28.8k modem in the new computer was awesome. Online was awesome. I came into a new MUD game - Gemstone III - this was in 1994. Time online wasn't cheap. When the first phone bill came in that was over $400 my mom was pissed (again). I was grounded from the computer for a month (A MONTH!). Once I was allowed on the computer I was rationed to 6 hours a week online and each and every minute was devoted to GSIII. Eventually AOL went unlimited and when that happened my step-dad got a dedicated phone line for online and we upgraded to a 56k modem - the speed was blazing! I spent countless hours on GSIII and playing computer games. Warcraft 2 and Starcraft and so on.

A couple years pass and I'm given the PII 366 as step-dad moved up to a PIII 733. I'm basking the glorious Windows 95 on this thing and enjoying my games. Playstation comes out and I enjoy many games on it, but the PC still took priority for games. 1999 comes along and I get my very first own computer - houses AMD Athlon 600 processor - for my freshman year of college. The computer crushed whatever Pentium III my roommate had. We both found the enjoyment of Half Life and Counter Strike. We played Counter Strike a lot. Since we sat across from each other, we didn't have to rely on VOIP and we could communicate instantly. We played the game as it should be played, working together and we absolutely slaughtered the competition. We constantly got kicked or banned from servers because we were accused of cheating. We embarrassed high ranking clans on their own servers. The clan members would all be on one team and we'd be on the other with a few random people. My roommate and I worked together, called out locations and flanked like no one else...every match came down to him and I being the last 2 survivors on our team as we wiped out the 7+ members on the other team. A few clans tried to recruit us, but we didn't have time for tournaments and such with school so we always declined.

College wasn't my thing. A few years passed and I upgraded the GPU in my computer (don't remember what it originally was) to what I thought was an awesome card...a FX 5500! It was a little better over what I originally had and it did allow me to play the leaked Doom 3 demo.

I purchased a PS2 and enjoyed a lot of games on it, but that was my last gaming console. Once Oblivion came out and my computer (was running a Nvidia 7800 AGP - best AGP at the time) had a lot of issues handling the game, I finally splurged on a new computer. I didn't know enough about computers to build my own, but I knew enough about some hardware to get something I considered decent for around $1000.

I purchased a computer with the following specs:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (Manchester chip - 939 socket)
2GB DDR RAM
2 7600 GT in SLI
80 GB (might have been 160) HDD
The computer also came with AIO water cooler on the CPU - the CPU overclocked like mad from 2.0 to 3.1

From that point on it's strictly been PC for me. I build my own and build computers for friends/family if they need help. I love the hardware and I love solving the problems that come up - whether it's hardware related or software. Computers are logical and I love logical things - they just fit with my personality.


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## Melvis (Sep 7, 2016)

I got ill 10-11yrs ago (age 24-25) with a un known problem which Dr's have never been able to figure out, got really high blood pressure, basically got worse and worse over a period of 2 weeks till it got to the point I couldn't get out of bed anymore. Nearly had a heart attack one night and died because of it. Had to quit my job at the time as a Linen courier and then spent pretty much every waking moment in front of a PC as I went in and out of Hospitals and Dr's trying to figure out what happened. Got really interested in Computer hardware and building them for a few yrs learning how they all work etc then started my own business back in 2009, rest is history, that's how I got into Computers


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## biffzinker (Sep 7, 2016)

Recon-UK said:


> I think i found it, if not extremely similar, the keyboard definitely has a curly wire. [image]


I seen one of those when I was in high school in NJROTC (Navy Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps) sitting on the Sargent's desk.


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## R-T-B (Sep 7, 2016)

My first PC, a Packard Bell 486DX2 66Mhz, is responsible for my addiction.

That's right, I know it's hard to believe, but Packard Bell got me into computers.

EDIT:  Holy crap, someone made a Packard Bell Wiki and I found my old model...  the horror:






http://pbclub.pwcsite.com/wiki/index.php/Executive_8707_D


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## stinger608 (Sep 7, 2016)

Who remembers 5 1/4" floppy disks????? Not 3 1/2, we are talking 5 1/4! Well, waaaaaaaaaay back then; in mid 80's when you had to load an "operating system" with a floppy disk.

That was when I got my very beginning........If you remember that far back then you will probably remember that any computer in that era had to have the "hard disk" parked. If it even had a hard drive.

I came up with a really really short code that would actually park the hard disk automatically........Yep, it soon became a hit and was put into the firmware of every frigging hard disk made.

Now, fast forward about 8 years, and Doom was the turning point in my computer history. That is when I became a junkie for computers and gaming!

Crap, that is when dial up was costing per minute of use! AOL was a hit! Hell, everyone was getting them disks in the mail LOL.

And as @ThE_MaD_ShOt stated, Unreal Tournament was a huge turning point for me as well. Hell, I still play UT2004 more than probably any other game.

Old school? Yea, I reckon.


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## Caring1 (Sep 7, 2016)

I was one of those kids that pulled things apart to see how they worked, radios, watches, TV's, motors etc, basically anything I could get my hands on kept me amused, and I guess taught me a lot.
My father brought home old electronics and mechanical gauges for me, probably to save the household items from that fate.
Generally things worked again after reassembly, even if broken prior I managed to fix them.
The first computer I remember was massive and you had to use punch cards, it was at the local University, home computers weren't available as far as I remember.
I got my first IBM compatible clone after I got married in my mid 20's, I think it was a 386 but i'm not sure, I did have a 486dx later.
I wasn't very good with the software side of things, but knew how to put them together blindfolded.
I still remember the sounds of the dial up modem, and the dot matrix printer clattering away.


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## Recon-UK (Sep 7, 2016)

Caring1 said:


> I was one of those kids that pulled things apart to see how they worked, radios, watches, TV's, motors etc, basically anything I could get my hands on kept me amused, and I guess taught me a lot.
> My father brought home old electronics and mechanical gauges for me, probably to save the household items from that fate.
> Generally things worked again after reassembly, even if broken prior I managed to fix them.
> The first computer I remember was massive and you had to use punch cards, it was at the local University, home computers weren't available as far as I remember.
> ...



A lot like me as a kid but i got in trouble lol.


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## Outback Bronze (Sep 7, 2016)

My addiction started with "Aliens vs Predator 2" which was an awesome game at the time.

Before the "PC" started I was on the old 8 bit Sega console, followed by the 16 bit Sega console, then PlayStation 1 and finally my last console PS2.

So what happened....Well I was happy with my console's until I went around my mate house and we started playing AVP2. We loved it that much he set up another cheap PC so we could played lan games against each other where we learnt a hell of a lot about the game.

So I purchased AVP2 (coz I loved it sooo much) and installed it on my parents Pentium 3. I didn't run too well (must have been onboard graphics) and I knew absolutely nothing about computers. My mate said lets install a voodoo 2 to see if that helps. Well we did but it did not run a great deal better.

During this period I also installed Diablo 2 on my parents computer which I also enjoyed quite a bit. I would still play my PS1 with the like's of Tekken 2 but the PC was starting to get a strangle hold of me.

My parents ended up getting divorced and the whole family split. I was 21 and my sister ended up getting the family PC grrr.

I needed a computer to play my AVP2 and Diablo 2. So I went to a Electronics store (not even a PC shop) and purchased a Pentium 4 2.4Ghz (533 FSB) with a GeForce 4 which I had to make payments on just to pay it off. Cost me like 2K in the day. I made sure when they built the PC they made the case upgradable and it had a side window.

*This is where my addiction started! *

I was going down to my mate's house and was reading his PC magazine's he would buy. It was around 2003/4 when I was reading his mags and saw these Radeon 9800 pro's making piss on everything. 6 moths later I was still watching these Radeon 9800 pro's making piss so I decided to collect all my funds to purchase one.

WOW I was hooked!!  From then on it didn't stop. The 9800 pro was and 8x AGP and my board was only 4x so another upgrade, an 8x motherboard. I purchased an Intel 865 with later on down the track a Pentium 4 (800 FSB) HT.

Then.....It was getting too hot and overheating in the summer. What did I see when my mate took me to a PC store??? A 478 Socket Water cooler!! Came with a 478 Block, Pump, Res, Radiator and all the pipe work to boot. Lovely kit!!

What happened??? The water kit would not fit inside my original case so I Purchased a UV Acrylic case (still got it) so the entire unit would fit.

Long story short....This is where I started with PC's


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## Hnykill22 (Sep 7, 2016)

I live in Iceland. back in 1998 i lived in the west fjords. my father was a fisherman. i was 17 at the time. he lived in a place where there wore only 200 people. Sudureyri  ..but.. there was nothing alse to do but playing on computers. We playe'd Quake 2 alot. and my dad and his friends put a coax cable between all our houses, so we could play when winter came. practilly snowed in for many month's.  it was like a internet between us. well.. voodoo 2 card. Quake 2. Half Life. The first 1 Ghz CPU, the birth of Geforce cards. ISDN landline.. so on and so on. now i have a i7 5820K @ 4.4 Ghz and a jetstream GTX 1070. the years have been kind to me


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## tabascosauz (Sep 7, 2016)

I've gotta be a late bloomer amongst y'all. But then again, I'm also quite a bit younger than many of you.

My first PC came straight out of hell, though I didn't know it at the time. It was 2004/05, I was basically too young to know anything, Intel was waist-deep in yet-to-be-uncovered, nefarious anti-competition behaviour towards AMD and thus my first was a Gateway tower powered by none other than the *venerable* (HAHAHAHA) Pentium 4 530. For the next 8 years, I tried to eke out of that piece of shit some semblance of "performance", of course failing because there was _nothing _that sonuvabitch _couldn't_ do. I learned to endure the screaming of its Cooler Master-manufactured abomination of a CPU cooler for hours at a time. Nothing comes close. If all the young'uns think that the R9 290X was loud, then they should be damn grateful they never got to make this POS' acquaintance. 

2012 came with an XPS 8500 from Dell (still repurposed and acting as a work computer for a family member). It was interesting for me because it was the first time I had experienced such performance. It had an i7-3770, 12GB (4 + 4 + 2 + 2) DDR3-1333 and a very special GT 640 (full GK107 core with all the TMUs and ROPs). The GT 640 was special because it was basically a downclocked GTX 650 without the connector, none of the ROP-cutting, GDDR3 or Fermi-rebranding bull of the rest of the GT 640 variants. In 2014, I built in an H440 with an E3-1230 v2 and R9 280X...the rest is history. I think I've assembled no less than 8-9 PCs in the past few years, and continue to care for a good chunk of them as they fulfill their various purposes.

Ol' Beastie came in January of 2015, and with its 7th flight and 50,000km mark due in less than 14 days, it's going to need an upgrade to keep doing what it does. That said, the other thread with all the pics of everyone's PCs will know when Ol' Beastie gets a makeover 


In the process of my tinkering, I also developed a penchant for collecting old CPUs and GPUs out of the [really] old ones at the office. If I'm not mistaken, my current collection stands at:

P2 MMX 233MHz in glorious Slot 1 / Some Mendocino Celeron in Socket 370 (could be 333MHz?? not sure until I find it again) / A metric ton of desktop Core 2 family CPUs throughout the different generations (including E5200, E2140, E7400) and one mobile T7100 in Socket 478 / beloved Q8200 still runnin' 

As for the GPUs, my collection is small but certainly vintage. One is a S3 Trio64-based Expertcolor DSP3364 circa 1994, and the other one is a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5446 circa 1996. 


Even though it's taken sort of a backseat to my insatiable keyboard obsession, getting started with PCs is something I'll never regret. The knowledge I've gained from trudging through more forums than I can count and almost building more PCs than I can keep track of is invaluable and cannot be summarized in a single document in any form. And it's definitely something that I won't be putting down for as long as I can help it.


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## lorraine walsh (Sep 7, 2016)

My father got me and y elder sister a PC when I was 13. It was Intel Pentium 1. Basically, it was ordered for my elder sis so she could work on her college projects but I was the main one using it. Watching mp4 videos and playing that boring card game.


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## Jetster (Sep 7, 2016)

Downloading porn with a 14.4 baud modem from a BBS. Pre www.   One pic at a time. Painfully slow

Hey if anyone wants a 56K 90 Hardware modem Creative Labs  ISA slot I give it away


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## MxPhenom 216 (Sep 7, 2016)

Played Counter Strike Source at my friends house back when i was 13 (23 now). Decided i wanted to play it more and installed it on my Dell Dimension 3000 with a P4 2.8ghz and no graphics card. The game barely ran. Bought a FX5500 and put it in, and thats when my life changed.

1 year later i was building a $1600 rig with a E6600, X1950XTX, 2gb of ram inside a Thermaltake Armour case. 

Ever since then computers have basically been my life. Built about 15 other computers for families back home, and couple for my friends gaming and workstations. 

My first official job was a Lab Engineer at Microsoft. My sisters always talked about how i made more money than they did and i didnt even have a degree yet. I had just graduated high school when i was given a chance to work at Microsoft for the summer. Which ended up being about a 2 year thing while i finished up at a community college. 

I am now 23 and getting an Electrical Engineering bachelors degree with emphasis on Computer Engineering at Washington State University.


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## CAPSLOCKSTUCK (Sep 7, 2016)

To start......i am 50

My first experience of computing was 1977/78 when my school got its' first BBC computer. We used to play Space Invaders during morning break. At least sometimes we did because invariably it would take so long to load the game off tape ( if at all) that the bell would ring before we got to play.

Fast forward 10 years and pcs were becoming common in the workplace so me and my brother got ourselves on a free course where we learned the basics.......word processing, data base and excel. 

This opened up new work opportunities but didnt inspire me at all. Home pcs werent a "thing" back then as it was pre WWW.

Then the use of email really took off and i wanted access to it. Amstrad brought out an cheap flimsy email machine and though i didnt buy one it made me start rethinking the whole pc thing...............me and my wife had moved to London     for work and i wanted to keep in touch with my friends and family as they moved to  far flung corners.

The Amstrad thing was shit and shoddily made and as soon as i saw one for real i decided i needed something better. My son was just born, i was earning good money so i bought a second hand IBM 486x and my world completely changed. I suddenly had access to all sorts of amazing information.....no more trips to the library .

I now had easy access to all the topics that interested me, yes, dialup was shit but it was available. Back in those days i had to really prioritise my searches because loading took ages and cost money by the minute.


The 486 served us well.....I'm typing with the k/b now and the balled mouse is in a drawer for posterity. When the kids were little i bought reading and educational games for them, i was working shifts including nights and my kids slipped into a similar sleep pattern when they were pre-school so at the times when there were no TV shows on for them the PC was a great distraction.


that was it for a while till i found TPU through GPUZ. The 486 was showing its age and prebuilt PCs were still outrageausly expensive......i wanted to build one so i did !!

I had the 486 hooked to the WWW and a big box of brand new parts and being honest i said to myself " what have i done?" Hundreds of pounds spent and i really didnt have a clue what i was doing. 


With the help of various videos and many Google searches i built  it,  and it worked at the first press of the button.
Athlon ii x 4 630 
HD 5750
4 gb ram

unlocking and overclocking was the next priority......getting more power for less and i havent looked back .


Since then i have built many, many computers,  several for me but many more for other people. Using recycled parts i get people on the web for cheap and get my friends gaming for as little money as possible.


TL/DR

TPU led me down the road of pc addiction..........thankyou TPU, i love you  ( see sig for further info)


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## silentbogo (Sep 7, 2016)

stinger608 said:


> Who remembers 5 1/4" floppy disks????? Not 3 1/2, we are talking 5 1/4! Well, waaaaaaaaaay back then; in mid 80's when you had to load an "operating system" with a floppy disk.
> 
> That was when I got my very beginning........If you remember that far back then you will probably remember that any computer in that era had to have the "hard disk" parked. If it even had a hard drive.


I remember worse....
For a short time I transferred to a government-sponsored special school (Ukrainian Physics and Mathematics Lyceum in Kiev), and while it all sounded awesome at the time, it was teen's debauchery heaven in early 2000's 
We lived in dorms, attached to the main campus building, slept on 50y.o. metal-spring beds that sagged almost to the floor, and had a computer lab with already pre-historical collection of 386s and 486s, most of which did not have a hard drive.
In short breaks between classes, weekend drinking marathons in the nearby park and occasional trips to female student dorms not far from there, I used to go to the lab to play Civilization and brush-up on my Turbo Pascal skills (the only thing that interested me at the time besides beer and boobs). My reserved space had a computer with both 5.25" and 3.5" FDD, but no HDD, so I had to bring the whole pack of disks with me. A book store located a block away from the campus, was one of the very few places where you could still get brand new 5.25" floppies.
Got expelled 6 months later and that, to be honest, was a blessing.


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## erixx (Sep 7, 2016)

I started at a printing house, translating and editing with a huge computer with 5,5 floppies and a green screen! 
Many years later I had my first computer, a 386, and again years later I got a game on a floppy...


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## Jetster (Sep 7, 2016)

Remember 100Mb Zip drives. They were crazy big back in the day. Obsolete now

Remember having to set up sound cards with IRQ address. And you would get conflicts with other address for hardware like the keyboard and modem


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## Caring1 (Sep 7, 2016)

Jetster said:


> Remember having to set up sound cards with IRQ address. And you would get conflicts with other address for hardware like the keyboard and modem


I remember doing that for early joysticks.


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## Komshija (Sep 7, 2016)

I received first (used) Atari 2600 in the early 90's. After that new Sega Mega Drive II in 1994 and my first PC in 2002, which my mom bought me.
I was a teenager and my knowledge about PC's was limited but still well above the average PC user, so I literally ordered a PC by components via phone call. PC was assembled for free at the shop. It was consisted of Pentium 4 1,6A Northwood, MSI 645 Ultra, one stick 256MB Samsung DDR333, Inno Tornado GeForce2 Ti 64MB, WD Caviar 40Gb 7200 RPM, NEC DVD drive, Floppy drive, some case with 400W PSU, Samsung SM551S etc. It was quite powerful machine and the most powerful PC in my class.


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## CAPSLOCKSTUCK (Sep 7, 2016)

Me and my two brothers first played games at home on this, i still have it




Sports Vision 1000   (1977)







here comes a very good link to early consoles......http://pongmuseum.com/collection/intel-tvsport1004.php


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## Recon-UK (Sep 7, 2016)

CAPSLOCKSTUCK said:


> To start......i am 50
> 
> My first experience of computing was 1977/78 when my school got its' first BBC computer. We used to play Space Invaders during morning break. At least sometimes we did because invariably it would take so long to load the game off tape ( if at all) that the bell would ring before we got to play.
> 
> ...




I had no idea you were so young you make me look old at 26


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## CAPSLOCKSTUCK (Sep 7, 2016)

Recon-UK said:


> I had no idea you were so young




When i was 26,  PC stood for Police Constable.


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## Recon-UK (Sep 7, 2016)

CAPSLOCKSTUCK said:


> When i was 26,  PC stood for Police Constable.



Times change :/ i remember in 90's we had a street warden lol.


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## P4-630 (Sep 7, 2016)

CAPSLOCKSTUCK said:


> Me and my two brothers first played games at home on this, i still have it
> 
> 
> 
> ...



A bit off topic, but this was my first own console (bought it myself in 90s):

Philips CDi player 450 with videocard.





Still have it in a box somewhere with lots of games and movie video cd's as well.


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## natr0n (Sep 7, 2016)

Around 97-98 I got a pc made for me and my bro from a guy at my moms job.

It was a cyrix 233mhz I believe. It was nice I had free internet from netspy for years I think that was the name. I broke windows cause I deleted system32 files.The guy fixed it, but found pron star pics and told my mom.
From then on I learned computers top to bottom. I built a an AMD k6-2 500 on some soyo board.Had an awe sound card as well. My 1st bought gpu was a nvidia geforce 2 mx it had a purple pcb. I had a an s3 gpu from previous pc before i got the geforce2mx.
I used to mess with tech demos and be amazed.
The exact gpu is on this page.
http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/component/k2/item/244-nvidia-geforce2-mx-400

Lots of hard to remember memories lol


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## Ahhzz (Sep 7, 2016)

Gods, we're so old... I'll join the 'Rocker here. 

Some of my fondest memories of my dad come from the 80's. He bought us (me) a Commodore 64 and tape drive not long after release. There used to be a magazine called "Compute!", and in this magazine came programs in Basic, Machine language, and Assembly. My father would sit on the couch for hours at a time, not 4 or 5, but I remember 1 to 3 easily, hours at a time, reading off the Assembly and Machine Language code to me, as I typed it in to create these silly little games and programs....


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## Grings (Sep 7, 2016)

As a kid i had an Oric 1 which was exchanged shortly after for a (rubber key) Spectrum 48k, when that died i had an Amstrad CPC 464 for a while, then got an Amiga 500+ a few years later. My Brother had an Atari ST and while we liked playing each others computers, used to always argue which was better (pretty much like an Nvidia/AMD thread here nowadays ) My parents got a PC around this time which i used to play games on a bit, though most games of the era were much better on amiga/st, other than some early vector graphics flight sims and the monkey island games (actually better sound and graphics on the amiga, but i didnt have a hard drive and 2 used 11 floppies!)

I got a playstation soon before i moved out of my parents at 18 and really couldnt afford my own (decent) PC for 3-4 years or so, or an internet connection for that matter, i picked up a few mediocre 2nd hand pc's during this time, but as with the 16bit era it was not as good as the consoles i could actually afford.
I suppose the first time i actually got into PC's properly was when i got a still reasonably new k6-2 450 rig free off a friend and picked up a voodoo banshee cheap 2nd hand.
Once i had a decent base PC to upgrade from, the floodgates opened


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## P4-630 (Sep 7, 2016)

Ok if we are talking about when I was really young, our very first computer was a philips msx home computer 






You could stick cardridge games in it, we only had 1 cardridge game.

The rest of our games were on cassette tapes, so we had a tape recorder connected to it with a small black/white tv.


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## INSTG8R (Sep 7, 2016)

Commodore 64 was my first "PC" I kinda tricked my parents into buying it for me. But games like Test Drive and Ace of Aces solidified my love for gaming, driving and flying. First "real" PC in our house was a Pentium 3 666hz(SATAN!!) Think it had a Riva TNT in it.


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## eidairaman1 (Sep 7, 2016)

13 when My Grandpa B got us a IBM baby AT in 98 with W98, I got intrigued when he was fixing them. God Bless his Spirit. He passed away March 28 2016 at 84. I am 31 myself.


Before that I had used the Apple II E and Macintosh in Elementary and Windows 3.1/95 on IBM/Dell in High School. Really wasn't Interested in Apple


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## dozenfury (Sep 7, 2016)

Going to also show my age a bit, but I started in computers as a kid back in the late 70's with the TI-99/4A, and my best friend who had a Radio Shack TRS-80.  In both cases you could write programs and then attach the PCs through an audio cable to a cassette recorder (same cassettes you'd play or record music on) and save programs to them.  What really gave it a kick were the TRS-80 monthly magazines that would come out and each had programs in text in them that you could then manually type in and they'd play a very simple game or do something on the screen.  So we'd do those together but were a blast to put in and then see the result, kind of like building blocks.  Often they had bugs and you'd have to get the next months issue for the corrections or figure out how to correct them on your own.

All of that evolved for me as PCs improved in the 80s with the early Commodores, and eventually the early XTs and 286 PCs, along with the glorious Amiga 500 a bit later.  Those opened the door to all kinds of things that you could do with more powerful PCs, and particularly the modems and bulletin boards which were the predecessor to the Internet we know today.  The 286s especially changed things because that started the modular hardware approach, where instead of having proprietary equipment you could actually begin customizing the internals exactly how you wanted.  Prior to that you could add for example a 5 1/4 floppy drive to a Commodore 64, but you had to buy theirs and you generally never opened a C64, or the prior PCs, and upgraded them internally.  So that started the hours spent thumbing through the thick Computer Shopper mags pricing things like internal hard drives.


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## Ahhzz (Sep 7, 2016)

dozenfury said:


> Going to also show my age a bit, but I started in computers as a kid back in the late 70's with the TI-99/4A, and my best friend who had a Radio Shack TRS-80.  In both cases you could write programs and then attach the PCs through an audio cable to a cassette recorder (same cassettes you'd play or record music on) and save programs to them.  What really gave it a kick were the TRS-80 monthly magazines that would come out and each had programs in text in them that you could then manually type in and they'd play a very simple game or do something on the screen.  So we'd do those together but were a blast to put in and then see the result, kind of like building blocks.  Often they had bugs and you'd have to get the next months issue for the corrections or figure out how to correct them on your own.
> 
> All of that evolved for me as PCs improved in the 80s with the early Commodores, and eventually the early XTs and 286 PCs, along with the glorious Amiga 500 a bit later.  Those opened the door to all kinds of things that you could do with more powerful PCs, and particularly the modems and bulletin boards which were the predecessor to the Internet we know today.  The 286s especially changed things because that started the modular hardware approach, where instead of having proprietary equipment you could actually begin customizing the internals exactly how you wanted.  Prior to that you could add for example a 5 1/4 floppy drive to a Commodore 64, but you had to buy theirs and you generally never opened a C64, or the prior PCs, and upgraded them internally.  So that started the hours spent thumbing through the thick Computer Shopper mags pricing things like internal hard drives.


I wondered who'd be the first Trash-80 representative....  

JK   Thanks for posting!


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## 64K (Sep 7, 2016)

Ahhzz said:


> I wondered who'd be the first Trash-80 representative....
> 
> JK   Thanks for posting!



Ah yes, The Tandy TRS-80. Available at your neighborhood Radio Shack back when Radio Shack was relevant. It went away before I bought my first computer in early 80's the C64. I had a lot of fun on that computer. It was definitely a step up in gaming from my Atari 2600 console plus you could program it. 

First PC was a XT 8088 CPU with dual 5 1/4 floppies but no hard drive and 640KB RAM and CGA graphics. That was a nice PC in it's day. 

What got me into computers was a high school science teacher (late 1970s) that went out and bought an Apple computer with his own money because the school thought of computers as being for businesses only and wouldn't buy one for the school. He kept it in his class and let anyone that wanted to mess around on it if they were careful with it.


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## Sasqui (Sep 7, 2016)

64K said:


> What got me into computers was a high school science teacher (late 1970s) that went out and bought an Apple computer with his own money because the school thought of computers as being for businesses only and wouldn't buy one for the school. He kept it in his class and let anyone that wanted to mess around on it if they were careful with it.



My high school shop teacher (who influenced me more than any other teacher) wrote a program on an Apple II that he'd purchased himself and brought to school.  His program stopped functioning after he added more code to it.  After some digging, he realized he'd maxed out the 64kb of RAM


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## dont whant to set it"' (Sep 7, 2016)

Back in the day PC's did all sorts of stuff (games included) so it would be natural to think they(le: they them it pcandor's) could do my homework also.[circa mid90's]


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## Black Panther (Sep 7, 2016)

What got me into pc's? The Elder Scrolls - Oblivion. But there's a long story before that!

____________________________________________________________

The first pc my family bought was way back in 1992. All I remember was that it was a 286 and had a ''turbo'' button which didn't make any difference.

Having a pc in the house triggered my interest. The only pc I ever touched before was in 1998 when my best friend's dad bought her an Amiga and we used to take turns playing on it. The games were on cassette tapes, and we used to wait 30 minutes for a game to load before playing.

____________________________________________________________

Anyway I was very interested in our first 286. It didn't even have a mouse, and we never got the joystick to work, but it had enormous 5¼-inch disks and we didn't need to wait 30 minutes before playing a game.

My mom had a ''back to the future'' relationship with this pc - she used to type in questions like we normally type on Google today, expecting the machine to answer and then get disappointed when she got a ''<Dir> not found'' error. It never told her the weather or gave her any solution to whatever she typed, and at the end she gave up.

Whenever my dad had a problem it was always me who solved it. They were mostly command prompt errors - DOS is like that - he'd forget where something was and I'd go searching the directories for him and show him what to type to get to it
.
However that computer used to give a lot of trouble and dad was constantly taking it to the seller. One day when the warranty was up and the computer wouldn't start he decided to open the case, and he found pencil batteries (those disposable ones!) connected very amateurishly to something. Now my dad might not have known anything about computers but he's a qualified radio technician and could easily recognize whether something was factory-made or an attempted botched fix.

From then onwards my dad always bought computers with the family money (obviously not from the same shop!), and they were for all the family and for my studies. Certainly not gaming pc's. The last one we had (some Pentium 4 with an MX440 graphics card) used to stagger a lot while playing The Sims 2. Basically I only played Sims games. At that time still I knew zilch about hardware. If it beeped or anything, I'd just put it in the car and take it to the shop! I never even opened up a case to clean inside!

____________________________________________________________

One fine day I was playing Sims 2 on this Pentium 4, which had been going strongly for quite some years, and this time it was blissfully silent.
Remember I had never opened the case - way back then they used to be sealed and if you broke the seal you void the warranty. I never imagined that dirt might accumulate inside... since the seller was fine with me not opening it for 2 whole years for warranty why should I have bothered for the years to come? I only imagined it's safer to keep it sealed!

Anyway this time I noticed that the pc had suddenly become incredibly silent. Which was weird considering that it had become so noisy that I suspected that some thousand bees had set up home inside.
Realizing that the sudden disappearance of those thousand bees was too good to be true, I cautiously started examining the case. Externally. With a flash light.

That was when I saw this fan at the back, which was stationary (It was the PSU fan but I had no clue). My only thought was that since this thing is powered up then that thing (a.k.a. fan) should be powered up as well. So I took out my tool-kit... erm.... my thin ball-point pen and kicked one of the blades. Sure enough the fan started turning and my 1000 bees were back humming in full vengeance.

I spent months doing this 'trick' to get the PSU fan running. Then one day it refused to run any more and the smell wasn't very nice especially after Sims 2. So I switched everything off, placed the tower on its side, and for my first time in history I got a screw-driver and opened the tower.

Believe me I wish I took a photo. There was fluff and cobwebs everywhere. There were even live spiders and dead moths inside. Everything looked very sticky (I used to smoke indoors while playing). It was disgusting. I didn't touch any of ''it'' but realized that the fan was in another compartment I needed to dismantle! I still had no idea what it was or its function. Anyway I unscrewed it and gently eased it out of the tower, taking a lot of care that the rest of the wiring was still attached since there was no way I could wire that thing up again. I opened the PSU and dismantled the fan. The following day I went to the pc store, gunky sticky yellow fan in hand, asking them to ''give me a fan like this''. With the new fan I went happily home, replaced it and put everything back in place, blew with my mouth on everything inside the tower to try to get as much gunk out of the case (had no clue I could use compressed air!) and my pc was back working as good as new. Ran fine for a couple more years, and to my relief, without the 1000 bees inside.

It was only much later that I learnt that I had been working on the PSU, and that it could have been quite dangerous...

_____________________________________________________________

Fast-forward to 2006 and I saw a youtube video showing Oblivion. There was no way my ancient still-cobwebby Pentium with MX440 and heaven knows which other sticky components could run those awesome graphics, bee-hive or not.

I also quit smoking indoors, not for my sake, not for my husband's sake and neither for my kids' sake because none had been born yet. I quit smoking indoors for my beloved computer's sake. 

So I decided to get my own gaming pc, with my own money. This was some months before I registered on TPU. I went to one of the best local shops who suggested that they build a custom one for me.
Anyway, this seller suggested an E4300, Asus P5B, 2GB of generic RAM, some PSU, and an 8600GT inside the cheapest case possible. He quoted the total at €1,400 which was a phenomenal sum for me at the time so I didn't commit myself. I researched, found benchmarks, and thought wow this is a monster (compared to the gunky pentium!)

Since he had given me a breakdown for each part, and was charging only like €25 for assembly and installation, I decided to check how much it would cost for me to buy the same parts online. Imagine my surprise when I ended with slightly more than €600, Windows included and with a nice case with large fans and blue lights everywhere  rather than the cheap office-type one I was offered!

That was when I started searching the net, spending hours reading on how to build pc's and found TPU. I didn't register because I felt embarrassed posting anything. Everybody here were building their own pc's, overclocking them etc and I felt a total idiot...
But this forum gave me the courage - so many people were doing it, why couldn't I?

Hence I bit the bullet and bought the parts. Spent a week or so staring at them, strewn on a table. Finally bit by bit I assembled the computer. And by golly it worked at the first try. I gamed on it for some weeks, while still reading TPU. I remember reading a good thread on overclocking the E4300, and I got it to 3Ghz without any glitches. That was the moment when I felt comfortable enough to register.

Oblivion ran fine but frequently it went below 30fps so I was disappointed a bit hence 2 or 3 months later I did away with the 8600GT and got an 8800GT and added 2GB more RAM which made the game run perfectly just the way it should.

______________________________________________________________

My main job isn't related to computers at all, I never even studied IT, but pc's are my best hobby. I've assembled over 10 pc's for free for family and friends, and also a couple for work. Software and virus removals? I've lost the count.
I was always cautious on overclocking though, and never attempted it unless the person really needed it to get the most out of old hardware or specifically asked for it.

______________________________________________________________

My next challenge is laptops. My first experience was not great. I had bought a Clevo laptop with a Q9400 and two 8800GTX  in 2009 and after the warranty expired one card started frying up after the other. I bought some 3 cards in total, barely getting the chance to run them in SLi as intended, replacing one after the other myself and when finally the last card quit working I just gave up on it.
My only success on laptops so far was dismantling my mom's to replace a dead HDD. She's become quite proficient now in computer use, Microsoft Office, our accounting software at work. Oh and now there's google so she can ask anything without getting a ''<Dir> not found'' error.


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## Tatty_One (Sep 7, 2016)

Got handed this flat square thing at work in 1993, someone said it was called a laptop but I remember it to be as big as some modern day midi towers lol, no instruction some very early version of Windows..... can't remember, Windows 3 I think and lots of DOS, I just remember lots of DOS and some basic word processor software, that sparked my interest and then eventually, in 1996 I bought my first pre built desktop PC.


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## CAPSLOCKSTUCK (Sep 7, 2016)




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## cornemuse (Sep 7, 2016)

I happen to be 69 yrs young! When I got out of USAF in 1970, went to a bar that had 'Pong". Wow! what a bitchin game!! That started it all.
Early '80's I first got a Timex-Sinclair, plugged it into my (b&w) tv, took over my kids 'Fisher-Price' cassette player, (after they went to bed!)
& tried my hand at programming. (use that term lightly). Sears Robuck sold a apple II clone which was a little better than the T-S. Went and bought an Epson HX-20, another early laptop, still have it around, the T-S too. The Epson has built-in small printer & micro-cassette play/record unit. Also got all the way from Japan their 'screen controller' to plug it into an RGB green screen monitor.

Got divorced.

First real comp was a 386 based unit with a 'Cyrix math co-processer', 4 MEGS ram, a 5 1/4 floppy, a 120 MEG hdd, and Dos 5.0. $1,600.00!!
Had the power switch on the power supply, no keystroke combo to shut down, use your finger.

First build was a (early) Pentium which was in a huge plastic case on the mobo. It had a controller card to plug hdd & floppys into.
It scared me what my son (about 9 or 10 then) could do with dos. Second build was a Celeron base unit. Put an 'Awe 64 Gold' sound card, it was awesome sounding!

The boy told me to go with AMD & its been AMD ever since. Prolly built 20 computers since, except for the 386, I have never bought a brand new case, allus used. A few were identical mobo etc. so I could 'clone' a drive instead of installing complete os. All were/are now XP Pro 32 & 64, & various flavors of linux, early were Win 3.0, 3.1, Chicago! (14 1.7 meg disks!,  it was the 'beta' of 95 I think). 98 + SP's, then xp.

One brand new laptop, a toshiba with xp home. About 6-7 months ago I got about a dozen used laptops, installed various ubuntus on them & gave them away. Still have 6 laptops & 8+ working desktops.

In case anybody wondered, I operated (retired in 2010) heavy equipment, bulldozers, backhoes, etc. and never had need of computers. They have always been toys for me, I enjoy them more 'cause of this reason.

Thats my story & I'm sticking to it, , , , ,

-corne-

(cornemuse = from 'Penguin Island' by Anatole France, a good book to read)


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## uuuaaaaaa (Sep 7, 2016)

Back in the days at fridays the news journal would come with separate special section (like a magazine) of tech news and computer stuff. I saw a picture of the Abit IC7-MAX3 in there and fell in love with it, that's it. After that it all startedfor me! Check my system specs!


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## Sasqui (Sep 7, 2016)

CAPSLOCKSTUCK said:


>



Love it... had a Panasonic KXP-1124 (if I recall).  Did you see what the old dot matrix printers are fetching on the Web??!?!?


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## Black Panther (Sep 7, 2016)

CAPSLOCKSTUCK said:


>



OMG thanks for sharing those. I had that very same model of OKI printer at work!


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## dorsetknob (Sep 7, 2016)

Sasqui said:


> Did you see what the old dot matrix printers are fetching on the Web??!?!?



shit got a dot matrix  in the loft   have to india ink soak the ribbion for it to print and it still does


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## CAPSLOCKSTUCK (Sep 7, 2016)

Sasqui said:


> Love it... had a Panasonic KXP-1124 (if I recall).  Did you see what the old dot matrix printers are fetching on the Web??!?!?




the dial up sound would make a brilliant phone ring tone.


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## Dethroy (Sep 7, 2016)

My dad is running his own software business and that's why I started dabbling with PCs at the age of 4.

286 -> 486 -> Pentium 90 -> Pentium 133 -> Pentium II 333 -> Pentium 4 2.4 -> Core 2 Duo E8700 -> current rig

memorable moments & games that wowed me:

Action Adventures: Tomb Raider (1996), Outcast
Adventures: basically all LucasArts Adventures, Blade Runner, Myst, Discworld II
(A)RPGs: Diablo I & II, Baldur's Gate I & II, Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale I & II, Deus Ex
first game I owned on CD-ROM: Star Wars Rebel Assault
Flight Sims: U.S. Navy Fighters, Jane's AH-64D Longbow, Commanche 3
FPS: Magic Carpet 1 & 2, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, Half-Life, Unreal
MS Paint
Racing; NFS 1-3, Bleifuss
RTS: Dune II, C&C Tiberian Dawn & Red Alert, Warcraft II & III, Dungeon Keeper, StarCraft
Space Sims: Wing Commander III & IV, Freelancer
TPS: MDK, Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Messiah
Probably forgot a lot of old gems...


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## qubit (Sep 8, 2016)

CAPSLOCKSTUCK said:


> the dial up sound would make a brilliant phone ring tone.


haha I can imagine the look on people's faces every time someone calls.


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## yotano211 (Sep 8, 2016)

qubit said:


> haha I can imagine the look on people's faces every time someone calls.


https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Dial_up_modem_noises.ogg


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## HammerON (Sep 8, 2016)

Built my first computer in 2004 with an ASUS motherboard and an AMD 64+ 3200 CPU.  Cannot remember the ram, PSU or case.  I do remember that I bought a Sapphire 9600XT (wanted a 9800XT but way to expensive).  The reason I wanted to build it was first of all because I had never built a computer and second I wanted to be able to play DOOM 3. 
I have been upgrading ever since and got into water cooling in 2007.


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## CAPSLOCKSTUCK (Sep 8, 2016)

yotano211 said:


> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Dial_up_modem_noises.ogg





DONE


sounds great......thanks @yotano211


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## Mussels (Sep 8, 2016)

HammerON said:


> Built my first computer in 2004 with an ASUS motherboard and an AMD 64+ 3200 CPU.  Cannot remember the ram, PSU or case.  I do remember that I bought a Sapphire 9600XT (wanted a 9800XT but way to expensive).  The reason I wanted to build it was first of all because I had never built a computer and second I wanted to be able to play DOOM 3.
> I have been upgrading ever since and got into water cooling in 2007.




so.... young...


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## BraveSoul (Sep 8, 2016)

tried Duke Nukem 3D on friends pc in 1998 (9th grade) = liked it a lot, Sony VAIO pc was acquired shortly after, upgraded with dedicated gpu & cut a hole on side panel for extra fan.................... rest is history


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## yotano211 (Sep 9, 2016)

CAPSLOCKSTUCK said:


> DONE
> 
> 
> sounds great......thanks @yotano211


wow, hahaha, you have to post a video of your phone making that insane sound.


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## slozomby (Sep 9, 2016)

i miss the turbo button on the front of my 8086.


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## CAPSLOCKSTUCK (Sep 9, 2016)

yotano211 said:


> wow, hahaha, you have to post a video of your phone making that insane sound.




i dont have a webcam so other than using mirrors around my phone i will struggle to do that.

It does sound brilliant though and i will get my next visitor to vid it for me. i will be going to the pub to meet my wife from work later so i will see what reaction it gets in public...


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## yotano211 (Sep 9, 2016)

CAPSLOCKSTUCK said:


> i dont have a webcam so other than using mirrors around my phone i will struggle to do that.
> 
> It does sound brilliant though and i will get my next visitor to vid it for me. i will be going to the pub to meet my wife from work later so i will see what reaction it gets in public...


you have to report back on the findings.


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## Kissamies (Sep 12, 2016)

Consoles (I had PS2 back then) didn't have games like Diablo II and Heroes III.. the rest is history


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## biowiet (Oct 9, 2016)

Loved reading this thread! Good old memories... Hungary, 1990, I was 12, and I had a Commodore+4 already for a few years.

I've started with a 8088 capable of 4.77Mhz stuffed with 512Kb RAM and 20 Mb HDD, and a beautiful 320x200 4 colored CGA monitor. Thankfully there was a switch to monochrome. I was pretty jealous for my friend's Schneider PC XT which was running at an outrageous 8Mhz with 640K and 40Mb HDD. Floppy disks had a capacity of 360Kb (DS-DD), some of the first games I've copied from the before mentioned friend were Grand Prix Circuit presented by Accolade and Battle Chess both taking up 2 disks each, Sokoban was a big favorite also. The opsys was PC DOS 3.0 and later MS-DOS 5.22 for long time, started up Windows 3.11 sometimes. My family couldn't afford buying new tech, so when companies started dumping obsolate tech, I always got parts from a friend working as system administrator here and there. Upgraded to 80286 8/10/12 Mhz, a little later to a 10/20Mhz. Went step by step to 4Mb RAM, EGA 640*480 16c, 2x40Mb iconic ST-251-1. We've got some warez BBS numbers and login codes, dialing first with a 2400baud, later with 14kbaud modem over night to download stuff. No internet. We were extracting the socketed RAM ICs from XTs and early ATs, stuffing those into the 512Kb Trident VGA cards make them up to 1Mb. I've built a sound card for LPT port with some resistors and capacitors known as "Tandy". Dumped as I've got an AdLib a little later. This upgrade went until 1996, it was a 80386SX-33 + 80387, 16Mb RAM, sVGA monitor, Sound Blaster, and then with a sudden sharp turn I went from computers to Sziget festival, went full heavy metal, and for a couple of years I did not care for computers too much. 

I still can't wrap my head around the progress I've experienced. Thanks OP for bringing this up!


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## Estaric (Oct 9, 2016)

it was about 3 years ago my Xbox 360 broke because my dog tripped over the controller cord and at the time my buddy had given me his older computer with a Q8300 and 9800gt (still running btw) and i loved the feel of mouse and keyboard compared to a controller. so i decided to buy a gtx 750 ti black edition for it and i absolutely fell in love with building computers so i conviced another friend to have me build his computer. and that about it sense iv built around 5 computers and joined here cuz i wanted to share my passion for my computers with others.


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## VulkanBros (Oct 9, 2016)

1986:
80286-12,5Mhz - 2MB memory - AND 2 floppy drives (5 1/4") a single sided and a double sided  - no harddrive - OS: DOS 3.0
Got it free from a company that where upgrading there machine park to 386 ......wow


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## Jeffredo (Oct 9, 2016)

Diablo II.  My first PC game.  Up until then I just had a little cheap Celeron box for emails.  Once I got DII it gave me the bug to play games and the next year I built my first PC - an Athlon XP 2500+ with a 9600 GT.


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## Ithanul (Oct 9, 2016)

Hmmm.

My first introduction to a PC was around 5-6 years old with Windows 3.1 on a Packard Bell.  As well as the Pre-School I went to had a basic computer class.  It was more or less on how to turn them on and off, and small games with basic math problems, etc. in them.  Later in Elementary they had computers we would do basic math games and such on for a hour or so.  Half the time I would get bored quickly with the ease of the games, and start trying to do other things on the computer (would get in so much trouble for that).  Rarely did much gaming on PC even back then.  Most of if any gaming was on my cousin's Game Boy or NES, or my Uncle's SNES.  My parents where the type that consider video games as time waster like movies and TV.  Most if anything I did gaming wise, or I consider interesting that was game related was board games (checkers, chess, Chinese checkers, etc.) and 1,000 piece puzzles (I was doing 100 piece puzzles in Pre-School).

After that did not really have much dealings with PCs until around 18-19 years old when I made friends with a guy in Comm squadron on base.  Saw his computer and asked where he got it.  He told me that he built it.  Once I get interested into something especially if it entails building.  I tend to go learn about as much as I can, and there is so much learn about computers indeed.  Though, my first computer build was nothing fancy.  More of learning the basics and seeing if I could at least get a basic computer built and running.

Now, it more or less a hobby that I highly enjoy doing when I can get parts to mess with.  Plus, I'm almost done with my Associate CS degree which I should be completely done with mid next year. Of course I'm not stopping there as I'm very curious how electronics work at the hardware level and lower program levels hence I plan to go to a higher Uni for Electrical Engineering degree.

I tend to build mostly for tinkering and seeing what I can do with the hardware.  Reason I tend to see gaming on PC as something extra a PC can do, and not a major reason to build them in the first place.


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## RealNeil (Oct 9, 2016)

My wife (now an ex-wife) was working at a real estate company owned by her parents. 
I used to hang around waiting for her to get off of work, and I gravitated to the office PC because I was curious about it. 

This was an old 8088 8MHz. IBM PC clone with an amber screen. It had a 5 1/4" floppy drive on it. It's HDD was a 15MB RLL type Seagate drive.
They had just soaked $3,500.00 into it, and it was how they accessed the local real estate listings to find properties and land for their customers.

One day I was playing around with it and I noticed a floppy disk that said diagnostics on it. I put it into the PC and got a prompt to run diagnostics.
I did it.

After a few seconds, the PC made a farting sound and died. I tried everything to bring it back to life to no avail. I was mortified!
I called a friend who had a bit of knowledge with PCs and he came over and pronounced it dead.

Being that it was a Saturday and we were close to Los Angeles, California, we took off and went to the Pomona Computer show. I bought a motherboard (a 286-12MHz) and CPU for it, and we came home and installed it.

I didn't go near any PCs for over a year after that.


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## Kissamies (Apr 24, 2018)

Heroes III and Diablo II. My first "gaming PC" was my aunt's boyfriend's old Pentium II 400, Asus P2B, 512MB RAM, GF 2 MX & 10GB HDD.

Overclocked it to 450MHz, it had 64MB RAM which I upgraded, and a S3 PCI VGA card which I upgraded and OC'd. It had W98SE first, installed W2000Pro.


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## _JP_ (Apr 24, 2018)

Microsoft Windows ME...and a motherboard that was a clone of a ECS model.

That thing barely worked. 

Also, "upgrading" from a RIVA TNT2 M64 to a Radeon 9200SE and wondering why the performance increase was minimal.


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## Kissamies (Apr 24, 2018)

_JP_ said:


> Microsoft Windows ME...and a motherboard that was a clone of a ECS model.
> 
> That thing barely worked.
> 
> Also, "upgrading" from a RIVA TNT2 M64 to a Radeon 9200SE and wondering why the performance increase was minimal.


ME crashed so damn much. 98SE was soooooo much better.


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## eidairaman1 (Apr 24, 2018)

_JP_ said:


> Microsoft Windows ME...and a motherboard that was a clone of a ECS model.
> 
> That thing barely worked.
> 
> Also, "upgrading" from a RIVA TNT2 M64 to a Radeon 9200SE and wondering why the performance increase was minimal.



95/98 for me.


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## Tatty_One (Apr 24, 2018)

Windows 3.1 for me in 1992, my boss back then walked into my office, put a new laptop on my desk (never even saw one before) and said "get on with it" after taking 10 minutes to work out how to turn the thing on I was greeted by a launch screen, no idea, no clue but after weeks of tinkering I got there, the rest as they say...... is history 

There is something to be said about being self taught, learning by mistakes, you explore so much more when you are clueless lol.


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## eidairaman1 (Apr 24, 2018)

Tatty_One said:


> Windows 3.1 for me in 1992, my boss back then walked into my office, put a new laptop on my desk (never even saw one before) and said "get on with it" after taking 10 minutes to work out how to turn the thing on I was greeted by a launch screen, no idea, no clue but after weeks of tinkering I got there, the rest as they say...... is history
> 
> There is something to be said about being self taught, learning by mistakes, you explore so much more when you are clueless lol.



Used 3.1 but it really was 95/98 that got me started


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## dorsetknob (Apr 24, 2018)

Dos  first then bootleged win 3  and on and on......................> and chuck in a 9600 Baund dial up modem
For networking Null modem cable ( Home made by Ghettoing Cables together)


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## Vayra86 (Apr 24, 2018)

Honestly?

Consoles and laptops.
The end


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## Bones (Apr 29, 2018)

The wife - It's all her fault. 
Nuff said.


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## Nuckles56 (Apr 29, 2018)

For me, it was playing games on a windows 95 PC, and what really got me hooked was playing return to castle wolfenstein and TES IV Oblivion on a P4 machine, but it was many, many years later that I built my first PC (2014), since then I have built lots of them to make up for lost time


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## trparky (May 21, 2018)

My first experience with computers was back when Tandy still existed and the system had an 8088. I remember putting some kind of speed up board in it and made it twice as fast. I have no idea what it was, it was years ago. That was my first system, my uncle gave it to me.

I'd get his hand-me-down systems over the years. My father then started getting new systems and he'd give me his older systems. Now it got switched up, I got a new system and he got my older system.


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## phill (May 21, 2018)

First experience was when my parents decided to buy a Hewlett Packard PC (Curry's special I think) which if memory serves was a P150..  I remember being in to Amiga's and such before hand, and sadly at the issue of my poor Amiga dying (was very nicely upgraded, PPC 603+ with Bvision graphics card and all the trimmings, running Amiga OS 3.5) and just one day, tripped the power out and dead..  Couldn't get it to turn on   I was gutted and so frustrated!!) and by the time the insurance company sorted something out it just wasn't the same..  No PPC or Bvision anymore...

But I digress..

Then it was on to PC's and as I was going through College at the time I decided that I needed something so a Cryix 150 which was about the same speed as a P120, was my first PC..  I can't remember the specs, Mb's of ram, maybe a couple of Gb hard drive, but when I upgraded I went to a K6-2 with a Voodoo 2 I believe, was way faster!!  

Then I went on to a Duron 650Mhz with a Geforce 2 MX 32Mb card which I could overclock and I think it's gone rather badly ever since that date really..  Still I don't regret any of it but I'm pretty sure that my bank account and my home does..  I'm rapidly running out of space for newer hardware!!  I mean that is just totally unacceptable if you ask me...


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## Space Lynx (May 21, 2018)

My Dad got hurt at a NFL game in the early 1990's, got a settlement from the NFL. He bought a first gen Pentium 3 grand CPU with part of the money, I played this game called Cheesy Pursuit on it all the time around 23 years ago... hard to remember. Then a few years later Age of Empires came out if i remember right. Good times. No regrets.

If anyone knows how to find that cheesy pursuit game btw, I'd love you forever. I can't find it for the life of me anywhere.


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## Vayra86 (May 21, 2018)

lynx29 said:


> My Dad got hurt at a NFL game in the early 1990's, got a settlement from the NFL. He bought a first gen Pentium 3 grand CPU with part of the money, I played this game called Cheesy Pursuit on it all the time around 23 years ago... hard to remember. Then a few years later Age of Empires came out if i remember right. Good times. No regrets.
> 
> If anyone knows how to find that cheesy pursuit game btw, I'd love you forever. I can't find it for the life of me anywhere.



Something like this, perhaps?
https://archive.org/details/24GamesForWindows95


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## dj-electric (May 21, 2018)

I was born into a family where my older brother was introduced to PCs and coding from an early age.
When i was physically able to (about age 3), i started using the PC we had back then (386). Of course i can barely remember anything.
My oldest memory is of playing a game that you punch things and then become an animal. Took me a solid 10 years to realize it was Altered Beast.

From then, what i conciser the first golden era of PC gaming began, with gigantic libraries of MSDOS games. My favorites included Jill of he jungle, Fury of the furries, and Supaplex.

I only got into hardware and PC's guts when i was about 12. Had a PC based on Pentium 3 800Mhz with an nvidia Riva TNT
Quake 3 Arena and UT were the triggers the fueled many years of spending money on hardware


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## stinger608 (May 21, 2018)

lynx29 said:


> If anyone knows how to find that cheesy pursuit game btw, I'd love you forever. I can't find it for the life of me anywhere.



You might also check on this site:

https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_win3

Tons of games and programs.


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## basco (May 21, 2018)

After playing Rise of the Triad it took me 4 months to get Duke Nukem 3D to work on the same machine a Vobis 486DX2-66 VL




*but after that i was hooked *


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## robot zombie (Jun 15, 2018)

Our first computer in the house was a HMD Apple II... ...in maybe 1995. I was 5 years old. My dad was the maintenance guy at a church and school that was upgrading their computer lab and decided that 20 working Apple II's were worthless to them and thus simply threw them out. They had a ton of games, too. Mostly learning and more christian-friendly games, but I remember things like Alice in Wonderland, Type To Learn, Math Muncher, Oregon Trail... ...so on. You could not pull me away from that thing for an entire year. I played on that thing every night. The Sega Genesis and SNES I got in 97 is the only reason I stopped playing on it 

In 2000, we got a crappy, bottom-level HP desktop loaded up with Win2k. We had an iomega cd burner. THIS was where it all started. I friggen loved that thing. Spent almost all of my time on it. It was slow and it crashed all on its own a lot, but I didn't care. I loved watching stuff on newgrounds, ebaums world,  and albinoblacksheep. Played a lot of DOOM and ROTT via dos emulators. I got into a few forums and found that I really liked it. I remember getting caught on a lockpicking forum and having to answer some interesting questions from my parents... ...such as why an 11 year old is trying to pick locks. Truth is I just found it interesting. I used to practice on locks around the house when they weren't home. The internet was so awesome to me in that way. I felt like, "Man, you can learn about anything on this thing!" So I spent a lot of time just learning and researching things... ...just sort of answering questions that would pop into my head. As a child, I was always super-interested in figuring out how things around me worked. The internet fed that in a really big way.

As a young child, people would look at me astounded at what I knew and the things I would do for fun... always saying "How did you learn that?!" I was always building things, fixing things, reverse-engineering things, describing how things they probably thought of as "forbidden techno magic" worked. They must've though I was some sort of prodigal genius. To be fair I was an intelligent kid, but I don't think it was anything built into me that facilitated my knowledge. I was generally average. I just found a great tool and learned to put it to good use. I had the library of Algernon at my fingertips and I knew it. I spent a lot of my middle childhood alone, teaching myself things and taking in new information. I would say it was a major formative component to being the person I am today. It cued me into the fact that you don't have to be a genius to do what you want to do and do it well. Very little is beyond the average person in this golden age of information. Because of those experiences picking new things up, I have a very wide/deep range of knowledge and skills, which is what most people around me know me for - most of it things a lot of people would look at themselves and say "I'll never be able to learn that." And it's all thanks to the internet and that old computer. The internet instilled in me the love for learning and problem solving that defines me to this day.

In 2001-2002, Neopets got me into web coding and graphic design (which I did a ton of.) I figured out how to pirate photoshop and took off with it. I found a few small communities to share my work with and got sucked in. I ran several stupid fansites and portfolios that I built from the ground up on like, angelfire and shit like that lol. I remember being frustrated with the lack of control. I was almost spending more time trying to bypass their stupid scripts to get what should've been basic code to work like it did in my local browser. I eventually found a host that gave me full control on the backend. I set up and ran a phpbb forum for friends to have our little secret club where we would do things that would definitely get us in trouble at home  That stuff ended up being a big part of me. I considered doing signage and websites as a career at one point. The only thing that stopped me was the overwhelming number of other things I wanted to do at the time.

I also pirated a lot of porn and music, which me and friends would barter disks of, much like people used to do with tapes. I ripped through CD-R's much to my parents' dismay. Sometimes I burned stuff I didn't need to just because the idea of it was really cool to me 

With songs people wanted that I couldn't find, I learned I could rip them off of the radio by feeding the headphone out to the computer's line in. I recorded and chopped them up with audacity. Not the best quality, but friends bought it. I also learned that our monitor had a built-in mic. I remember using that to do mock-up radio broadcasts with friends back in 6th grade. We would play the songs through winamp, with audacity taking the output from that and the mic simultaneously. I must've used splitters to make it happen. Good times.

Admittedly, I ran the thing into the ground. Between all of the viruses from sketchy sites and bad practices, all of the "tweaks" I would make, and constantly topping off the hard drive...


My parents finally got wise and let me get a computer of my own in late 2003. They let me configure my own dell on their website. I remember spending a lot of time deliberating over components... ...just trying to figure out which ones would give me what I wanted within the budget I had. I'd say this is when it all started. This one had WinXP and much better stuff inside. I really liked that computer. This is when I officially started crossing into the realm of becoming a power user. I taught myself the operating system in and out, learned to get it doing everything I wanted optimally, started running backups, keeping it virus free, customizing... ...I sought to master it. I took apart and reassembled that computer countless times. I found myself completely enamored with all of the components inside. I would often open it up and just look at it... ...just kind of tracing the logic behind it and marveling at how it all comes together to do what it does.

I started researching individual parts and learning about how they all contribute to a working system. Everything from how they're made, to what they're made of, to how they work. I made several upgrades to that box. I added ram, as well as a discreet GPU and one of those swanky Soundblaster 5.1 cards. I went back and did a fresh install of XP on my parents old computer. It wasn't enough to save it - the hardware just wasn't good anymore, so I helped them pick out a new one. They completely ignored my advice and bought the cheapest eMachines rig at walmart <_< I never let them live it down. Every time there were problems or it just couldn't handle what they were trying to do I made sure to remind them that they made a mistake buying that thing.

In 2005, I would be forced to learn a lot more. 2 years prior, I picked up the guitar and found my true calling. I was getting decent at it and looking for outlets. I found it in the form of a crappy distortion pedal with a DI out. One day, I realized that I could plug that into the computer to record my playing. After some research, I found my way to fruity loops and cool edit pro. The very first time I layered different passages and threw a drum track over it, it was like a whole new world opened up to me and it quickly consumed all of my time. I thought "Shit I can really do this! I can make songs!"

And that's just what I did. I still have some of the better ones, which I would say are pretty impressive for a highschool freshman with no clue what they were doing  It really changed the way I thought about music. I found myself seeking out and listening to all sorts of music. And things I struggled to grasp with theory and composition very quickly started making sense as I went along.

But I was hitting a wall. I was getting into VST amp/drum emulation. The latency was unacceptable. Not to mention my rig really couldn't handle loading a ton of tracks/vsts. I couldn't do the things I wanted to do. I would need a new computer.

Shopping pre-builts was depressing. They were SO expensive! This would lead me to build my first computer. I can't remember much. It was a dual-core AMD Athlon with 2 gigs of DDR2, running 32-bit XP. I also got a dedicated DI box to plug into the old Soundblaster card from my old computer. This did the job and allowed me to take my recordings further. Later on I would get a Line 6 pod farm to take the load off. Between working on graphics and recording, I became more deeply interested in OS'es. I felt I had tapped the limit of XP and frankly, wasn't happy with its performance or stability. So I looked to linux. I used the HD from my old build as a test drive. I must've tried a couple dozen distros before settling on Ubuntu. This was a game-changer. It was so fast and stable compared to XP. Everything just seemed to work and I could make it do anything I wanted to with a little time and care. I found the console to be a more superior and intuitive way to get things done. Never looked back.

In 2009, I started making a lot of money working 2 jobs and started getting the itch. I did another build based around a Phenom X3 with 4gb of ram. This one had an acrylic side panel with a bunch of red led's inside. This is when I really got into overclocking. I unlocked the 4th core and spent probably months messing with my OC on that thing. I loved it. I ran a dual-boot ubuntu/xp64 config, which I had painstakingly tuned and streamlined to my liking. Everything was done with purpose and care. I suffered a PSU failure and a couple of HDD failures, both due to bad choices on my part, but otherwise I think I did well for myself.

I started wanting to test my abilities, so I started doing builds for friends, family, acquaintances, and coworkers. I have never had one complaint from any of them and in fact, some of them are still running these builds! How they stand it these days, I dunno. Casual users continue to mystify me. Over the years I have taught them how to be better operators and clearly it has paid off. It felt really good to be doing things like that. I looked back on how much I had managed to teach myself and took great pride in it. Best feeling in the world when you take a skillset you have picked up on your own and use it to accomplish things that benefit you and especially others.

At some point in 2011 I sort of trailed off. I was 21 and off on my own, just exploring other areas of life. Between working, partying, a couple of failed relationships, tragic happenings, and the insane multitude of hobbies and art forms I picked up, I just didn't have the luxury of time, money, or fortitude to keep going. The build I did ran very well and suited my needs fine. Maybe you couldn't game on it but that's what I had consoles for. I made a few slight upgrades to keep it going here and there but otherwise it was totally off of my radar. I had my music, high-end audio, vaping (I was building box mods and exploring coil dynamics in detail,) woodworking, hiking, mountain biking, photography... ...the list goes on. Hard to do that, have a life, and find the time to tinker with PCs. :/


Fast forward to 2018. At age 27, I am calming down and realizing that my time is the most valuable asset I have. My life is more streamlined and I have begun to come into my stride as a person. I've had the requisite ups and downs for learning what is really important. I set goals and I hit them. I barely have a social life and I like it that way. I work a steady 9-5 and moonlight as a handyman doing simple home repairs and water heater installs. I am now single and not looking. I left my sweet "old faithful" build from 2009 with my ex. My focus is on learning as much as I can and building a skillset that is beneficial and enriching to my life and endeavors. I realized that I had a really good thing going with PC building, and that I've always missed it. My living situation is the most stable it has ever been and I actually have spending money... ...and time to do good things with it. Couldn't think of a better time for me to get into PC building.

I did my first build in over a half-decade at the start of this year. I found myself astounded by how far things have come... ...just what you can do with the basest level components is amazing to me. RAM prices and GPU prices notwithstanding, I really liked what I was seeing. I love how cases look and the features they have. Some of this stuff I really wish I had back in the day. RGB is pretty cool in small doses. I did a modest build in a sexy black S340 Elite case. Based it around the Ryzen family with an Asus ROG Strix B350 mobo. 8gigs of ram and a GTX 1050 for when I wanna game a little. Got a Samsung 860 evo as a system drive. SSD's are insanely awesome to me. So snappy. I went with Win10 because I felt like it would actually be a little more challenging for me. Coming from Ubuntu for years, Windows 10 throws me through a loop sometimes, but I like it much better than any of the older iterations and little by little things are coming back to me. Getting up to speed on components was a pretty big endeavor... ...almost like learning everything all over again, but I'm pretty much there now and I've found it all to be really fascinating. The future is amazing. What else can I say?

It isn't much, but I love this build. I love just looking at it, I love the way it runs, and I love that built it. I can't wait to make more upgrades to it. I can't wait to do more builds. I've done 3 this year. 2 for me and one for somebody else. PC's, consumer electronics, and music are really all I care about these days.

Where I go from here, I dunno, but it's good to be back!


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## grunt_408 (Jun 15, 2018)

The good old C64 with action replay got me hooked , but after that I did not get another  PC until I built my first new socket A system.


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## Flanker (Jun 15, 2018)

It was in highschool when I wanted to play a game called flyff. We had a computer with a VIA chipset which couldn't really handle any 3D. I started to look up on graphics cards and read all about PCs. I didn't end up upgrading that computer though. When I started university I built my first computer with 9600GT.


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## Kantastic (Jun 15, 2018)

I was an insolent teenage fuckup with a lot of time on my hands, and after dropping out of high school I needed a hobby to occupy myself with. It's hard to imagine how much has changed since I made this account back in 2009. I was 16 and now I'm closer to 30 than 20. Thankfully there's very little I can complain about now given where I've been, where I am, and where I'm headed.


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## robot zombie (Jun 16, 2018)

Kantastic said:


> I was an insolent teenage fuckup with a lot of time on my hands, and after dropping out of high school I needed a hobby to occupy myself with. It's hard to imagine how much has changed since I made this account back in 2009. I was 16 and now I'm closer to 30 than 20. Thankfully there's very little I can complain about now given where I've been, where I am, and where I'm headed.


Good vibes man! I feel that so much.

Honestly... kinda looking forward to 30. If you've played your cards right, you still have the vigor and ambition of youthfulness at hand. Your body is fully developed and probably as capable as it'll ever be. Your mind is still fresh and hungry, but now it actually houses some wisdom (hopefully.) The only difference between 20 and 30 is that at 30, you've likely acquired the requisite tools for really making something of it all.

Things like values, self awareness/love/honesty, priorities, potential, convictions... ...all of these little things you take for granted when you're just a kid just sort of jump out at you as an adult. You realize how little you will ever know about anything. As a kid, the idea of limitations and the disappointment of the real world can crush you. But in that way it starts making sense and it makes you a better person. You are less limited by what you don't know and things you can't do. Humility is a powerful tool. A man recognizes his own existence without need for proof and does more with less. There's this new concept you can leverage... known as "personal assets." I.E.: Shit you've earned that makes you, you. Ya aren't just born with the privilege of doing things the easier way.

For me, looking back on 16-23, it's like a switch flipped one day and I just sort of... became a person. I felt myself drop into my skin, like everything before that point didn't even count. My process was "Oh, I'm just a person trying to grow and be happy. Just like everyone around me. Okay, so what do I do now? Ah, I see... that's not so hard. Alright so if I just... ...YES"

You start realizing you're becoming the person you're going to be forever and crystallize in a dramatic cascade. You recognize that the choices you make define who you are. Suddenly that starts to really matter to you more than the things that happen to you. Life's not a game anymore. And yet it's not as scary as you thought. New and difficult experiences are miraculously easier to integrate. More meaningful in a more practical way. It all just makes sense in time. And you know that it will before it does. You learn to take comfort in the idea that things needed to happen and then ask yourself why that is true. The answer is always a new insight into your own happiness. Every major life experience is but a single star in a whole sky of constellations. It's not so bad after all.

That ability is something you gotta earn as you go through life... something that arises from the necessity of meaning that comes along as one emerges from the childhood bombardment of so many chaotic THINGS and just... STUFF, man. You have to suffer that meaninglessness. It's what makes you able to see and react to things like an adult. Most people in their late teens and early 20s don't know how to appreciate the mindset quite yet. The serenity of adulthood is hard to place. I recognized it in people as a kid, but it was such an alien thing to watch how adults handled themselves. Just completely mystifying. Kids don't have that sense of "Hey, you're fucking shit up for yourself right now. Stop and check your stupid emotions."

"You have your whole life ahead of you." Real adults tell you that all of the time when you're a young adult. But let's be honest, nobody has any concept of what that means when they first hear it. When you finally get it, everything changes and you just sort of look back in awe at your choices. Humans are dumb for (at _least_) a quarter of their lives - one has to go from one place to another a few hundreds of times before it clicks. And even after that, we're still pretty dumb. It's just a more advanced and nuanced bumbling.

I remember the disdain for my elders' tendency for pet affection. It was if they thought "Oh look at you... ... so precious. You're not even a real person yet!" Now, they tend to call me "sir" and treat me as an equal. Still not used to that. Funny thing is, I swear my face hasn't aged a day since 20. When you're at a certain point in life, it's almost like people can sense it and respect you more. I knew something was changing when I started looking at people maybe only 5 years younger than me and realizing how much further they had to go before we would be able to really connect... ...like "Wooooww, they don't even realize it yet! They have NO idea what they're in for..." And you want to tell them... ...but you know you can't. The mindset has become too alien to you. It's not that I look down on them. It's just... there's a distinct simplicity to it that's really obvious when you're seeing it from the other side.

To me it's a real high point - physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Late 20s - early 30s is a great place to be. Probably the most important years of a person's life. You can really make a lot of it if you're on the ball.

I dunno... ...for me the steep climb in awareness approaching 30 is pretty incredible. And to think I used to fear reaching, let alone coming out of my early 20s. Now, I'm just glad I made it. It's crazy difficult, but it doesn't really _feel_ that way and it's so much more meaningful. Being a person is weird. I'm weird. Everything's weird. It only gets weirder man, trust me. Nobody really knows what's going on.

Life is fuckin long. Long as hell. Still feels like it just started over here.

Sorry for the platitudinous ramble. Just struck a chord.


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## Upgrayedd (Jun 16, 2018)

When Sony announced PS+ would be mandatory for PS4 multiplayer I decided there was no way I was going to pay for my gaming machine to have access to the internet that I already pay for...cheaper games, better game selection, emulation, mods, hardware upgrades, PC lifespan and warranties, superior controls, multi-functionality and I like to tinker.

Edit: This is actually my 2nd PC that I own. My 1st PC I ended up selling it was an i5-4670K, I believe a Sapphire 7870 ( wanted an XT but they were never in stock). Then a few months later I got my current machine.


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## lexluthermiester (Jun 16, 2018)

My first PC was an IBM clone with an 8086 and an 8087 math co-processor, dual floppies and a whopping 512KB of ram. No DOS, it had CPM.


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## dorsetknob (Jun 16, 2018)

lexluthermiester said:


> . No DOS, it had CPM.




DOS was Plagiarized CP/M Bill's Admitted this many times


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## lexluthermiester (Jun 16, 2018)

dorsetknob said:


> DOS was Plagiarized CP/M Bill's Admitted this many times


Didn't know that. I thought he helped with it's development?


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## dorsetknob (Jun 16, 2018)

lots of myths /rumours and lies about CP/M and DOS Some Say MS Breached Copyright and Stole Code for DOS
But Bill admits to Adapting and Rewriting CP/M   that's Plagiarism and not Copyright Theft


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## Apocalypsee (Jul 5, 2018)

What got me into PC was and always be *gaming*. I started playing the likes of Doom at early 1995 but I never have any PC until late 90's. It was a modest *Pentium non MMX 166MHz* with *S3 Trio 64V+* card given by my dad. It could run the OG Command and Conquer Red Alert very well and this is the game that got me hooked to PC gaming. 

When Red Alert 2 comes out it is obvious my PC wasn't enough and my dad bought *Dell Optiplex GX100* with *Celeron 600MHz* (66MHz FSB) with *64MB SDRAM* and *Intel i810* graphics (with dedicated VRAM to boot!). It could handle Red Alert 2 well. I played RA2 so much that even if I played it right now I still remember each of the stage 'loopholes' to finish the level quickly. 

Later when 3D game emerges like Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Medal of Honor Allied Assault my poor old Dell gives all sorts of problems. The supplied Dell driver is outdated and gives OpenGL problem when trying to run both this game thus I need to look for updated driver via slow 56k dialup. Even so the Intel driver were so terrible it either gives missing textures or it will run with white textures if not crash to desktop.

I started reading what made 3D games tick and makes me read about graphics card and AGP slot with OpenGL and DirecX requirements. I was disappointed after I looked inside the Dell I can't find any AGP slot but still I look for PCI card and find *Inno3D Riva TNT2 M64* card. That was my very first add in 3D card. I can at least run the game better and see where am I going with it but performance was very limited since it only have 66MHz FSB with 66MHz RAM speed plus the PCI bus wasn't helping either.

The next upgrade was a weird *Elitegroup K7SEM 3.0c*. It comes with 'integrated' (soldered to motherboard) Duron 1200+. Its weird because Duron don't have the PR rating moniker like Athlon did. The 1200+ was really only 800MHz Duron (if my memory serves me well) and it have the holy grail AGP slot! The first card I used is *GeForce4 MX-440*. It was a decent card but as DirectX 8 emerges it lacks the hardware vertex and pixel shader. My very first DirectX 8 card was *Powercolor Evil Commando Radeon 9000 64MB. *The VERY first thing I do after installing driver is run 3DMark2001SE Nature Test. It was a breathtaking scene seeing pixel shader for the first time. I run it occasionally because it looks amazing.

Those are some of my early days using PC. I still have my Pentium system the Dell is dead and corroded heavily after house renovation but I can't remember what happen to the ECS K7SEM. Kinda miss that weird board. I think its been thrown off with other old junk. Could've used it for retro Windows 98 gaming PC if its still around.


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## Canon (Jul 26, 2018)

As a child I grew up with an Amiga A1200 in the house, my dad essentially dedicated a room to it and the masses upon masses of floppies he gathered. I loved it and that was my introduction to games and hardware, since it was always having some sort of issue. 

I played the DOOM shareware release with my sister and never forgot it, I wasn't old enough or clever enough to get my own setup at this point. Until the day my older brother (by 20 years) came to stay with us, he brought his PC, unfortunately I don't remember the spec but he set it up and started playing Half Life. It was at this point he got a seriously eager kid chomping at his ankles to get a go, he let me play for a bit. Then for months after all I could think about was working out how to get my own system with cool games and imagining all the other cool stuff I could do. 

So eventually I convinced a parent to let me take loan of the home PC, of course it was a terrible old beast. Pennies were saved, components were bought, errors were made, lessons were learned and eventually the games were played, the child was happy and now the child is here.


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## Deleted member 178884 (Jul 26, 2018)

A windows me and xp desktop - Loved the cinematic games at like 10fps


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## StrayKAT (Jul 26, 2018)

Technically, I didn't start with PCs... but a Vic-20 that my brother got in the early 80s. And just being fascinated through the 80s with friends who had Amigas and other Commodores. My family didn't get a proper PC until 1994, when I was already in my late teens.. a 486. But I must've spent day and night with that thing. Learning about PCs was the result of just breaking things.. and being desperate enough to get things up and running. Then by 95 or 96, I discovered Linux and messed around with alternative OSes. Afterwards, I switched back and forth owning Macs and Pcs through the years. I still think Mac OS X is the greatest OS ever... just not Apple's hardware unfortunately. Software wise, they accomplished the dream of a Desktop Unix before anyone.. and really, are still the only ones who do it right.


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## Papahyooie (Jul 26, 2018)

robot zombie said:


> Sorry for the platitudinous ramble. Just struck a chord.




That was the most beautiful bit of off-topic rambling I think I've ever heard.

EDIT:

I love these threads, and I just scrolled back to see I hadn't commented on this one yet that I could find.

For me, I'd always been an inquisitive kid. The type to take apart the remote control to see how it works, and get grounded for it. I played some old games on my mom's PC back in the windows 95 era, but would have never dared to touch it for fear of breaking what amounted to a huge investment at the time.
Played consoles as a kid mostly. Xbox came out, and one fateful day, I discovered The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind. Played that game religiously for years. Eventually I found out that you could mod the PC version, and I absolutely HAD to get in on that. But there was no way my mom's PC was going to handle it, and they wouldn't let me upgrade it.
I literally found a PC sitting beside a flee market dumpster, and asked them if I could take it. They said it was broken, so sure. I got on the 56k interwebs (yea, my small town still had dial up) and researched my butt off.
I fixed the computer, as it luckily had a good motherboard. Upgraded it to a Pentium 3 500mhz. By this time, I had a small stash of "broken" computers from various sources, and stole all the ram out of them, and upgraded the original computer with it. Had a whopping 768mb of ram, which was utterly massive in that day. 1gb ram sticks wouldn't be affordable for another several years on the consumer market, and a computer with 256mb of ram was considered a high end computer. Luckily, the original motherboard had three ram slots, and with a bios update and three sticks of salvaged 256mb of ram, I basically had a supercomputer. Eventually found a Pentium 3 1ghz, and that thing flew (compared to what it was before lol). The graphics card was a Radeon 9550 AGP. I played SO much Morrowind, WoW vanilla, Guild Wars, etc on that thing.

Skip forward a few years of being the go-to tech nerd in town, several jobs and a stint in the Marine Corps later... A buddy of mine got me a job in tech support at a local company. I'm still at that company, but am now a certified Software QA Engineer, and now get to break software for a living.

Long story short... I owe my career to Morrowind. Thanks Bethesda!


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## witkazy (Jul 31, 2018)

Well,back in 1999 my wife said i'm spending way too much time on console (typical psx widow talk) so we bought our first pc, comaque pressario 2000 .Well ,best part of of the setup were JBL speakers Roughly 20 years later i,m playing Tomb Raider 2 staring Lara Croft on emulator ,old habits die hard it seems .


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## StrayKAT (Jul 31, 2018)

witkazy said:


> Well,back in 1999 my wife said i'm spending way too much time on console (typical psx widow talk) so we bought our first pc, comaque pressario 2000 .Well ,best part of of the setup were JBL speakers Roughly 20 years later i,m playing Tomb Raider 2 staring Lara Croft on emulator ,old habits die hard it seems .



It's kind of impressive that you had a wife before you ever had a PC 

I'm in my 40s now.. and most likely never will be married.


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## witkazy (Jul 31, 2018)

StrayKAT said:


> It's kind of impressive that you had a wife before you ever had a PC
> 
> I'm in my 40s now.. and most likely never will be married.


Dude, me thinks it is more impressive that i'm still married  ,28 years and counting.


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## John Naylor (Jul 31, 2018)

This talk of marriage and PCs, reminded me of the funniest article I ever read:

http://users.rcn.com/alderete/humor/comp/scott-adams.html


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## StrayKAT (Jul 31, 2018)

John Naylor said:


> This talk of marriage and PCs, reminded me of the funniest article I ever read:
> 
> http://users.rcn.com/alderete/humor/comp/scott-adams.html



He's just as entertaining a writer..

It's even funnier that Kanye West, of all people, credits Scott Adams for his recent... umm.. controversial change in political views.


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## M0rafic (Mar 31, 2019)

The first computer I bought cost me about £250 in 1979, I can't remember what it was called, It had an led display, a rom with BASIC on it  and you had to plug it into a tape recorder to save/load programs. There was an option for an external hard drive (or as they were then winchester disks and it could also be upgraded to run cp/m . Needless to say as a student reading computer science I couldn't afford the options. I hated it, I despised Basic and after being switched on half a dozen times it went up in my parents loft.

The first computer I fell in love with was the ICL 2980 mainframe running vme/b, programming monte-carlo neutronics  simulations and x-ray crystallography stuff for the Atomic Energy Authority, sheer bliss. It even had a magnetic drum! The only one I have ever seen.

After that real-time radar processing and air traffic movements in CORAL66 and assembler at the National Air Traffic Control Centre in West Drayton  and 4 massive IBM 9020 D's to play with each of which was made up of 3 or 4 "smaller" IBM 360 series mainframes. There was a folder containing maps by the door of the machine room so that people could find their way around. I'm autistic so I used to go in there for hours at a time to work. Just coming out for lunch and the odd coffee break.

Then Mrs Thatcher decided to cancel the project I was working on so it was out into the real world.

Somehow stock-control, accounts, payroll, MRP etc the normal commercial IT stuff was about as stimulating as last weeks porridge, so I switched from coding to the operations side of things.  Plus by this time the IBM AT and a million clones had arrived and I was pretty sure I wanted nothing to do with them.  So I switched from programming mainframes to looking after mainly Dec VAXes, with the odd Sun Solaris box and for a blissfull six months one summer I negotiated my way into working constant night- shifts looking after two rooms full of VAXes and a by then superannuated ICL 2960 still running 10 years after its proposed decommissioning date. In the whole six months I didn't see anyone.  

But then thanks to all that time with VAXes running VMS got me a normal 9-5 IT job with loads of network pc's running wfw 3.11 because they also had VAXes running their email system and real-time data-logging and archiving. Doing stuff with VAXes usually meant out of hours even if it was only defragging disks and  rebuilding databases. And what do you do at the end of a long day when there isn't really much to do except wait. You play Prince of Persia or Doom  on one of those annoying pc's just to pass the time. When the VAXes were replaced with HP intel powered servers I left and went working for Dell, telling other people what to do with broken/failing servers or I played with servers. On the occasions when I was the one who turned up to look at a clients kit rather than the usual site engineer it was really important to Dell that it be fixed.  It wasn't unknown for planes and helicopters to be chartered to ensure that the person who was going to solve the problem got there in time. Even if "there" was a ship in the middle of the atlantic. 

Anyway I did at one point think of getting a Dual Processor VAX but they use rather a lot of power.  So I made do with a dual celeron Abit BP6 (a 100% overclock to 400Mhz) with scsci drives and DAT tape an ATI 2d graphics card an ATI 2d graphics card and a pair of Voodoo 2's (this was pre-Dell)  I also bought a few old IBM desktops on a pallet along with a HP 4MV A3 laser printer and a lasejet III. the Laserjet 4 had a jetdirect card in it so it was handyand i had a little network of 4 or 5 pc's.  I also bought an ibm thinkjet. 

Then came Dell, and a burglery so all the kit got knicked. So given the company discount I bought the XPS m1330 I'm typing on.  Its had a few upgrades since but it will happily play Skyrim and Halflife 2 so it does ok.

As for Dell I retired on health grounds and am now reasonably content, last month I picked up a Dell Precision T7500 as I still like the idea of multiple physical processors even if for most tasks there is no benefit in the real world. Just like the dual celeron machine was absolutely useless for gaming back in the day it was fun to build. 

Similarly just to be awkward the  2010 T7500, has an NVMe boot drive, the games etc, sit on a a group of SAS drives plugged into  a raid controller from a server forming a raid 5 array.  And it has 48Gb of triple channel ram along with a vega 56. It doesn't really need the complexity  at all, I'm useless at gaming  but its just pushing the envelope without having to have the latest bit of kit where it isn't going to  provide much real benefit for having spent an awful lot of cash.  

I have learned two things in working in IT, how to make old kit go far faster than it should be capable of and that being on the bleeding edge means you pay through the nose, the promises are never delivered on for a year or perhaps even two before the  drivers and firmware catch up and let you finally get the performance AND reliability that initial release offered.

God I've waffled on.......

Mike


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## SamirD (Mar 31, 2019)

StrayKAT said:


> It's kind of impressive that you had a wife before you ever had a PC
> 
> I'm in my 40s now.. and most likely never will be married.


Say in Vader voice--"Impressive.  Most impressive." 

Never say never friend!  In my circle of friends we never thought our friend Ed would get married and he did--at 40.  And I thought that if it can happen to him it can happen to me, and it did--at 37.  I think getting married later is actually better as you know yourself well enough to know what you need and want in a spouse. 



witkazy said:


> Dude, me thinks it is more impressive that i'm still married  ,28 years and counting.


Say again in Vader voice--"Impressive.  Most impressive." 

Marriage can be hard, but hard in a way you've never known before you were married.  But if there's a commitment of each person to the other no matter what, somehow that becomes something that is hard to explain--a solidarity, a uniformity.  Yes, it can come with a lot of butting of heads, but gives one something that you never thought you could attain.  (Just 6 years married here.)



John Naylor said:


> This talk of marriage and PCs, reminded me of the funniest article I ever read:
> 
> http://users.rcn.com/alderete/humor/comp/scott-adams.html


The funny thing is, is this has become true!  I remember when being into computers or video games put you on the fringes of society.  Now, it's mainstream!  And the girls!  Where did the hot geeky girls come from?!?!  These were never around before.   PS, I'm writing this in boxer shorts in front of a 22" CRT running 2560x1600 via vga, haha.

Women generally do like intelligent men, period, so being an intelligent gentleman is the tortoise in the race of life. 

I love reading the posts here.  I thought I had added my own, but didn't see it so I'll have to do that sometime.


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## Aquinus (Mar 31, 2019)

High school, it was a 2.4Ghz Northwood Celeron, FIC motherboard, Radeon 9200. I used spare parts from my earlier computer, an eMachine. First computer I ever built. I still have it, it's in the attic.


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