First post, by KCompRoom2000
...does it seem like I have pretty bad luck when it comes to scoring old computer hardware?
For example: The first time I went to RE-PC back in June 2013, I was in need of a computer for 9x gaming, the oldest machines I've found in their complete systems (including without operating systems) selection are a generic beige K6 tower of some sort and a Dell Dimension 4300S, between those two systems, the one I chose ended up being the Dell. Also, I felt like getting components to build an Athlon XP rig to fill up a spare case, the motherboard I chose was a Chaintech 7NIL1 which (along with the Dell) was mentioned by yours truly in a thread for discussing hardware that you regret buying due to interference with the dead (and idiotically soldered on) CMOS battery. Due to the problems I've had with that motherboard in conjunction with the impatience of the typical 13-year old kid that I was at that time, I ended up settling for the Dell. That too was problematic due to me resorting to a sound card shopping spree thanks to its shitty Analog Devices chipset not supporting DirectSound, but that's not the only reason I hated buying that system later on, the other reason is that the Dell Dimension 4300S has some garbage specs (Willamette Pentium 4, Low-profile AGP, AND PC-133 SDRAM? no thanks) and I didn't even know that it sucked until after I joined this forum. 😢
Another example is when I finally realized I was doing my 9x setup wrong and bought a different computer to use instead, I bought an ATI Radeon 7200 graphics card because some fool here claimed it had better image quality than the Geforce cards from the same era. As I'm sure you know, image quality isn't everything and the ATI cards lack a couple important features (table fog and 8-bit palettized textures) that some DX3-5 games needed, as a result I recently replaced the Radeon with a Geforce4 Ti4200 to rectify that gap.
And (although more of a stupid rant based on a misinterpretation) one final example is the motherboard in my Slotket Celeron build, originally it had an ASUS P2B-VT motherboard with a VIA Apollo Pro (can't remember if it was 133) and an integrated nVidia Riva TNT video card, but when my Dell E773c CRT died in 2015, it took the video chipset's VGA port with it. Instead of simply buying some sort of AGP video card to use in place of the non-functional RIVA, I ended up replacing the P2B-VT board with a P2B-VE which has an Intel 440BX chipset and integrated ATI Rage (non-128) Pro video. In terms of reliability, it was a godsend because I no longer had to deal with the prior issues I had with the P2B-VT board (i.e. CD drives losing functionality upon reboot and having to manually turn off the computer due to an incompatibility with Windows 95's APM/ACPI implementation), but in terms of features (particularly the video chipset), it was worse and I didn't realize it until after I came here, (Stupidity starts here) once I read the arguments on VIA vs Intel chipsets, I immediately felt like a fool for replacing a defective VIA motherboard with a working 440BX motherboard (but that was before I realized that kanecvr's comment was targeted towards people using the 440BX chipset in builds where it shows its age - particularly Tualeron and late Coppermine builds). In addition, sometimes people here say bad things about ATI video cards from the 9x-era due to weaker (compared to S3) DOS compatibility, poor 3D performance, and (on newer models) lack of the two features mentioned above. With that put into consideration, I probably should've bought a Slot 1/early Socket 370 board without integrated video and just used a regular old AGP/PCI video card of some sort instead. (End of stupidity)
Does anyone else here have the same problem as me?
EDIT: Added a stupidity bracket in the last paragraph so you know when to ignore the misinterpretation towards the chipset differences.
