I find it shocking to look back and think "omg I've had this sound card since it was new in 1996".

10 years ago I was still using a PIII-550 with an AGP Geforce 2 MX that could barely run Morrowind. I still have it laying around in case I need to read floppy disks.

10 years ago I had my overclocking wonder, a Celeron 600 which worked without a problem @900. With a Leadtek WinFast TNT2 M64 video card, SB Live! Value and a 40 Gb Matrox HDD. This rig had 3 speeds: 600, 750 and 900.

To think I was maining a GeforceFX 5200 8 years ago!
However I often associate other hobbies with the use of parts, like Toonami Tom 1.0 with my last serious Voodoo2 usage days. When Tom 2.0 came I was on a Geforce2.

10 years ago...2003....I was running a pentium 3 500 with a diamond monster fusion...still have that motherboard - an Asus p2b 😁

fillosaurus wrote:

10 years ago I had my overclocking wonder, a Celeron 600 which worked without a problem @900. With a Leadtek WinFast TNT2 M64 video card, SB Live! Value and a 40 Gb Matrox HDD. This rig had 3 speeds: 600, 750 and 900.

Omg! That is VERY similar to mine. I had Abit BE6-II with the same CPU overclocked to 900, TNT2 Ultra, SB Live! Value, 128MB RAM, 13+40GB harddrive.

Upgraded later that year to Athlon XP though.

vetz wrote:

13+40GB harddrive

extra points if this combination of sizes were Maxtor DiamondMax, and bonus points if the 40gb isn't working anymore but the 13gb is.

leileilol wrote:

vetz wrote:

13+40GB harddrive

extra points if this combination of sizes were Maxtor DiamondMax, and bonus points if the 40gb isn't working anymore but the 13gb is.

Both were IBM Deathstars. The 40Gb drive died very quickly (summer 2004 according to my old website), the 13.5GB drive just said "click-click-click" when I tried to test it last year. Wish them well in harddrive heaven 😜

Speaking of hard drives, my brother gave me his old original XBox, and I'm thinking of softmodding it and upgrading its HDD. I did something similar with my Wii a couple years ago (has it been that long?), which now has a USB-powered 500GB Seagate external USB drive.

My Linux box currently has at least 3 drives in it: A 160GB Seagate boot drive, a 160GB drive that is now empty (had WinXP on it, but I moved everything useful off it last night and reformatted to ext4), and a 400GB Hitachi Deskstar/"Deathstar".

The Deathstar is IDE, which would be perfect for the XBox (which has the HDD and DVD-ROM drive as master/slave on a single IDE channel), but I have a bunch of old stuff on it that I want to keep local to that box. Fortunately, I have 2 dodgy 250GB Seagate SATA drives laying around which would probably work for offloading the data if I can get one or both of them going again.

My Windows box has a 300GB WD VelociRaptor and a 2TB WD Caviar green, but they're both getting pretty full and I don't want the Deathstar's data hosted on that machine if I can help it. It's tempting, though, as that box is in a giant Cooler Master Storm Sniper case with tons of drive bays and has an EVGA E657 motherboard with tons of SATA ports.

I should also mention that the pair of 250GB drives were once a striped RAID-0 array, and I'd like to see if I can find out what's on them before I reformat them. I got some software that's supposed to help with that, but a quick attempt to get the drives to be detected by my Windows box's BIOS the other night failed.

I plan to spend my evenings this week trying to push data off of the Deathstar, then mess with the 250GB Seagates this weekend and the XBox the following weekend.

BTW, I hate Seagates now and mostly only buy WD. Those 250GB drives have what look like SMD (surface mount) inductors on the exposed part of their circuit boards, and I accidentally knocked one loose early on while putting it into a drive caddy. It worked after I soldered it back on, but eventually got flaky enough again that I stopped using it.

So Seagates are designed poorly to be fragile. WD drives are better, but even their drives often die on me within a couple weeks of purchase; fortunately WD has a good RMA program 😀

ncmark wrote:

How many of you measure the passage of time by what computers you had?

🤣 Count me in... and I'd add that by looking back at the rig I had that year, I also get a gauge of how much spare cash I had at that particular point.