FFXIhealer wrote:I did not buy my first two PCs.
Same here. My first PC was not even ours to begin with. It was from my dad's work, but he had no need for it (or the know how to operate it) so I was the only one to use it. I was a 133Mhz cyrix with 8 mb of ram - no sound card, no CD-ROM. The second one I helped configure, but due to budget constraints it wasn't exactly what I wished for. Was still happy with it tough.
The first computer I built was a socket a machine - back in 2001-2002. It was a 900 or 950MHz duron on a Matsonic SDR/DDR combo board. I didn't have enough money to buy a whole PC so I traded in my K6 + some $$$ for it. It still used 128 out of the 196mb of SDRAM my K6 had, as well as the 4GB HDD (witch I still have - sadly it developed bad blocks). Practically I only bought a cheap-ass ATX case + PSU, the motherboard + CPU and a radeon 7500 (witch is where most of my money went) + a second hand creative voodoo 2 he had lying around to pair with the CT6670 in my K6 (I had just figured out how to make most glide games run). It was a piece of crap, but at the same time a great machine. Imagine going from a 400MHz K6 to a 950MHz duron and from a Trident Blade 3D + Voodoo 2 to a Radeon 7500 😀 Damn that thing was fast for it's day 😀
I was under the impression (until not long ago) that I kept the K6 for my sister but it turns out I didn't - the K6 she got was a leftover from my cousin. I know now because she has pics of it and remembered what was inside - a 500MHz K6-II and an AGP Riva TNT2 M64. My K6 didn't even have an AGP slot (VIA MVP4)
A few months later I upgraded the CPU to a 1700+ athlon and swapped the SDR for a 256MB stick of DDR266, and got a 40GB HDD. It was when I decided to install winXP. I still had 98 on the 4GB drive, and would alternate booting (from bios mind you, I had no idea how to make a dual-boot setup) from one drive or the other (there were no Voodoo 2 winXP drivers back then - at least none I could find). XP was great for web surfing and 98 was great for games 😀. That machine went trought so many changes util 2005 when I finally replaced it... from 950Mhz duron to 1700+, then 2000+, then 2400+, 2500+ and finally a weird OEM 2700+. I wish I kept the CPU since I've never come across a 2700+ barton since then. I also swapped quite a few boards and cases / PSUs - I had trouble with the shitty matsonic mainboard, as well as with the crappy noname PSUs of the time. By the time my sistem contained an nForce 2 + FX 5200 ultra, It ran a brand-name (antec I think?) 400w PSU because it wasn't stable with anything else. I remember being so pissed when I had to send 250 lei (about 100$ back then) on a PSU - a part witch brought no performance increase whatsoever.
I really wish I kept the 586 machine - but it was technically impossible. I tough my dad traded it in for the K6, but it turns out he had to turn it in back at work. He did manage to take out the CT6670 (witch I still have), a hard drive and my sound card, but that's it. I really wish I could have gotten the CPU back... oh well.