Pretty sure I had a PII-400Mhz. But shortly after probably really early 2k I went PIII-800MHz. The P2 had a Geforce 2 Ultra in it, which transisitioned to the PIII-800, but the P3-800 probably ended its life with a geforce 3 ultra in it.

I had a pii based celeron with the i810 chipset. I was stuck with integrated graphics at the time, which were horrible. I lost interest in PC gaming for a number of years as a result. Finally ditched that thing when I built an Athlon XP machine a few years later.

My sis had a Celeron on 810 at the time too. I gave her a PCI Radeon SDR which got Morrowind running well enough (critical for her). I don't miss the days of motherboards without AGP. Thankfully I've never run into a modern microATX board without PCIe x16.

Back in that time I had an 486 DX4 @ 120 Mhz with 16 MB RAM running Windows 95 and I played some really heavy games on it like starcraft,Tomb Raider 2, having to wait 5 minutes for an fallout 2 saved game to load, and playing quake 2 on it with very low fps reason for me buying an S3 virge hoping to get better performance. An year later I got an Celeron 366 Mhz with 128 MB RAM but no AGP slot and onboard SiS graphics w/o 3D support, so in 2003 I bought an RIVA TNT2 M64 hoping to run counter strike 1.6 with decent graphics and GTA Vice City, needless to say I was very dissapointed, but still was amazed to see accelerated graphics for the first time but had to get and P3 rig with an Radeon 7500 in 2005 to finally get a decent experience. All these rigs are perfectly working nowadays.

In 1999 I had access to three different systems at various times of the year.

My aunt had her Packard Bell Legend 406CD still (P75, 24mb RAM, crappy everything else) and I used that mostly when I was there, but it was the first machine I had regular access to back when I helped her pick it out in early 95.

My own personal machine was my Compaq Presario 4808 (P200, 32mb RAM, Trio64V2, blah blah).

I moved in with my father in Chicago in February, and he had a NEC Ready 9889 (PII-300, 64mb RAM, no clue what else, but it did have DVD player and was the first time I ever saw a DVD played)

I moved back to my mother's after a few months and went right back to my machine, which my sister had appropriated and covered in fucking hello kitty and 90210 stickers.

Work furnished my computer back then, and they just budgeted money for new workstations in January. A lot of stuff carried over from my previous build. I was budgeted $1,500 I think, so that probably just covered the CPU's and mobo! :p

2 x Pentium III 450MHz Katmai Slot CPU
128MB RAM (at least)
Supermicro or ASUS mobo (can't remember which)
Voodoo2 (single card -- think it was just the 8MB one)
AWE32 with 2 x 2MB SIMM ?? (didn't even know what it was for back then)
OS: Windows 2000 Professional (beta still I think)
Got that wicked silver IntelliMouse Explorer for almost $100 when it first came out!!

Took my 'puter home everyday after work. I was beta testing cable modem service back then.. what joy! 😀

High-school ended for me in 1998, and in November that year my father asked me to start looking around for a new PC to substitute the old 386.
So I spent the next month going to every local store, hoping to have one brand new machine by xmas, confident with all my reading of PC magazines. 😊
Soon I started to realize I didn't knew as much as I thought I did about hardware, but after nagging the hardware people, sometimes for more than an hour each (they were very patient with me being only 16yo I guess, and also wanted my money 🤑 ) I was getting an idea of what I needed. It was only then I realized that there is so much going on when choosing the components.
Still it was very hard to decide, I needed a PC for the next 5years because I was going to college. At the time stores were still selling Pentium-S as an entry level, Pentium-MMX as the mainstream and PentiumII for the top machines.
Fortunately, in the second week of December, at the last store I entered I recognized the man behind the counter: my informatics teacher from last year! I got a good advice from him which I promptly followed "Wait for the 100MHz BUS".

And so that was how I didn't get my new PC for Christmas, and although it was assembled the 31st of December 1998, it was really a 1999 machine as it was only plugged at home the 2nd January!

Here are the original specs:

DFI Motherboard based on Intel 440BX (P2XBL or P2BXL?)
Pentium II 350MHZ 100MHz Front Side Bus
64MB SDRAM PC100
Matrox Millenium G200 AGP 8MB (they did try to sell me Voodoo2 and a cheap 2D card but I was determined to image quality above all)
6.4GB Quantum Fireball 4200rpm
floppy drive 1.44MB
PCI sound card instead of ISA (Creative 64 PCI)
2X CD-R 1x CD-RW OEM (from Philips)
32X Toshiba CD-ROM
Sony Trinitron 15" CRT (best buy ever!)
TEAC PowerMax 240 (these are very good and powerfull)
Wheel Mouse from Microsoft
Microsoft Natural Keyboard (in the end I got used to it)
Epson Photo quality printer
Umax Scanner

at the end of 1999 it already had :
a 56k modem! 😉
a 128MB stick of Ram for a grand total of 192MB (Win98 was so thankful)
a X16 CD-R 8X CD-RW from LG: I was able to backup a music album in 8min instead of 30min!

After that I bought the cheapest DVD-ROM drive I could find (it was a Memorex that died on me too soon).
A USB 2.0 add-on card because the pendisks were getting bigger and bigger
a Maxtor 40GB 7200rpm(this was the upgrade that did the most improvement , I was not expecting it, I just needed more GBs)
a 550MHz PIII when I saw my cousin's PIII750 riping mp3 I had to upgrade, this was the maximum I got at the time.

Several technology tried to kill my Deschutes/440BX machine, but in the end it was Windows XP that did it 🙁

I don't know if the specs are the same but this is roughly the same machine I had. The thing was a real piece of junk:

http://reviews.cnet.com/desktops/compaq-presa … 7-30578827.html

chaintech slot 1 440bx board
p2 400 sl2u6 at 533, de-cased with alpha twin fan heatsink
voodoo 3 2000 pci
sb pci128
usr 56k pci
128mb ram
6.4gb hdd
"case 2000" case
win98se

I was a senior in hs. This was the first machine that I actually built (though I had been messing with PCs since '93), and I had built it about a year before with a celeron 400 on a sloket and 64MB ram. $ was hard to come by back then!

In 1999 I had just upgraded from my first PC, a Cyrix 686 133Mhz with a Matrox Mystique 4MB, to a Celeron 300A with the Matrox Mystique and M3D upgrade card installed. The new machine was all special ordered parts by me, or hodge podged from my first PC that was a custom build.

I recently tried to recreate the 300A system in a Gateway case my brother in law gave me, but since that one had a PIII 500 and Riva TNT in it and one stick of 128MB PC100 I took two of the 64MB PC100 dimms out of my stored Asus P2B to upgrade the PIII machine to 256MB. I then snagged a Matrox Mystique 8MB off ebay and now can switch between it and the Riva TNT in Windows 98 or XP. I think back then I exclusively used an ISA AWE 64, but now I'm using a PCI Live! Value.

In '99 I was a senior in college majoring in computer science, but I was using a lowly hand-me-down from my parents. If memory serves, it was a Pentium 200MHz with 64 or 128MB of RAM and a Diamond Fire GL 1000 video card running WinNT 4.0 Workstation. I liked to tinker with 3D Studio MAX at the time.

A few years prior, as a freshman, I was one of the first people in my dorm to have a CD-R drive, which quickly earned me the friendship of my floor's resident hacker/geek, who used my drive to burn lots of stuff that he'd downloaded from binaries newsgroups. Worked out pretty well for both of us.

I notice a couple of people mentioning 80GB and 120GB hdd's... I honestly don't remember seeing them that big in 1999? I bet they were bloody expensive at the time! Pretty sure I had an AMD K6-2 based PC around 1999 with an ATI Rage Fury graphics card and a dodgy 'super' socket 7 motherboard manufactured by Commate. I can't remember exactly as i've had so many different PC's 😖 .

I also used to have a PC with an IDT WinChip C6 cpu installed... It was nasty! It ran at 240Mhz (with MMX), but had the performance of a Pentium 133Mhz chip 😒

Nothing too fancy, even by 1999 standards.
Compaq Presario 4824
PII-233
32MB of RAM, later upgraded to 64MB
6.5GB Quantum Bigfoot hard drive
Onboard Rage Pro with a whopping 2MB of video memory
Integrated ESS(?) audio with a built-in 10w amplifier
Proprietary 440LX motherboard
56K ISA modem
Windows 95
It came with this awesome Cyber Troopers: Virtual-On game designed to show off the processors MMX instructions. Pure arcade fun.

I used that Compaq (and Win95, and dial-up) until early 2002, when I upgraded to a P4-1800 with XP.

PowerPie5000 wrote:

I notice a couple of people mentioning 80GB and 120GB hdd's... I honestly don't remember seeing them that big in 1999? I

I agree that would have been mega back then. I pieced together 10gb along with a few other drives, 3.1, 2.1 etc., Who rocked a 120gb in 1999? Step forward...

Yea my HDD in my P2 must have been 2 or 4 GB, something like that...

Funny how I use 2GB CF cards in my machines and run out space 😳

tincup wrote:

PowerPie5000 wrote:

I notice a couple of people mentioning 80GB and 120GB hdd's... I honestly don't remember seeing them that big in 1999? I

I agree that would have been mega back then. I pieced together 10gb along with a few other drives, 3.1, 2.1 etc., Who rocked a 120gb in 1999? Step forward...

I think it was not until the early 2000 I swap my trusty 6,4GB Quantum Fireball for a D740X! So not here, 40GB was plenty, at least for me.

My main rig rocked a 40GB drive until 2009 when I built my current box. 🤣 I foolishly started this thing out with a cheap 160GB, but when it had a near-death experience one day I swapped it out for a 500GB Samsung. 😁 I'm currently running it with a 500GB Seagate as my secondary and I'm rather amazed that I thought 160GB was good enough at one time.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

My main rig rocked a 40GB drive until 2009 when I built my current box. 🤣 I foolishly started this thing out with a cheap 160GB, but when it had a near-death experience one day I swapped it out for a 500GB Samsung. 😁 I'm currently running it with a 500GB Seagate as my secondary and I'm rather amazed that I thought 160GB was good enough at one time.

I wouldn't consider anything less than 1TB these days (a small SSD for the OS is an exception).... Especially with Steam installs taking up loads of space!

I've got about 80GB of free space on my system drive along with the better half of my secondary, so I'm doing fine. 😀 Admittedly though most of the space I've used is from old backups and stuff that I should do something about one of these days. 🤣 Also, I don't really play too many Steam games nowadays. I was big on TF2 and stuff when I was younger, but nowadays I find myself firing up Unreal Tournament and Duke Nukem 3D much more often.

I just popped for a 2TB Seagate as my 1TB + 640gb drives are getting uncomfortably full. I moved the OS and select games to a 256gb SSD [OCZ V4] a few months ago. What a game changer - I'm wondering if the new Seagate will be the last IDE drive I get...