First post, by Woody72
- Rank
- Newbie
Hi all, Quick intro.
I'm Guy, 48, from the north west of England. I work in IT in the nuclear industry and have been into PC gaming since I got my first computer, a Packard Bell 386SX16, when I was at Uni in the very early 90s. I bought a PC from a guy in Hungary on eBay recently but it was useless. It was a PII 400 with a 3Dfx card but it had a really obscure Soyo motherboard which made sorting out drivers nearly impossible and every singe screw in the thing was stripped. Anyhow, I sold it off for parts and nearly gave up.
Fats forward a week or two... My office at work is basically a 30 foot square company junkyard of old AV and computer equipment and I noticed my current PC amongst the mess. It was a Pentium 166 MMX with 256MB of EDO RAM and a Geforce 2 MX200 graphics card in a very solid mini tower case. After asking for, and gaining, a lot of people's permission (and proving to the company head of IT Security that the HDDs were to be removed and securely destroyed!) I was allowed to bring her home! I have a really smart Samsung 753S (thank you Freegle!) and a P/S2 keyboard I bought prior to getting the 1st PC so I set about getting her up and running. I initially used 16GB flash to IDE adaptor but gave that up and used the 6GB HDD from the Hungarian PC because we all love that sound, right?
The machine ran beautifully but froze occasionally so I downloaded and burned a bootable Memtest86 CD and left it running. It turned out that 2 of the 4 SIMMs were faulty. One froze the machine up and the other one showed 30,000+ errors in Memtest86. Anyhow, she's now running beautifully with 128MB of RAM. The sweet spot of graphics card driver and DirectX version turned out to be 45.23 and directX7.0. 3DMark 99 kind of ran before but there were no textures, it runs perfectly with this combo though, albeit somewhat slowly.
Here she is:
I don't have a sound card at the moment, I sold the AWE 64 the Hungarian PC came with *DOH!*, but I have a Sound Blaster Pro and some cheap beige speakers on the way so I'm looking forward to some retro-gaming!
Modern PC: i7-9700KF, 16GB memory, RTX 3060. Proper PC: Pentium 200 MMX, 128MB EDO memory, GeForce2 MX(200).