This story begins in 1999, I was 16, with my first PC chosen component by component, based only on two years of reading magazines like PCWorld and PCProfessionale. I barely knew how to insert a CD and look for the installer. I knew nothing about DOS, except that it existed. The first computer I ever touched was an Acer Aspire purchased by my school. A P2mmx 350 MHz, 64 MB of RAM, a 15" CRT screen with speakers attached, a graphics card that I never figured out exactly which one it was. The control panel said Rage Pro, I think it had 2 MB of RAM. On those PCs we played Final Fantasy 7-8, Half Life, Motocross Madness, Incoming, Age of Empires, Forsaken, Driver, Supreme Snowboarding. Obviously, some ran well, others poorly, but for the time, it was all magical. As I was saying, in the summer of '99, after studying for months, telling a lot of bullshit to my mother to convince her, I went to order my 700Mhz Athlon on an Asus K7v with a Via chipset and an A slot, 128MB of PC133 RAM, a Guillemot Hercules 3D Prophet 2 GTS 32MB (!!!!!), a Creative Sound Blaster Live 1024, a Quantum Fireball LM Plus 15GB UDMA66 HDD, a crappy winmodem, a NEC Multisync FE 700 that weighed a lot, a floppy disk used only for booting, a fast but noisy Pioneer DVD 104s slot-in drive, a terrible LG 4x4x32x burner whose model I forgot, which cost a lot, and which didn't read subchannel data (!!!!!!!!). I also got some Creative 4.1 speakers that I loved. I spent nights gaming, nights formatting, nights on IRC, nights dreaming of becoming a hacker like Mitnick, IRC scripts, Napster, MP3s, CDs everywhere, Rotten.com, ICQ, and even back then I was emulating the consoles I had, replaying NES and SNES classics, like Zelda... It all survived in the basement until a few months ago, when my mother decided to throw everything away without asking me. Obviously, it caused me great pain and anger, considering she had already thrown away my old NES, SNES, and Genesis consoles, along with all the games, on other occasions... I'm a nostalgic and I'm very fond of memories, images, movies, and games that remind me of times and people... Okay, let's look ahead. I open eBay and decide to give myself a useless gift that won't make me feel any better for losing my things, but it will at least allow me to take back a little piece of that past, even if it's not steeped in my blood. So I decide to pay what I consider crazy: HIM.

It cost €150 and has one important, non-technical feature. It looks the same as the Acer computers my school bought, which I mentioned at the beginning. I couldn't leave it there. It will replace my old computer, now in the hands of some vintage dealer.

It's a Pentium IIIE 600MHz, with 256MB of RAM (64+64pc133 + 128pc100 🙁), an Acer S61 Slot 1 motherboard with a socket 370 adapter. A 20GB WD200 Protege IDE drive, a Dell OEM 5.1 0200 SSD that I installed myself, a TNT2 M64, a floppy disk, and a Philips CD-RW.

I've been fiddling with it for two days now... It crashes every second, haha, but it's not broken... it's the magic of Windows 98, so imperfect... So I'm joining the community too.

I'll delve into my memories and eBay auctions to try to improve it a bit, while maintaining maximum backwards compatibility with the world of the time.