tincup wrote:

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...

How's your OCZ SSD holding up? I went through 2 of them in the space of 5-6 months... Drive health dropped dramatically until they both got plagued with bad sectors and became unusable. I also had a Corsair SSD that pretty much went the same way 😒. This was a while ago now, so things might have improved.... I'll look into getting another SSD once i know they're totally reliable (i don't ever remember having a mechanical drive fail on me).

OCZ Vertex 4 with 2 partitions which I keep at less than 50% capacity each: almost 4 months in and no problems to report.

I have four SSD drives all up. a 60GB Silicon Power in my Media PC, a 256GB OCZ Patrol in my Office PC, a 128GB Silicon Power in my Gaming PC and a 64GB Silicon Power currently unnused. Also a 750GB Notebook drive with hybrid SSD (Seagate I think).

So far no issues. The 64GB in the Media PC (basically a media centre PC hooked up to my TV) I have had for almost a year. The others maybe half a year.

In my office PC (that's where I do important stuff), I have 2TB green storage and an external HDD dock for backups. All data is on platter drives and gets backed up daily by a scheduled process. So if the SSD dies, nothing is lost. I also use lots of Windows 7 libraries, fantastic feature and makes organising things that are all over the place so much easier.

I was still using my laptop that I bought in 1997. Pretty awesome spec for its time.
Mitac Brand
P166MMX
48MB EDO Ram
1.6GB HDD
24x CD ROM
12.1 Passive Screen
2MB Video

Was great for running SC1, ripping MP3's, etc...

I was running an AMD K5-75, an S3 Virge graphics card, and a 19" Viewsonic monitor. I bought everything for price reasons (except the monitor) so basically I missed any 3D card before Geforce 4. Looking back it's no wonder I ignored PC games back then. I'm revisiting the GPUs and games I missed and having a great time doing it. My current focus is a PII-450 with a Voodoo 3 3000 and an SB Audigy.

Unless I'm off by a year, I was using
Cyrix 6x86 133MHz ("P166+")
M-Tech R533 motherboard (430VX I think)
Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 (S3 Virge)

I was happy with it, it ran all my DOS games great except for Quake. Windows 3D is what made it feel old, there was a steep dropoff because of the lousy "3D" card and Cyrix's weak FPU.

I think it was Christmas 1999 when I upgraded to a K6-3 450. Maybe a good slot-1 board with an overclocked Celeron would have been smarter. Especially since it would have had a Coppermine upgrade path.

I remember that I built my first system that year, it was a dual Celeron 300A with an Abit BP-6 motherboard with 128MB of RAM. I remember that it had a Sound Blaster Live! and a Geforce 256 card. However, I made the mistake of using Windows 98 at the time, which had no SMP support, and the second Celeron was useless, even in Quake 3.

At the start of 1999, I had a "weak" specification Pentium 166 MMX with 16MB EDO RAM, Samsung 32X CD-ROM, Avance Logic ISA sound card (Sound Blaster 16 clone), S3 Trio but with only 1MB, Fujitsu MPB3021ATU 2.1GB hard drive, Chaintech 5SIM motherboard, floppy, cheap unbranded keyboard and mouse, etc. It initially had Windows 3.1 which was later upgraded to Windows 98 (First Edition) where performance was poor due to "low" memory and 800x600 was restricted to 16 bit when I really wanted 32 bit.

In June, it was upgraded to a "massive" 128MB PC100 RAM (clocked at PC66), SiS 6326 8MB PCI graphics, BTC 48X CDROM because the original broke and added a SoundBlaster PCI 64V (previously Ensoniq ES1372). Because the PCI sound card emulation of a SoundBlaster Pro was broke, I had to run both the ISA card for DOS games and apps and the PCI card for Windows 98 side by side in the same system. I also bought a better quality branded keyboard and a Microsoft Wheel Mouse PS/2.

In December, I added an Acer 4X4X32 CD-RW and an Aztech MSP-3880-SP-W PCI modem to the computer which was when the Internet days began. It was a Conexant based modems and was the worst modem I ever bought despite "PCI being better than ISA, etc." It was only compatible with Windows, took up loads of CPU power as it was a software modem and worst of all, their drivers installed so much bloated crap such as Adobe Reader that you could install separately. You were forced to download 7MB when only something like 100K is actually the drivers!

s3freak wrote:

It was a Conexant based modems and was the worst modem I ever bought despite "PCI being better than ISA, etc." It was only compatible with Windows, took up loads of CPU power as it was a software modem and worst of all, their drivers installed so much bloated crap such as Adobe Reader that you could install separately. You were forced to download 7MB when only something like 100K is actually the drivers!

Yeah, the PCI modems were a mistake back then. It seemed like the best way to avoid accidentally getting a "winmodem" was to stick with ISA or an external. PCI was basically just something they could abuse to make them software based.
I made the same mistake, I had a USR winmodem which was always a pain to deal with. Once I got into freeBSD/Linux I switched to a serial modem. What a huge improvement in all respects - I wish I had gotten that the first time.

I remember the reputation of PCI modems got so bad that hardware modems seemed to go out of their way to boldly advertise "ISA!" as a selling point. It's not like they couldn't put a hardware modem on PCI, but lots of people didn't trust that format anymore so they went retro to avoid the issue.

Hmm...that would pretty much be my first computer, a hand me down from wealthier relatives.

There was a

486 DX2 @66Mhz
32MB memory
8x CD-ROM
14.4 Kbps modem (now this thing was...special)
a Trident video card, ISA I think
Hard drive might have been 200MB
SB16?
Win98

So, a pretty useless computer, but it did in fact browse the web, it ran programs like SimCity 2000 or Civilization, and pretty much did everything I wanted it to...very slowly. It wasn't for another couple of years that I bought a game requiring hardware rendering. Oops.

I hope I remember correctly... 'cause I upgraded everything by components from 1992 - when a 286/16 was in the case and in 1999 the case was still with me 😉

I believe this were the specifications:

- Pentium MMX 166MHz - OC'ed to 250MHz
- 64MB ram
- a few 1-2GB HDD's
- 32X CD-ROM Teac
- ATI Charger 2MB
- ATI TV Wonder
- SB16
- Sony 19" Trinitron GS420

In early 2000 the CPU was replaced by AMD K6-2 450MHz, ram up to 128MB, ATI Charger for 3dfx Voodoo 3 2000 16MB, Sony 19" GS420 replaced under warranty for Sony 19" E400.

DonutKing wrote:

WE just bought a new PC in 1998: […]
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WE just bought a new PC in 1998:

Pentoum 2 266MHz (Klamath)

Chaintech 6LTM2 motherboard (i440LX chipset)
S3 Virge GX2 AGP card (a horrible card, I wanted a 3dfx but we got that instead)
ESS SOLO 1938 sound card
32MB SDRAM
3.2GB Hard Drive
Windows 98

I was stuck with that for a few years. I wished we'd waited a bit and got a BX-chipset motherboard so we could upgrade to a Pentium 3 🙁 The board we had wouldn't even run Coppermine celerons.

Waiting for the BX chipset , and 100MHz FSB CPUs would only be reasonable by the end of 1998, your system was a fantastic machine in the beginning of 1998 and full of new technology , adding a voodoo and more 32MB of ram would do make it very reasonable , even by the end of 98

To the best of my knowledge, we had a Cyrix 686 rig with a Matrox G200 card and a Sound Blaster AWE32. God, that Cyrix chip was good for squat. Anyone else have the extreme displeasure of owning one?

Amd K5-100Mhz
Chaintech 5VGM socket 7 motherboard
40mb ram
Expert color video card S3Trio 64v+ 1 mb
1,2gigs Fujitsu hard drive
Btc 1815 soundcard with OPTI 925 sound chipset
Mitsumi quad speed(4x) cd rom.
Samtron 14" monitor
Windows 95 Osr2

The pc was bought,as new by the end on 1996,but in 1999 was still stuck with it,only in november 2000 i managed to get a new pc.
I still have the procesor,ram,videocard and hard drive.

bucket wrote:

To the best of my knowledge, we had a Cyrix 686 rig with a Matrox G200 card and a Sound Blaster AWE32. God, that Cyrix chip was good for squat. Anyone else have the extreme displeasure of owning one?

I had one and loved it until Quake came along. That was when the weakness of the FPU came to light.
In integer apps/games, I thought it was great. Part of my pleasure though was the fact that it was stable - my previous PC (a PCChips 486) had been terribly unstable. So the Cyrix let me finally enjoy games that had previously been crash-prone.
That 486 almost scared me away from building from components ever again. I actually was so worried I went on Cyrix's web site and made sure to buy a board that was on their recommended list.

It's funny, at that point in time (when building the Cyrix), I remember looking at the CPU options for AMD and thinking "wow - these guys are waaay behind.. they're not going to be around much longer."

shamino wrote:

bucket wrote:

To the best of my knowledge, we had a Cyrix 686 rig with a Matrox G200 card and a Sound Blaster AWE32. God, that Cyrix chip was good for squat. Anyone else have the extreme displeasure of owning one?

(...)

It's funny, at that point in time (when building the Cyrix), I remember looking at the CPU options for AMD and thinking "wow - these guys are waaay behind.. they're not going to be around much longer."

😁

bucket wrote:

To the best of my knowledge, we had a Cyrix 686 rig with a Matrox G200 card and a Sound Blaster AWE32. God, that Cyrix chip was good for squat. Anyone else have the extreme displeasure of owning one?

Lousy FPU=lousy game performance. Those alternative CPU's back then were meant for businesses and casual computer users who needed good integer performance for apps at a lower price than Intel, not for power gamers. I think many of us owned a non-Intel Socket 7 or Super 7 system back then and regretted it almost immediately after we inserted our first game CD in the drive. I know when I finally got my K6-2 533 it wasn't nearly as exciting as when I upgraded from my 486 DX2-80 to my Pentium 150 box because games became a lot more demanding in the intervening time period.

While the Cyrix 6x86 wasn't good for Quake (in software mode, that is. Surfaceblock functions aren't Cyrix friendly) it still was okay for SNES emulation, WinAMP, Total Annihilation and Activision 3d games, and with a Voodoo2 card, that Quake performance deficiency can be totally forgotten about 😜

I do know that Cyrix 6x86 and the PowerVR PCX2 are a terrible combination when it comes down to performance (even Jedi Knight is slow) and stability (freezes).

Also, the AMD K6-2 was great for Quake.

Yeah, well... since I was the only one in the household who played games, I was the only person to know how bad it was. I suppose the Matrox helped matters but that was its own cheap backalley brand (I heard the 400 competed better with mainstream cards). Two Win9x games ran well on it: Unreal, which was an excellently-coded game overall, and Shadowman, which was "specialized for the Matrox" but still a horrible game for many other reasons.

I was only 10 at the time and the PC is long gone, so this is by memory.

Dell Dimension, no idea what kind

CPU=Pentium iii 450MHz? (it was a Slot 1, so a Katmai)
RAM= It had 1 stick (double sided) of either PC100 or 133, I'm inclined to believe 100, guessing 128MB
Sound=Turtle Beach something or other
GPU= some kind of Nvidia TNT 2 Riva
DVD Drive (don't know the speed)
Floppy
Hard Drive was somewhere between 12 and 15GB
56k Modem

It had ISA, PCI, and AGP inside, probably 4x
Rear end had PS/2, USB 1.1, RS232, Parallel, (gameport, line in, RJ11 and VGA all on the cards)

It had room for another optical drive and probably a zip drive, but I never got them.

Sometime around 2004 the PSU died, at the time was only around 15 or so and didn't know anything about computers, wet called someone up, got it fixed and a few months later it made some horrible noises and eventually died (HDD probably died, didn't know it at the time) So I had to disassemble it and that's how I learned all I know about computers...for the most part.

during its life it ran Windows 98FE, 98SE, and 2000.

I currently have a similar model (Dimension XPS T450) which is maxed out for the most part.