From the aspect of owning a computer I'd say 90's was the golden decade. You could finally afford a proper machine and get online with a modem. Everyone was hooked up to the internet by the end of the decade. The graphical OS overtook character based OS and evolved to what we pretty much use today. That made it easier for everyone to enjoy computers, not just nerds and geeks. Also games were better and more mature than on consoles at that time.

For me all is subjective and i see my computer journey through my eyes so i generally consider 3 "ages":
1. classic era: 1991 - 1998, when I did not built my own but I had access to computers that my mother had - 386 and 486 with big 5.25 floppy disk drives, very small hard drives and the eternal message "you must not change a thing"! - and later when I got to faculty my roommate had back than - K6 166 with 32mb if RAM and Windows 95 crashing at least 3 times a day on which I played Diablo 1, Dark reign, Warcraft 2 , Panzer General 2 and many other games to the death. This was the time when i got really "hooked" up!
2. golden era: 1998 - 2008; this was really the period that I remember most fondly; I still remember vividly the first PC I assembled: K6-2 400, the fist boot up of Windows 98 and the first weekend spent entirely in front of the monitor! The first time I had a 3d card - geforce 256 - and the countless hours playing Diablo 2, RTCW, NFS High stakes and Porsche; the first lan parties when I had to carry the case and the CRT monitor across town and how we all gathered in awe around 1 system that had the latest and greatest with me being so jealous because all I had was a lowly Duron 1300; the first WOW moment with the freshly assembled Core 2 duo on Abit AW9D-MAX with blue leds and the one and only time when people congratulated me.
3. modern era: 2011 - present: 2600k......

For me it would be the 1993-1995 window(486 core + Doom).

Largely a subjective question. I'm sure you'll get plenty of people who think the 80s with Commodores and Apple products were the golden age, for example.

Personally, i would say the 90s. Maybe that's a bit broad but new CPUS and technology were coming out at a ridiculous clip. I mean, just look at how many architectures and socket types and upgrades came and went during that period. Throw into that the advent of affordable CDROMS, sound cards, 3d graphics accelerators, the Internet explosion, and software which took advantage of all of this. It was not unheard of for someone to buy a new PC every other year. Not to mention the browser wars, search engines competition, dotcom boom, etc. Very exciting time.