Your first PC?

[Stephen Coates]

The first PC which I 'personally purchased' was a Dell OptiPlex, which I got second hand for about £25 a few years ago. I did have a few ideas for use and it has been quite useful for testing servers and just being a spare PC. I always thought I could sell it after I had finished making use of it but I kept it as it has been. Havn't used it much recently though. Has a 400MHz Celeron and came with about 128 or 256MB RAM.

Other than a slightly rubbish Compaq Presario laptop which I got to replace an identicle one which I made a complete mess of, I have never bought a PC.

I still like the speakers and keyboard on that Presario. The passive matrix screen is crap though.

[JLPedro]

My first PC was a Pentium 133Mhz with 8mb ram, 1GB ide HD and a Samsung 14'' monitor! paid 1500€ (1185£), didn't even had a cdrom or sound card !! this was about 1993.

[Demon Cleaner]

I had a 486 DX2/66 with 16MB RAM, a Diamond Stealth GPU 1MB, Creative Soundblaster 16 and a 540MB HDD.

[Harrison]

My first graphics card was a Diamond Stealth too. A G460 8MB one. Was OK for desktop work, and could handle OpenGL sort of OK, but was really crap for DirectX games.

[StuKeith]

1st PC I brought was £1700 a Time Machine! It failed in the 1st month and I then spent 6months trying to get my extended warrenty money back! Spec was

AMD K6-2 366mhz
Win98
128mb PC133
8mb ATI Rage 128
10GB HDD
DVD Rom
15" CRT
Epson 640 printer (I think)

I even had to pay £20 for the printer cable. It cam with Lord of the Dance DVD which took a month longer to come after getting the DVD, and loadsa software including lotus suite, games, norton, dragon and a host of other options.

Now, well I got rid of it years ago. I brought it in 1998 and kept it for about 2 or 3 years, and got rid of it just when XP came out. I brought an Evesham Pc with ME after that, as was told to hold off from XP then.

I brought the original Half Life for it. Spent ages playing it, wondering why it looked rubbish, compared to the box images. Wasn't till almost completing it I found out you could change the graphics modes! DOH!

I had been playing it in 640x480 software mode for ages.

[Buleste]

A Time Computer breaking after 1 month. They never used to last that long. Unlike most PC manifacturers that use trained monkeys to build their PC's, Time didn't bother with the training and sometimes didn't bother with the monkeys either.

[Harrison]

Time were definitely crap. There were quite a few budget PC builders around at the time. Now I think we mainly just have Medion left. And sadly even Evesham is gone.

[woody.cool]

My first PC was as follows:

HP Vectra 500
Intel Pentium 133 Mhz
16MB RAM
1.2 GB HDD
Aztec 16-bit Sound Card
14.4K Internal ISA Modem
Integrated SiS Graphics Adaptor
8X CD-ROM drive
Windows 95B

I got it around 1997 ish time.

By today's standards it's totally laughable but it was top notch back in the day.

[Harrison]

Computers were definitely moving forward at a much faster pace back then compared to today. A 133MHz CPU in 1997 was a year later already replaced with a 450MHz P2. These days most CPUs have been at about the 3GHz mark for a few years now, with more cores being the main advancement.

14.4K modem. Now that is slow! Imagine trying to use that these days.

[Demon Cleaner]

I had a 486 DX2/66 with 16MB RAM, a Diamond Stealth GPU 1MB, Creative Soundblaster 16 and a 540MB HDD.

Ok, so my actual GPU has 32000 times more. WTF!