In 1998 I purchased my first new PC. Before this I had been devoted to the Amiga for years and refused to buy one. I had owned PCs before but they were always old second hand ones. I spent the whole summer saving up for the PC working full time for job agencies as I needed a PC for my university work. I also took ages pooring over specs and reading PC magazines to learn as much as I could about current PC hardware and what I should buy.

The PC I eventually purchased was a (state of the art at the time) Pentium 2 400MHz with 256MB ram, 8MB G460 AGP graphics card, Voodoo II 12MB additional graphics card, ISA Soundblaster sound card, Buz SCSI and video capture card, external 56K modem and a huge 12GB HD!!! I remember also purchasing a SCSI A4 flatbed scanner with it, and upgrading the monitor it came with from a 17" one to a 21" one!

That computer with the extra hardware and monitor cost me over £2600!!! The monitor alone added £600 to the price to upgrade it! I remember at the time thinking what an amazing spec it was. Until this point my main computer had been an A4000 with a 1.3GB HD and just 18MB of Ram. The graphics cards in the new PC had more combined ram than the whole of the Amiga!

And I still remember getting it all home, connecting it up and switching it on. And then installing and running the original Unreal. That game's graphics blew me away!

And now... I've just got rid of that 21" monitor by giving it away for free on freecycle! Mad!

As for the computer. It was used for a few years as my main PC until about 2002 and over that time was upgraded a lot to 512MB ram, G400 Max graphics card, 60GB HD, firewire card, USB2 card, network card etc... And the OS went from Windows 98 to 2000 Pro. And after that it became a testing and download server. And what is it doing now? It's sitting in a cupboard stripped of useful hardware and then all my old obsolete hardware was put into it and it was turned back into a Windows 98 machine with the original 12GB HD, a 32MB TNT2 graphics card, PCI Soundblaster live sound card and network card. The intention was to run old DOS and Win9x games on it, but it has only really been fired up a few times in the last year. For old games I tend to just use DosBox or a virtual machine. Not actually sure what to do with it now. It's taking up space so needs to go, but it works perfectly so I don't want to throw it away.

So what was your first new PC? The first one you personally purchased? What was the spec, price etc? And what is it doing now?