First ever PC?

  • Thread starter Thread starter smr
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Good thread :-)

I remained 8-bit for waaaay too long, sticking to my trusty Beeb until 1998!

Got my 1st PC in early 1999, through a grant, therefore not mega specs. P II 350MHz, 64MB RAM, 3.2 GB hard drive, 40-speed CDROM, Soundblaster 16, some crappy 2MB ATI card, 230W PSU, all in a standard height beige case. The PSU blew early on. Covered by on-site warranty though, so engineer popped another 230W in and that blew as well lol. Went back to his van and fetched a 300W which went in fine. Printer and scanner were also included in the grant. Deskjet 695 and Scanjet 5200 respectively. Windows-wise, I went for 95 instead of 98 because I preferred to get OSes that were on final versions, where 98 was still only on first edition at that time.

Later on, I doubled the memory to 128MB, installed a second hard disk (6.4GB), added a CD rewriter, got shot of the 2MB ATI in favour of a Voodoo 4 and got heavily addicted to Final Fantasy 7 & 8. Good times :-)
 
I think we had a Dell with an Intel P3 processor, 13GB HDD and maybe 32mb of ram.

It wasn't anything special but it did last a good few years and it taught me a lot (more through trial and error tbh).

Thinking about it Dell PC, then an Evesham, then I think I bought an Acer laptop then 2 Dell laptops in succession.
 
I had a Fujitsu with an AMD K6 266Mhz and the only other thing i remember about is was it came with an integrated Zip 100 drive.
 
I was late in to the PC game because I was running Amigas until I just couldn't resist it any longer. Descent had something to do with it too.

Pentium 75MHz
8MB RAM
840MB HDD
4x CD-ROM
Cirrus SVGA graphics
Creative AWE32
14" 800x600 monitor
 
I had a Pentium 1 120Mhz thing, custom built by a shop up the road. It cost my parents a fortune but they assumed I'd need it for secondary school, I remember Encarta encyclopedia did a lot of my homework for me before the internet came along haha.
 
Tiny (I guess I can say the name here as they no longer exist)

P100
8MB ram
1Gig Hdd (for some reason they used a 2.5" drive)
Cirrus logic graphics card
ESS Audiodrive (which lasted all of a month before i replaced it)
8xCDRom (only paid for 6x)
14" Tatung CRT

When I upgraded to a 200MMX I sold the only board and CPU to a mate. I remember him moaning a few months later as the CPU fan failed. They had used glue to fix the cooler onto the CPU. Since the fan was built into the heatsync he had to try and fix a new fan on top of the old one.
 
A really crap bottom of the range Celeron based Emachines system that was £500! It didnt even have an AGP port to upgrade the gfx, so had to play SOF2 on ultra low and it only just managed it.
 
Deep said:
I think we had a Dell with an Intel P3 processor, 13GB HDD and maybe 32mb of ram.
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What was the P3's clockspeed? I think they started at 450MHz, and the 32MB RAM would have dragged the processor down considerably!

No-One said:
Tiny (I guess I can say the name here as they no longer exist)
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Yeah, Tiny, Time, Gateway, Tempo etc would be ok as they don't exist any more.

Not sure about Evesham though. A few people have mentioned them in this topic and they were once our main supplier before we switched to Acer.
 
Mr_Orange said:
IBM PC XT - Model 5160. It was older than me!
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I still have one! :D

Actually, I have all my previous builds.

Next was an Olivetti 486 SX25 with 4Mb Ram (upgraded to a DX2-50 and 8Mb)
P150 with 8Mb Ram
P166 MMX with 16mb Ram
Athlon 2000 with 64mb Ram
Pentium 930D with 6Gb Ram
Core i7-930 with 24Gb Ram
 
MJN

286 sx12
2mb ram
10mg HDD
14" CRT

best part of two grand at the time! most normal systems had 256k of ram, my dad went mental and splashed the best part of a monkey on 2mb :p
 
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