How much did your first computer cost ( PC )

First PC I bought was a 1Ghz Athlon T Bird, Abit KT7A and a massive Antec case that weighed a tonne. Was the nuts. Cost about £1000 and about another £500 on upgrades over time. I think it ended up with 512Mb of RAM. It had two 18GB SCSI HDs. I was always repairing it and re-installing windows :D Those SCSI disks weren't very reliable. And made an absolute racket.

Before that though I'd always ended up "owning" other people's PCs because I knew how to use them and they didn't. My mate had PCs back in the 80s and that held me in good stead when I came across others. "ooooh... VGA graphics!" :)
 
Second hand Wang 386sx 25mhz, originally 1mb expanded to 4mb, 40mb hard drive, 256k graphics and floppy. Think it was around £200 second hand, played Civilization, Colonization, Settlers and Simcity. Originally came with DOS version 5 and 3.1, ended up with 6.2(?) and 3.11 for workgroups.

After this it was a 486 dx2 50mhz, 16mb ram, 200mb hard drive, 4mb Cirus logic graphics, first CD-rom. Drivers were problematic I seem to remember. Started with 3.11 and moved to 95. Lots of Settlers II and Doom. Think this was about £300 second hand.

Then, quickly, it was a Cyrix P166, Celeron 233, PII 333, then an Athlon 650 - first computer I had bought new (self build). It wasn't until I was making a T-Bird 1ghz build for college that I made my first order here.
 
1996/7

P133
16mb RAM
1mb onboard graphics
15" monitor
8x CD Rom (think it was 8, maybe 4)
1.2gb hard drive
Windows 95

£1000inc

Best thing about it was the demo of Duke Nukem 3D it came with and Terminal Velocity!
 
Duke said:
£949 - still got a scan of the original advert :)

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Had exactly the same one as my first Windows PC. Bought it August '95, by the October I'd gutted it and rebuilt with a P75 OC'd to a P100 and added a SB AWE 32 and ATI Mach 64 2Mb.
 
Lured into Tiny on the high street by the advert in the window for an £800 PC in 1998. By the time the salesman had persuaded me and the wife we needed the upgraded HDD, Optical drive, RAM, CPU and MS Office, actually paid almost £1400 for it!

From memory: Pentium 2 400MHz, 128Mb RAM, 10GB HDD, DVD-ROM drive, and when it arrived it had the newly launched Windows 98 on it rather than Windows 95 in the brochure.

Still remember buying a 32Mb graphics card purely for the TV-out S-video socket, then running a cable out of the room, down the stairs, and into the front room TV. Could only get one monitor active at once, so after we'd watched a DVD the wife would be downstairs shouting up "move the mouse left a bit, now up, too far, back down, click!" to get the output back upstairs.

Simpler times... :D
 
arc@css said:
Year 2000.

About £1100.
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1.5gb ram
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1.5GB is an insanely large amount of memory to have in a home PC built in Y2K, even 512MB was considered very high end at the time and I'm surprised you managed to fit it into a £1100 budget (I'd imagine 99% of people who could afford that much RAM would want a cpu faster than 600mhz!). Looking at OcUK prices, even by the end of that year they were charging £180 for 256MB dimms: http://web.archive.org/web/20010107...co.uk/acatalog/online_catalogue_memory_8.html
 
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1st pc i bought myself was around £500 when i was at uni i believe, all i remember was it had a abit ax8 motherboard and a geforce 7800gtx
 
Monserrat said:
First PC was a Pentium II in 1999 but was provided on a scheme similar to Access To Work (disabled scheme) for my university course. So I didn't get to see what the invoice was.
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Sometimes that year scares me a little now. All these square boxes, as in crt tv's and monitors. Scares me as in it's not that long ago yet it feels a long time. As well as Quake 3 was just out then a year later all the Matrix Q3 mods/remixes in the add-ons.

Funny thinking back how awesome that year was. Everyone going crazy over, The Matrix.
 
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£2200 for a gateway p120, with 8mb ram running win95 in 1995. I straight away overclocked to 130mhz. This pc replaced my Amiga.
 
Mine was in 1998/1999 by a company back then called Evesham.

Was a great machine. not cheap, but I remember that one came with a 5.1 speaker system which (creative works) was and still it fantastic audio.

Cannot remember the spec, but think it had something like a 200mb HD. beige PC tower and CRT monitor.

Happy days.
 
neodude said:
1400 quid. Was a Packard Bell 486SX-25 with Dos 6.2 and Windows 3.1
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Ditto :

I got an SX-25 Packard Bell in about 1991, I sold all my Warhammer minatures to finance the purchase in Southampton East-street Dixons.
My Packard bell had a CD drive and came on HP with a small £500 loan, paid for with a weekend/evening job a WHS Do-It-All

First thing I remember was installing DOOM.
Lost Six Months
Then I discovered DUNE
Lost a few Months
Then I found Command & Conquer
Lost a Year! :cool: [ LAN Parties over IPX / BNC coax with a couple mates - awesome ]


Also Just remembered...Packard Bell was the first PC 'I' purchased!

My FIRST 'Computer' was an ATARI 400.....Membrane keyboard :).....
 
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I don't remember how much my first computer was but I remember paying the following prices for bits of kit:

CD ROM Drive - £200
CD Writer 2x - £350
200mb Harddrive - £207
 
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