The way things used to be

Dogboy73

Dogboy73

Dogboy73

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27 May 2004
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693
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UK
I've just bought a new mobo, PSU, GFX card & RAM for my PC to bring it a little more up to date (see signature). That lot cost a very reasonable £267.97 all in & I'm very pleased with the results.

Today I've been clearing out some old toot from the loft. I came across the first PC I ever bought new (I had an old second hand one from a mate a good for years before). It was a Gateway (remember those?) & just out of curiosity, coupled with a desire to take a break from the job, I decided to rip it apart to have a look inside. Blimey! How things have moved on! Bearing in mind I bought this just before the original Half Life game was about to be released - so that would be about 1997 I guess? 10 years ago.

Inside I found a rather strange looking Pentium II CPU that fits into it's own kind of PCI slot! I think it was a 400MHz. The power supply was a whopping 90W!! It had 128MB of PC100 system RAM, a Voodoo II gfx card with 12MB of onboard RAM & a 500MB HD :) It must have been a very quiet system because there wasn't a single fan anywhere!

And the cost of this 10 year old mega system? I remember very well forking out a whopping £1400 for this lot! I kid you not. Imagine what you could buy for that these days? And to think how worthless the whole bloody lot is these days! It's not even worth keeping the case because it's so small I doubt you could fit a micro ATX mobo inside it :p
 
The systems worth a fair bit to someone, donate it to charity. :)

Technology moves on, but the PC there is still a fine internet box for minor usage.
 
upgrade it. 2 quid gets you a 600mhz p3 cpu. and 3 quid gets u 512mb of ram for that machine. set it up as a downloads box or something.
 
/ponders if in 10 years someone will post the same thing about their 'Antec Sonata, JeanTech 500W, Gigabyte P35C-DS3R, Intel Core 2 Duo E2180, Ati X1950 Pro 512MB, Geil 2GB PC6400 800MHz, M-audio Audiophile 2496, 80GB SATA, Windows XP Pro (SP2)' rig :D












Well just imagine :) But that's technology for you.
 
Where do you live, I'll take it off your hands if near by :rolleyes:
I need some basic components to start an abstract case project lol
 
I remember my first brand new pc. Pentium 200MMX, 32Mb RAM (Upgraded from 16Mb), 1Gb Hard drive (Quantum BigFoot 5.25" drive). Dont remember the rest of the specs. The 386 and 486 i had before that were 2nd hand. To the OP - that Pentium 2 was a Slot A.
 
My mums was a P166 with MMX technology, 16mb ram, 1.44gb hard drive, Windows 95, USB ports that didnt work until upgraded to Windows 98.
My dad had a P40 before that, think it had maybe 8mb ram? Could have been less.

Having said that I built a PC for my partner out of some old bits - Celeron 633, 256mb SDRAM, 40gb hard drive, 3D AGP, Windows XP Home runs nicely and its a nice internet/very low level gaming rig for her.
 
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Cyber-Mav said:
upgrade it. 2 quid gets you a 600mhz p3 cpu. and 3 quid gets u 512mb of ram for that machine. set it up as a downloads box or something.
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To late! ....... I've just thrown all the bits back in the case after I'd ripped them out to exam them & then bunged the lot outside ready to be taken the the local refuse centre on Wednesday :D I've got loads of old bits & pieces from my previous 3 builds, since the Gateway. It was time to start thorwing some of the old stuff out & so the Gateway had to go ;)
 
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Wonder whats in my old dos pc then. Thats incredibly old lol. I used to love the game with that dog out of micky mouse and what not. Had loads of "learning" games though which ididn't like and cross word and hang man lol.
 
hp7909 said:
/ponders if in 10 years someone will post the same thing about their 'Antec Sonata, JeanTech 500W, Gigabyte P35C-DS3R, Intel Core 2 Duo E2180, Ati X1950 Pro 512MB, Geil 2GB PC6400 800MHz, M-audio Audiophile 2496, 80GB SATA, Windows XP Pro (SP2)' rig :D












Well just imagine :) But that's technology for you.
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In ten years you'll look back, and wonder how you ever managed on less than 80 22nm cores @10GHz and less than 128GB RAM.

Or a handheld supercomputer :D
 
Sat on a shelf approx 1ft above my monitor I have a P3/mobo/ram sat around. I've been planning to do wire trick voltmod and try and get it to run at 150fsb but haven't got round to it.

The good thing about old hardware is that you can mess around with it without worrying about breaking it, since it's practically worthless anyway.

Actually come to think of it I've still got another P3/mobo/RAM that I bought off MM a couple of years back for some unknown reason. Seemed like a fun cheap project at the time until I realised that wiring it up to a case with no manual would be a nightmare!

Let's see, what else. A P133 with a bunch of edo simms I got form my old work for £1. A couple of busted Celeron (one P2, one P4) rigs that my had used to use and I haven't figured out what's wrong with them, almost certainly dead mobos.

Heck, I've also got a perfectly decent system (2.5ghz A64, 2gig PC3200, 6800GT) sat around that hasn't even been booted up in months. I need to find some time to sort out all this crap!
 
HangTime said:
Sat on a shelf approx 1ft above my monitor I have a P3/mobo/ram sat around. I've been planning to do wire trick voltmod and try and get it to run at 150fsb but haven't got round to it. The good thing about old hardware is that you can mess around with it without worrying about breaking it, since it's practically worthless anyway.
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Yeah I suppose it would be good to have a real mess about with this old stuff & see what I can do with it. I guess you could learn quite a bit in the process & what & what not to do. And as you say, if the whole thing blow up in the process you can just sit back & have a good laugh about it (as long as you don't blow yourself up in the process of course ;)). I've chucked out the old Gateway Pentium 2 now but I might have a go of some circuit bending with the next build I had (the AMD 2000 one).

Ironically it was the Gateway system that lastest the longest out of all my PC's. When I bought my next PC I sold the Gateway to my brother-in-law. He's a couple of years older than me but had never had a PC before so it was a good starting point for him. Before he took it I'd wiped the HD & installed XP for him. It ran suprisingly well given the age of the PC (XP wasn't even out when I'd originally bought the PC!). I installed Half Life & Unreal for him so he was well pleased with that. When he then bought his next PC (a half decent & quite well specced Dell) I took the Gateway PC back home where I was using it in a bedroom as a DVD player :)
 
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