My Early PC Experiences

Departing from the normal content of this blog, I thought I'd share my rather interesting PC experiences from when I was young.

Initially, the first computer my family ever had was some 486 build that I don't remember too much about. It ran Windows 95 but I wasn't allowed to use it much since I was too young at the time. When I became competent enough to actually play computer games, my dad had already made a custom build to replace the decrepit 486. Since I still use the case and Soyo motherboard to this day, I can confirm it had either an AMD Athlon or Duron running somewhere in the field of 700-1300Mhz; not bad for around 2002-3. At this time, it may or may not have had a secondhand Voodoo Banshee video card.

When I was about 5 or 6 years old, my dad threw together a custom build that me and my brother could use for playing games. I didn't land my first video game console until I was 10, so the PC was the only thing I could play games on. It rocked an ASUS A7V motherboard (RIP) with some upper-class Socket A Athlon that was eventually capable of playing Star Wars Battlefront II with the GeForce FX5500 we got in 2007. This was a reasonably capable computer for the time, although I think the CPU was a bottleneck for the graphics card. It initially ran Windows 98SE from an 80GB Seagate Barracuda. After we got games that wouldn't run on it, a new partition was made to run Windows 2000. Since my parents' PC ran XP during a time when you actually had to buy the license, I got the 2000 key left over from before their computer upgraded. Win 2K was more of the prosumer workstation OS during a time when the masses got either 98 or the beloved Me. Surprisingly enough, almost all PC games made until around 2006-7 worked flawlessly on 2000.

It was around this time the household ditched dial-up internet for what was known at the time as "high-speed internet." This was in 2007, so we were a bit late to the party. This was the first time I was ever really allowed online, but had to stay off of YouTube so I wouldn't be exposed to this. Nevertheless, flash games and RuneScape galore! Around 2008, we actually got a 3rd partition on the hard drive so we could run XP (we kept the other two operating systems on for compatibility purposes). Since this was before the household got a NAS server, a 25GB primary partition on a gaming computer with documents filled up super fast. Somehow, a boot virus rendered the whole thing unusable in 2009.

For a few months, we used a high end Toshiba laptop from the mid-2000s for our computing needs. The lesser integrated graphics but superior Pentium 4 processor made the unit roughly on par with the previous machine. After my dad found a cheap open-box on an ASUS M4A78L-M motherboard, he bought it along with an AMD Athlon IIX2 2.90GHz and threw it in an old mATX HP case. I freaked when I found how much faster it could emulate DOS games, something that I had just gotten into around the time. In addition to a new WXGA+ flat screen monitor and a Geforce 210 I bought, this thing could play all of my old games with a new dimension. For a reason I can't be completely certain of, hard drives were absurdly expensive during this time, so we could only settle on another 80GB drive that filled up way too fast, but hey, just one partition and it was SATA! I still use the video card/motherboard in my current Ubuntu rig.   

Although that computer eventually got a Geforce 9500GT and 4GB of RAM from my own channels, this would be the last computer built with the assistance of my parents. I used this as my primary rig for about 5 years.

Soon, I'll probably post about my current PC experiences.