You kids have it so easy these days in building a computer....

[Dabombinable]

Nope, I still don't get it. If it's for casual use it should be fine, but if you want to do video rendering, gaming or watching youtube as you said you would need something newer. There is lot of disadvantages using legacy stuff, why take the headache unless you want an antique for old memories, in which case I understand what you are saying.

What headaches? Before I upgraded the motherboard I had my Jetway 994AN-L (from 1999/2000) running a Pentium III 667MHz with no issues ever, except for HDD wearing out, which was expected. My new rig in contrast already has gone through 2x GTX 970 G1 Gaming, for a while it wouldn't even post, I can't overclock the CPU at all due to its design and that of the motherboard, and to top it all off it has no backwards compatibility with PCI cards, which would have then wasted over $300 worth of components that work just fine, and aren't 'supported' under newer OS. I can play games and render on it as well, the GPU is actually a limiter before the CPU's, and it could render just fine-but of course over a longer period of time, which I can stand.

[shadowblitz3]

damn brought back memories of helping my dad in building our first computer

[Xsinar]

What headaches? Before I upgraded the motherboard I had my Jetway 994AN-L (from 1999/2000) running a Pentium III 667MHz with no issues ever, except for HDD wearing out, which was expected. My new rig in contrast already has gone through 2x GTX 970 G1 Gaming, for a while it wouldn't even post, I can't overclock the CPU at all due to its design and that of the motherboard, and to top it all off it has no backwards compatibility with PCI cards, which would have then wasted over $300 worth of components that work just fine, and aren't 'supported' under newer OS. I can play games and render on it as well, the GPU is actually a limiter before the CPU's, and it could render just fine-but of course over a longer period of time, which I can stand.

 

Ok, I did not know that it was possible to run 2 GTX 970 on Windows 3.1 that has 8MB Ram and 85MB HDD. 

[Albatross]

I grew up with all that, but luckily I had my dad who knew it all to teach me and or help me out with this stuff. :lol:

[Dabombinable]

Ok, I did not know that it was possible to run 2 GTX 970 on Windows 3.1 that has 8MB Ram and 85MB HDD. If that's the case there should be no problems. 

*facedesk* look at my sig, my currently working rigs are all there (minus the graphics card for my modern rig). And those 2 GTX 970 got RMA'd (1st one degraded and got RMA'd, the 2nd was a replacement for the first but didn't last long-I hope I'm lucky the 3rd time around).

[SkilledRebuilds]

Nice read,..

 

Remembering my first PC, a Pre-Pentium AMD (I think)  486 DX100 @ 120Mhz via dipswitch overclocking... which is simple maths like today, but instead of doing it in the bios, you used a couple on/off switch's in a row and used a pattern to get your FSBxMulti.

Good times...

I also had older PC's, but that's after having this first PC.

 

Wanna hear the most annoying sound in the world....?

 

This... everyday, multiple times even....

[Dabombinable]

Building a computer may be easier now, but don't forget the detractors:

[mr moose]

Building a computer may be easier now, but don't forget the detractors:

 

I found my C64 in the shed the other day, it's looking a little worse for wear, If I remember tomorrow I'll take a photo.

[Schoolofmonkey]

Wow 56k modem, try 9600bps... :rolleyes:

I remember my first PC 286dx, 512kb ram, 20mb hd, 5:25" FDD and Dos 5.

Cost us around $3000 back then, no internet, we had ASCII based Bulletin Board Systems.

 

Man I'm old...

[SkilledRebuilds]

Wow 56k modem, try 9600bps... :rolleyes:

I remember my first PC 286dx, 512kb ram, 20mb hd, 5:25" FDD and Dos 5.

Cost us around $3000 back then, no internet, we had ASCII based Bulletin Board Systems.

 

Man I'm old...

I feel for ya, I mentioned 56K because thats the 'standard' most young punks would remember.

I had a 9600 baud, kill it with fire.

 

BBS FTW! Knew people who had many multiple phone lines for this stuff.

[Schoolofmonkey]

BBS FTW!

 

When I upgraded to my 486DX, 1x CDRom and 14400bps I ran a BBS from home through the night (MajorBBS if I remember correctly), mainly ASCII RPG's, but it was fun.

Used to get all the games from the floppy disks of overpriced computer mags imported from the UK or USA...lol..

 

I did have a Commodore 64 with a tape drive before the 286, but that's not worth mentioning..

[Dabombinable]

When I upgraded to my 486DX, 1x CDRom and 14400bps I ran a BBS from home through the night (MajorBBS if I remember correctly), mainly ASCII RPG's, but it was fun.

Used to get all the games from the floppy disks of overpriced computer mags imported from the UK or USA...lol..

 

I did have a Commodore 64 with a tape drive before the 286, but that's not worth mentioning..

Was it a 486DX-66 or faster? Because if not you got ripped. (I've got a Cyrix 486@25, and once I realized that it was a lot slower than my 386 DX-40, it went into an early retirement).

[Schoolofmonkey]

Was it a 486DX-66 or faster? Because if not you got ripped. (I've got a Cyrix 486@25, and once I realized that it was a lot slower than my 386 DX-40, it went into an early retirement).

 

We are talking 24 years ago but I can safely say it wasn't a Cyrix, It was a 486DX2 (my bad)

I loved the "turbo" button it had..lol.

 

Oh I should mention I delivered menu's to my entire town everyday for a week to get that 1x CDRom, and the damn thing didn't have a mechanical tray, all done by hand..lol

[GhostWindGamer]

epic post dude very insightful 

[Ertman]

Old timey

Just want to retort to his points. It wasn't as bad as he made it out. More difficult then today... Yes, but the early 2000s were not that bad.

1. There was no Youtube, social media, flash art to give you visual refrences on how to put stuff together. You went and got a "Build Your computer Bible " Version 28 book from Barns an Noble and marked pages

Why bother? Sure books were useful, but the internet had webpages and forums that helped a lot. It is easier now having quality video sources that are great walkthroughs, but it was still pretty east by 2000.

2. You didn't have price search engines, you opened up multiple WINDOWS of etailers and compared prices side by side

Super helpful now, I agree. But in the old days you would go to your local computer store(s). It was more social and it also helped with point 1. We have seen a remixer fence of this, a little.

3. You spent SLOWLY modem dialing across forums for hours on end dealing with "veteran builders" who kept ignoring you

It's forums, dialup wasn't that bad for accessing forums. People were as helpful then as now. If anything now is worse.

4. You had to still learn to use jumpers on your IDE drives correctly, or no booting for you. And God forbid if you bend one of the IDE pins

Still working with IDE drives in a rig from that era. Not difficult at all given that they had diagrams right on the drive of what the jumper settings were. Otherwise a trip to altavista solved that problem. Bending IDE pins weren't that problematic. Bent one last week straightened it, no big deal.

5. Make sure you didn't crush your new Athlon GPU die by putting too much pressure on heatsink

I just put new TIM on my Athlon 2 weeks ago. Not a deal at all. Yes how the heatsink clamped made you feel like you were going to crush it, but it was only a little more so then now and still not very difficult.

6. USB was VERY MUCH "Plug and Pray" back in those days...

Never really had a problem with this. USB worked fine unless you didn't get the driver like the instructions said to do. It was honestly pretty easy.

7. Driver downloads took half an hour on times on dial up modems

Some people now with their less than highspeed internet access still have this problem with gpu downloads. It took a while so,stiles but it honestly wasn't that bad.

8. BIOS'es were still big Blue and white screens of fear. Good luck configuring boot up devices if you didn't understand with the included manual

Don't know what this is about? My gigabyte uefi bios is still blue and white. It's not scary, it is easy to read, terms can be confusing, but simple.

The problem was with OEM boards where everything was locked down.

9. LED lighting? Hah, didn't exist. You spent good money on a cold cathode to show of your pimped rig through the window YOU YOURSELF cut and installed

Meh. Not much to say... Still don't light my rigs. It sounds right.

10. Dual CPUs? On a single die? NO no, they had their own sockets. If you had a dual cpu setup, you were a farking god among men

Not sure how this show how easy we have it now. More cores doesn't equal more power.

11. Overclocking was a true russian roulette game, with a mis firing gun. You would spend hours on forums trying to get detailed information on what BIOS settings to tweak and NOT to touch. There was no preset and "forget" oveclocking, let alone Windows versions

By the time the early 2000s rolled around just changing the multiplier was an easy, basic and effective way to do basic overclocking. It's kind of the same now for those avoiding the stability issues that sometimes arise with the easy auto tools.

12. Boot to windows over USB? Whats that?

Yes that is nice now, but every computer came with a optical drive so it wasn't necessary.

13. If your Windows key didn't take for whatever reason, have fun spending half an our on hold with microsoft.

Never had this problem, and by the time I did it was an automated system.

14. Is your Soundcard or add on NIC card *most mobo's didn' thave onboard LAN* not working or crashing system? You got to play the PCI slot swapping and reinstalling gaming to find which one was the culprit

By the early 2000s on board nics were far more common then just a few years before. Either way never had too much of an issue. Unexplained PCI failures either ended up being drivers or the hardware itself and was determined pretty easily thanks to device manager.

15. All in one, prebuilt water cooling kits for $100? Pffffaa bwaa haa!! You had to spend $300 or more from DangerDen on DIY kit with tubing like garden hoses and pray to god your seals held on your waterblocks and self made reserviors.

Yeah AIOs are kinda nice but are inferior to the real thing. It is nice to see how much water cooling has improved.

16. Downloadable ISO's? Hah, you went to the store and bought your copy of Windows 98SE or Windows 2000 if you were a really rich pimp and prepared for hours long install with the CDROM drive spinning away

Definite improvement. Bid fan of the ISOs and quick installs. Why does it take over an hour to install windows 98!

17. Pre painted and sweet looking cases with good airflow? HAAA!!! Nope, you broke out the spray paint cans, the dremel and jigsaw and MADE your case look good and cool well.

Kinda almost takes the fun out of it doesn't it?

18. 24-30 inch flat screen LCDs? Oh no, you were a pimp if you could afford a quality, 20" flatscreen Sony Trinitron that weighed 40 pounds that you lugged to LAN parties. If you were poor, you bought Viewsonic 19'' CRT monitor.

19" what a dream. I had a beautiful 17" Princeton. And before that a 14". Still better than the tiny monochromatic monitors of the 80's. It's better now, but we had it good in 2000.

19. If your dial up 56k modem was getting you downloads speeds of around 33 kbytes a second, God was smiling on you.

26.4-28.8 here, still better than my 14.4 I'm the 90's or slower earlier, or even no internet at all. The Yes high speed internet has come along way.

20. Was your case getting to hot with that AGP graphics card and multiple hard drives? You had to make your own blowhole, jigsaw style! Or get real creative....

Produced less heat. The PSU was often enough to ventilate cases in 2000 and many cases had proper vents located to provide cooling to those devices. Most cases from that era didn't even have the capability of doing more than 2 hard drives without mods.

21. Presleeved power supply cables and SATA cables? Haa!!! What are those?

My Antec VP 450 used in my non main rig is unsleeved, it does make it harder to manage.its still a thing on the budget end.

22. If you couldn't afford a $300 CD burner, you got a Iomega Zip drive.

CD burner was a better buy in the early 2000s. It didn't cost $300. I still have a 4x HP CD burning working.

23. You wanna listen to your Blink 182 music CD in full digital? Be sure you have this cable installed

Big deal is what?

So be thankful you little digital rascals of what you have today. Now get off my lawn....

I know this was in nostalgic fun, but it wasn't as bad as your remember it. I think the biggest improvement is prices and availability.

Just glad I didn't do this in 70's and 80's.

[Norman_the_Owl]

Wow, it's almost as if technology is improving over time

[Jambls]

That is so cool.

"if you were running 2 CPUs you were a god among men"

I am using a dual xeon system from 2003...

[Hero7750]

Sorry i built my computer 3 months ago with ease :'(

[middleclasspoor]

I remember using ST506's with RLL and MFM drives.......sometimes spending hours trying to come up with an IRQ and DMA configuration that let all components work together without conflicts!!

 

I don't miss those days at all!

[InfamousMEE]

nice post

[mr moose]

I did have a Commodore 64 with a tape drive before the 286, but that's not worth mentioning..

 

May I remind you that swearing or trolling on these forums is against the coc.  :lol:

 

Although I am only joking with you, On a serious note the C64 was the grand daddy of pc gaming IMHO.

[mr moose]

Old timey

Just want to retort to his points. It wasn't as bad as he made it out. More difficult then today... Yes, but the early 2000s were not that bad.

Why bother? Sure books were useful, but the internet had webpages and forums that helped a lot. It is easier now having quality video sources that are great walkthroughs, but it was still pretty east by 2000.

Super helpful now, I agree. But in the old days you would go to your local computer store(s). It was more social and it also helped with point 1. We have seen a remixer fence of this, a little.

It's forums, dialup wasn't that bad for accessing forums. People were as helpful then as now. If anything now is worse.

Still working with IDE drives in a rig from that era. Not difficult at all given that they had diagrams right on the drive of what the jumper settings were. Otherwise a trip to altavista solved that problem. Bending IDE pins weren't that problematic. Bent one last week straightened it, no big deal.

I just put new TIM on my Athlon 2 weeks ago. Not a deal at all. Yes how the heatsink clamped made you feel like you were going to crush it, but it was only a little more so then now and still not very difficult.

Never really had a problem with this. USB worked fine unless you didn't get the driver like the instructions said to do. It was honestly pretty easy.

Some people now with their less than highspeed internet access still have this problem with gpu downloads. It took a while so,stiles but it honestly wasn't that bad.

Don't know what this is about? My gigabyte uefi bios is still blue and white. It's not scary, it is easy to read, terms can be confusing, but simple.

The problem was with OEM boards where everything was locked down.

Meh. Not much to say... Still don't light my rigs. It sounds right.

Not sure how this show how easy we have it now. More cores doesn't equal more power.

By the time the early 2000s rolled around just changing the multiplier was an easy, basic and effective way to do basic overclocking. It's kind of the same now for those avoiding the stability issues that sometimes arise with the easy auto tools.

Yes that is nice now, but every computer came with a optical drive so it wasn't necessary.

Never had this problem, and by the time I did it was an automated system.

By the early 2000s on board nics were far more common then just a few years before. Either way never had too much of an issue. Unexplained PCI failures either ended up being drivers or the hardware itself and was determined pretty easily thanks to device manager.

Yeah AIOs are kinda nice but are inferior to the real thing. It is nice to see how much water cooling has improved.

Definite improvement. Bid fan of the ISOs and quick installs. Why does it take over an hour to install windows 98!

Kinda almost takes the fun out of it doesn't it?

19" what a dream. I had a beautiful 17" Princeton. And before that a 14". Still better than the tiny monochromatic monitors of the 80's. It's better now, but we had it good in 2000.

26.4-28.8 here, still better than my 14.4 I'm the 90's or slower earlier, or even no internet at all. The Yes high speed internet has come along way.

Produced less heat. The PSU was often enough to ventilate cases in 2000 and many cases had proper vents located to provide cooling to those devices. Most cases from that era didn't even have the capability of doing more than 2 hard drives without mods.

My Antec VP 450 used in my non main rig is unsleeved, it does make it harder to manage.its still a thing on the budget end.

CD burner was a better buy in the early 2000s. It didn't cost $300. I still have a 4x HP CD burning working.

Big deal is what?

I know this was in nostalgic fun, but it wasn't as bad as your remember it. I think the biggest improvement is prices and availability.

Just glad I didn't do this in 70's and 80's.

 

Not too sure what you are trying to say here,  most of what he posted is relevant from about 93 till 2003.   

[Ertman]

Not too sure what you are trying to say here, most of what he posted is relevant from about 93 till 2003.

You missed the point. I was saying, if your read the post, that pc building in the early 2000s, the topic of the original post, was not that much more difficult than it is now. Most of what makes pc building currently easy, existed in the early 2000s in some form. With the use of proper drivers, most hardware was easy to install and setup. For example, the difficulty of IDE jumpers was pretty easy at the time as it was labelled and the internet was a good source for specific information on most other problems. I know this because I am finding posts from 2003 troubleshooting a specific problem I have had lately.

So while we all have it easy now, we still had it easy in 2001 too. There are obvious exceptions, but they only pertain to specific scenarios.

[mr moose]

You missed the point. I was saying, if your read the post, that pc building in the early 2000s, the topic of the original post, was not that much more difficult than it is now. Most of what makes pc building currently easy, existed in the early 2000s in some form. With the use of proper drivers, most hardware was easy to install and setup. For example, the difficulty of IDE jumpers was pretty easy at the time as it was labelled and the internet was a good source for specific information on most other problems. I know this because I am finding posts from 2003 troubleshooting a specific problem I have had lately.

So while we all have it easy now, we still had it easy in 2001 too. There are obvious exceptions, but they only pertain to specific scenarios.

 

Um, yeah so?  onboard nics where around in the late 90's doesn't mean majority of enthusiasts had access to them.  It seems you are trying to dismiss his experience (and by the look of it, the experiences of many enthusiasts of the time) because you had better hardware and internet back then.  

[Schoolofmonkey]

May I remind you that swearing or trolling on these forums is against the coc.  :lol:

 

Although I am only joking with you, On a serious note the C64 was the grand daddy of pc gaming IMHO.

 

Yeah, I won't do it again I promise... :lol:

 

Though it is true, I did use to program Basic on my Commodore 64, you know making a ball bounce across the screen, text repeat etc etc.

Oh it's also where I pirated my first game after buying the floppy disk addition.