Your first PC memories and most notable upgrade ?

[Shoxxx]

Hi

 

I was just thinking back about when my first PC happened and the various upgrades over the years.

I was lucky enough to see a large range of changes in the PC world and how its been a long time since a true hype change.

I was wondering what peoples most impactful events regarding the PC were to them, it would be cool from a "Big tech milestones" perspective.

 

First PC Experiance:

My dad brining home a 286 based prebuilt PC with a Color Monitor (Hardcore) running windows 3.1, all I did was play with MS Paint until it was bed time.

 

Most impactful memory:

Quake came out and that was the first time seeing true 3d graphics, a 3dfx voodoo rush GPU ended up following soon (First 3dfx gpu do have 2d+3d built in), I remember that being a life changing experience for me in my PC world.

 

Latest memory of a wow this is lifechanging factor PC change:

SSD's

[Moonzy]

14 minutes ago, Shoxxx said:

Latest memory of a wow this is lifechanging factor PC change:

SSD's

my first notable upgrade was pretty much this

i "upgraded" the mechanical drive in my 2011 laptop with an SSD, despite the shop telling me it's incompatible and refused to do it for me

spent a fortune on it and lost a bunch of storage space because i could only afford a 240gb, but man was it worth it

the user experience skyrocketed by so much, it even made a friend of mine who borrowed my laptop for a week to switch to SSD after i took it back because he cant stand the HDD speed anymore haha

 

my first PC memories would be dial-up noises and neopets, much mini games on there

[thrasher_565]

my family pc with windows 98 and duke nukem was the first game i played on it. later on we got an 4gb hhd voodoo 2 and i bought my own pc p4 for $800 and played alot for diablo 2

[Tan3l6]

From Pentium 100 platform with 8MB of RAM and 1MB video card to Duron 800Mhz, 64MB RAM and nVidia Geforce MX400 iirc.

The difference was really impactful.

[SorryBella]

My 3rd laptop is probably the biggest upgrade ive ever had. I went from a Protege T110, then to an HP 15-af109ax which was horrible response time wise with windows 10+5400RPM HDD double whammy. My new main laptop is Asus VivoBook K413EA and not gonna lie, its a massive banger so far. i51135G7 with Xe, 8GB of ram, and 512GB NvME SSD, snappy as fuck and the windows hello is an amazing bonus.

[X-System]

My big upgrade was from MSI GeForce 4 MX 440 64MB to Hercules 3D Prophet 9800 XT 256MB on my PC Pentium 4 HT.

 

3D performance increased very lot

[Helpful Tech Witch]

Upgrading from a laptop with a a10 9600p and integrated gpu (and a hdd) to a desktop with a 7400 and a rx480 (ssd). 
really didn’t love PCs that much until then. I thought they were always so sluggish.

[LaVulpo]

moving from an acer espire or something like that to another laptop with an amd a4 APU was a pretty big leap, I could finally play teamfortress 2 at like 30fps. I was blown away when I built a machine with an rx 470, so happy with it that im only slowly upgrading from that after like 4 years.

[Kavamale21]

first pc pentium 100 8mb ram 1mb video card 500mb hdd no sound or cd rom.

noticble update first brand new pc that i buyed with my own money and completely pasive cooled gigabyte video card how i love silent pc....

[Uttamattamakin]

For me it was ... a Texas Instruments computer.  We more or less used it like a video game system similar to this one.  I was very young 3 years old or so.  The Texas Instruments TI-99/4A (classic-computers.org.nz)    At age 4 we switched to a Coleco Adam computer which came with an impact printer that also housed the power supply for the whole unit.  Even had the Coleco game system which could work with it.   Used it to play Donkey Kong and War Games based on the 1980s hacker classic of the time.   

When not gaming on it I was just pushing random keys until it made beeping noises because it couldn't keep up.  Yeah computers were that slow.  Didn't get an IBM PC (mostly compatible) until getting a Tandy 1000 RL from radioshack in about 1988 or 1989.  Nothing like using an 8086 when a 80386 came out and utterly trashed it a couple years latter. 

[SeanChronicR]

First family PC was a pentium 100mhz that had windows 95 earliest PC gaming memories is Warcraft II, Diablo and Starcraft 

[Spindel]

My first computer was a Commodore 128, wonderful machine still have it in a box in the attic.

 

First IBM compatible PC was an IBM with a 486SX 33 Mhz. Actually a crap computer compared to an much older Amiga.

 

After that the jump was to an Pentium 2 233 Mhz, that was an substantial upgrade.

 

First computer I bought for my own money, and built myself was a machine with a 600 Mhz AMD Duron OCed to 800 Mhz. That computer later got a CPU swap to a Thunderbird 1333MHz and my first 3D graphics card, a Riva TNT2.

 

Mucked around for a while, dropped the heat sink and cracked the die of the Thunderbird and than moved on to a Athlon 2500+ and a Radeon 8500 Pro. Awesome machine, my friends where envoius of my pixelshaded water in Morrowind.

 

The athlon rig lived for a while, got upgraded in ram, got a Radeon 9600 Pro, then a GeForce 4. By this time I had grown to hate Windows and switched to run Linux full time. 
 

During all of this I had finished school and university and started to work. Being young, single and having a decent salary I bought an iMac. The move to mac is the most substantial upgrade I have ever made and have never looked back since then.

[Guest]

I think it was some Celeron garbage or whatever. I was pretty young, we just got a computer with a CRT screen. I remember having a good play with Word - must have been 97.

 

Most notable upgrade was my own computer. Had a Celeron, 1GB of RAM (Or we upgraded it later on), some Nvidia card - we had to upgrade it, to I think a 5200FX, in order to run Lego Star Wars. 

 

Weird to think that we once had just one computer for the family, now we have so many smart devices. No need to wait around to chat on MSN messenger. 

[Gamer4714]

My Biggest Upgrade was Windows 7 to 10. 

[DoctorNick]

Going from a prebuilt Packard Bell with Athlon 64 X2 3800+, Geforce 7300 SE (or something like that) to a custom PC with Core 2 duo E6600, 8gb DDR2 800Mhz Corsair XMS2, XFX 8800 Ultra with Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme 8800, Thermaltake Soprano case, Thermaltake Toughpower 850W. 

[LogicalDrm]

Mom and dad had work laptops before our own desktop was bought in -94. The first big upgrade was going from that 200Mhz Pentium Pro to AMD Athlon XP + Radeon 9600. Finally could play some CS1.5. This was in 2003.

 

After that, buying my own whole PC in 2008 (E8400 + 8800GT and upgrading that 5 years later (4770K + first SSD). Closing in with my next upgrade, hopefully later this year.

[Prodigy_Smit]

First notable tech upgrade was going from an old MSI powered by a single core atom to a i7 3635qm quad core, like damn even web browsing was snappier with that upgrade. Oh and also I could finally play minecraft and graduate from friv.com games (damn that brought back memories)

[Skiiwee29]

First memory of PC for me was my Aunt having a 1980s MAC that was command line based and we use to always want to go over and play games on it when I was little, like 5, 6 years old in the 80s. First PC I ever built personally was in 2004/2005 for World of Warcraft when it first launched and I had an old Corsair water cooling kit with it. Was on my old AMD Athlon 64 2500+ and a Geforce 6800 GT. Felt like king shit strutting around Orgrimaar with my uber gaming rig and great FPS.

 

The most notable upgrade I ever did was going from my GTX 1070 to my 2080ti. 

 

 

[AzzaNezz]

My first computer was windows 95 pc,and my first upgrade was spilling water on it so my dad bought another PC,this one was not that bad.I cant remeber the cpu that it used,but it was DDR2 2 gb ram,so i bought another 2 gb stick and felt like a hacker.

Funny things is i remebered just now,once per month i cleaned the pc,and i took the stock cpu cooler off and used the compressor to dust it out.But in those 4 years of owning that PC i never applied thermal paste...ouch.

[Alcarin]

First PC was a crappy Athlon X2-based system and a 9600GT. I bought it off one of my cousins since they went in military and decided to give it up. It was slow but it popped my PC gaming cherry. A year and a half later, after having a summer job and saving up, I bought a pre-built system from CyberpowerPC (I know...) with a 2600k and a GTX 570. The upgrade was night and day.

 

Another very impactful (though less so than above) upgrade was when I upgraded to my GTX 1080 from a dying R9 390.

[Mike Sapienza]

Has anyone heard of the SPACE Future Dreamers cp-201 case? It is a digital multimedia power system likely from the early to mid 2000s. I can't find anything about it online.

Sorry for the potentially vulgar writing on it. I got it from a family member who wrote on it with a Sharpie.

[hihihi8]

my first notable upgrade was moving from a 750ti to a 980ti, then a second for SLI

[jones177]

Going from 1080p to 4k.

In 2014 LTT did a video on the 28" 4k Samsung monitor. After watching it I went down to the local Tiger Direct store to see one in person and they actually had a 4k demo running on one. The same demo was running on a 1080p monitor and it was a night and day comparison. They wanted $600 and so I checked out Best Buy and they had it for $500 so I got one.

At the time I had a GTX 970 and it struggled even at 1440p. It was not until I got a GTX 980 ti in 2015 that I really started to enjoy 4k gaming and it was not long before I got another 980 ti for SLI. 

4K gaming only stopped being a struggle with the GTX 1080 ti and it now is a total pleasure with the RTX 2080 ti. 

 

[Stahlmann]

I started out with computers on my family's PC when i was 8 or so. It was some "Medion" PC (when the brand was still around) with Windows 98 on it. I remember mostly playing flash games back then. Then i went for a very low-end PC for myself when i was around 12 and had a bit of money saved up. (also don't remember any of the specs)

 

Most noteable upgrade was when i upgraded from this PC to something "proper" with a 3770K and a GTX 660Ti when i was around 16. From being barely able to play flash games to being able to play Battlefield 3 at Ultra 60+ fps all of a sudden was a huge jump for me.

[Tonyx]

My first one pc from 2005 had p4 630, Nvidia fx5700ve, 512mb RAM, Windows XP and 200gh hard disk

Then in 2010 i get a netbook for birthday (i join High school) with the weaker atom ever, the z520

Then for Christmas 2011 a decent notebook with i7 2670qm, 8gb RAM and Nvidia gt540m, but with a very slow 500gb hard disk, now my sister use it (with a 240ssd upgrade)

6 years ago with my first own money i build my PC, i5 4670k, 8gb RAM, amd R9 280 and 1tb SSD, between 2019 and 2020 i upgraded the PC with 16gb RAM, 500gb SSD and gtx1650 super