What was your first computer?

[durpflip]

my first PC was a windows 98-based packard bell tower that came with a CRT monitor.

i don't exactly remember the specs (i was 4 why would i care) but i used it daily for playing chip's challenge and whatnot.

[ElenaLeffelZXC4]

I'd Love to say that my first computer was one from 1980 or something, but in reality, it's not. When I was 7, I got to visit my dad's for the first time in years, (Family issues) I played Diablo II on his Windows 95 Machine, I have literally No idea what System Specs the computer had, but it wasn't my first computer, so that doesn't really matter. I did learn some pretty interesting things, Like how you could put a random user account and password and have full access to the computer (Providing there was no Document Protection), and a bunch of other useful tidbits of info.

 

Fast Forward to Grade 7, and Lots had happened. My mom said she would get me a computer in half a year, but that ended up being a lie. So, I went to school, and Boom, Found an Old Dell Desktop Computer, with a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 on the side of the Road. This was about 2007-2008. Not a very impressive computer, but it was better than nothing. I think it also had an old Geforce4 MX 4** or something. It took me about half a year to get the money to get a proper hard drive, and I was so naive that I thought Windows came Installed on a Brand New Hard drive. Lol.

 

So, I ended up getting my friends windows XP disk, and I installed it, but I had My Computer in Processor Compatibility Mode, without realizing it. So I ended up having windows XP install, WITHOUT EXPLORER. Yeah, Explorer wouldn't run. Not to mention, that I didn't have a valid Product key, so I had to reinstall the Trial every 30 Days. In case you are wondering how I ran programs, I used CTRL + ALT + DEL, to run Program to browse Folders, and launch Applications.

 

First Time I reinstalled, I had lost all my documents, so I Got Learnt about Partitions, and unencrypted documents. So I was able to play some very Basic Games, Red Faction, and The Great Escape Video Game. 

 

Every week, I went out in the middle of the night looking for Computers that were thrown on the Curb. I ended up finding lots of parts, and such, that I ended up using. Better Space Hard drives, a Geforce5 Graphics Card, TONS of 2000 Era Tech, and even TONS of 95 Eras Tech. It was here that I realized how important it was to delete your Data before Throwing Computers out, because I found an old 95 machine that had ALL of a Company’s Tax info and such. And even the person who owned it. 

 

Eventually, I came upon a Very Lucky Find. An Intel Motherboard, sitting in a case, soaked with Rain. I thought for a fact that it was dead.

I took it back and tried it anyway, it Blue screened, and I couldn't get it to work and I couldn't get it to Stop Blue-screening, no matter what I did. (I Left it in a dry place and didn't use it for a week before trying). I gave up on it.

 

I then found a Rare Sound Card for PC, that Now Makes Headphones. It was a Santa Cruz turtle beach sound card. I used that for So Long, but didn't realize how badly I would need it later. The audio ports on the Motherboard I had found that Blue screened had Been Ripped off by the previous user.

 

So, one day, when I was bored, and found a new case I wanted to move my computer to, I decided to give the Intel Board a try again. And it worked, and damn was it SO much better. I went from a 2.4GHz Processor, to a 3.0GHz Processor that had 2 Threads. It was awesome; I had my First Real Processor Upgrade! I moved all my data over to the new computer, kept the motherboard, and tossed the case, with a bit of hesitation.

 

At this time, I HAD NO IDEA about Thermal Paste. Yup, you guessed it, I Was Running "Steel on Steel" My Idle Temperature was 46 Degrees Celsius. When Playing a Game, I hit 80+ Degrees. I was having issues playing a bunch of games, and playing 720p Video. And 1080p video just wouldn't play.

 

a Friend told me about Thermal Paste and I was Amazed, I had just upgraded to Windows 7, and my graphics card didn't support the OS, But I didn't Know that.

 

So I Immediately Experienced a HUGE Performance Boost from the Thermal Paste, Obviously. 1080p videos played with little trouble, and my computer was fine with temperatures, around 60 - 70 degrees, when gaming instead. It's funny that the only game that made my computer crash from overheating was Star Wars KOTOR II the Sith Lords.

 

Eventually I found the Godsend of Finds. THE LAST AGP 8X Video card. The ATI HD 4650 AGP 1GB GDDR3. (I think it was GDDR3?) I put it in, and that’s where the real fun began.

 

Just Cause 3. 30FPS Low Settings

Skyrim, 30FPS Low - Medium Settings

Alan Wake, 30 FPS Low

many other games were now playable to me, and I guess for the time 30 FPS and low settings weren't impressive at all,  but I was still Impressed because i could play games that I never would have thought Possible.

Even the Tomb Raider game was "playable", (10-30 FPS with a GPU overclock)

 

And All Of This Was Free, and Took about 4-5 Years.

 

EDIT: Oh right, the hard drive I bought ended up not working anyway, and the place I bought it from wouldn't take it back, so it was a Waste, and I don't count it as money spent on the computer.

Edited July 1, 2016 by Zileth Ryder

[PattyJ]

HP computer with 2gb of ram,intel pentium 4,ati radeon 9500 hd (ati was later bought by amd) finally 40gb maxtor HDD (maxtor was bought by seagate) so yeah a lot of companies have been bought

 

[francmyster]

My first computer was a custom built AMD Duron 900MHz, 256MB RAM, MSI motherboard with integrated graphics running Windows 2000 back in 2002

 

In retrospect I'm in awe as to how far we've come.

[Fruit Dubious]

Mine was an old eMachines business desktop. I remember it was only powerful enough to run Windows XP, use Microsoft Office, and browse the internet.
I still remember when I upgraded the ram from 512MB to 2GB. I felt like a complete baller since the upgrade finally allowed me to play games.

[ESPImperium]

Mine was a UK brand called Tiny. The specs were roughly this:

 

CPU: Intel Celeron 500mhz

RAM: 32mb DDR2

HDD: 20GB Wester Digital IDE

56k Modem

Windows XP Home

Own Brand MoBo, PSU and Case and cooler, IDE CD-ROM

Upgraded it with a IDE LG CD-Re Writer

Crappy Tiny 12.1 inch CRT monitor and 3.5W speakers too

 

It worked for about 2 years before it slit its wrists, then i went for a custom build from a shop, my next 3 PCs were like that, upgrading every 2-3 years, my last one lasted 5 years before upgrade and now i have a self made custom build.

[FluffyPuppyKasey]

Mine was an HP Pavilion running XP MCE 2005. Don't remember the specs at all.

 

It looked like this:

 

[bugs399]

On 1/6/2013 at 1:35 AM, Casper said:

Actually the first computer I have actually owned is the one I have now.

Corsair 600T Case

AMD Phenom BE Denab 3.2 ghz cpu

H100i Enclosed Water cooling

8 gigs Gskill Ripclaw x ddr3 1333mhz ram

AMD MSi R7950 3GDDR5 Twin Frozr III

Primary Monitor Asus 23inch 1920x1080 led

1 Corsair Force GT 120gig ssd

2x 500 Gig WD black drives

How old are you?

[Laputacake]

On 1/1/2016 at 7:04 PM, PampaZiya said:

Am I the only one who's first PC had a 256MB of RAM? not even pentium 4, the one before it, some intel graphics with 500mb ;p..

Mine had 256 DDR, pentium 4 thought. Intel 82845/g graphics. rip GTA SA.

[CommanderAlex]

My first desktop PC was this back in 2006..lasted me 8 years till the motherboard went from the OEM replacement PSU.. 

 

My first gaming PC is what I have now. 

[Ramin_Studios]

Do laptops count...i'll pretend they do. A Dell Studio 1458 (purple(my mom had this laptop first)) it had a Core I5 @ 2.7 GHz

Intel intergraded graphics

4GB ram

500GB HHD

 

http://www.dell.com/us/p/studio-14/pd

[MilkJugg24]

And old windows 95 computer, I don't know the specs because it's in my grandmother's house under 10 feet of dust.

 

All I remember is that it had 3.5in floppys you needed to insert and type a command line to run the disk.

 

I used to play this ripoff game of pacman, it was alright.

[flibberdipper]

On 6/27/2016 at 2:40 PM, onlybuilt4cubanxlinx said:

Some Acer pile from Best Buy. I want to say my step dad spent $750-1k on at the time. 233mhz is the only spec I remember. I put a 4mb ATi card in it after they divorced. It was a joke of a machine, but it ran HL1 and TFC some how. Pair that machine with AOL 56k dial up and whooa man! I remember trying to find the least used phone number to connect to so I could get the max connection. Ping was around 280-300. Then I figured out how to save system resources by using a Microsoft dialer instead of logging into AOL. I wouldn't change of my setup at that time for anything. It has made me very humble when it comes to tech.

I still had to use good ol' Prodigy to get online back in 2008.

[JMSOG]

It was 2009, and it was a low-to-midrange computer at the time that my parents got me. It had a .5gb ATI graphics card of unknown name (which i assume is one of those low-end "Media PC" cards), a dual core i3 (i think) and a 1080p 60fps LCD monitor. It served me well for a while. I've given away the desktop to a family friend since then, but that monitor still serves it's purpose as a second monitor, can't complain

[Dumaurier]

The first computer I remember at home was the family computer, an Acorn Electron, although shortly before that we had a Sinclair ZX 81.

It was on the Acorn that I first started basic coding be reading the magazines and typing in the pages of code that where listed for the games. We didn't have "demo" discs back then and it was a way to get free or "shareware" games easily as there wasn't a lot of people we knew at the time that had access to the casettes.

After that the first home pc we got was an Olivetti 486 with 4Mb of ram and at the time Windows 3.1 and DOS

[soup]

1 hour ago, Dumaurier said:

 reading the magazines and typing in the pages of code that where listed for the games. We didn't have "demo" discs back then and it was a way to get free or "shareware" games easily

Easily?

I remember spending hours laboriously typing in lines and lines and... of code only for one comma to be wrong and so the whole thing didn't work then spending more hours trying to find what was wrong.

[Dumaurier]

On 03/07/2016 at 8:29 PM, soup said:

Easily?

I remember spending hours laboriously typing in lines and lines and... of code only for one comma to be wrong and so the whole thing didn't work then spending more hours trying to find what was wrong.

haha, yeah it did have it's downfalls and was worse when there was a misprint in the magazine so was even worse trying to find where the error was.

At a young age though, it was easier than trying to get access to regular cassettes to get the games though :-)

[JoePro87]

What was your first computer? What were the specs? OS? Mine was technically an old Point of Sale computer that met it's fate quickly by my hammer....but my first REAL PC was a 1998 Compaq Presario, with an 800Mhz single core (I think a Pentium 3?), 128MB of RAM, a 40GB hard drive, and Windows 98, with dial-up! What a beast it was...

[radical guild]

Acer e15 with windows 8 with a i3 4gb of ram a 500gb HDD 5400rpm

[MalaySausage]

my compaq laptop was a duel core pentium with 2 gigs  of ram and the worst display ever 

                

[Creiger]

Can't remember what it was other than it was Win98 though, and when I compressed the hard drive, I had a tiny bit over 1 gig of space.

[LizardsAreOP]

Dont remember the specs,Dont remember the OS but i do remember it was a ATI card

[AresKrieger]

I don't know what it was called but it was an HP from 95

[BlueCrazii]

Unknown Case Unknown CPU 512 MB ram 6GB HDD windows 2000 

[JoePro87]

1 minute ago, MalaySausage said:

my compaq laptop was a duel core pentium with 2 gigs  of ram and the worst display ever 

                

Yeah...worst display ever? Try getting an old DOS monochrome monitor