Did you build it yourself? What OS did you use? Did you have internet access?
Feel free to outline the component brand names and model (if you remember them) and let us know if you still have access to the computer.
This was in Jan 1997. It was running Windows 95 (Windows 98 wasn’t released yet). No internet (we got dialup later in the year; maybe in the late summer). It was built by my parent’s colleague (company system admin), I was too young to build my own PC.
*Pentium I 133 MHz *1.5 GB HDD *CD-ROM Drive *FDD *Sound Blaster 32 (remember getting Sound Blaster Live! In the next build). *32 MB RAM *S3 ViRGE 325 (4 MB RAM if I remember correctly).
I think the colleague who built it sold it off when we got a new build.
I don’t actually remember the models, just the story. This was around 2010.
My first job, I saved every penny I’d made working with my dad over the summer installing wood-pellet and solar heating systems in Australia.
Took that to my local computer shop and picked out a laptop I’d had my eye on for the whole year (I don’t even remember the brand on this one tbh, too long ago for my crap memory). It was the last one they had of that model; so they had to take the display unit, format it, and give me that. Halfway through that process they shut it down and handed it to me; said I could turn it on at home and it would finish re-installing windows and all would be good. (spoiler, no it was not)
When I got it home, it refused to start at all. After a bunch of screwing around (pretty new to computers, didn’t really know what I was doing and had no one with tech experience around me) I took it back to the store and was told it had corrupted the recovery partition it was re-installing windows from and would have to be sent to the manufacturer to be fixed.
From there we decided to trade it with a slightly cheaper HP laptop (HP Pavilion I think? One of their models with a fingerprint scanner and dual graphics) that became my gaming machine for the next like 7 years. Plus because of this being the shops screwup: they gave me a 1tb usb drive, a laptop bag, and a random wifi router all for free. That drive saved me soo many times holding important data while I screwed up the OS and reinstalled crap while I experimented and learned. Then the router got DDWRT flashed to it and became a wifi client bridge for connecting wired clients to wifi during LAN parties. That poor laptop went through hell; being the testbed and primary machine for my teenage shenanigans, but it held up pretty well considering. Stripping it apart once a year or so to clean all the dust out and refresh the factory thermal paste helped quite a bit.
A fond memories. It all works out in the end.
Eventually I replaced that laptop with a custom built rig housing an i7-8700k and an RTX3080 that now hosts 30ish docker services and serves media to friends+family ~12 solid hours a day on average.
Thanks for comming on my walk down nostalgia lane.
Sounds pretty painful for your first purchase with your own money (that’s a special kind of experience), but it sounds like you got a good deal on the trade-in. 😄