An unexpected Pleasent surprise

Judas

Well,

Anyone remember thier very first, EVER computer you built, by yourself, using parts you purchased yourself, and whatnot (if you've built yourself a computer thus far).

Back in 2000, i built, from scratch, my first computer, an AMD Athlon 600mhz using an MSI 6361 (or 6163? ) Slot A motherboard, with 512mb of ram (combined 256mbx2) and a Voodoo 3 3000, which was later switched out for a Kyro 2 hercules 4500 and then again for a Radeon 7000, also included a 30gb maxtor ATA133 2mb cache hd and a 40x24x40x Yamaha CD-RW with DiscT@2 (a feature that was born and then lost which is kinda a shame as it had it's very neato application, but still useless as putting a logo burnt into a disc resulted in no data being written to that area). Later in 2001, it was the first machine i sold that i had custom built.

Well, it's made it's rounds all the way back to my shop today.

The computers condition?

Well aside from locking up in games on the ati radeon 7000 agp, it appears to work relatively fine considering. I mean over the years, running windows ME orginally then apparntly later upgraded to windows XP home, being loaded up with a pile of litterly, crap, i think with a good cleaning, the system will run just fine. (course i think the vid card did get warm as i'm getting corruption on the screen)

Reguardless, it's kinda refreshing to see a machine come back this many years later, in relatively decent running condition, and being the first.

Anyone else experience this?

Judas

ooo, takeing it appart and forgot what else i've put in it... sb live value 4.1

sparkle 350 watt psu.... thought i had used an enermax....

pr0digal jenius

T@2 was retarded...it was Lightscribe's premature half brother

Zelig

The first computer I build (celeron 433 MHz machine) had a flaky motherboard (as far as I could tell, after using it for years), and is now quite destroyed.

Geminiwave

my first computer came back to me recently...and I fixed it up and it runs all modern games. pretty cool for a 3 yearold computer, yea? Actually its almost 4 years old. I built it in the spring of 03.

pr0digal jenius

my first was an Athlon XP 1800+ with 512 MB RAM and a radeon 8500 128MB

That was, god, 6 years ago? Back when Windows XP was just hitting shelves and they gave me an OEM XP Home disc for $10 with my motherboard

That thing ran like a raped ape.....and plowed through things like Soldier of Fortune II and Max Payne.....and, well, then came Far Cry and it instantly became "slow"

Judas

T@2 was inovative in a manner, pointless in most... but it was interesting..

Yamaha CD-RW drives are amazing though.

Aftering tearing the sucker completely appart and redressing everything up, recabling it up to my own standards again, i've found the following changes have been made since i touched it.

It's got a nvidia MX400 agp card in it, it had a 10gb Fujitsu hardrive in it, it's got a LG 32x12x32x CD-RW drive in it, and the one of the worst jobs ever done putting it back together by whom i'm unsure, but missing screws not to mention WRONG SCREWS used in various places, this sucker was just short of completely falling appart physically inside.

Tinkerhell

Man I couldn't even begin to recall what was in the first PC I put together. It was back in the early 90's and I think it was running Windows 3 or 3.1.

Zardon

im way before you guys, back in the times of 286/386's most of you were probably in preschool the days of configuring DOS and freeing up enough memory to load drivers.

Tinkerhell

Yep. Used DOS (and liked it) but I came along with it just before the win gui's came out so never got to doing too much mem management for drivers. hehehe.

Judas

well guys, the suspected pleasent surprise didn't turn out as one in the end.

when tearing it appart, and taking a closer look at things, it looks like the cage that holds the floppy and hardrive in place were screwed with my someone else and ended up actually falling (at some point i don't know) and making contact with the motherboard (shorted out or something). Now although the machine seems to startup and run fine, after roughly 2 minutes of use, be it within the bios, or where ever, the system hardlocks, or appears to go into a standby like state for about 5 seconds, then reboots to a hardlock before post state.

I'd like to know who the hell fiddle with the frigen machine, it's a solid rig, and would still be if some jackass had actually used the correct number of screws, and ACTUALLY put things together correctly, but na, i've come across way to many machines, custom built usually, that give us all a bad rep, that are so terribly built, with cut corners and purposely made to fail components or build structure.


Just an example, i recently had a machine come in. it wasn't running very well, it was crashing occasionally, locking up others, and overall falling appart, low and behold, tearing it appart showed the following:

AMD Duron 1300mhz socket A
Gigabyte GA-7ZMMC
2x128mb 168pin ram
20gb maxtor HD + 10gb seagate HD
HP CD-RW drive
pci modem
pci network card
several serial and usb devices
150 watt Generic no name brand psu

Now emediately, the 150 watt has to go, replaced with a 300 watt sparkle psu

but here's the real kicker,

you'd never guess what was on the cpu for a heatsink, a Pentium 1 heatsink with a 40mm fan.

The heatsink was orginally black, but sevearly discolored, the fan was totally screwed, and the cpu tempt was registering 78*C in the bios, and that's not even with a core temp reading.

So completely ripped the sucker appart, the case this was built in had to go, as it was pretty much useless because it used a dinky psu that didn't seem to fit any standard (dell?). put on a copper AMD x2 certified heatsink, and noticeing the DIE on of the cpu was heavily discolored as well (purple), cleaned it up, put some OCZ 5+ silver thermal paste on and hooked everything up, the Maxtor 20gb hardrive looked like it was from an oem build not orginal for the machine, and it was dieing, quickly. (smart had considered it failing, and transfering data from it was nearly impossible even with NTFS helping things out).

Anyways, got the machine running through CPU burn test to see if the cpu is going to show and errors, although it's lifespan is extremely shortened, it's running roughly 5% faster then most other people with the same cpu, 40*C, and solid/stable.

It just erks me to see a poorly built machine, i mean, cmon, i've seen a meatball or food of some type jammed between cables, what was the person doing? Eating launch while building someone a computer?

temeteus82

my firs pc was 486DX2 66Mhz (AMD) 8 MB RAM ET2000 vga chip and SB 16 ISA!
I think it had 150 MB hd... and Zardon I remember how to make multicofiguration to config.sys and autoexec.bat So that I could run games that used EMS, XMS or Dos4GW! Those were days...

And we are talking about early 90's ...

SFOSOK

Hell, even I've used DOS. This is my first ccustom built computer. In the first 6 months after I made it I learned a hell of a lot real quick.

Zelig

Yeah, "Not enough conventional memory" was always fun. Sad part was, I was using a 386 with DOS when everyone else had Win98.

Judas

i had my fun rebuilding a 1993 compaq with a 486dx4 running 90mhz

gaud, that sucker owned with windows xp pro sp2

still works today on highspeed

pr0digal jenius

i started on a mac that had dual 5.25" floppies...btu that wasnt my machine..w.as a friends.

ANyoen else waste their youth playing Marble Madness & Blackthorne?

Judas

at school we were lucky to play oragon trail maybe once for about 15 minutes per month.. or 2....


on a good ol mac....

the windows 3.1 machines we later got in school around 1995-1996, we ended up using those to shock the hell outa other poeple, they were one of those pos all in one compaqs, monitors/speakers/computer all in one small box. if you put your hand on the screen, and then touch someone else, and forced thier hand onto a nearby grounded metal object, or perhaps another machine's speaker, you could litterly make the piss themselves from the shock.

god those were fun as hell/funny as hell days...

niceguyrichy

oh hell yeah!!

I was playing marble madness online just the other day as it happens, still great fun

my computing life started with a sinclair zx spectrum, followed by a 386 (I think). happy days playing x-wing on lowest settings
found the sinclair when I moved last, and it still worked (as well as it ever did anyway..)

Zardon

yeah im sure it rocked with XP. ive a ZX81 running vista myself.

Sandok

WoW really?

Can I have it, please? I can't run Vista...

Zardon

Sorry im trying to mod it to run Vista x64 atm no sharing - ive managed to compress vista to run in 5k of memory but its getting tough now. You could ask Judas to build you a killer system out of coke cans and matchsticks though, if he has time.

Judas

what?

that compaq ran with xp pro sp2 better then when running 95/98/me

i tried them all, finding drivers for 98/me was pretty much pointless, nothing but errors and slowdowns and general chaos. Windows XP Pro, serprisingly not only had EVERY driver for the sucker already provided in it, but the sound playback didn't cause the herky jerkies like windows 98/me and the sound playback actually didn't have squeels and static like in 95. Plus bootup time was faster then 95/98 and slightly slower then ME, loading and operating MS office programs was much much faster, which pretty much hand in hand with just about everything else. To top it off, being xp, all the latest programs would