What made you get into Pc life?

[n-ster]

if a PC company actually released decent gaming computers without apple worthy price tags, this whole console gamer thing would drop off pretty fast...

and what i mean by that, is stop cheaping out on the F'ing graphics cards

Yea, a gaming rig at 2000$ is a 5770 + i7 920 lol

 

[L|NK|N]

My Story

Basically I started gaming on the Intellivision at the age of 5 (1985). Growing up I went through every console released with the exception of the 3DO, Atari Jaguar, and Sega Saturn. In Junior High and High School, the majority of my friends were gaming it up on there PC's a la Doom, Decent, Quake, Duke Nukem. They tried to get me into it, but I just couldn't see myself enjoying the Keyboard / Mouse. So I stayed away from PC gaming until 2003 when I took a s370 emachine with a 600 mhz processor and upgraded the memory to 512mb, 700mhz processor, and bought a PCI Geforce MX4000 to play some Warcraft 3. Then I heard about this cool MMORPG called Guild Wars having a Beta/World Preview. I got into that and I was hooked. I had to build a new system though to play it decently, and from there it just took off. Then in 06 I was researching overclocking my ati video card and found TPU.

PS. I have since learned just how Ultimate the KB/Mouse combo pwns as a controller!

 

[cdawall]

My first pc I built with my dad in about 05 I guess? It was an athlon xp 2000+ tb and ecs k7s5a pro it was a frys combo with an asus ti 4200 64mb still got the ti 4200 best card I have ever owned. The ecs blew its caps got an msi k7n2 delta and from then on I have been building primarily amd rigs. Never been a huge gamer but liked benchmarking lol weird.

 

[Champ]

when I was 12 or 13, my older brother was heavily into building gaming PCs. Now I built my own PCs, fix other peoples and went to school for networking. If I hadn't picked that up from him, that would have utterly altered my life.

 

[WhiteNoise]

My mom got her first pc and I started messing around with it. It's as simple as that. I was 27 years old and I would visit my Mom and surf the web and thats when I decided I wanted a computer. That was 11 years ago.

 

[hat]

Back when I had that K6-II 400MHz system, my dad burned lots of CDs for me. Most of them contained Dragonball related stuff. Music videos, clips, episodes and whatnot he found on various archaic file sharing services like Kazaa and Grogster back in the day, downloaded over a dialup connection. I remember one time I got a disc with a single Dragonball GT episode on it, low quality 60MB or so with Japanese audio and hardsubbed English subtitles. I told him "hey, I really liked that" and one day some time later he handed me a stack of discs with every DBGT episode, 1-64. I still have those.

That's mainly what I used that machine for, watching the shit he gave me, and playing some old games like Quake, Quake 2, and Unreal Tournament using the software renderer. I would hear my dad talking with my uncles about other games, Quake 3 being one of them. I was facinated at the fact of there being a Quake 3, and I desperately wanted to try it out. He told me I didn't have powerful enough hardware to run the game, and he would see what he could do about upgrading it. That machine never got upgraded, but I did get a whole new tower some time down the road with a 2GHz Celeron, 512MB RAM, and some 32MB PCI video card... later an FX5200. Since then I've been upgrading that computer, evolving it into what it is today (and building other rigs along side this one, mostly thanks to my interest in the DC projects we're involved here, and thanks to my interest in hosting games). Now it's a part of me that I don't see going away any time soon.

 

[Melvis]

Illness yay

 

[Virus-j]

My Dad Got me a Tiny Computer (400Mhz processor, 256mb Ram, 10Gb hard drive ,4mb graphics Running windows 98) When i was 4 Think he paid £1000 back in 1996 and bought direct from Tiny, When my Dad first set it up and turned it on i was like WOW what is that first thing i played on it was reader rabbit and my bed time was like 7pm and i diddn't want to come off and was holding on to the desk ; ) I was soo amazed by it.

Think about 2 years later we went in to a computer shop and bought a CD called Mame32 which had like 1000 Old arcade games like pacman,Toobin,Golden Axe Etc. First games i ever played on pc and loved them. Still have the Original cd today ; )

When i was 8 though i decided to open the case up and took some of the bits out of the computer and stuck them on the carpet when my dad come in from the garden his face looked like he was gonna cry. ; ) Had to get a engineer from tiny Fix it and replace the parts.

2 years later my dad got bought command and conquer games by my sister and he played them alot and once i saw them i was totally Hooked i would not come off them, then i think on the game Tiberian sun i saw the trailer for Emperor battle for Dune and Ended up buying it but then when i installed it and went to play it my pc diddn't have a good enough graphics card.

I was so Gutted that i decided to get some books from the library and once we got internet (Dial up) i went around finding the info i needed to play this one game ; ) Never did end up playing it though i think once i started learning about the parts i was more into how the computer works then getting this one game to work.

Even today u still take apart Tv's, Dvd players Etc Fix them or just fiddle : )

 

[_JP_]

No comments...

 

[n-ster]

[url]http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_UOxUepAAo6U/Sx7MHgskmCI/AAAAAAAAACk/8FAhsvgCe6E/s400/Windows+Millenium+Edition+%28ME%29.jpg[/URL]

TBH, I never had problems with ME XD

but 98 SE was the best for sure

 

[freaksavior]

This has been asked before but I love these.

I was 10 when my dad built a pIII machine, watching him build the machine, loading windows 95 on it, going into the bios to configure all the hardware and listening to him mutter under his breath how he hates doing this becuase it never worked right the first time.... oh good times, gooood times.

 

[Swamp Monster]

I got my PC later than my friends and I knew nothing about PC's, so I went to my computer teacher and he wrote PC specs on paper and told me to go with that to the store. It was Athlon XP 2000+ with 256MB RAM, MX440 64MB, 80GB HDD. I bought that PC with Win XP and NFS: Hot pursuit pre installed. That game got me hooked up an later I got Max payne 2 and Colin Mcrae 04. It really lagged with MX440 and I went to my teacher again and he sudgested me to buy ATI 9600 128MB. When I saw improvement in graphics performance I played more and more games that had good graphics and started to learn what is the difference between graphics cards and how to make my PC run faster. That is how it started

 

[Black Panther]

Hmm several things actually..

1) I had a Pentium IV with an MX400 and 256MB RAM. The Sims 2 was released, and I couldn't play the game. So I took my entire tower (!!) to a large popular pc franchise outlet so they find out what was wrong with it. The tech there suggested I buy a 512MB RAM stick, I remember it was some €70... and as the best bang for buck graphic cards he sold me the FX5500 :shadedshu for €95..... Now everyone knows that the FX5500 is crappy for gaming, and was a flop even on release..

2) Oblivion (the game).
By then it was 2006 and I had started reading and lurking on a lot of forums, and getting to know computers more. I immediately knew there was no way I could play this awesome game with these out-of-this earth graphics on a Pentium @ 1.5Ghz and an FX5500 which barely ran the Sims 2. So I did some research on how much a new pc would cost....

3) The prices.
I found a German ebay shop, and asked them for a quote on an aeroengine jr (I just chose the 'prettiest' cheapest case on offer since I never heard of air-flow!), a 550W PSU (lol as long as it was 550W I didn't care about the brand ), an E4300 (was cheap and I had already read that it would overclock like hell, so I planned to try that next ), a 'good' cpu cooler, 2GB of whatever RAM, a 320GB HDD, dvd burner, an 8600GTS 256MB and any motherboard as long as it was compatible.
I was adamant not to buy from abroad since if something happens it's easier to go 2 miles to the shop rather than ship it etc etc.
Anyway these guys told me the parts would cost €800 (specifying the PSU would be LC Power, zalman 9500 led for the cpu cooler, the DVD burner LG and the HDD Seagate Barracuda and remember this happened 5 years ago).
So I promptly went with the same specifications to that same large franchise which has the best prices in Malta...
The price they gave me for the same hardware was €1400 and I had to add €23 if they assembled the pc for me.

Sure the assembly costs were a bargain, but I had no choice except get the bits and pieces from abroad and go forth from there.

Anyway to cut this short, lurking and reading on TPU I managed to get the E4300 to 3Ghz, which I felt was an awesome feat then

After buying Oblivion, I realized I hadn't exactly made the right graphic card choice, so barely 6 months later I put the 8600GTS on a shelf and got me a new 8800GT 512MB on release. This was November/December 2007. The 8800GT made my games fly - especially since I was gaming on a 19" 1280x1024.

The next step was a bigger monitor, so I got the LG 22" 1680x1050.

Later on in 2009 a new pc was needed at work. For warranty purposes and the like dad wanted a pre-built. So we agreed that on this pre-built they put my old E4300 and I get the new E8400 (E0 stepping ) and I pay the difference. So I got the cpu dirt cheap, and immediately oc'd it to 4.2Ghz

2010 came and I realized that although I had a fast cpu, my 8800GT couldn't keep up with maxing out games like Fallout 3 with full anti-aliasing on the 1680x1050. So I did a crazy thing and splurged out on a Corsair HX 850, and HD5970 graphics (totalling like €800!). I wasn't sorry for the splurge though, fraps couldn't even keep up to count the fps at 1680x1050 (ok I'm exaggerating that a bit).

Come Oct/Nov 2010 I started thinking that a powerful card like the 5970 was wasted at 1680x1050, so I did my next crazy thing and spent a fortune on a 2560x1440 Dell..... What makes me feel a tad guilty is the fact that I have no regrets on spending so much money on this stuff!

All my games run perfect now, from Sims 3 to Fallout New Vegas, maxed out resolution, maxed out AA..
Well, nearly all. Metro 2033 leaves to be desired but wait a sec my E8400 a quite old core 2 duo now and probably is bottlenecking the card from reaching its full potential...

So guess which upgrade is next?

 

[wolf]

Back in the day we had a PC for the whole family, running win 3.11 and a handfull of dos games, after a year or so we got rid of that for a P2 MMX 233mhz, that eventually became mine in favour of a AMD K6 533mhz. I started playing games on it (poorly) until I was given a GF 2 MX 400 PCI 32mb card as an Xmas present and from there on in it has just grown and grown.

I was given the K6 533mhz machine when the family pc was upgraded too, and a couple of years later my first build was a 2.4ghz 800mhz fsb Celeron on a 800 series intel chipset, with a radeon 9200. later on that same mobo came to hold 2gb od DDR 400, a 3.2ghz prescott p4, and a 6800Ultra AGP card. at this point I was sold on PC gaming, mid-high end parts, and indeed overclocking.

the story after that involves a shitload more parts, upgrades and overclocking, but yeah, thats how it all started. ask for more details if you want to hear the whole story

 

[Frederik S]

I got my first gaming PC when I turned five or six, it was an IBM PS/1 oh gawd that was a sexy machine back in the day. It was super you could buy games at the super markets in Denmark on floppydisks. But yeah I started rocking space invaders and then I was hooked.

Amazing how you could make do with just a 10 MHz CPU single core CPU back then. And that was only 16 years ago. Previous sentence just made me feel really really old haha!!

 

[Ptep]

Started with a Commodore 16 at age 8 or 9 i think, my cousin gave it to me one christmas! The games or programs were loaded from a tape drive or typed in (i was handed a stack of magazines full of basic programs for the C16).

After that i had a whole series of machine ranging from Acorn Electron - with 3" floppy drive and expansion unit, Acorn Archimedes, BBC Micro, Apricot XEN, and then various 186, 286 and 386 machines!

Then came my love for all things Amiga, this was also my first foray into computer modding! I originally started with an Amiga A500 Plus, and soon afterwards upgraded to an Amiga A1200 bought from the ill fated Escom (they bought the Amiga brand to revive it, then shortly afterwards went bankrupt). My A1200 stayed in its standard form for a long time until i had finally saved up enough money for a hard drive for it - i was about 13 at the time - the keyboard all in one style A1200 case could only accept a 2.5" drive which at the time were much more expensive than a 3.5" ide drive, so i bought a 40-44 pin ide converter and a pc psu.

Eventually i got fed up with the cable and drive hanging out of the side of the case so i completely dismantled the A1200 and refitted it into a PC tower case which had been modified with the help of my father, plus some adapters from a company that specialized in converting A1200s to tower case computers. This was my first case mod I guess!

I used my parents computers for a long time and sort of lost interest with computers until I got a job which if i remember rightly paid for a 3.6Ghz P4, DFI Lanparty motherboard and an Nvidia 5700 graphics card, plus watercooling gear for the cpu and motherboard, it was a lot of fun to build and looked awesome at the time!

TL : DR im sure but you did ask

 

[TheMailMan78]

Because consoles suck for FPS. True story.

 

[n-ster]

Because consoles suck for FPS. True story.

And RTS

 

[Thrackan]

My first experiences with computers were Commodore 64 games. Alot. We had a monochrome green/black monitor, and if Dad was in a nice mood he'd plug it into the TV so we could play in colour
C64 is also where I learned my first programming skillz GW-Basic ftw!

I must have been about 6-8 or so.

Meanwhile, my Dad had a 286/386/486 with Windows 3.11 at work. I got to use it a couple of times and played Dark Forces on it. That should be around '95/'96 according to the release date of the game, so I was 11-12

Around '96, we got our first PC at home If I remember correctly, it was a P2 333Mhz, and I know it had an ATi Rage 2, which I have abused alot through the years, altering drivers and installing wrappers, so I could play games that were not specced to work on it

Afaik, not along time after that we got Interwebs. Actually the first region with Cable, so I never experienced the horrors of Dial-Up. We got a 10Mbit hub and somewhere along the line I got an old 486'er to play with That 486 (DX-100!) lasted me quite a while, but after I got myself my first (partially second-hand) AMD Athlon 600 (which I clocked to 750 with the flick of a jumper ) the beast was unleashed.

 

[Rowsol]

Doom.

 

[Doherz]

I was about 12 years old. Unreal tournament 2004 came out, played it on a friends pc and wanted it. Month later and lots of nagging my Dad gave in and got his cousin who worked in a small pc shop to build us a gaming rig, he basically let me build it with him. 7 years and two rigs later here I am with my own computer paid for and built by myself. Feels good, but nothing beat the feeling of playing UT2004 on my own pc at the age of 12.

 

[overclocking101]

my first custom cuomputer was built with an asus A8N SLI deluxe, and 2 7950GT KO's 1gb ddr, and an amd 64X2 3200+. was a decent rig back then, before that i rocked a emachines i got into pc's mainly due to being on house arrest.

 

[VulkanBros]

Gyro computers in Leopard 1 tanks (WAX driven - if anybody knows what that is )
I was electronic mechanic on these things in 1993...

Comodore 64 / 128 - Sinclair - ZX Spectrum

 

[Lionheart]

First off, Ind2288 Im glad you made this thread, I can feel the awesomeness of TPU coming together but anyways my story with computers would most likely start back in the early 90's.


1992 - I remember having this old type of computer, but its so long ago I don't even remember the specs or what type of rig it was (OLD) all I can remember it used those huge floppy disc's and it had alot of awesome games on it like, Tetris, pong, star wars, battle chess, heaps of card games, and heaps of others I can't remember, oh and apparently I screwed the whole thing up, I rearranged the whole OS sumhow and none of my family could use it except me because I remember what everything was I was like 4yrs old


In 1997 - we bought another PC, it was a Packard Bell or something and I had some fun times on it, specs were....Intel Pentium 200Mhz, 32MB RAM, 2MB Onboard Video and 2GB HDD, I remember playing POD (racing Game) and basic Win 95 games.


In 2002 - and this is where my seriousness and real interest started in computers, all I can say I had some of the best times with this computer and some shitty times too(Dial Up net), here are the specs Win XP, AMD Athlon XP 2100+ 1.77Ghz, 512MB Ram DDR, 80GB HDD and ATI All In Wonder Radeon 7500 64MB and sum generic PSU. First game I played on the system was Battlefield 1942 and OMG, awesomeness also had Age Of empires 2, Starcraft Broodwar, Half Life, Counter Strike and the list goes on. The yrs past and I upgraded the system to 1.5GB RAm and bought a FX 5200 128MB vidcard (POS) The RAM helped but video card sucked (I was still a noob) so down the line I saved up more money and bought a ATI X800 Pro 256MB, and it was an awesome card, had a CPU bottleneck though I bought it so I could play Half Life 2, Doom 3 and Quake 4 decently, and it did the job well.


Now I bring to 2007 - this is where I first started to get into high end PC gaming you could say. The specs were Win Vista 32bit, AMD Athlon X2 6000+ 3Ghz, 2GB RAM DDR2, 320GB HDD and a ECS 8800GTS 320MB, came with a generic PSU but I changed it to a Solytech 500W or sumthing, did the job well. All I can say is I fell in love with dis rig, played all games maxed out at the time, but ran into many issues (Vista Related) but still, played old games and new ones like Company Of Hero's, Bioshock and so many others. upgraded it abit with an extra gig of RAM and swapped out he video card twice, first with a HD 4850 512MB which was an awesome card but didn't really like my nvdida motherboard, so I bought a GTS 250 512MB, it was smoother This was my first rig when I became a member on TPU I still have this PC BTW


End Of 2008 - I decided to finally buy my own rig and choose the parts, and I went nuts, also I was a big AMD/ATI fanboy you'll see why, I pretty much built an AMD spider platform, specs were AMD Phenom 9950 OCed @ 3Ghz, 8GB Corsair Dominator RAM, 500GB WD HDD, HIS HD4870 1gb vid card and a Vantec 550 PSU. Long story short, it was an awesome rig and played all my games at full detail including crysis (played at low res) but I had to sell it, needed the money


And end of 2009 - is my current rig and I have upgrading it ever since, I don't really need to go into detail, because I feel like its been with TPU ever since I built it...The End

THATS MY LIFE STORY............

 

[sakai4eva]

Wow... My first computer belonged to my dad. Those were the days of 286s and whatnots. I remembered inserting 3 disks to install MS-DOS (they were in the IT industry back when it was called the computer industry), another 3 disks to install Windows 3.1.1, and 30 disks to install the entire Lotus SmartSuite. Yeah... those were the 1.44 MB not-so-floppy disks. Oh, and we (that is, my brother and I) had to install all those on 30 computers. Nice way to spend a Saturday when you're 10.

First PC game I played was... Tetris, maybe? First game I really dug into was Diablo.

I have been putting rigs together since I was 12, so naturally I have a huge advantage compared to my peers (who had very unbalanced rigs).

My first "seriously mine" PC was back in 2004 I think, when I bought an AMD Athlon 2000 (I think) with 1GB RAM and a 7600 GT, and also a generic mobo (can't even recall the damn thing now), and then plugged them into a steel case from the PIII days (yeah, my prior PC was a "gift" from my dad... a PIII) and started playing games at low resolutions. I had this 17" CRT monitor that goes 1024x768 pixels.

When Crysis came out, I splurged on a new PSU (another generic basterd) and the ASUS 8800GT. Man, that was awesome. Until I realized my whole rig was imbalanced and bought more RAM and a 3500+ processor.

Fast forward to 2009 and I bought a 5770, my current CPU and Mobo. A few months later I bought my current RAM. I just got the other components this year.