I am taking a bit of leeway and calling one of my earlier computers a “build” even though realistically it wasn’t a build at all, but really a hodgepodge of miscellaneous components thrown together. This also isn’t quite so much information about the “Build” as much as it is the history of the PC. Not really that interesting, I argue, but I feel like writing.

We’ll start with the specifications of the system when I received it. The system was given to me in 2002-2003:

Motherboard: Epox MVP3G-M Super Socket 7

CPU: AMD K6-2 350Mhz

RAM: 32MB

Graphics: ATI Rage Pro 3D Turbo AGP

HDD: 2GB Maxtor

Audio: Sound Blaster PCI

Now, for reference,  this system was effectively to replace a 386-based system, and it represented quite a substantial upgrade- it would run Windows 98SE, for example- finally, I could run a version of Windows that could be debatably referred to as “Modern”!

I used this “Build” for old games, and for general computing tasks. I didn’t have the Internet for the majority of the system’s service life, so much of the time on it was spent reading articles and content from the MSDN Library and writing programs in Visual Basic. Eventually, I started upgrading the system piece by piece. I did not make enough money and was not particularly good enough with it to actually save any of it and ended up trying to upgrade the system when realistically I ought to have stowed away money to build a new one. By the time I had replaced it I had maxed out the RAM at 512MB, replaced the hard drive with an 80GB model (which required the use of the cylinder reduction jumper that limited the available space to 32.7GB due to BIOS limitations), Graphics card had been upgraded to an ATI Radeon 9250, I’d replaced the power supply, and I found a slightly faster AMD K6-2 450Mhz CPU as well.

Overall the system served me very well, though it was not without it’s problems. In particular, the Power Supply was underpowered for when I started filling the system up with expansion cards and hard drives and DVD Drives and such. However, given I got it for free and it served as a mostly-reliable workhorse for many years it certainly offered more than I expected.