The First Time...

They say that you never forget your first time. I know that I will never forget my first time. Now get your mind out of the gutter! I am talking about computers of course. I was thinking about this the other day a bit. I don't remember all the exact details but I do remember my first computer. Until around 2006, all of my computers had been hand-me-downs. When my parents would get a new computer, I would get the old one.

My first computer was a Packard Bell 486. It was a 66MHZ processor and had a 250MB hard drive but I am not sure how much RAM it had though. This computer had ran Windows 3.11 which at one point was the newest and greatest. I also remember the computer having a caddy style CDROM drive. I also remember losing the caddy and having to go crazy to find it. I used to play some games on it like Kyrandia 3 but I really didn't know what I was doing all the time since I was young.

My second computer I do not remember as well but I do remember that it was a Pentium I running at 133MHZ with Windows 95. This computer was custom built by a local store so there was no brand. This is probably why I don't really remember it much. It was given to person we knew many years ago when she needed a computer.

My next computer, and this one is sitting in my room right now, was an IBM Aptiva. This one ran Windows 98, and then 98SE. Originally the computer had a Pentium II running at 350MHZ but I had actually upgraded the processor to 450MHZ. The graphics card was also upgraded to a GeForce 2, if I remember correctly. I would check but the computer isn't actually hooked up right now. The computer came with an 8GB hard drive. I had upgraded that to 60GB and never thought I would ever have that much stuff to store.

The RAM when I had used it as my main PC was a whopping 384MB. That was one 256MB chip and one 128MB chip, if I remember that correctly but I have been wrong before. There is 512MB in it now and it is running Windows 2000 as I couldn't find my Windows 98SE CD.

I remember this computer being used a lot. In fact, this was the first time I ever used Linux and it gave me false expectations of Linux. Everything just worked on it. I was using SuSE 9.3 on it since a friend had sent me a copy of it in the mail. I also upgraded it to SuSE 10 when it came out.

The next one I got was a Sony Vaio, with a Pentium 4 running at 1.3GHZ. This computer wasn't used for long since it uses RDRAM, also known as one of the biggest rip offs known to geeks. This computer came with Windows ME, which was later upgraded to Windows XP but with only 256MB of RAM, in 4 sticks of 64MB each, wasn't quite enough to do much really.

I was lucky in a way since this had helped to finally get me a laptop after so much time wanting one. I will save that one for the next installment of Classical Computing though. Now I have another hand me down desktop again but this one was built by my dad and I and works great even though it isn't the newest. I can still run Windows 7 on it and that is really all that matters. It has an AMD 2.4GHZ Athlon 64 dual core, 2GB of DDR memory, and a 1TB hard drive. It also has a nice 512MB 9500GT graphics card.