The Spark Of Life.

Early October 2001... I'd been using an old 486 hobbled together from a hodgepodge of parts from around the World. A "Frankenstein" PC as it were. That sounds so ancient, and it was... still, it was a world above my earlier machines.

Some of which I still own, others I wish I still had. An original IBM 5150, A Zenith 286 with a backplane motherboard, XT's, A Compaq "Suitcase" XT Computer. That was one of the first "Portable" machines. Ha ha...

I still have that one and it still works. I used to use it to log in to the local library to put holds on books. Before they closed down that system. That was fun.

It was right after 911 and things were shakey. Americans were encouraged to spend money on products to help the economy. A local screwdriver shop was running some pretty good deals and I decided to buy my first "real" PC. Not one I built from thrift store appendages with bolts protruding from the neck.

I love thrift store PC's but I'll save that for later. This Blog is about the life of my current PC after all.

I picked a store special that had an ECS K7S5A Motherboard. It was the first motherboard I'm aware of that had DDR Memory slots, a huge deal at the time. They didn't throw in the DDR Memory without an extra charge, so I went for a measly 256 PC133Mhz of memory.

It was an AMD Motherboard. Of course I didn't want an Intel Chip, not then, not now. AMD all the way! A 1Ghz Athlon "Thunderbird" which was great back then. Unfortunately though just like with the memory, the "Thunderbird" was only a 100Mhz Chip. Running at a clock speed to equal 200Mhz. 100 X2.

Still that was much faster than Intel chips which were topping out at 133Mhz Bus Speeds.

If I had waited one more day the XP chip would have been available which ran at much faster speeds. There were Thunderbirds running at faster clock speeds too but the shop where I bought my PC wasn't selling those in the package I chose.

It had a 40Gb Maxtor HDD running at 5400 rpm, also not the fastest available. But a good size for the technology of the day. They were still putting floppy drives in PC's then too, even though they were just about useless.

There was a 32mb S3 Savage 4 Video card with no TV out or anything like that. Now S3 was a goodproduct at one time, but they were starting to fade away by 2001. 32Mb wasn't too bad for those days, but the card was a lemon. I'll get to that later.

By then on board sound was a regular feature, the days of needing a sound card were long since past.

I had a choice of Windows 98, or I could wait one day and get the new operating system... Windows XP. I chose the Home Edition which was about an $80 charge.

The machine came in an awful little ATX Case with a cheapo keyboard and mouse.

I paid for a 17" AOL Monitor, good for the times... but when I went to pick up my machine several days later they gave me a Hansol Monitor. I asked about it, but didn't push for the AOL which was out of stock.

The people in the shop were very helpful and friendly, but I must say some of them probably shouldn't been allowed to touch a PC. I'm pretty sure you will find those people everywhere?

I was pretty excited when I got it home! Then, the journey began...