Ever felt buyer's remorse on your CPU?

[Blue_Max]

Heck... I remember selling off my beloved Tandy 1000SX (7.14MHz XT) for a crappy shop's 386DX-25. The speed was great but I didn't understand the value of components then. Besides being overpriced, it was VERY poorly built - the hard drive wasn't even connected and the case had a big crack. The shop owner refused to give my dad his money back.

Back then, Tandy Computers would actually take back their units to sell you a new one with a big discount... I really should have moved up to a 286-based Tandy unit at the time - one even had both VGA and the Tandy graphics of the time.... would've been a VERY well built unit for much less money... but, hey - I was only 12!

The difference between 8088 and 80286 was night and day! Moving up to 386 from there was less so. I remember a 286 with good video card running Wing Commander far better than my 386DX did!

In my late teens, I'd upgrade that 386 to a 486DX2-66 (for an amazing boost!) then to higher again... but it never dawned on me at the time that when I paid $300-500 for these upgrades and they installed them - I never got my old board/CPU back! They ripped me off at least $100+ each time! Dirty buggers playing on my ignorance...

 

[seitur]

Spoiler

Very dumb question but back then when you guys was still using your computers in the 90s and early 2000s did you guys feel that your computer felt slow at the time. Or did it still feel fast because there was a lack of software that demanded more power from your computer like flash? I'm talking mostly about computers with like 100-1000 mhz cpu clock speed

Desktop experience was definately slower than nowadays. While older OS like Win 3.11 or 95 were much less demanding than newer ones - it still felt sluggish.
It is not direct linear slow - fast comparision though.
In example working on Windows 95 sometimes was quite fast, but you constantly was hitting bottlenecks. Like HDD being used as swap constaly and because HDDs were painfully slow, then whole system was painfully slow.
Single core CPUs also meant that if you were multitaasking, whole experience often started to be slow, etc

Fast and slow is also relative.

Anyway - for "normal everyday usage" from average PC user - today situation and speed is much better. Nowadays even from cheap PC parts like i.e. Celeron G1610 or cheap AMD APU - and some cheap 7200 rpm HDD or small cheap SSD you will get VERY SMOOTH desktop performance.

Back in the day - diffrence in every day usage between cheap and expensive hardware was bigger. (like i.e. old ATA HDDs vs. fast expensive SCSI drives)