What were you doing the first time you opened a PC case?

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tnt118

Member
Jan 17, 2010
170
6
81
Installing a token ring card... man that thing was rough. Thought for sure something was going to break.
 

mikeymikec

Lifer
May 19, 2011
21,152
16,358
136
I attempted to install a Gary chip and 2MB chip RAM upgrade in my Amiga 500. Unfortunately it was unreliable so I had to revert to stock.
 
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OVerLoRDI

Diamond Member
Jan 22, 2006
5,490
4
81
Adding 2x128mb RDRAM sticks to my first gen p4. Man that thing sucked and the ram was stupid expensive.
 

Cerb

Elite Member
Aug 26, 2000
17,484
33
86
I don't remember too much clearly that far back. I would have been just learning to read...
 

HeXen

Diamond Member
Dec 13, 2009
7,838
39
91
To add more Ram so that Blade Runner did not stutter so bad.
 

mooncancook

Platinum Member
May 28, 2003
2,874
50
91
To install additional 4 mb of ram to my 486, to a whopping total of 8 mb. It made a huge difference in Win 3.1 though.
 

IGemini

Platinum Member
Nov 5, 2010
2,472
2
81
"Upgraded" an AGP ATI Rage IIc to a PCI S3 Savage4, sometime in 1999. Might've been an actual upgrade if it was AGP...the graphics looked better but had really sloppy performance.
 

skipsneeky2

Diamond Member
May 21, 2011
5,035
1
71
Back in 2006 when my friend/roomie at the time had his POS Celery Emachine.Middle of a factory reformat the cd-rom tray refuses to open.I end up using a butter knife to position the disc on the spindle as it was a multi disk reformat.Next day i bought a $3 used rom from a second hand store that worked well till the tower went poof not long later.
 

LTC8K6

Lifer
Mar 10, 2004
28,520
1,576
126
Installed a math co-processor and some ram as an update to military 286 computer system in 1993.
 

Nohr

Diamond Member
Jan 6, 2001
7,302
32
101
www.flickr.com
Probably just poking around my 286 to see what was inside. I didn't know much of anything about hardware at the time and never did any upgrades or repairs to that PC. I didn't build my own until many years later when the Celeron 300A was out.
 

HeXen

Diamond Member
Dec 13, 2009
7,838
39
91

Ha, I used to have that same one. Had a few cartridge games for it but none of the other peripherals shown in that pic. Granny bought it for me at a flea market and it didn't come with any video out cables nor did any place sell them anymore at the time so I never got to use it. But technically it was the first computer I ever possessed.

First one I ever used was a radio shack Trs-80. First real computer games I ever played was my friends C 64, he had strip poker for it and that really amused me.
 

Fenixgoon

Lifer
Jun 30, 2003
33,388
12,991
136
i think i was installing additional ram? hard to remember exactly what it was, but i remember being worried that i would nuke my computer from orbit. oh how naive i was :p
 

Ruptga

Lifer
Aug 3, 2006
10,246
207
106
i think i was installing additional ram? hard to remember exactly what it was, but i remember being worried that i would nuke my computer from orbit. oh how naive i was :p

Static discharge is scary stuff. Better touch the case a few more times before touching anything important, just in case.
 

Fern

Elite Member
Sep 30, 2003
26,907
174
106
Wow, hard to remember.

Could be back in the late 90's to add more ram or network cards.

Around the yr 2000 I started building my PC's (for me and my small business). The reasonable priced PC's in stores just didn't offer much opportunity for upgrading and OCing.

Last time I opened a case was about 2 weeks ago to clear the CMOS on a PC after the power went out while it was booting. (I also went down to BB to get a new backups unit.)

Fern
 

SolMiester

Diamond Member
Dec 19, 2004
5,330
17
76
was circa 1993-4 and I was building my own system, DX2-66 8MB RAM, diamond stealth 2mb VL Bus graphics with creative sound blaster Pro and attached CD drive. No plug and play in those days!
 

Leros

Lifer
Jul 11, 2004
21,867
7
81
I was adding 32MB of RAM so I could play Age of Empires (I forget it if was 1 or 2). I usually paid Best Buy to do stuff like that, but it seemed simple enough that it wasn't worth dropping off my computer for 2 days and paying $60.
 

Gillbot

Lifer
Jan 11, 2001
28,830
17
81
Ha, I used to have that same one. Had a few cartridge games for it but none of the other peripherals shown in that pic. Granny bought it for me at a flea market and it didn't come with any video out cables nor did any place sell them anymore at the time so I never got to use it. But technically it was the first computer I ever possessed.

First one I ever used was a radio shack Trs-80. First real computer games I ever played was my friends C 64, he had strip poker for it and that really amused me.

I think I only had one cart but had other stuff on tape drive. The speech synthesizer was a lot of fun.
 

alzan

Diamond Member
May 21, 2003
3,860
2
0
> 1995-ish: I was upgrading the onboard video RAM for a HP Pavilion desktop model; from a meager 32KB to a generous 96KB.

Also eventually upgraded:

HDD - 635MB to 2.0GB

RAM - 4MB to 16MB

OS - Win95a to Win95c
 

OverVolt

Lifer
Aug 31, 2002
14,278
89
91
To see if I could overclock my Compaq.

The name is pretty fitting.

<----

Promptly found out that I couldn't, so I ordered an XP 1600+ AGOIA stepping and OC'd that ho to 2400+. Built a whole computer just to do it. Still sitting in a basement somewhere, still works except for the purple artifacts everywhere and how it now calculates pi to 5,000 decimal places... differently... every-time.
 
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RaistlinZ

Diamond Member
Oct 15, 2001
7,470
9
91
Installed a 56k modem into our Packard Bell PC. It may have been a 486 machine, can't remember.

This was around 1995.