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

[tnt118]

Installing a token ring card... man that thing was rough. Thought for sure something was going to break.

 

[Carson Dyle]

Does a PDP-11 count?

 

[mikeymikec]

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.

 

[OVerLoRDI]

Adding 2x128mb RDRAM sticks to my first gen p4. Man that thing sucked and the ram was stupid expensive.

 

[sswingle]

Upgraded the 486 16 to a 486 33

 

[Cerb]

I don't remember too much clearly that far back. I would have been just learning to read...

 

[HeXen]

To add more Ram so that Blade Runner did not stutter so bad.

 

[master_shake_]

stupid 33.6 modem died in my parents compaq.

my first opening and repair.

 

[mooncancook]

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]

"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]

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]

Installed a math co-processor and some ram as an update to military 286 computer system in 1993.

 

[Nohr]

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.

 

[Gillbot]

My first computer
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI_99/4A

 

[HeXen]

My first computer
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI_99/4A

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]

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

 

[Ruptga]

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

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

 

[Fern]

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]

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]

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]

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]

> 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

 

[Jadow]

trying to install a sound blaster into a 286

 

[OverVolt]

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.

 

[RaistlinZ]

Installed a 56k modem into our Packard Bell PC. It may have been a 486 machine, can't remember.

This was around 1995.