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

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Added a cheapo SVGA card to a 486 that we had gotten free from my moms work in the mid 90s.

Built my first "gaming" system in 96, at the time, just a cheap cyrix p200+ with 32mb SDram and a 4GB hard drive, but once I installed the Pure3D that thing was awesome for Carmageddon and Quake. The CPU sucked, but it was replaced the next year with a k6 233, and then later on with a bh6 and celeron 300a...
 
Swapping out the Intel 80286 motherboard and 12 mhz proc for a new board with a Harris 20mhz AT proc.
 
All of my friends were playing Counter-strike in high school & I wanted to get into the action. Knew squat about computers & was told I needed to buy a video card since the game ran at one frame per second. Got some stupid video card that was barely above integrated & got up to like 3 FPS lol, so popping it open to get the GPU in was my first exposure to it.

Even the crummy card was expensive, so I cooled it on computers for a couple years until I got into CGI & decided I needed to build my own for rendering. First box was an 1.4ghz Athlon Tbird with 1.5 gigs of RAM, which was enormous at the time. Hooked ever since! 🙂
 
I opened the case on my 386sx to see if I could add more ram. It didn't have enough to play Wing Commander II. Even when I allocated enough to the himem.sys it still crashed half way through the game.
 
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I don't even remember, but I do remember my first major PC upgrade and PC build projects. I quickly learned that you do those things yourself when you're trying to get the most value for your money, NOT when you're trying to spend the lowest dollar amount possible. What a pain in the ass.
 
Arcadio said:
I remember that the first time I opened my PC case was to install a USB PCI card because my PC didn't come with USB ports. This was back in 1999 or so.
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How the hell am I suppose to know?! I've opened a case so many times. Maybe to change RAM. Come to think of it it could have been when I got my tax return an I upgraded a Dell. That sucker had all new pars except the mother board. LOL!

My first PC was a green screen HP Vectura. PAMCODE anyone? It's so old you won't find a reference to it on the Internet. It was the Personal Application Manager.
 
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I opened my first PC case just so I could learn about what was in there. It it was an IBM 486 machine. I was just getting into PC's and did a lot of reading, then hands on experience. I remember when I would go to Barnes and Noble after dinner and read books. I wanted to understand what made them tick and so I completely disassembled that computer and put it back together. It really taught me a lot about components, installing CPU's, RAM, HD's etc.

Next came the Pentiums and learning to overclock.
 
added 2x256 sticks of RDram to my dell, circa 2003.

PC1066! the good stuff! I finally had a full gig, living the high life.
 
Arcadio said:
I remember that the first time I opened my PC case was to install a USB PCI card because my PC didn't come with USB ports. This was back in 1999 or so.
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Can't remember, most probably nothing and just looking around. I mostly opened my first pc when I had to for floppy drive maintenance.
 
Changed the FSB jumper on a DX4100 from 20 to 25MHz OCing the DX4 to 120 which allowed me to run Diablo without a Pentium 😀
 
Installed a 5 1/4" floppy drive in my new 486DX50. They were starting to fade away, being replaced by optical drives but I needed to install software from 5 1/4" discs.
 
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SunburstLP said:
It's all about the LOADHIGH, man.
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Ahhhh the .... not so fun days.. Sadly I had to play with that recently to flash HBA controllers. Crazy that in this day and age you still have to rely on DOS and floppies at times. Had to flash 3 HBAs and it kept crapping out and I had to load emm386 and stuff to make it work.
 
I tried to repair my Atari 600XL as a kid. I was on vacation with my mother. My much older brother stayed at home. After returning, when i looked at my atari, i knew something was wrong. When i opened it, it became obvious he played with it and lost. He had hit the keyboard with his fist and broke the pcb in so much pieces it could not be repaired. When i asked him why, he blamed me for not tidying the cables. :'(

Atari-600xl.png


EDIT:
Now that i think about it, i opened it even earlier than that. I am not sure why. Curious i guess.
 
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William Gaatjes said:
I tried to repair my Atari 600XL as a kid. I was on vacation with my mother. My much older brother stayed at home. After returning, when i looked at my atari, i knew something was wrong. When i opened it, it became obvious he played with it and lost. He had hit the keyboard with his fist and broke the pcb in so much pieces it could not be repaired. When i asked him why, he blamed me for not tidying the cables. :'(

Atari-600xl.png
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I could never get used to a keyboard like that.
 
My brother was upgrading or building a new PC and was teaching me.
About 1996 or 1997.
 
I remember installing the original Radeon in my old Pentium II rig. Probably the first time I really tinkered around with a desktop. When I was three or four, I took apart one of those Tiger LCD games to see what was inside. Couldn't get itnback together though. 😛
 
Installed an ISA Soundblaster 16 and a CD-Rom. The sound card had an on-board ATA port for the CD-Rom player which the motherboard lacked. This gave me sound, and the ability to install programs/games from CD! High living...
 
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