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Comment by nunez | Hacker News Reader

What a time to be a kid then.

We had a hand-me-down DEC x86 desktop at home with a Pentium II running at 233 MHz until I want to say 2002? This was around the time I learned how to build a PC since doing that was cheaper than buying one and no-one in my family had the money for that!

I saved whatever money I could to buy a 128MB stick of RAM from Staples (maybe it was 256MB?), a few other things from TigerDirect/Newegg and _this processor_. With some help from my uncle and a guide I printed from somewhere whose website started with '3D' (it was quite popular back then; I don't think it exists anymore), I got it done.

Going from 233 MHz to this was like going from walking to flying in a jet! Everything was SO MUCH F**ING FASTER. Windows XP _flew_. (The DEC barely made the minimum requirements for it, and boy did I feel it.) Trying to install Longhorn on it a year or two later brought me back into walking again, though. :D

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My first pc I built was with an AMD athlon 64 4000+ and a GeForce 6600GT. Going to that from an e-machines piece of junk was INSANE. It’s so hard to come up with a similar experience shift nowadays. Even websites seemed to load instantly with the same DSL connection. Everything felt soooooo good.

This is very close to my fist build. I believe 3600+ in my case.

Edit: ok I looked it up because I was curious and newegg never deletes anything from order history. Athlon 64 3200+ and 6600GT. Windows XP Home with Service Pack 2. I got a great deal on a case+enermax power supply at Fry's Electronics.

You reminded me that building use to be considerably cheaper than buying.

I remember my teen years, doing odd jobs to get some cash, buying a part at a time until the build was complete. Worrying that if you didn't scrap together enough parts soon there may be an architecture change. Finally getting it all together and the feeling of pure bliss installing the OS, troubleshooting drivers, installing this or that. Good times.

My sister liked to make her own clothes. One time I asked her if she did that to save money. No, she replied. She often spent more to make her dress than it would have cost her at the store. But her version was nicer, and better fitting, using nicer materials, in exactly the style she wanted.

I think there’s a lot of overlap between that and modern PC builders. It’s not necessarily cheaper, but is likely to be a lot nicer at the same price.

They sure were. Building is what got me into this crazy field. Abusing VBscript (and myself in the process) got me into my software developer era later on!

I had a similar speed jump, went from a Celeron 233 to the Athlon 1Ghz. Such a huge uplift.

That must've been an even bigger jump since Celerons were notably slower than PIIs.

Win2k would run most of the XP software with a bit less resources.

GeForce 3.

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