Intel e7200 @ 4.0GHz (4.32GHz SuperPi(e)) Lapped

Asus P5E-VM (Vdroop pencil modded)

4Gb Patriot Pc6400 4-4-4-12

250Gb Samsung Spinpoint

Sapphire ATI 3870/Akasa Vortexx Neo

Enermax 600 Watt PSU

Ubuntu/Win XP

All in a Thermaltake Handbag...

Or flying @ 4.21GHz in the Stacker.

 

Try some MM Super Pi(e) here!

still have it the one thing i remember about them the power supplys where crap and hard to find used a 19v adaptor.

i used the bbc micros a lot at school i remember finding the speech program for the bbc and setting the computer into a loop with swear words and we left 3 of the computers doing that

those where good days.....ive always loved computers i guess.

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(Rig1) C2D E4400@(2.7ghz) MSI p965 platinum 2900XT (512mb) 2*500gb (wd) hds 3gb ddr2 ram. xp home (games rig)

(Rig2) Xeon 2.4ghz dell mobo 6200gt 256mb 80gb hd 1gb ddr ram ecc Win 2000

(Rig3) X2 5000+ hp mobo (asus) 8400gt 256mb 2gb ddr2 ram 400gb hd Vista premium (media rig)

PS3 40gb

oldies Ibm thinkpad 486 50mhz 12mb ram 530mb/hd win 95

26 Feb 1969- 31 Aug 2007 Huddersfield UK 1st September 2007- Ontario Canada (start of a new life )

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I built my first diode and POW[prisoner of war] radio aged 5, and a slightly more advanced radio, which powered a speaker, and was driven by a power transistor and a mosfat, aged 6. By the time I was 9, myself and my cousin David, who is 3 days younger than me, used to hang around an electronics repair man's house, who also repaired computers. The boards, and the chips on them were enormous.

No 'firing' out defective cards, and 'firing' in replacements in those days, they were too valuable. Technicians had to isolate individual faults within a card, identify the offending component, and replace it. One IC chip in those days, was more expensive than many cutting edge cards today.

For IC's with intermittent faults, he had an occilliscope, and he used to compare the waves on the screen with those printed in reference manuals which were so thick and numerous, the place looked like the research library for Encyclopaedia Britannica! To us, the cool factor of the occiliscope was 110%

He designed a circuit from surplus parts, for which he had to lay down the printed circuit tracks on blank board himself. We got to solder in the sockets for about 6 IC's and resistors, capacitors and other components. 5 of the IC's were rectangular in shape, and they had either Siemens or Mitsubishi printed on them. The other one was a large square one, and I can't remember much about that. He had wires which needed to be soldered on to the board in various places and these went to connections to a powersupply, a 6" b/w monitor, a keyboard, and a jack socket that took input from a tape. He had lots of these tapes. When it was finished it played some games that were programmed in Basic. Nothing like space invaders, not even the most basic of sprites, any graphic designs were produced by the arrangement of ordinary keyboard characters on the screen.

Much later, I had an Atari 1040 STE which I expanded to 4mb ram and added a hard drive .. wow!

The first x86 machine I got exposure to was an Opus 086, followed in 6 months later by an Elonex 386.

My first self build should have been an intel 386 sx for which I luckily picked up a maths co-processor brand new and boxed in a boot sale. Unfortunately, 3/4 of the way through the build, a friend, Patrick, who was a trainee technician, blew a similar machine he was building for a customer on the side, and I agreed to let him take mine to solve an immediate career difficulty! It was 2 am in the morning, and I was just after being delighted by the appearance of a post screen. 30 mins later, I parted company with it!

The first one that got all the way completed [ including OS and apps.  installation ] was AMD 486 DX2 80 based, had 4 meg or ram [wow] and a Conner 20mb hdd [wow again]. CD [read] drives were out, but they were only 2x at the time, and expensive. I also got a free 5 and1/4 drive from Patrick and a shed load of ex corporate 5 and 1/4 floppies, which was useful, because 3.5 floppies, the removable media of choice of the time, were quite expensive.

Thanks John

Rig # 965467 Summary: Stuff that's not as impressive as Rigs # 1-965466

Little did I realise that I would be using one a few years later to learn basic, and re-input a stores database!

First PC I bought (from an advert in Micro Mart) was a Commodore PC1, it was an XT, had a single floppy drive, and a socket on the side you could plug an external Amiga 3.125 drive in. (I was given one by my son who no longer needed it) A memory increase to 640K and an internal speaker were the only other upgrades. With no HD, it was very difficult to unpack programs from the free mag discs, but I managed to evolve a method! How I loved that little silent PC, I used Galaxy, a shareware WordStar compatable wordprocessor, even ran Cad software using the Hercules graphic emulator

Old Engr

--------------------Signature. Containing hilarious remixes since 2008--------------------
If I'm not posting, I'm questing

My Dad bought some magazines with the program listings in them for me and I set to work typing the programs, which took forever and a day due to the 'original' keyboard design! I ended up playing dumb with some of the longer listings to try and get my Dad to finish them. Then there was the inevitable debugging phase, trying to find every tiny litlle typo error.

Obviously the games features were limited by the ZX81's meagre specification - 1kb of RAM (upgradeable to 16kb), B&W output and no audio. But the pride in completing the program listing and finally playing the game was tremendous! This was the start of a lifelong hobby. I was hooked!

I have owned computers from nearly every generation since and I would dread to tally up the total cost of my hobby, but it has given me two decades of enjoyment. It hasn't all been sweetness and light though, I have been frustrated, angry, woeful and even contemplated giving up the hobby on occasions!! But computing has had such a large part in my life now, that I could never give it up, even if I wanted to.

Cheers,

Stuart