Whats the best computer you ever had

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What's the best computer you ever had? Past or present? The computer that constantly amazed you at what you could make it do, or what it could withstand...

For me that would be the computer I'm typing this up right now.

That would be my 12 year old packard bell computer.

On July 12, 1993, a trip up to best buy in Green Bay resulted in my parents getting our second computer. For the price is was a near steal, only $600. But the salesman said that this computer had alot of potential on down the line as almost everything on it could be upgraded. Initally it only had 2 megs of ram and a 80 megabyte hard drive.

This machine sparked the fascination I had with computers during my teen years. My tinkering with it also showed how much abuse a well designed computer could handle with out cooking it.

I've accidentally yanked out cables when it was turned on, short circuited the mother board a couple of times trying to do mods. It survived a lightning strike that blew out the original power supply, survived a second power supply frying when the fan failed. After it was retired from normal service in 1998, it ran for a short as a web server using FreeBSD.

Tonight I pulled it out of the closet, hooked it up and did a fresh install of Windows 95A and IE 5 and have been surfing the net with it friday night.

Surprisingly, it's reasonable fast loading pages up on a 33.6 modem.

I've upgraded it as much as I possibly can. And despite being 12 years old, it just does not want to give up.

The best computer I ever owned was the Radio Shack CoCo-II. It had a 6809 microprocessor and 64k of RAM. It had less hardware than some of the other popular boxes of the day (such as the C-64) but was in many ways a much more capable machine. It was also (and most importantly) an exceptional learning platform. The 6809 processor supported 100% relocatable and reentrant code, which made learning assembly language a breeze. It was also not too bad at gaming, although that was never a strong point.

Between the 2 computers I own, I cannot make up my mind. Both of them have taken abuse.

I would have to say that my first one is well travelled however. I owned that one through college/COOPs moving from Buffalo New York to Rochester New York to Durham New Hampshire back to Rochester New York to Hyde Park New York to Rochester Minnesota and back to Buffalo New York where it became my sisters computer until I eventually told her it was very outdated (originally a 486DX 40 upgraded to a P133. Now I have been told to get it out of my mothers basement in Buffalo the next time I am there so I guess it is coming back to Rochester with me. I am thinking about turning it into a firewall/router/server using a variant of BSD.

This current one...

Pretty sweet...

12" powerbook G4! First apple i've had since apple IIe in 1983. I am a convert, or 'switcher' as they call me in the mac world. You tell it to do something, and it does it. smart and efficient. secure. faster than my "super pc" for many day to day tasks. and it's tiny. and wireless.

An ancient Packard Bell desktop with Windows 3.1 on it. Oh man, the hours I wasted playing Skifree on that thing...

Now look what you've done, you've gone and made me nostalgic.

My next one....

I was quite attached to a HP Pavilion (Celeron 600MHz, 64MB RAM, 15GB hard disk) that I had as my main computer between 2000-2003 though, even though my son kept messing it up so I had to reinstall Windows 98SE every couple of months... I still use the monitor.

Dunc

The one now 100 percent for my own use did outfitt it at the time with hardware to last awhile. Still works fine for most things could use a new Video card heeh 64 MB to a 128 Mb would be nice.

I am pretty proud of the fact that I have never owned a "brand-name" computer. Actually that isn't true, my very first computer was a hand-me-down 286 Compaq with a green monochrome monitor. But I had to change out parts on it to get it running. I got that computer in 1995 or so, and slowly upgraded everything in it.

Nearly every computer upgrade I have made has coincided with a new Simcity game. That very first computer allowed me to play Simcity Classic. (which I wanted to play ever since playing the SNES version) I then upgraded to a handme down 486 motherboard and processor. And I was finally able to play Simcity 2000. Which I played on a monitor that had severe burn-in, which was also given to me.

Then I saved up some money, about 300 bucks. And was able to buy a new mobo, processor, memory and a few other parts to really upgrade my machine. I bought an AMD K-6 processor, 266 mhz if I remember correctly. That was back when AMD made much slower processors then Intel, with cruddy floating point performance. But it was good enough for me. And that computer allowed me to play Simcity 3000. I eventually ugraded the videocard, sound card, monitor, etc. Since I was working a part time job during high school.

I used that computer for a long time. Probably 4 years. But eventually I bought a completely new machine. It was an AMD athlon 1.2 ghz, with 512 MB of ram and a geforce 3 video card. It was a great machine at the time. This computer is unique though... it wasn't built to play any simcity game.

I upgraded various parts in that machine over a few years. But due to poor simcity performance I ugraded the big stuff mobo, and processor... mostly to play Simcity 4 better. (which is quite the resource hog of a game... but it's worth it.)

The best computer in terms of speed is the one I currently own, obviously. Also despite the many years of computer use, I only have one distinct time of building a whole new system. So I technically have had only 2 computers. But in each computer I have replaced so many parts, each one didn't have (or doesn't) any original parts in them any more. So can they still be considered the same computer?

But I have many fond memories of the first computer. Saving money to get parts, getting computer parts from other people... when I finally bought the first new processor and motherboard for it was a great time for me. And to be able to finally play Simcity 2000, after years of wanting to play it was probably makes it the best computer I've ever had.

best computer? probaly my old ppro 200mhz, 512k cache / 128m proliant server. quite fast (at cpu side) running fbsd.
lot of (/&&%%¤#" noise and 500W (i hope that's peak) power supply.

Best one I've had so far has been my netbook, but I haven't had it that long. Asus EeePC 900 - fast, durable and stable (runs Eeebuntu).

I had an Averatec laptop that was compact and also durable, and survived mountain dew being accidentally poured on the keyboard. But the graphics card was an S3 Unichrome, and that was a drawback.

My Acer Aspire 5100 WLMi has been great so far, but the Kingston Memory that I put in is crap.

My current box is more than a year old, but it is quite capable of running most current things and will be so for the next 1.5 years, so the current one is the best (performance wise) i have had.

The best (in general) computer i have had was my Amiga 1200/030 (which i still have)... Back in the early 90's, i could run Amiga, GNU, MSDos and some Mac applications on it, all at the same time!


On a side note: I remember that the more powerful Amiga 4000 when it got the Motorola 68060 processor upgrade and an Apple Mac emulator, it was the fastest Apple Mac in the world

Memories like that and the current generation of handicapped home computers makes me sad...

The one I have now is the only one I've ever had besides the Commodore 64 I had in the '80s.

Easy! That would be the one I'm currently using

386sx16
1 mg ram
52 mb hd
It Was Blazingly Fast!

My Amiga 4000 which unfortunately "died" on me in late 1999. Lovely machine and once I started using Amiga several years ago I was hooked by it. I'm an Amigan for lifetime.

My interest for Linux has made me less interested in computer hardware and much more interested in computer software.

Wiki about Amiga.