My Various Computers Throughout the Years

Hello everyone,
I thought it might be fun to have a thread where I would start with my very first computer I ever owned, and then move along in time and post pictures of each computer and setup I've had over the years. So this won't be a log about a single project, but rather all of my PCs throughout the years.

Also, please feel free to post your own old and new systems as well! I always love seeing pictures of all types of computers including very old ones, so if you have pictures of your old computers please do post them here!

In around 1999 my dad had a custom pc built in a computer shop that was around at the time. It was fairly high end at the time. The specs were: Pentium III 533MHz overclocked to 750 MHz, The video card with the original GeForce card from nvidia and it even had 3D glasses. It had a sound blaster audigy sound card with a optical bay I/O panel that had Midi in/out and i believe SPDIF. I dont even remember how much ram it had, but I'm sure it was quite a small amount 256mb or 512mb probably. There was a dell 21in CRT monitor as well as a few 19 inch ones one Syncmaster by Samsung and a couple nokia 19 inch CRTs. The nokia ones were the kind that were flat on the sides but curved at the top and bottom. My dad also built a wooden stand to raise them up about 6 or 8 inches. That stand is still around today he modified it and his current X79 system sits on it right now. The sound was a quad channel gaming sound system for computers. I believe it had cambridge soundworks badges on it. We used to play games such as Need for speed Hot pursuit, and my dad was a huge fan of Decent 3.

I dont have many pictures from that time period, since I was very young at the time, but here is one picture I have of the main desk area with the dell 21 inch crt on it and one of the nokia ones.



Before that my dad also had a couple of laptops, one was a no name pentium 133mhz (i believe) and one was a dell pentium II that he got second hand with a broken screen and he replaced the lcd panel. both of those laptops could run the original decent game, but i cant quite remember if either of them would run decent 3. i think the dell one may have been able to run decent 3, but at reduced graphics settings.

In 2002 for my birthday my dad and i went to future shop and got an hp pavilion 541c. The specs for this was AMD Athlon XP 2000+, 512mb ram, and it had a geforce 2 series integrated graphics, which even for the time did not perform well. I soon upgraded to a geforce 4 series 4200 card from msi. i played around with that card a lot and i was able to get some pretty decent overlclocks from it.

here is a couple photos of that system:

Next is 2004, when I decided that I wanted to do a built in an acrylic case. I got ahold on a sunbeam acrylic case that had a clear left side panel,front and bottom, and top panel and right side panel with a blue tint. I did see later on some sunbeam cases with 120mm fans, but the model I had included only 80mm fans, so it was quite loud.

The specs of this system were:
AMD Athlon XP 2900+
Some budget off brand AMD XP motherboard
1GB of ram 2X 512mb sticks
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro which had 256mb of ram
After market Zalman cooler for the video card with 1 heatpipe
80gb samsung hard drives x2
Fan controller
The PSU was a Ultra xConnect 1 with the blue UV cables mixed with some green UV cables from one of the xConnect UV Units
The IDE cables were green uv cables from mutant mods
The fans were 80mm green and blue UV fans from Antec
and I had a couple 30mm UV cold cathodes

here is a few pictures of it:

Sometimes I wish my parents new something (even anything) about computers...

ruairi.C said:

Sometimes I wish my parents new something (even anything) about computers...

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it's definitely a nice thing to have in common. my dad and i have been building systems for 10+ years now and its been a lot of fun for sure.

2007, I bought another HP Pavilion because it was well priced and I liked the look of the hp cases at the time. It as an HP Pavilion a6228x and the specs were:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+
2GB PC2-5300 DDR2 Memory
16X DL DVD+/-RW with Lightscribe
Nvidia Geforce 6150SE
15-in-1 Card Reader

I enjoyed Having a nice card reader built into the case. I actually used the SD and CF slots a lot because I take a lot of photographs.




















Even though Hp pavilion cases are obviously very common, I enjoyed mine a lot. I liked the look of it and the card reader, and it was pretty much completely silent in it stock form as it didn't have any hot video card in it so it didn't even have a case fan, just the cpu fan which was auto controlled by the msi motherboard and it kept it near silent most of the time, and a 92mm fan grille at the rear served as passive ventilation.

As I'm sure you can imagine though, it didn't take me long to get sick of the terrible Geforce 6150se integrated graphics (about 15 mins of use approx) so I ordered a Nvidia 8800GTS SSC edition for EVGA and it arrived a few days later.







The power supply that came in the pavilion case was only 250w or 350w at most, so i replaced it with a ultra xconnect 2 550w








The 550w powersupply and the 8800GTS fit nicely into the small hp case. I added a 92mm exhaust fan at the back and later on I added a 3rd hard drive by drilled 2 holes in the bottom of the case and screwing a drive in on its side. I also added 4gb of corsair xms memory. I never had any heat problems with the case, the temperatures were good and the noise was still very minimal, nearly silent.

Really nice to see the history of your purchases. My first computer purchase was around 10 years ago. I really just played games then and didn't really care for the specs. Never took any photos of my older systems, but they were all pre-built systems.

yassarikhan786 said:

Really nice to see the history of your purchases. My first computer purchase was around 10 years ago. I really just played games then and didn't really care for the specs. Never took any photos of my older systems, but they were all pre-built systems.

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Thanks! There is definitely something enjoyable about looking back and past systems and remembering when you had them and tinkered with them! I wish I had taken more pictures of some of the earliest ones, especially the interiors of them, luckily I have always been interested in photographs so I do have some photos, but not as many as i would like. I'm also gong to post some of the systems I have built for my sister, dad, and maybe some other ones too.

andrevautour said:

Thanks! There is definitely something enjoyable about looking back and past systems and remembering when you had them and tinkered with them! I wish I had taken more pictures of some of the earliest ones, especially the interiors of them, luckily I have always been interested in photographs so I do have some photos, but not as many as i would like. I'm also gong to post some of the systems I have built for my sister, dad, and maybe some other ones too.

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Yeh I wish I had taken some photos as well, for nostalgia reasons at least, but oh well

in jan 2008 i decided that i wanted to move my little hp system into a larger case. the case i choose at the time was a thermaltake tsunami dream, i believe those were quite popular around that time and earlier. I am not thermaltake fan, that is for sure, but i do think a few of their older cases did look fairly decent, even though the designs were quite bad functionally (same as other brands at the time) i still think the version of the tsunami dream withOUT the windowed door looks quite good - that little strip of plastic chrome trim in the middle which looked like crap. of course at the time i choose the one with the window side panel. the paint on the sides was quite nice as well, it was a black metallic with chunks of silver and blue in the paint.


















My hp pavilion internals with the upgraded corsair ram and nvidia 8800gts lived in the tsunami dream case for a period of time, and i eventually went back to the hp case for a shot time until i moved to my next case.

meanwhile, in this time period, my dad went from his pentium 3 system, to a pentium 4 with 1gb ram, geforce 4200, sound blaster audigy 2 sound card. Then an amd athlon 64 bit single core 3200+, geforce 5600. Then around the same time as me moving to the thermaltake case (dec 2007) he built a new system, this time with an nvidia nforce 680i lt motherboard, intel core 2 quad q6600 cpu, and nvidia 6800 ultra video card, 4gb corsair ddr2 ram.
here is a photo of that q6600 system. it had a zalman 120mm cooler on the cpu with a copper heatsink, and at the time this photo was taken it had been upgraded from the 6800 ultra grpahics card to an 8800GTX from EVGA. i believe it had around 640mb of ram. it was built into a generic aluminum case in a design that was popular at the time. it had 2x 80mm fan grilles at the front and 2x 80mm at the rear and my dad cut 92mm holes so there were 4x 92mm vantec stealth fans in there instead of the 80mm ones.

jan 2008, my sister decided that she wanted her system at the time built into my old sunbeam acrylic case from a few years back, so i set about building her something based on that case using various parts that were around the house.

before this her computer was built into the case my dads very first pentium 3 system was built in back in 1999.















the graphics card that was in her system before the new case was a radeon 9600 XT with an arctic cooling silencer 2 on it.





since the motherboard we used was an msi pentium 4 board with the pentium 4 from one of my dads previous builds, the board only had agp for video cards, so we had to find a video card that still came in an agp version. the hd2600 was one of the last cards to come in agp version so thats what we ended up using in there.







here are some pictures from the built process:

















































Looking back at this system now, i really loved to way it looked. Obviously there was no cable management or anything in the case and its very messy, but still something about it I really like the look of it, much better than when I had my system built up in it. even the unsleeved power supply cables I think had a nice look in this system. This built will always be a favorite of mine.

Holy cow! That ThermalTake Tsunami Dream actually looks kinda good! A bit curvy in my opinion, but it's better than ThermalTake standards

AverageNinja said:

Holy cow! That ThermalTake Tsunami Dream actually looks kinda good! A bit curvy in my opinion, but it's better than ThermalTake standards

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The white interior is still ugly though

yassarikhan786 said:

The white interior is still ugly though

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yeah the interior is really bad no cable management at all or any of the modern features on cases now really. the actual build quality was quite cheap also (it was aluminium so thats part of the light feel it had) but i like the look of it better than anything from thermaltake these days though esp like i said the non window version had a nice look to it.

andrevautour said:

yeah the interior is really bad no cable management at all or any of the modern features on cases now really. the actual build quality was quite cheap also (it was aluminium so thats part of the light feel it had) but i like the look of it better than anything from thermaltake these days though esp like i said the non window version had a nice look to it.

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Yeah it certainly looks better than the cases Thermaltake produce now.

yassarikhan786 said:

Yeah it certainly looks better than the cases Thermaltake produce now.

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for sure. i really dont like when cases are really complicated and busy looking and very plasticy and cheap feelilng. i like a minimal simple looking case.

shortly after i got the tsunami dream case i ordered some stuff from frozen cpu, 2 blue cold cathodes from ac ryan, and 2 red ones, plus a 92 mm orange uv led fan for the door.

i really didnt like it at all, even back then, as 'ive always thought that cold cathodes (and leds) are usually too bright for the interior of a case for full time use,i like something more dim and subtle. the blue and red together does looks fairly nice in some of the pictures, though.


IMG_5559 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_5561 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_5576 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_5577 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_5584 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_5596 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_5597 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_5599 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr

In Oct 2008, when the Unibody MacBook Pros came out I went into the store and got one, they weren't even out on display yet, the lady there got it from the back.

I have never liked any PC laptops really, the majority of them I have seen look and feel cheap and tacky, and they just do not have the quality feel and build that the Unibody MacBook pros have.

Even thought I have used A Mac laptop for years now, I have always kept a desktop PC because I love tinkering around with hardware.

The Specs of the first MacBook Pro in Oct 2008 were:

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.53GHz
4GB DDR3 1066MHz
500GB 7200RPM HDD
Nvidia Geforce 9600 256MB Dedicated ram


IMG_5771 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_5772 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_5773 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_5775 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_5777 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_5778 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_6563 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_6566 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_6569 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr