Those were some good specs back in the day... And the price 😯
I repaired about 1000 of these in a single year.
That USR softmodem was an absolute plague.
this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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Was that the modem that used “spare CPU cycles” as its processor?
Because that was hot garbage.
Yep, software modem.
So if you bogged your system in any way while doing anything online, you'd DC in a heartbeat.
Additionally, the software part was buggy and prone to getting tainted beyond repair.
Driver updates also often borked everything.
And replacing the modem was only 50/50 going to fix your issues with it, so until the internet developed a driver cleaner tool specifically for the USR Softmodem, you often had to reinstall Windows to actually fix the issues.
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I have a very similar PC in the kitchen right now. It was my first PC. Pentium II 400, 32MB RAM, AWE64 ISA, DVD Decoder card, etc. That DVD decoder card was definitely an upsell though. That AGP graphics should have been able to do mpeg decoding in hardware.
A 300 MHz Pentium II in early 1996 is insane. No wonder it cost so much!
I remember getting my first computer in 1998 and it was an AMD K6-2 and it cost approximately $1200.
Our first desktop was a 365k. It cost $5600 Canadian and my father had a program at his work that allowed him to buy it and pay it back in payments. It took him 5 years to pay it off.
That mouser was so comfy (first consumer optical)! You could spin it out, but then again also overclock it.
And not to brag, but I bought (also my third computer) a Celeron 300A at that time & overclocked it from 300 to 450MHz making it the fastest Intel CPU for years. Those were some good days.
My first PC build was a K6-2, overclocked with jumpers from 300 to 400 MHz. Setting Vcore with jumpers made for a very exciting first power on!
These days it’s hard to destroy a processor by overclocking, and it seems like it’s on its last legs. My 3090 and 5800X3D have no headroom, it’s the first non overclocked rig I’ve had since 2001.
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Hello fellow overclocker! Got myself the 366 and managed to get it to a consistent 550, 605 with a box fan on it 😂
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64MB ram? Go wild!
Intellimouse is a timeless classic
Well, we know he overpaid by about 1500 dollars...
My man got that dual DVD setup in 1998! I got my first own computer when i was 15 in 2001 and it had a DVD tray and I thought I was cool af. Watched the first DVD the same day and a few days later I got a DSL modem and I was king of the world. It ran Delta Force like a dream.
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Wow. That seems really expensive for that time. I guess it must have been top of the line?
I wished I had better memory or still had the receipts for my home built 486 gaming rig (Matrox Mystique gfx card) around 95(?) or the year old Mac G4 I bought around 99 or 00. I swear it was well below half that^1. I've always been too cheap to get top of the line computers lol.
1 (ed) looking up the old specs and prices... If it was a G4 450 it cost $2500 new and I got a refurbished model. I guess I am misremembering the price. (Wtf was I thinking, spending that kind of money on a damn computer lol. It served me well for years and years though).
I ordered a similar one but in 97 in Canadian dollars, near Aug for University. The 17" flat screen (crt flat) alone was $1400, I think the total was close to $4k.
This does seem a bit on the high side though I agree. I think mine was a P2 200, 32MB RAM and matrix millennium card. Maybe their processor was the top end at the time which could account for a higher price. I think that hard drive was really big for the time, 8GB in 98? I may be misremembering too.
Yeah you're right about the hard drive being big for the time. I got my first PC around then and plumped for the 8GB drive. It was a Dell too and the bump in cost wasn't actually that much.
My roomie, who was far more computer literate at the time, said I would never fill it.
Heh. I filled that sucker up with a huge MP3 collection pretty quickly.
Similar enough specs but lower in many regards it was 2400 Irish pounds which if I remember correctly was around 1.4 US dollars per pound.
Nvidia riva 128 graphics card. I nearly peed my pants when I saw hardware accelerated quake when they brought out the alpha drivers.
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