My first PC was a Packard Bell that I bought at a department store at the mall for approximately 4 zillion dollars. It had an almost bottom of the barrel 486SX-20MHz processor and was essentially garbage, but it was my garbage and could run Wizardry and Doom.
The first pc I bought with my own money was a gateway. I was so poor and so young I didn’t have a credit card. I took out a loan at the credit union (using my pickup truck as collateral) and paid them with a check. I was in Omaha so to save money on shipping I actually drove up to their headquarters in South Dakota. Being 19 and an idiot I just strapped the boxes into the bed of my pickup, not even considering that it could rain on the 3 hour drive back. About 30 minutes in I ran into a thunderstorm and had to pull over and unbox the stuff so it would fit in the cab. Good times.
But what if Justin reads this thread?
The only prebuilt desktop PC I’ve bought in the last 20 years was a Gateway from Frys in late 2010. I’ll admit the brand name helped me decide in its favor. After owning it for a while, I found out Gateway was bought out by eMachines, a brand I never would have knowingly bought. It’s still going after almost 10 years, in one of the boys’ rooms.
Don’t you be dissin’ on eMachines.
I bought a brand new eMachine (on clearance) from Best Buy back in '07 I think for $186, just because it had a decent processor and some of the specs looked decent. I installed an nVidia gaming card in it, doubled the RAM, and actually beat Crysis on that rig.
Two years later, the PSU died and took out the motherboard. For some reason, I was determined to keep that thing alive, so I ordered an identical motherboard for $200, got a better PSU for $65, put in an additional hard drive, spent another $400 on a matching eMachines LCD monitor because I liked the eMachines aesthetic of that era, and used it for several more years.
I really loved that thing, although by the time I was done replacing everything, the only things left on it that were still original eMachine parts were the case, motherboard, and CPU. It still works fine, as far as I know. It’s now in a closet.
eMachines were known for having cheap, horrible PSUs that would blow their capacitors and take out the other components. My sister had one, actually. After opening it up and witnessing the carnage inside I vowed not only to never own that brand, but to never cheap out on a PSU.
Oh yes, I learned that lesson.
Thing is, I saw the $186 price tag and couldn’t pass it up. Not really thinking ahead to what it would cost to get it to the point where I could realistically use it for anything. I just dropped in a GT 7950 and called it good.
By the time I was done with it however, with upgrades, replacement parts for the PSU burn-out, matching monitor (well, I wouldn’t really have needed that), illuminated Logitech G15 keyboard and G7 mouse, I totaled it all up one day, and that $186 super deal ended up costing me slightly over $1,200. It is now probably the nicest eMachines in the United States. :-)
Probably one of the few still running, anyway.
Damn, you really did!