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by jefflinwood 1761 days ago
The first computer I built myself was a 386 SX/33 with 4 megs of RAM and VGA (I think). I couldn't afford a hard drive at first because I was a kid, so all i had was a 3.5 inch floppy drive. Had to buy a hard drive later, and if I had to guess, it was an 80 megabyte one. In the mean time, I could use a RAM drive.

Computer Shopper was such an amazing magazine to go through, and I would always try and find the best deal from the systems advertised, not that I had any real money. Usually it was from the ads in the back, not the big pretty Gateway ads in the front.
2 comments
duncanawoods 1761 days ago
> Computer Shopper was such an amazing magazine to go through

I really miss that type of advertising. I don't want advertising intruding on unrelated activities, ruining tools and destroying my neighbourhood with billboards.

But there are times I want to be sold to. I want 100 firms to show off what they have and extol their virtues in an easy to browse format.

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Scoundreller 1761 days ago
I miss how much money you could save by building yourself.
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ansible 1761 days ago
In general, you can still save a lot of money, and have a higher quality end result by building your own desktop system, unless you want a really low-end machine. Well, this is not quite true these days, but if the blockchain madness abates, then GPU prices will fall back into reasonable levels.
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aidenn0 1761 days ago
I have not found that to be true at all. It's true if you go with a high-end custom pc builder, but you can often get a very respectable desktop prebuilt for less than the cost of equivalent components.
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ansible 1761 days ago
I guess it also matters what we define as a prebuilt. Some prebuilts are just standard components assembled (hopefully competently).

Some prebuilts, especially from Dell, HP, Acer and Lenovo will have custom motherboards, custom power supplies and custom cases that can't be re-used later on. Those usually have the very crappiest cooling solutions too. So they will end up costing you more money down the road, because you can't incrementally upgrade the pieces as much as you could with a self-built PC.

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pjmlp 1761 days ago
In Portugal that was never a thing back then, because the difference was minimal.
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