Discussion

eMachines never obsolete PCs: More than a meme

Bratmon: So if they're never obsolete because you can always get a $99 replacement, where should I send my 486 to trade it for a Ryzen 7?

whalesalad: This era reminds me of the time that my grandmother (in same house) got a new Compaq with a CD burner. It was running windows ME. My dumb ass thought that because a had disk drive could be mounted as a volume over the network, a burner could too. Turns out you can sort-of network mount a CD drive but its not usable. The days and hours I wasted on this project, including convincing my mom to take me to Fry's in Burbank to get a Netgear hub (not switch!) to glue everything together.

tracker1: Back when Fry's Electronics actually had hardware in stock. The last time I tried to get something at the North Phoenix location, it was pitiful and I couldn't find what I needed. I hadn't been there for years and wound up having to wait 2 days for Amazon anyway.FWIW, I haven't been to the Phoenix Microcenter yet, mostly in that I'm afraid of how much I might otherwise spend there.

tracker1: They were ok for the price... I think they were probably the most responsible for squeezing every bit of profitability from independent builders though. It really became a race to the bottom, combined with more interest in mobile/laptop computers.I remember in the mid to late 90's, you could build a computer for someone and walk away with enough for an upgraded system for yourself. Of course the churn on performance was very real. IIRC, 1992 maxed out with a 486 DX2 @66mhz. Around 2000 we crossed the 1ghz mark from both Intel and AMD. We went from OG Doom that couldn't cut it full screen, to Half Life and Quake 3 Arena on Voodoo 3 and early NVidia cards.

stackghost: Oh man those first few generations of CD burners were rough. We had this old Pentium 2 that had so little memory you had to close everything but the burner software (Easy CD Creator or something, IIRC) otherwise the memory exhaustion would cause a buffer underrun and the disc would be ruined.A few years later my mom finally let us get one with buffer underrun protection (and some multiplier on the write speed) so I could make mix CDs with music off Napster for my girlfriend and life was good.