Life-cycle of my beloved first PC

You might want to go through this post before proceeding, but its not really necessary because I'll include the important points of that post here, as and when they're required. Also, this will be a VERY long post (just a prior warning for inpatient people who can't read long posts). But I haven't included any irrelevant information.

As previously mentioned, I got my first PC in October 1999. The specifications consisted of a 733 Mhz Pentium 3 processor, 20 GB hard disk, 64 MB RAM, 15 inch monitor and a dedicated graphics card, along with a printer and modem. This was considered quite high-end at that time (by India's standards at least). I was having the time of my life, playing all the latest games. Little did I realize that my joy-ride was about to end soon.

PC hardware was advancing rapidly, so it was just a matter of time before my PC would be unable to run the latest games. The first game which my PC was incapable of running satisfactorily was 'Prince of Persia 3D'. Although this game was released in 1999, I didn't attempt to play it until 2001. The game used to start, but only the main character was visible while the environment was fully dark. I was wondering if there was some configuration issue, because I was too naive at that time to realize that it was due to unsupported hardware. Then, through a lot of internet research, I came to know about a lot of interesting but disappointing facts. My graphics card's model was 'SiS 6326' and it had 8MB of dedicated video RAM. There were two popular APIs for 3D graphics acceleration in games, namely Direct 3D and Open GL. Some games used Direct 3D, some used Open GL and a few games were even capable of utilizing both. Apparently, Prince of Persia 3D partially utilized Open GL (although this wasn't mentioned anywhere on the box or the manual). To my dismay, I realized that my graphics card only supported Direct 3D and not Open GL, which meant that all games which utilized Open GL couldn't run properly (or not run at all) as long as I continued to use this graphics card. So it was time for my first upgrade -A graphics card with Open GL support!

After a lot of research to determine the most suitable graphics card for me with Open GL support and affordable price, I decided on a card named 'S3 Savage 4'. When I visited the shop to buy it, I asked for the 16MB model. I was pleasantly surprised when the vendor told me that he could provide me a 32MB variant at a marginally higher price because the 16MB variant was out of production. At that time I didn't even know how to replace my previous card, so I had to take my cabinet to his shop for him to do that for me and install the required drivers. I felt at the top of the world because I owned a video card supporting both Direct 3D and Open GL, which meant I could run any game. I immediately tested Prince of Persia 3D, which worked flawlessly. I was also able to play games based on the Quake 3 engine (which was a pure Open GL engine). So, my joy-ride was back on track!

But as they say, nothing lasts forever. My next hurdle came in the form of a game called 'Spider-Man: The Movie'. The game even refused to start on my PC. Then I came to know that this game required the graphics card to support a feature called 'Hardware Transform & Lighting'. This time I really didn't want to invest in an upgrade just for one game. But by now, I had realized that it was only a matter of time before all modern games require this feature. I had also noticed that game load times had become excruciatingly slow (modern games used to take more than 90 seconds to load a saved game). This was apparently due to insufficient system RAM (which was still 64 MB). So, my next upgrade was on the cards - a graphics card with Hardware Transform & Lighting support, along with more RAM.

I settled for the graphics card NVidia GeForce 2 MX 400 (which supported HW T&L, and had 64MB of dedicated video memory) along with an additional 128 MB RAM stick (which raised my total system RAM to 192 MB). So I was set to go on, but I didn't know for how long. I was well aware of the fact that by this time, PC hardware had begun advancing exponentially rather than linearly. So I knew that I would need an upgrade sooner that I'd like.

As expected, the need for the next upgrade came up within just 8 months of my previous upgrade. This time, a game called 'Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time' required a hardware feature called 'Vertex and Pixel shaders', which my current graphics card didn't support. But this time, there were several issues which made upgrading very difficult. Firstly, the size of games had already gone well past a GB, which meant my 20GB hard disk wouldn't suffice anymore. Next, my 733MHz processor was causing a bottleneck, and I realized that I couldn't upgrade the processor without upgrading the motherboard too (because my motherboard only supported Pentium 3 processors). Also, 192 MB system RAM had become insufficient. But the widely available memory at that time was DDR RAM, whereas mine was SD RAM. This meant that I had to change the motherboard too, and buy one with DDR RAM support (along with DDR RAM sticks). Hence, I had to make 5 major upgrades - graphics card, hard disk, processor, motherboard and RAM. Obviously, this would be too expensive for my comfort. So a more viable option was to sell my entire PC and buy a new one. I went one step ahead, and decided to sell EVERYTHING (which included my monitor, speakers, voltage stabilizer, keyboard and mouse, although I retained my printer and modem). I finally sold my beloved PC (which I had bought for ₹60,000) along with upgrades (which had cost around ₹25,000) in August 2004 for a supposedly 'best price' of ₹9000. But it had served me commendably for almost 5 years.