An HP Pavilion xt953 running Windows ME...
It was equipped with a pretty nice 1 GHz Pentium III processor and 128 MB of ram that was pretty good in 2001, the time I got it, but it had a pretty bad integrated Intel GPU with only 11 MB of VRAM. I couldn't do a lot of gaming on it at the time but I still managed to have a lot of good memories with it despite my frustrations with Windows ME. It was around that time I was starting to learn how to use a computer thanks to being part of a program called GenYes in elementary school and it was this new thing that I was starting to really get into. I would apply my lessons learned in that program when I got home to my own computer, and learn even more by fiddling on my own.
I did a lot on that thing, I played The Sims obsessively on it, discovered the world of retro gaming through emulation, which was getting very well programmed at that time. If it wasn't for that I would have never played a lot of NES, SNES, and Genesis classics or even some arcade ones for that matter. I also was part of the abandonware scene for some time since I couldn't run newer computer games at the time (I got the PC in 2001 and didn't stop using it until 2010, Linux made that possible) and couldn't get many games as a broke preteen that would run on the thing. Blood, Shadow Warrior, Heretic, Hexen, Lemmings 95, Marathon, Alone in the Dark, Wolfenstein 3D, Spear of Destiny, Quake, System Shock 2, SiN, and many others dominated my existence from 2005 to about 2007 when I eventually switched to Linux to keep the machine going for modern purposes. The computer was old, ME was a nightmare, and I missed out on some really good PC games from the 2000's when they launched... but by god was that machine the thing I called my own. It was something else entirely when I learned to use it, and if it was not for that I probably would have never learned how to use a PC properly, have an interest in computers at large, or even enjoy older PC games and be a part of the GOG community.
Post edited January 08, 2015 by SpooferJahk