Defunct PC brands - which did you own?

Which did you own?


  • Total voters
    124
I looked at the list like "what do you mean gone?" Before it clicked.

JEEZ.

I recall my family having a gateway when I was a kid.
 
Packard bell fo life !!!!!

Interesting enough it was packard bell that I had one of the first 3d gpus and it was built onto the board. ATI
 
Last edited:
the only prebuilt PC I ever owned was a Dell when I was a kid. back then they were basically the best quality you could get.

I think I had exactly this case:
Dell_Dimension_8250.jpg


it had an Intel Pentium 4, either 500MB or 1GB RAM (I think it was 1GB) and a Geforce 2MX.
it also came with a really good CRT Monitor, which I used for my Xbox 360 for a while later lol
 
Last edited:
R.fb753ed9d0703c58d9bf827f4359d260


Weirdest thing, customer back in the day just didn't want it anymore. SGI O2.

0895AF36-2FD6-4C6E-9680-48F5984FDD56-scaled.jpg

One step further, had a nice Linux 1RU server to start a web business with. Cobalt RAQ2.
 
Last edited:
Only brand name PC/laptop I've had are Dells and just recently MSI. MSI laptop rocking great. Zero issues in two years.

Dells were fine. The old ass tower in the 2000s was great.

The laptops worked fine except in two of them the frame part would crack. I think I bought 4 Dell laptops across 15 or so years. One from me opening/closing it too many times. And the other from picking it up on a corner and it snap cracked. I dont know, maybe that's my fault. The most recent Dell laptops I had - one had an annoying BIOS blue screen error every once in a while I'd watch/stream videos too much (it would always bomb out about 2 hours in requireing a reboot), and the other one had broken keys (which I fucked up more watching YT videos thinking I could fix it myself opening it up with tweezers and shit lolol). They always have it going wrong around year 4. lol

My first PC I bought on my own was a tower from some noname store. Probably saw their ads in the newspaper. Didnt even customize it. Just ordered a model as they advertised. Took two weeks to be ready! I was a few days away from cancelling. Never again I'd buy from a random PC shop. Just buy a branded model I could get online or from a store right away.
 
Last edited:
CTX with an AMD K-6 3dNow @450mhz, 64mb RAM, 8gb HDD, 16x CD-ROM. Got it for my 15th birthday in 1999 from Best Buy. Thanks mom! I got a serial 2x CD-RW drive soon after.
 
Last edited:
I'm pretty sure Compaq Presario was the family's main computer when I was about ten. Loved it as it gave me so many great gaming memories. It was there when we got broadband for the first time and I was able to try out a bunch of DOS and Flash games I found online.

compaq-presario-5050-vintage-home_1_17677d81774c3a575cfcbb33f23ba34d.jpg


I actually was a PC player first and foremost unknowingly the first part of my life as we didn't get at console until I got older. Had I had friends who liked to open up and tinker with computers it might have changed my gaming related life. Never entered that space on my own.
 
Some old IBM with Windows 95. It was not mine at first, it was owned by my parents, but as soon as they got a laptop with Windows XP they gave it to me.

I have fond memories of playing DOS games from that abandonia website. I also have not so fond memories of kinescopic PC monitors.
 
I still own IBMs, Packard Bells, Compaqs and several generic/OEM machines.

Most surprising thing is that somehow Acer managed to survive. I own some of their horizontal desktops.
 
I built all my PCs myself except the very first PC I owned: an Olivetti PC AT with a monitor that could display VGA, EGA and Hercules graphics. Sound was crap of course but those Lucassoft point n click adventure looked so much better on this business pc than on my Amiga ...

DSC_4347-2048x1360.jpg


Olivetti died in the early 2000s like many other famous Italian companies that couldn't compete on the European, let alone global, market. This is a cool video about both the company's history and the huge abandoned Olivetti factory.

 
Last edited:
The sounds look and feel of these machines is unforgettable. I feel bad for today's youth to not have been able to experience the crunch of a HDD, dial up, and windows 3.1 let alone windows 95.
 
Managed to find a picture of the exact machine:

maxresdefault.jpg


Upgraded it to a Voodoo 3 2000 so I could play the original Rainbow Six, Age of Empires 2 & X-Wing Alliance.
 
Last edited:
2IogyLhgAl38YpDe.jpeg

WdgPeB6u9qUQKlwb.gif


This is the bag of shit a mate of mines girlfriend's dad had that we used to hostile takeover on for Delta Force!!

No way :messenger_tears_of_joy:

That's a blast from the past!

..I never bought pre built. Always built my own
h0PECn1P3ZXg1Wu2.jpg
 
I inherited my family's Gateway when they got a Dell Pentium 4 machine. I played a bunch of Half-Life and made songs solely through Sound Recorder by dubbing over itself. Lots of 1-minute tracks.

For the Dell, I don't think it had a dedicated video card. I played Half-Life 2 on it, and that was before I understood graphics settings. I'd like to know what framerate and rez I played through it at 🤔
 
Still have my families Packard Bell from '95 along with the CRT display. Everything works 100% when I tried it last about a year ago, including it's disc player. No maintenance done on it at all. It's crazy it's got our game high scores on it from the 90's still.

Also had a few Gateway desktops. HDD failed on one, but I think that was all that happened. Just got outdated otherwise. Later on we just built our own desktop PCs.

We got a $1699 Sony Vaio laptop in 2006. Was... not great. My mom got totally ripped off at Office Depot. It had a 17" display which was huge and I had good time with Diablo 2/Maple Story on it at least. It got really slow about 2 years later and the fan kept making a terrible sound (yeah that went hand in hand I'm sure)

We went with a Mac for laptops after that as we heard they were pretty reliable and required no virus protection. We never looked back. Which is funny we paid much less for the Macbook Pro ($1299 I believe) than we did for that Sony. Usually it's the otherway around when people talk about that.
 
My parents got me a Compaq Presario CQ50 laptop for my birthday in 2008. I emulated all of my old n64 and ps1 games on it and even could play Fallout 3 at low settings. That thing was my home. I'd be on it every moment I could get just messing around.

Before I'd have to share the family computer or out up with the Wii internet browser.
 
I'm positive I saw a Gateway computer at Walmart the other day

I don't think mine was a brand anyone would have heard of. In the 90s everyone had a beige box computer brand.
 
Last edited:
Top Bottom