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Dan Arturo Martinez
Animator, 3D Modeler, Layout Artist, Editor, Illustrator, & Tech Specialist
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Compaq Presario 5477
My very first computer from a very young age.
This here is the Compaq Presario 5477 Desktop Computer.
Backstory of my Compaq Presario 5477
This thing was purchased by my father in 1999. Shortly after he, my mother, and I moved to Vancouver from Mexico City in June 29 1999.
I don't know what he needed a computer for but my guess it was work related. I can't recall what his job was back then but I will say, getting a computer was an absolute necessity.
And it served us very well for the first few years of my new Canadian life.
What were my specs?
I can't remember clearly but a quick Google Search gave these results.
It had a 500 MHZ Intel Celeron Mendocino.
I don't know if it had Integrated Graphics or it had a 3dfx Voodoo3 card installed. Maybe both.
The ram was the stock 64MB which was the most common ram configuration for pre-builds at the time.
What I know for sure was that it came with Windows 98 Second Edition Pre-Installed by Compaq since that was the norm for computers in 1999.
I think the Hard Drive was a 13gb.
And yes it had a 24x Speed CD Drive.
I don't think we had a dedicated soundcard so most likely, we had to live with the integrated Sound Chip which provided sound on the included JBL Speakers these machines came with.
Oh and we did have a printer which came with our Compaq.
Man, those older Inkjet printers were so slow compared to today's inkjets and Laser Printers in general.
I pondered very carefully and considering one of my 3D games didn't perform very well with this machine,
I would hazard a guess we had a either a Voodoo Banshee or an Nvidia Riva TNT2 GPU in my Compaq.
What did I use the Compaq for?
It was split between me and my father. Back then, my mother didn't want to use the computer.
My father often used it for playing music as well as messaging with his friends on ICQ.
As for me, I mostly played Edutainment games but I also played this game too:
Oh Incoming. This is a classic in PC Gaming.
For some reason, this game was bundled with our Compaq and we tried many times to get this game to run.
Holy Crap was this game temperamental. We tried to get this game to play ball with our setup but often at times, the game would often refuse to start up due to some random crap happening. Was it the memory? Was it the graphics card?
Was it the AMD Processor? Who knows. But as far as I can remember, Incoming had a lot of issues running....
Though that may have been my Vobis having issues.
The sad truth about this game is we tried so many times to get this game to run in our various computers we had back in the day and nowadays, the versions of this game on STEAM and GOG run way better on 64-bit Windows thanks to decades of hardware improvements, patches, and config software.
What happened to my Compaq?
Don't get me started with this.
What happened is beyond my imagination since I was just a young child.
All I know is my father took it for himself and stored it somewhere. Doesn't matter since we had the Vobis Highscreen with us by this point.
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