Story: Way way back in the year 1999 just before the internet boom my dad got a job which required him to own a PC the company being greedy wouldn’t issue him with one so we had to get one for ourselves, so my dad and I toddled of to the late Tempo ( now taken over by PC World ) to see the range.
Love at first sight: The IBM Aptiva caught our eyes, with impressive specifications ( for the time ! ) and the new brilliant Windows Operating System Windows 98. My dad was familiar with IBM PCs and soon we were driving home with a shiny well grey PC in the back of our F reg Passat ( old for the time :P ).
Connecting it up: Even now I still remember it well after getting the enormous boxes into the house we tore them open ! It was pretty tricky to set up as we had never had a PC before and had no idea what to do. Luckily after reading the instructions a few times and many cups of tea we had figured it out. It wasn’t that bad, just plug in the keyboard, mouse into the ports which were labelled just that. Next the monitor which plugged into the blue connector labelled monitor then the printer and scanner. Then plug it all in and off we went.
It lives: After plugging it all in we flicked the switch on the back of the tower and away we went, swept into the digital age. After seeing the logo screen which read IBM Aptiva and setting the clock the desktop loaded, the PC was ready to take orders from its masters. The PC ran fluidly and with ease capable though running the most demanding applications and the HD light would come on flash like mad and you would be treated to a blue error screen. Normal use was no problem my dad could get Office 2000 to run nicely and I could get Quake III Arena working.
Zoom zoom Zoom: The IBM Aptiva was a very good PC with the latest processor from AMD in it named the AMD K6 2 which had a mind-blowing 400 MHZ of CPU speed but was equivalent to a 500MHZ Intel Chip. The processor was propped up by a 100MHZ FSB ( Bus ) which gave our lovely IBM PC enough speed to outclass all its rivals.
Storing the dirt: The IBM PC was truly top of its class and was fitted with a whopping huge 8GB ( 8000MB ) hard drive, most PCs back then were fitted with a 4-6GB hard disk so there was plenty of space for everything my games and my dads office software.
It Can Think Too: The PC had excellent an memory chip, 64 whole MB of PC 100 Ram, the latest and greatest technology had to offer, some PCs where preloaded with an enormous 128 MB but 64 was enough for our IBM. Your PC cant run faster than its slowest link and the memory was good but still slow, noticable when loading up the machine with a full hard drive the 64MB or ram just wasnt that capable.
It looks So Good: The graphics where provided from expert graphic chip makers ATI, and our IBM was fitted with an ATI Rage Pro 8MB graphics chip. Although onboard the graphics were great and it could play all the class of 99 games in style, I remember playing the brilliant Battlezone and the fantastic GTA London and being blown away each time.
Ohhh look at that: Bundled in another box came the 15 inch CRT IBM branded monitor, not the largest in size but a good little monitor capable of up to 1024 X 768 pixels in the True Colour 32 bit mode you could see photo realistic images.
Dad The PCs Talking: The IBM PC came with multimedia speakers made by Infinity, these were large but the sound actually was quite puny, you needed to turn the volume up high to hear anything.
DVD ? What are you on about: This may shock and amaze you but DVD rom drive was extremely rare and CD RW didn’t exist, our IBM had a CD ROM drive which read the disks at an amazing 32x surpassing many inferior products. It also came with a 1.44 Inch Floppy drive capable of reading and writing 1.44 MB floppy disks.
Plug That In: The PC came with keyboard and mouse and speakers, I loved the keyboard it was truly amazing with separate volume controls and customisable buttons. The mouse was pretty basic 2 buttons no strings attach.... well it did actually :P. The Infinity speakers where very big which makes them look impressive but they didn’t sound so great.
Cant We Plug More In: We sure could, the PC was equipped with 2 new USB 1.0 ports which boasted high speed data transferring from device to PC one for the printer and one for the scanner. Very good :D
The Interweb: The IBM PC was net ready from the box the trend back then was a 28.8 kbps modem but no, our IBM had a 56.6 kbps Rockwell net ready modem for cruising on the net at super fast speeds. We got internet access later that year and we've always used it since.
Software: The PC came with the standard software included the OS Windows 98, a trial edition of Norton Antivirus 98, Configsafe Autocheck, Quicken 98 and the very impressive Lotus SmartSuite which is basically a cheaper version of Microsoft Office, but the greatest thing it came with was IBM ViaVoice which enabled you to control your PC with your voice, it didnt really work that well but it was fun to do :D
The Look: Actually back then this PC was very stylish, a minimalistic PC not covered in writing, the CD ROM drive was plain old grey, the opening door on the PC was grey too, it was all grey, but the way it was put together was like no other with the small touches such as the blue eject button to the black floppy drive cover it oozed pre millennial style.
PERFORMANCE
Office Performance: The IBM was able to run office 2000 with ease although press the F1 ( help ) key and you would have to wait a while for anything to come up and sometimes you would get a blue screen, although if you are familiar with office you will have no trouble whatsoever.
Game Performance: The game performance was adequte but it only had a small 8MB of video memory so if you think you're going to play Halo think twice, this PC can just about hande Age of Empires 2, Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament. Games are unplayable at higher resolutions so if your are planning on gaming use resolution of 640 x 480 or even lower if the game is more demanding. We upgraded to a DVD drive but DVD video performance was poor suffering from a jerky framerate making DVDs almost unwatchable, cartoon DVDs seemed to work fine though.
Internet Performance: The 56kbps modem was adequete for the time and was capable of browsing the net at good speeds. Later with the introduction of flas, animated ads etc. the 56kbps is very slow, we installed 512kbps broadband but it slowed the computers pace to a crawl and had to upgrade the memory to get results. So if you are going to use broadband in one of these you better have atleast an extra 128MB of ram to put in, 256 MB gave it a much needed boost and with this amount of memory you will be able to browse at fast speeds.
Overall Performance: The PC could do everything adequetly apart from play DVDs, and broadband internet was unbearably slow withought the extra memory. If you are planning to buy this PC it would be very wise to buy some memory as it reduces freezes and greatly enhances performance and is the most cost effective performance enhancer at around £20 for a 128MB chip.
Running upto date software: The latest software on the PC is Microsoft Office 2000 Word has been updated to Word 2002 and Autoroute, I havent tried Office XP so I cant comment on that. It will run MSN Messanger 7.0 beta but nudges must be switched off or the program will crash. For security protection it can run the latest version of AVG antivirus free edition and the firewall is the latest version of the free edition of Zone Alarm. It has 256kbps broadband with an Alcatel Speedtouch broadband modem which always works though after extensive use it will stop working . I use my Sony W12 digital camera with it though making a slideshow will take 30 minutes plus and sometimes it will not detect the hardware at all. For scanning and printing I use a newish Lexmark X series printer which works fine though sometimes when printing webpages you will get an error and it wont print anything till you reboot.
Upgrades: For future expansion you can upgrade practically anything, inside the PC there are 2 memory connectors one is already occupied with the 64MB chip but you can add upto 256MB ( 2 x 128MB chips ) note this PC is ONLY compatible with PC 100 ram. The CD ROM we removed to replace it with a Samsung DVD drive although it was a pain to install using the floppy disk to get the drivers. There is a second CD ROM shelf inside but it isnt connected to the motherboard so you would have a lot of hard work to get results. The CPU is upgradable but only upto around 600MHZ, there is only one HD bay so unless you are experianced with installing an OS, formatting a disk and getting it to work I wouldnt reccommend removing it, if you must have the extra space buy an external disk. There are 3 additional PCI card slots ( 4 if you remove the modem ) for adding additional hardware. There are NO AGP ports.
Price: All that good stuff didn’t come cheap, the PC package including monitor, speakers, keyboard, mouse, printer, and scanner came to a grand total of £1099. Expensive but technology wasn’t so readily available my dad had second thoughts, I thought it was great but this was probably because I didn’t pay. I've looked and you can get these PCs off eBay for around £50, a bargain and perfect for a student who cant afford the latest.
So it was good: Yes I loved this PC and so did my dad, I think infact we still have it today, it sits lovingly on the IKEA multipurpose desk and it may well become a family heirloom: D
More details
Reliability
Good
Memory / capacity
Good
Range of Extra Features
Good
Instruction manual
Very useful
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