What are your"Coolest" all-time components/tech you used?

[dave_the_nerd]

Virtualization is all kinds of awesome, but I had a Macintosh computer with a PC Compatibility card.

Turns out I had a lot of backlog to play, since I had missed all the DOS games from the early '90s.

 

[WildW]

Two memories in particular stand out, one hardware and one software.

When the first dual core Athlon 64 chips appeared I wanted to go to multi core, but AMD was so far ahead that they were super expensive. Instead of going Athlon 64 X2 I bought a workstation board with two Nocona core Xeon processors instead - basically 3 GHz Pentium 4 with hyperthreading. Two core four thread goodness. I went AMD X2 later, and it was faster than the Xeons in a straight line, but felt much less snappy.

As for the software side, I will forever remember the day I upgraded my Pentium 3 machine from Windows 98SE to Windows 2000. I was doing a lot of web design and I could easily end up having to reboot 98 every hour or so. After I switched to Windows 2000 I literally went over a month without rebooting. That was the birth of the modern PC to me.

 

[UsandThem]

As for the software side, I will forever remember the day I upgraded my Pentium 3 machine from Windows 98SE to Windows 2000. I was doing a lot of web design and I could easily end up having to reboot 98 every hour or so. After I switched to Windows 2000 I literally went over a month without rebooting. That was the birth of the modern PC to me.

In my opinion, Windows 2000 was their best OS up until Windows 7. It was so stable, and it almost made up for that monstrosity known as Windows 98 ME.

 

[IronWing]

Virtualization is all kinds of awesome, but I had a Macintosh computer with a PC Compatibility card.

Turns out I had a lot of backlog to play, since I had missed all the DOS games from the early '90s.

My high school had an Apple II with a CP/M card. The card allowed the Apple's floppy drive to read Kaypro formatted disks so I could work on stuff at school and at home. I didn't know until just now that the card was made by Microsoft. Kind of ironic as Microsoft killed CP/M.

 

[richaron]

I built a rig for college over the turn of the century based around an EPoX 8KHA+ board with an Athlon 1900+, 2x256MB RAM, and a MSI Geforce 2 Ti with VIVO (video in video out).

To this date that video card is my "coolest" hardware purchase. In my college dorm not only could I wreck bitches in LAN games but I could hook up a VHS player to watch tapes and also tune into OTA broadcasts.

 

[EXCellR8]

trying to think... i really liked the 19" viewsonic LCD from way back in the mid 2000's if that counts. i was coming from a CRT so it was a pretty big deal for me back then. like clockwork though, it died after a few years and I sold it for parts. good monitor when it worked though, 2ms response

I have a 3.5" + 2.5" drive hot swap bay with dual USB 3.0 that's pretty handy, but I think it's idle at the moment