This has a 166Mhz first generation Pentium (second series/pre MMX) 66Mhz FSB socket 7 processor. It has 48MB of old 72-pin SIMM RAM in it. It currently has a 2GB hard drive ran in ATA mode-2 or at 16MB/s bandwidth to the hard drive.

It's motherboard has 512KB of pipeline burst L-2 cache, 4 PCI slots, 3 16-bit ISA slots, an on-board USB controller, AMI BIOS, 2 IDE dual channel controllers, 4 banks for 72-pin SIMM RAM and 2 banks for 168-pin DIMM RAM, and it as a baby AT form factor.

It has an ATI video card in it, I put in an ATI Xpert (Rage 128) 16MB PCI video card because the system has no AGP slots. I couldn't use any of my other video cards in there. I had to borrow that video card from a friend because old PCI video cards are so rare to find in good condition, it might have taken a while to find a video card for it.

It came with a Crystal 4-channel PCI sound card that I later replaced with an 16-bit ISA sound card to conserve PCI slots for future expansion cards. The system came with a Realtek 10/100 mbps Fast PCI ethernet adapter (network card), an old 8-bit ISA 56K modem that was made by Texas Instruments I think because there are many chips on it with the Texas Instruments logo on them.

The system had no video card so I put on in, the ATI Xpert 128. It had an old CDROM drive in it. I suppose it was 16X or slower. It would not read from burned (home recorded) CDs. It would read factory recorded CDs but I needed something that read home recorded CDs because of backup and archival reasons.

I got a 44X CDROM drive from a local dealer for about $20. I put in an internal IDE Iomega zip100 drive that I got from that same dealer for $5. I love zip drives. I haven't when't without a zip drive in or for my system since December 1998.

I think that I will always have a zip drive in my system. People consider me to be stupid because they think I fell victim to the "zip drive" fad or craze of the late 1990's. They think that I buy expensive (about $10 per disk) zip disks to do my system backup and archiving.

No, I am not that dumb to use such an expensive disk as that for that reason, I use CDs like just about everyone else. I use zip disks to transfer downloads from the Public Library's computers to my own systems here at home. I also use zip disks to transfer files from my systems here at home whenever networking is not practicle.

But I mainly use zip disks for the small tedious tasks that people used to use floppy disks for, use the zip disks to store my web pages on while editing them. The zip drives are very excellent for that purpose, try that with a CDR! For the quick and random reading and writing of files during project working, zip disks are perfect and CDs are terrible or not really practicle at all.

So the zip drive was not really a fad, it really served a purpose. I finally got my old and first CDRW drive back from whom my dad loaned it to. It still works good. On April 4th, I slashed open a finger and got cut on the other fingers when trying to remove a perferated piece of metal from the computer case to make room for more disk drives.

My pinky finger on my right hand got it the worst, it got slashed open on the sharp metal as the metal broke loose from the computer case. My hand slid off the metal and caught on the sharp corner edge of the piece that I broke off.

It cut into the meat and maybe not to the bone but I had a chunk of skin hanging off the finger around the joint. I can take a picture of it. Anyway, I had to put in a CDRW drive because my network card and mainly the Micro$oft Windows operating system are not working together.

I set this thing up myself and for about a week it was working good. Now the network card with exchange data with the other computers but only to share an internet connection, not to share files. This is still somewhat acceptable because with a CDRW drive (burner), I can still do what I was going to do and archive downloads like drivers for devices, programs, game demos, ect.

Because I have this old system, old hardware, and the refusal of corporations to keep track of stuff while writing efficient software which causes me to use old hardware, I had to resort to using the peer2peer file sharing programs just to find device drivers for some of the old hardware I have.

For some of those devices that I found laying around in dumpsters that still work, things that people gave me but didn't have the installation disk, stuff that I bought new and lost the disk, ect. I have situations where I couldn't find support files on companies websites, so I had to resort to using file sharing software to get drivers from other individuals on the internet who had the same hardware device as I.

I am using my old IBM 14" SVGA monitor and old PS/2 keyboard to the IBM system for this Nostalgic computer. I am using my old Micro$oft wheel mouse that I bought in 2000 for this system. I am thinking of getting another optical mouse made by a company called Micro Innovations. I bought one last summer and I like it a lot.

I am thinking of getting another one for the next computer I plan to build. I bought mine for about $15 new from a retail store. This old modem is pretty nice, I think that it really is controller based because of how old it is, I don't think that Winmodems (software based task managment style modem design that were dependant on Mico$oft Windows for their processing tasks and abused too many system resources) were common back when this modem was made.

It works good. Below are some pictures of my Nostalgic dedicated download machine. Click on a picture to view the larger picture.

I bought this system on March 18th 2004 from Bon Burris who owns a computer shop named "Computers Plus" which is part of the Almosta Mall In Palmyra Indiana.

Here are pictures of my hand to show the healing process.

This picture was taken about maybe 2 or 3 days after my hand was cut.

This is a month after my hand was cut by the metal in the computer case.