No idea, but it might have something to do with that I built my first PC from several scrapped computers when I was a kid, so I've always been heavily invested in my hardware. Long story short (in case you don't want to read the essay that seriously got out of hand below), a local school wanted to throw some old classroom PCs away. I knew a teacher who tipped me off, so I ended up taking what was working from around six or eight mostly broken computers and cobbled a functioning machine together. Given my limited computer skills at that point, it's quite amazing in retrospect that the thing worked.

While the teacher had informed colleagues about me sitting in the arts and crafts room in a pile of computer parts with a screwdriver and a determined look on my face, the janitor was not aware of this and "caught" me, which required some explaining on my part. He bought it and left me alone for the rest of the afternoon.

This was in 2002, but what I ended up with was basically a 1996 machine: A very compact case with drives on a tray that folded up and covered the board with only a few millimeters of air in between, 100 MHz 486, 16 MB of RAM, Tseng Labs integrated graphics with 2 MB of VRAM (2D only), a 500 MB hard drive, 3.5" floppy drive and a CD drive. No USB, no Ethernet, not even sound beyond a beeper, so I used a weird PCI to ISA adapter/riser card that somehow worked with a generic early 2000s PCI sound card under Windows 95. Later on, I found another 32 MB of RAM in my new school's nuclear bunker basement and the teacher said I could have it, since it was of an obsolete type. With 48 MB of RAM, Windows 95 was flying. It basically loaded itself entirely into memory and shut down the HDD after booting, making the machine entirely silent beyond some coil whine.

For 2002, having a 486 was suboptimal to say the least. I found a version of Opera that still supported both Windows 95 and the relatively limited instruction set of the 486. This allowed me to view webpages I had downloaded at school and at my local library onto floppy disks. The machine did replace my electric typewriter for homework, but I used Courier New for a while to mess with my teachers. As for games, I played tons of old shareware on this machine, as well as Sim City 2000, which ran beautifully. Games came either from CDs or from floppy disks, copied over from other machines, sometimes split into 15 parts or more using WinRAR.

We did have a family computer, a 2001 Fujitsu Siemens with an AMD Athlon T-Bird at 1.3 GHz, 128 MB RAM, a 32MB GeForce 2MX and a 40GB HDD. No networking, but it did come with a DVD drive, which was unusual back then. OS: Windows ME, which I actually liked a lot, despite daily bluescreens. I had to share this machine with my parents and my sibling though, so there was a great incentive to get my own computer. Since I was surviving on five bucks of pocket money per month at that point (+ a three digit windfalls every X-Mas, which I decided to save though), buying one was out of the question.

I ended up using the 486 until 2004, when my parents bought a new PC and I got the aforementioned Fujitsu Siemens. At that point, it had already been upgraded a few times, to 256 MB of DDR instead of SD-RAM (the board supported both; the upgrade doubled frame rates in tons of games and massively improved usability), a Radeon 9200 with 128 MB of VRAM, which was amazing, and additional USB 2.0 ports via a PCI adapter card (the PC only came with two USB 1.0 ports originally, which was never enough).

It then promptly overheated the summer I got it. I thought it was the CPU, bought a new one, an AMD Athlon XP 1800+, which wasn't entirely compatible with the board and didn't fix the issue. I then realized that the Radeon 9200 had overheated, so I bought a Radeon 9600 as a replacement. Despite "earning" more pocket money at that point, I ended up being broke for almost a year as a result. With some more RAM, 1 GB to be precise, a 160 GB hard drive and a switch to XP, I survived with this computer until 2008, at which point it was extremely outdated and struggled even with web browsing. Streaming video had become a thing, but I had to download higher quality videos and play them with VLC, since the CPU wasn't fast enough to decode them in the web browser (and my GPU wasn't helping). The most modern games that ran on it were SWAT 4 and Call of Duty 2 - and only because the latter had a DirectX 7 mode, which reduced the graphics to practically the level of Call of Duty 1 (it was still amazing). Perhaps the best-looking game this machine ever saw was Max Payne 2. When I first played it, I thought that no game could ever look better than this.

Funny story: It still had the Radeon 9200 when I got Max Payne 2. This card only supported shader Model 1.4 for pixel shaders and 1.1 for vertex shaders, but could somehow emulate shader model 2.0, as used by Max Payne 2. It mostly worked, except that the vertex shader effects used for facial animations in this game bugged out, causing very robotic facial animations. It was only after replacing the 9200 with the 9600 that I realized this was a bug caused by the emulation - I had previously thought this was the only visual flaw of this game.

Anyway, after replacing it with the Crysis-capable machine, I cleaned the old girl up, loaded it with a lightweight and locked down Linux distro and gifted it to a less fortunate friend of the family, who used it for simple web browsing and office tasks for a few more years. I think it was eleven years old when it was finally retired, which isn't a bad age for a beige box from 2001. The only original parts that were left in the end were the case, the power supply and the mainboard. Everything else had been replaced over the years.