Greg Cymbala's Personal Web Site

Since my father first brought home a Compaq "luggable" PC from work with a tiny monochrome screen, I have always loved tinkering and playing with PCs. I tried to figure it out long into the night.

In the early 1980s, my family's first computer was an Apple //c (See also The Apple IIc History). Not exactly the best computer to tinker with, especially in terms of hardware. But it did give me a good start. And with some help from my brother David, I quickly picked up programming using Apple BASIC. I spent a lot of time programming little graphics programs, utility progams and game programs.

My first IBM compatible PC was a no-name 386 25MHz clone with 4 MB RAM and an 80 MB hard drive. I was amazed by Windows 3.0 and had a lot of fun tweaking it -- and, of course, reinstalling Windows multiple times.

I learned a lot about PCs with that first 386. Slowly, piece by piece, I upgraded practically every component in that box. I added a math coprocessor, replaced the video card several times, added another 4 MB of RAM (wow! was that expensive at the time), added an old 8 bit SoundBlaster sound card and went through a few hard drives.

My tendency is to upgrade my PC piece by piece rather than to buy complete systems. I enjoy being able to decide exactly what components I put into my system.

My next major upgrade was a new motherboard, CPU and a new tower case. It was an IBM 486 DX2-66 MHz motherboard and CPU that I bought at J&R Computer World in New York City. I was a little scared about that first motherboard upgrade, but I got it working without too much trouble. A new VESA Local Bus video card was also exciting. Remeber VLB???

Unfortunately, that board died after less than two years and, in about 1995, I got a new motherboard and CPU (AMD 486 DX4-120 MHz). At that time, 486s were pushed to their limits and new Pentium systems were becoming more prevalent. But I thought I'd save some money. Even a Pentium 75 was more expensive than the 486 and I didn't have the money to think much about future expandability and upgradability.

That system actually lasted until pretty recently. For a while, I had Windows 95 and Slackware Linux on it, until the hard drive that Linux was on suddenly died. I went through several hard drives with that PC. I really have to say that I have had mostly bad experiences with Western Digital hard drives. Every one that I've had has failed! I highly recommend that you not buy WD hard drives. Instead, I would recommend the following brands of hard drives (just don't go for the Quantum BigFoot drives!):

My current system consists of the following:

AOpen AX6B motherboard

Intel Celeron 300 (overclocked to about 370MHz)

64 MB PC100 RAM

IBM 10.1 GB Hard Drive

Quantum 3.2 GB Hard Drive

Diamond Viper v330 video card

Creative 2X DVD Drive

No-name 24X CD Drive (seems faster than the DVD)

Creative SoundBlaster AWE64 Sound Card

In the near future, I hope to add ...

Intel Celeron 400