Tell us why your favorite retro computer sucked

[AnanaSUPREME]

It took forever to load anything... But I can't wait for my living situation to improve so I can have space to bring it out.

 

[Cecil]

Back then, it was the only PC I had. My Windows 98. It was quite the machine, ever chugging along with poor performance. I was but a child, and aside from WebTV, we had never owned another computer to compare it to. Replete with dial-up internet and the inability to play most games, I recall enjoying Humongous Entertainment titles with little issue, but never being able to finish Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone due to abhorrent framerate issues that played more like a PowerPoint. Tis I wonder I made it as far as the troll dungeon chase before the game froze forevermore.

That PC was a piece of junk and my PC in the latter 2000s was not much better, seeing as I couldn't even run TF2. Alas.

The one thing I look back most fondly... Perhaps it's the way I could paste entire images on the desktop. I recall little adoptables from a Golden Sun website. You were supposed to copy the code and use it on your page, but I outright pasted them on the desktop. Good times.

 

[Jade]

The internet speeds. I'm too young to remember dial up but remember having a furiously slow PC back in the late 2000s, even going into the 2010s. For some reason, it just took forever to do anything. Send an e-mail, load a video, get a document ready to print. I hated it.

this pretty much, but early 2000's for me. We had a computer with a Windows 2000 OS and a computer with Windows XP a bit later on, and I infinitely preferred the XP computer (although I didn't hate the 2000 one), the main reason being that the 2000 computer was soooooooooooooo unbearably slow. "Send an e-mail, load a video, get a document ready to print", yep, all of those things were like pulling teeth, especially the printer. And you could ONLY print from the 2000 computer cause the XP computer wasn't hooked up to the printer. AAAAGH

 

[brentw]

Hate to say it Emmy but I think you just had a bad computer. My computers ran really well in the late 2000s for what we asked of it.

That being said, it was a desktop and if you're talking about laptops then yes you definitely had to spend alot more money to get usable power in the mid to late 2000s.

I swear to god I got significantly better ping times in online FPS games (Mostly UT2K3 and UT2K4) with my first cable internet provider in the early 2000's (Charter) than I've gotten with any modern internet package in the last decade.

 

[MySpace Tom]

I was trying to think of a reason why it would suck, but being able to play 3D Dinosaur Adventure or Speed again on my old Packard Bell 486 would actually be pretty cool

 

[№56]

This thing brings back a lot of fond memories, but it was always a slow and style-over-substance POS. I still have no idea why Apple was so committed to sticking with a one-button mouse.

 

[Deleted member 3373]

The earliest computer I remember using was a windows 98. I was very young at the time but I still have some fond memories of using it. In all honesty I think my major issue would be the trackball mouse. Yeah, probably not what you were expecting but that was what I remember finding irritating about it. The trackball would sometimes get stuck and I'd have to mess around with it to make the mouse work again. Other than that I would actually enjoy having that old thing back. If not only to make the world less constantly online.

 

[Crash_overdrive]

128 kB of RAM and having to use 5.25" floppy again would not be fun.

 

[WALFTEAM]

I've posted from my Amiga before, but it's very hard to get even the most basic sites to work, even with a souped-up one. Haven't tried again in years.

 

[zalaz alaza]

128 kB of RAM and having to use 5.25" floppy again would not be fun.

but ultima bros.

 

[handoferis]

This thing brings back a lot of fond memories, but it was always a slow and style-over-substance POS. I still have no idea why Apple was so committed to sticking with a one-button mouse.

I really don't think the one-button mouse was that bad. Classic Mac OS was designed around it, so you really didn't need context menus very often at all. Obvs as things have gotten more complex, they're kinda bad to use these days - but I can still get by totally fine when I plug an Apple Pro Mouse in just cause I like how it looks. You just have to have the mindset of doing things from menus instead of right clicking on stuff.

That said, I'm still a person who doesn't let go of the mouse button when I use top menus in Mac OS cause pre-Mac OS 8 they'd just disappear if you let go.

 

[Jordshire]

I think what sucked the most about my childhood pc was the riced out, olive green, Herbie the Love Bug inspired Window's XP profile lol. That, and I'll have to echo everyone else who complained about their old computers being painfully slow even for the day..

 

[NostalgicDepression]

Back in the day you would have never admitted that it was anything less than perfect, of course, but now, looking back... what would annoy you if your favorite retro system became your main computer again?

Carrying the computer since it was too freaking big.
Slow startup.

 

[grap]

i really hated the green "start" button on windows xp. i hated the rounded side edge and i hated that it was green, and i hated the little windows icon next to it. i hated that the green didn't match the blue.

obviously now i miss it because i have brain damage but i thought it was extremely unattractive at the time

 

[elia925-6]

Because windows ME sucked

 

[MySpace Tom]

i really hated the green "start" button on windows xp. i hated the rounded side edge and i hated that it was green, and i hated the little windows icon next to it. i hated that the green didn't match the blue.

obviously now i miss it because i have brain damage but i thought it was extremely unattractive at the time

The XP theme was always bad. I have reverted all of my Windows computers since XP to the 9x themes. I even use the 9x theme here on Agora Road. You just can't mess with perfection

 

[Orlando Smooth]

The first computer I had that was mine alone, instead of a shared family computer, was a shitty second hand Dell laptop I got in probably 2006. It was old by the time I got it but it ran XP (which I do think fondly of nowadays) and I mostly used it to play RuneScape.

I don't miss that thing. Had one of those terrible liquid displays that would ripple if you poked it, achieved worse RuneScape frame rates than any other computer I used, and the battery quite literally couldn't last more than about 5 minutes. Also it was god damn heavy and thick, considering how small it was. Cheap plastic enclosure that rattled and creaked.

 

[ECHETLAEUS]

Back in the 2006 i had a 90s style fat phillips screen and a very nice pc that was made piece by piece from my father. All i have to say is that i played all the awesome games of this era, gta classic trilogy, eragon, need for speed etc etc etc, until I spilled chocolate milk and the pc got fucked, I was a little g crook lvl 1 in my childhood.

 

[YourOtherLeft]

Apple ][. Looking back at it, I don't even know how I used it.

 

[juicy_ricky]

I swear to god I got significantly better ping times in online FPS games (Mostly UT2K3 and UT2K4) with my first cable internet provider in the early 2000's (Charter) than I've gotten with any modern internet package in the last decade.

I've been saying this for years and people have been gaslighting me like I'm crazy! I was playing UT GOTY, Quake 3, Counterstrike etc late 90's/early 2000's on Charter broadband with stupid low ping times. No clue how that works - did games back then have better netcode or something?