To hell with it.

[coldfish]

My first PC was a used 386 for $200.  A love/hate sort of thing so I didnt want to blow too much cash on a PC.

I soon got hooked on the incremental upgrade/tweak cycle, (loads of cheap used parts) 486DX board for $30, 8x as much RAM $20, bigger HD $10...  in the end that machine booted Win3.1 in about 5 seconds and was fast and stable and I actually liked using it.  AND to stay on topic, after the board and RAM swap FPS's flew; from 16-20 to 90+ frames per second, it was a massive visible upgrade.

To get similar for my A500 wouldve cost $1000+.

[runequester]

My first PC was a used 386 for $200.  A love/hate sort of thing so I didnt want to blow too much cash on a PC.

I soon got hooked on the incremental upgrade/tweak cycle, (loads of cheap used parts) 486DX board for $30, 8x as much RAM $20, bigger HD $10...  in the end that machine booted Win3.1 in about 5 seconds and was fast and stable and I actually liked using it.  AND to stay on topic, after the board and RAM swap FPS's flew; from 16-20 to 90+ frames per second, it was a massive visible upgrade.

To get similar for my A500 wouldve cost $1000+.

yeah, second hand helps. In hindsight, with the time Ive spent with an 030 lately, I wish I had gotten that on a 1200 rather than switch to a PC when I did

Not trying to bicker with you btw. Your experiences are just as valid as mine, just interesting to me that we ended up with different experiences.

Today at least, hardware is cheap even for brand new stuff, and with linux, there's finally something out there that isn't concerned with whether I am doing something MS/Apple doesn't want me to.

But maybe thats an entirely different thread

Unrelated but because its cool.. On a whim, I set up Ibrowse to use RAM as cache instead of the hard drive, and its moving a lot nicer now. Dont imagine I'll ever max out the 64 megs of RAM I have now, so its all good.

Getting kinda used to downloading files to RAM too, and then unpacking them to wherever they are supposed to go. Good stuff

[fishy_fiz]

Personally I went against the grain and held out in getting a PC for a while. All my friends around me, and my brother went pc, but rather than jump ship I instead started upgrading my Amiga instead. This wasnt due to any particular overt loyaly, but rather the simple fact that I still enjoyed the amiga, and it's software was different to what was found elsewhere, and I had plenty of pcs around me at the time so could use one whenever I wanted to. I was tempted to go pc earlier, mostly due to the fact I was always a big fan of emulation, and a pc was a much better experience for that (mostly). Eventually when the pentium200mmx cpu's were released I decided to jump onboard. Around this time things were pretty glum in the amiga world, with very few bits of new software available, so I started using a pc more and more. After a few years (Win)UAE had progressed nicely, and pc hardware was powerful enough to replace my aging 68030 based a1200, so being skint for a $, decided to sell my amiga. For a few years I was pc only, and my amiga usage was soley through Winuae. Upgrade by upgrade I convinced myself that this was the way to go, after all a real 68k amiga didnt have anything like the raw speed available via Winuae, and I got "freebies" like rtg and rta thrown in for "free". After a while the amiga side of things became my most used aspect of the pc and my upgrades where in part decided by what would improve the amiga side of things more.

Enter Amithlon.

This really changed my computing world. No longer would I require Windows to get my fast amiga + rtg + rta, etc. fix. And considerably faster than Winuae as well. However at the time pc hardware wasnt fast enough to run 68k uae on the emulated 68k cpu in amithlon in a way I was content with. OCS/ECS stuff was fine, full framerate, but aga stuff was only 1/2way there (ironically a similar situation to os4.x today (which is a bit sad considering I experienced this about 10 years ago on an emulated cpu)). Because of this I decided to get myself an a1200 again and slowly but surely upgraded it (bppc/grex/voodoo3/sb128/etc). At the time however it barely got used as I'd grown used to using pcs and thier ways of doing things, and the raw grunt of amithlon was soooo much better at this. Eventually the a1200 died and I went back to soley amithlon for a while with occasionaly trying to use a dedicated Winuae box instead (never was happy with it despite taking the concept about as far as it can go (less than 100meg for windows side, booting straight into amiga os,etc.).

Finally, just a month or so ago I decided to get myself a classic amiga again, and Im having an absoulte blast. I was so concerned with competeing with the outside world for so long that I'd forgotten to appreciate the amiga for itself, warts and all. This time around I find Im using the classic more than amithlon/os3.9 and pretty quickly found an '040 accelerator (which Im still waiting on) to make the experience a little more flexible. I still really enjoy amithlon/os3.9, but Ive rediscovered the charms of real amiga hardware too moreso than I have in probably a decade. The 2 (amithlon/a1200) complement each other very well, and I couldnt be happier (well, I guess when my '040 card arrives I'll be a little happier)  

Anyway, sorry for the long winded, mostly pointless post, it just seemed to fit in with the last few posts of this, seemingly mostly random thread

[runequester]

Nice story, and don't worry, this thread is pretty random, and that is totally okay

[ElPolloDiabl]

I went to Classic Mac (040 256 color) before I went to PC (Pentium 100 24-bit S3 Virge graphics card). Up until about 2000 I still used the A1200 about 50% of the time. After that I found WinUAE more convenient and used Windows software a lot more too, so the 1200 went into storage.

[coldfish]

yeah, second hand helps. In hindsight, with the time Ive spent with an 030 lately, I wish I had gotten that on a 1200 rather than switch to a PC when I did

Not trying to bicker with you btw. Your experiences are just as valid as mine, just interesting to me that we ended up with different experiences.

Today at least, hardware is cheap even for brand new stuff, and with linux, there's finally something out there that isn't concerned with whether I am doing something MS/Apple doesn't want me to.

But maybe thats an entirely different thread

Unrelated but because its cool.. On a whim, I set up Ibrowse to use RAM as cache instead of the hard drive, and its moving a lot nicer now. Dont imagine I'll ever max out the 64 megs of RAM I have now, so its all good.

Getting kinda used to downloading files to RAM too, and then unpacking them to wherever they are supposed to go. Good stuff

Dont get me wrong, I wouldve upgraded my Amiga (back in the mid 90's) if I'd had the cash.  I used that machine exclusively just about every day for years.  When I got an A1200 with 030 years later I found out what I'd been missing, once youve had an Amiga with a HD and WHDload there's no going back to floppies.

I use Win, OSX and Linux almost daily now so I've kinda become platform agnostic, which isnt to say I dont find annoyances with each of them at times.