I remember first fitting in some ram in a windows 95 machine
my mate was telling me over the phone how to do it.
put it in and then I rearlised that my sound was really fuzzy....
so a visit to the local pc shop was needed, where I got a soundblaster sound card and then I fitted that
The first upgrade I did was on an Olivetti 8086, when I added an ISA EGA graphics card to use a colour monitor. It was only a monochrome CGA before that I actually really miss that machine!
The first build from scratch was a P200 MMX with 32MB Ram. It all went ok, and I seemed to be building quite a few from that point on!
CPU was soldered into the motherboard, the IDE connections were on a slot in card, it used a Soundblaster 16 and had 4Mb of RAM if I remember correctly.
And the build went perfectly but then I'm a clever bugger
Replaced my friends hard drive and dropped one of the side screws down into his case.
That was...nearly a year ago and the screw is still there. .
Also added some more RAM, which went a bit strange because I had to keep switching it around with the other memory slots because the pc couldnt 'find' the memory
Every new build is a first build, you ain't got time to listen to all my cock-ups ... but the best is taking 3days to set the jumpers on a MB (there were 40 combinations) bring back the good-old-days.
I did that once. Just fixing a floppy drive into machine while it was finishing off installing O/S. OMG did I poo when I had to tell him I had fried his Mobo
He said not to worry he needed to upgrade anyway and I had just given him a damn good excuse that he could tell his wife lmao
In the early 90's a friend and I did the old 386 sx to dx upgrade. For some reason we needed a new board. Went really smooth until we powered it up.
We had connected some of the wires (LED, Speaker etc) the wrong way round. The plastic on the wires melted like butter, filling the room with black smoke, and the mother board was fried.
Wort part is we did the exact same thing again a month or so later when we helped another friend to do the same...
Good ol SoundBlaster Pro was my first experience with her top off!
I remember my first build though - upgrading a 386 DX to a 486 DX2 66.
Bought the mobo, CPU and 8MB of RAM for a total bargain price of 420 quid! (GBP)
I had a huge 200MBHD, which I later upgraded to more than I would ever need 730MB!!! (It died after about 2 years!)
As Mucks says... fun and games with jumpers!
Funny how we made do with limited resources then - "Just upgrade" is such a common answer now!