My Pentium 4 of 2004 in Ireland, with updates up to 2009:

By 2004 I was still using my Pentium MMX of 1998, which I had brought over from Buenos Aires. By now this PC was too slow for the recent crop of computer games, and thoroughly inadequate for the great achievement of the time, MS Flight Simulator 2004. Besides, it was now imperative to have a PC that could run one of the best OS of the time: MS Windows XP. I now had a very good job and could afford the expenditure.

I had already bought a first class monitor one year earlier. It was still a CRT one (flat monitors were still very expensive and their refresh rate was too slow for computer gaming and simulation), but it had a remarkable 1600x1200 px resolution, the 19" iiyama MM904UT Pro455:

                     

The case for the new computer had to be a maxi-tower, but narrow enough to fit the impressive piece of furniture I had made in 1998 and had brought with me to Ireland. I went for the excellent AOpen H700B, a very affordable piece of solid iron with plastic front. See the front and back:

                    

The AOpen case interior, before doing any work on it:

                                  

A must for a “supercomputer” is a fan controller, such as the reliable Cooler Master Aerogate II:

    

The heart of the PC is of course the motherboard: so many variables to select among! I went for the beautiful Gigabyte 8I875 Ultra, with AGP slot and 5 PCI slots:

         

Now comes the CPU. For this, as for other components, specs increase more or less linearly with price, until you get to an ideal speed-vs-price ratio: if you go beyond it, you enter the “elite” models at preposterous prices. The Intel CPU at that ideal point was the Intel Pentium 4 3GHz:

    

Two years later I substituted the Intel CPU cooler—shown above—with the much more efficient
Zalman CNPS9500, a true work of art with its huge pure-copper fins:

                    

For RAM memory I installed two TwinMOS DDR400 Winbond 512 Mb strips. A total of 1 Gb of RAM, whoa!:

    

Gone were the days of the “3D cards”, as their functionality was now included in most graphics cards.
I have always preferred the ATi (later AMD), so I selected the by-then leading Radeon 9800 XT AGP, with 256 Mb (!) of memory:

    

All the top graphics cards overheat, and I resolved the problem in 2007 installing the remarkable Zalman Fatal1ty FS-V7 Graphics Card Cooler:

    

I always had at least two hard disk drives. I have a utility to back-up personal files in one disk on a special folder of the other disk, and I do this at all times: should any disk go down, or should I make a terrible mistake and save it, my personal work is always preserved. (Needless to say, this is irrespective of my monthly and yearly backups). I installed two Seagate Barracuda 7200,7 120Gb SATA, achieving 240Gb of HDD storage:

    

At the time many games and simulators required the CD or DVD to be inserted to run (I would later learn that in most cases you can bypass this with software that “mounts” disk images as disk drives). Therefore I installed a high performance CD-RW drive and also two DVD drives, useful also for backups. I moved one of the DVD drives from my previous PC, and I added a fast DVD +RW LITEON 8x:

    

A musician uses the PC for both recording and MIDI keyboard playing: it is then of the utmost importance to have an at least semi-pro sound card. It is particularly useful if you can control some features and plug microphones and headphones from the case front, yet sound cards with a front bay accessory have always been very thin on the ground. The only such card available (then and for many years since) was the Sound Blaster Audigy 2ZS Platinum: it was not available in Europe, only in the USA. It was quite difficult to find a reseller who shipped to Ireland, then once in Ireland I had to pay custom duty. Anyway, it was a very beautiful and complete piece of kit:

   

You also need an excellent all-purpose colour printer, such as the inkjet Hewlett-Packard HP5850:

              

For Flight Simulation you need a good yoke with throttle and programmable buttons, and also rudder pedals. I got the new and fully programmable ThrustMaster Hotas Cougar and the CH Pro Pedals. There was no longer any need to complicated MIDI connections, as both units were now USB (and I have them still in use):

    

           

I completed the case adapting a 2½" floppy panel to work as a LED panel:

    

See below the tower with everything installed, ready to be closed and used. On the right hand side you can see the back connections as per their last rearrangement (2009): note how all the 7 motherboard expansion slots were in use.

            

This was the impressive tower front. There was still a floppy disk unit!:

                          

Why a floppy, largely no longer in use at the time? Because Windows XP (generally available at the end of 2001) initially did not cater for the then new SATA hard disk drives. Windows XP could not partition them, format them or install on them. (Incredibly, only in version SP3 of 2008 was the problem resolved and the SATA install automated.) The limitation was not too difficult to circumvent: you needed a floppy drive, a serial port with a serial mouse attached to it, another PC in order to download the necessary software into a floppy disk, and to follow a relatively convolute procedure. I wrote down detailed directions and sent them as a readers' letter to the best PC magazine at the time, PC Plus. They promptly published it, declared it “Star Letter of the Month” and sent me as a prize a webcam and a novel external laptop sound card. This is a scan of the PC Plus page:

                     

My full paraphernalia for flight simulation can be seen below (note the old but excellent Bose VideoRoommate compact hi-fi stereo speakers):

    

This computer gave me more than 7 years of excellent services.