My Very First Computer
Most of my experience on a computer was not at school but on my best friend Andrew’s computer, which was a Acer Aspire 1100 series. I spent a lot of time at his house chatting on AOL and surfing the web. 
They even let me create my own AOL screen name on their account, CoryGump82. I can’t for the life of me remember what model the ACER was. I do remember it was a black with a handle on the front. If you pulled the handle you could open the computer up by sliding the computer out from the housing.
I got my first desktop computer as a graduation present from my parents. I got it around my birthday (April) my senior year of highschool (2000). It was a used computer which my parents purchased from “Millions Used Computers” in Southbend. It wasn’t until later that I learned that the guy that owns Millions (Tyrone Miller), is over priced and rips people off. Anyway my first PC was a Compaq Presario 4550. It housed a AMD K6 was a 233 mhz, 48 mb RAM, and a 4 GB hard drive. About the only thing it could do was play music and get on the internet. What more could any teen ager want from a machine? I did try to put a cd burner in it but that did not work out. I think the machine crashed everytime I tried to burn a CD or it would do a buffer under run. I joined the military right after highschool and when I got back from my military school I tried to upgrade my computer and learned that it was not upgradeable. I kept the machine until finally it took a crap (I think the power supply took a shit), and then built my own machine, which was really fun! My boss at work, Ron Deal, helped me set it up. But anyway that was about my first computer. What was your first computer??
Hello!
My first computer was precisely a Compaq Presario 4550 in the same configuration as yours! I bought it in 1998, which was the time the 4550 was released.
At first I didn’t do much with it either, but after some time I started using the internet and playing games with it (it was a very nice set then and could run many fun games easily). My favorite one was MotoRacer, that came with it.
Along with this I miss the JBL speakers it came with. They were excellent even for today standards. But I never used its USB ports. Back then there was nothing that used USB, which seems totally strange today where everything uses USB!
I had it until about 2004, when I decided to sell it and I regret it. As my very first computer and a nice one I should have kept it for history sake and for running old applications.
It was still working ok, though since new it was always quite unstable and crashy. Was it your situation as well?
I also tried to upgrade it around 2000 when I wanted to install a Voodoo graphics card to be able to play newer games but I wasn’t able. As you said it was not easy to upgrade it. Nowadays I was reading about the 4550 and it seems that this model was almost maxed-out from factory, so there is the explanation for this.
It was nice reading your post and seeing this nice picture of the Presario! Feel free to get in touch by my mail address if you want to talk more about it!