A Celeron PC in June 2002

This set was advertised by Saturn Vienna in June 2002. It is not a top of the line set, inside the flyer there are more expensive, more powerful sets. But it wasn’t a budget solution either, in spite of the Celeron. It was advertised as a giga-computer. The official name is microstar Avantgarde 1740 A 75 LE DVD.

It has a 1.70 GHz Celeron, 256 MB DDR-RAM, a 16× DVD drive, a 40 MB hard drive, a 64 MB ATI 7500LE video card, and a built-in modem. It comes with StarOffice and an XP Home OEM Recovery version that won’t work on other computers. The 17″ CRT has a maximum resolution of 1280×1024. Note that the included mouse has a wheel.

What the set does not have is a burner, the second drive is just a standard CD-drive, I wonder what it’s for. Maybe it can read CDs faster than the DVD drive. That the DVD drive is given more space on the ad than the hard drive is amusing. Note also the use of the smiley.

It’s amazing how fast the development was at the time. Three years earlier, a good all-purpose system had 64 MB RAM, 4 MB video RAM, and a hard drive between 1.5 and 4 MB. My current machine is about as far from the 2002 as the 2002 is from the 1999. But then, my current machine is pretty old, so maybe it doesn’t count.