My First PC
2000 - 2005
Rather than list all the specifications of each pc individually, I'll concentrate mainly on the software I used, and the images produced.
Soon after I bought my first pc in 2000, a 750Mhz Pentium, Maxon, the makers of Cinema 4D, ran an offer to upgrade Cinema 4D from the Amiga version to the pc version. The interface was the same, so it was an easy migration.
Unfortunately, the hard drive in this pc suffered a massive breakdown after a couple of years, and I lost everything on it up to that point. Also by that time, I had started to look at other 3D applications. One of these was a landscape generator called Vue, but at this stage I wasn't too impressed with it.
There was also a character renderer called Poser, which dated from the Amiga days. I had a practice with a demo version of it, but it would be a few more years before I looked into it more seriously.
My Second PC
32 bit 1Ghz Hyper-Thread Processor, Windows XP, 3gb Memory
2005 - 2009
By 2005, it was time to upgrade again, not only the hardware, but also in the software department. Vue, the landscape generator I mentioned in an early piece, had improved conciderably. It wasn't tied to just landscapes either; it also had a lot of the capabilities of Cinema 4D.
Although Cinema 4D still worked, it did lack some of the newer functions that Vue now offered, and any chance of upgrading Cinema 4D was now financially out of the question. Maxon had decided to push Cinema 4D towards the professional side of the market, with a hefty price rise to boot.
DAZ Studio started to produce a few suprises, with the quality improving with each update. The main software was free to download, and still is in 2014.