Ah, the good old days. My first PC was a 386-33 with 4MB of RAM. I got it in late 1998 after my friend upgraded the PC at his business. Needless to say it was slow even for the time, but it was better than having no PC. Anyway, that machine had a 1.2GB HDD which was using drive overlay software in order to access the entire capacity. Drive overly software was one of the worst ideas going. Sure, it let you access drives larger than 528MB without changing hardware. However, if you needed wipe the drive and restore everything from backup you were screwed if you didn't happen to have the floppy with the drive overlay software. Happened to me. I kept wondering why I got errors writing files, and the machine kept crashing. Then I talked to the guy in my friend's shop who set up the PC and he mentioned drive overlay software. He gave me a copy of the floppy. All was well.
Not too long after this same person, who was seriously into PCs, upgraded his home machine and gave me his old 386-40. The nice thing about this machine was that it could use the 4MB SIMMs. My 386-33 maxed out at 4MB. This machine could have 32MB. Since old memory was relatively inexpensive, I upgraded the machine to 32MB for about $100. Not long after I bought one of those Promise IDE expansion cards so I would never have to be bothered with drive overlay software again. The CompUSA had 8.4GB HDDs on sale for about $100, so I upgraded. I literally had the largest drive the Promise card could deal with. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of FAT16 at 2GB per partition I had to make 4 or 5 partitions on the drive.
Ever since then upgraded with mostly second hand stuff. I was always a few generations behind but I learned the gamut of hardware from 386s all the way to what we have now.
BTW, two things happened since then. One, PCs got fast enough for what I do that I haven't found myself wanting more speed in a long time. I'm using an A10-7870K APU (integrated graphics) with 32GB. The newest APUs have more than twice the graphics power, and 8 cores instead of 4, with each core being at least twice as fast as mine. Would it be nice to upgrade? Sure, but I find no compelling reason. I'm still blown away by the fact I have 1,000 times as much RAM as I did in my 386-40.
The second thing is storage has been more than adequate for a long time. I remember the 1.2GB drive was pretty limiting, to the point I sometimes had to be selective about what I keep. Those days have been over for a long time. I have two 960GB and one 500GB SSD on my machine, plus an 11-year old 2TB HDD.
Oh, and integrated graphics has been more than fast enough for my needs for a long time, so I'm not seeing any more graphics cards in my future.
So no more upgrade fever for me. Sure, computers in some ways have become sterile, boring appliances that mostly just work but that's fine for most people. I don't miss the days of jumpers on expansion cards and playing with IRQs and addresses. Yeah, the old PCs were dog slow but then again the software they ran was designed for them.