Nostalgic Toxicity

While I love being neck deep in the retrocomputing hobby most of the time, there's a small slice of it I don't really talk about, one that wears heavy on many of us, I'm sure. At least those of roughly the same age/generation I am (millennials).

And that's this pain, this longing for a future that we felt like we were promised, but never got, because we somehow ended up on the bad timeline and the thing that we used to love is now being used to, effectively, kill us.

For me, my "era" was the mid-00s. That's when I started getting into computers. I also didn't exactly grow up in the best household either, all of us living on fixed income. So I made do with less, and that meant old Macs and 90s PCs that were outmoded even when they first released. But it was okay, because for the most part the internet hadn't become this heavy behemoth like it is today. AIM still ran perfectly fine on potato hardware, for example.

But PC gaming? Oh man. I had a subscription to Computer Gaming World at the time (before they had rebranded to push Games For Windows) and just seeing all this absolutely cool stuff people were doing with PCs, I wanted this. But sadly, there was no way on this earth I could ever afford any of it. Me and my crappy little Celeron PC could only eke out like 20fps in UT99, if I was lucky. If I wanted decent-performance gaming, I usually turned to consoles.

This is what I love about retrocomputing. I can go back and acquire most of the hardware teenage me would have killed to have, and experience games and software the way I wished I could have back then.

But then there's the flip. In using old OSes like Windows XP, or older OS X on the Mac side, it really feels like we lost something along the way to where we are today: Software back then had a soul. XP with its iconic Bliss wallpaper and blue/green taskbar just invited you to play around with it. OS X with the Aqua UI that Steve Jobs famously said would make you want to lick it.

Even hardware had more of a soul. The G3 iMacs. The old Alienware machines. Hell, even Dell and HP knew how to have some fun (with the XPS 700 and Blackbird 002, respectively).

But more important than all that, at the time it felt like the user experience and technology were both in lockstep with eachother. Tech developments were mostly for the quality of life of all of us, giving us more methods to communicate and talk with eachother over vast distances. It felt like technology was a net good and there were high hopes for it, rather than it being seen as a net negative like it is today.

It was exciting to be a nerd, because we got revolutionary new stuff with each passing year, and it was stuff to legitimately be excited about! SATA meaning we no longer had to deal with cranky drive interfaces. Both Windows and Mac OS moving to next-generation underpinnings that made them suck way less. The advent of multiprocessing for everyone. The launch of devices like the iPod and iPhone. I could go on and on, but the point is things were exciting, and in a good way!

Then the 2010s happened, and the soul just started leaving everything. Hardware slowly began settling into this monoculture where everything started to feel the same. Everything started becoming sterile and safe. Microsoft went above and beyond with Windows 7 (which was just dripping with aesthetic) only to strip all the soul out of it with Windows 8, which I really feel was the true start of The Reckoning.

Apple joined in not long after, with the release of iOS 7 and Mac OS Yosemite adopting the flatter look, stripping out most of the soul of their software (that arguably started with Leopard but it was offset by cool things like Time Machine).

This is also when things previously thought to be either good or okay began to turn on us. Google had a leadership change and this eventually resulted in them pretty much losing everything that made them a Big Good in the 00s. Zuckerberg was always kind of a creep but Facebook was still seen as a more mature alternative to MySpace...until Facebook began turning on us, hardcore.

In addition to the soul being sucked out of everything, this is when disposable hardware really took off: MacBooks went from being relatively serviceable to becoming entirely integrated such that if something like your RAM went bad you were now the owner of a fancy aluminum and glass brick. It wasn't like the old days where you would just repair your hardware and carry on: You suffer a small failure, whole system's a brick because fuck you, pay us.

(It could [and should] be argued this is because of good 'ol capitalism. Because back in the mid 00s there was money to be made and growth to be had just...catering to everyone's needs and making good products and generally Not Being An Asshole to your customers. But as growth slowed and saturation became a problem, these companies were expected to pull profits out of their ass and had to resort to worsening their products or experiences just to make more money. Hence making hardware that was no longer built to last or be repaired.)

I think you get the point. Mid-00s tech painted this rosy picture of a bright future where things didn't suck and everyone would live in happiness forever. The mid-10s arrived and that dream is as dead as the Zune. (And now the AI bubble is just accelerating the enshittification.)

Using this old tech is to let the 13 year old kid in my head get some sustenance and enjoy himself, even for a little bit. But the 30 year old that lives in there too just looks at it and can't help but feel that deep longing, that pain that comes from realizing that there was once a time when you had hope, when the future looked bright, sunny, and was something to look forward to.

But now most everything you used to love has now been turned against you, and only exists to exploit you rather than help you. The interests and hobbies you have are either being burned down by tariffs, or burned down by AI. It's a hard feeling to sit with, and if it's one you don't have when sitting down with old stuff, I definitely envy you. Because while I enjoy messing with this stuff, it's hard to not hear the part of me that feels we were robbed of the future we should have had. 

VCF West 2025 Post-Event Thing

If you want to see the photos, they're right over here.

This year was...a lot to say the least. I don't say that in a bad way. This year was off the hook, shattering attendance records and having throngs of people roll through almost on the level of pre-Schaumburg VCF Midwest. It was nuts in the best possible way.

This year I decided to take a break from my usual thing and do Windows PCs, opting to focus in on 98/XP/7. My main goal with the latter of those three was to really make people rethink their opinions on retro/vintage, because I've grown quite tired of people who act like anything newer than their era will never be considered cool enough to sit with the rest of us.

I did eventually dial this back though, and opted to roll with Vista for the newest of my machines.

Those parameters defined, I settled on three machines: The custom Windows 98 build, the Shuttle XPC, and later the Nvidia Vista machine. The 98 machine had gone through a number of incarnations and the plan was to send it with the 1.26GHz Tualatin P3-S, but a last minute acquisition changed that plan and I opted to bump it up to a 3.2GHz Northwood Pentium 4. Mostly because I had also acquired a GeForce FX5950 Ultra, and if I was going to be in for a penny, well, I might as well be in for a pound.

This ended up working in my favor, as not only were the new digs faster, but they were also, surprisingly, more stable. I guess Intel wasn't kidding when they taglined their boards "Integrity you can build upon".

The Shuttle also saw a last minute upgrade too, as I eBay'd a Core 2 Duo E4500 for all of $5. Shuttle's documentation said (at least according to markings on my board) that the board revision I had wouldn't support a C2D, but thankfully, it POSTed after slapping the chip in anyway. I'm pleased to report it remained perfectly stable throughout the entire show, even as another exhibitor tried to kill it (I joke) with 3DMark05.

In a twist, the Nvidia PC saw a last-minute downgrade, as I had forgotten what CPU was in it. My notes said it was a Core 2 Extreme QX6700, and I didn't think this was right. So I went through the motions to get HWMonitor installed (because the BIOS identified it as a Core 2 Quad, hence the confusion) and hey, it sure was a QX6700! 

But the poor thing was also overheating. Badly. Idle temps were sitting around 80-85c and the stock Intel heatsink was really trying its best to dump all that heat off what I didn't know was a 130W TDP chip.

Thankfully, I had just acquired the very same motherboard (EVGA nForce 680i SLI) but with a Q6700 in it, which is the same clock speed but a lower TDP (95W) so hopefully this one will run cooler (and it did).

All of this handled a little ahead of schedule, I decided to have some fun. Upgrading the 98 build to a Pentium 4/FX 5950 Ultra put it right at the perfect spec to run pre-reset Windows Longhorn, so for giggles, I decided to try exactly that: Get Longhorn installed, and see if maybe I could coax beta Aero Glass into working.

This effort was successful, and if you saw my table at VCF West, then you probably gave it a spin. Hopefully. There were a LOT of people.

To make things even more fun, a friend of mine was running a similar table to mine so we just opted to join forces and make a huge Windows Megatable out of it, with machines spanning Windows 3.1 all the way up to Windows 8. It was a ton of fun.

We also had a network up thanks to the table next to us, who was also hosting a local instance of AOL Instant Messenger. As such we had put copies of AIM on all of our machines (that could run it) and this resulted in some absolutely hilarious hijinks later. We also had networked games going, and prior to last year, not as many people used them, opting to explore the OSes (and the Zunes I had brought along for the trip).

Day One

(Load-in was kinda whatever so I'm starting from the first actual day. Also, unlike last year, thank jeebus, WE HAD WORKING AIR CONDITIONING. Last year felt like running a table in a sauna.)

 

I had to dip out earlier the previous day because I had a bit of a drive ahead of me (I didn't get a hotel room as I live about an hour away from the venue) but our table was about 90% ready to go. I showed up 30 minutes early with the intent of getting the rest of the setup done, but not even 5 minutes after I walked in the hall...

"The show is now open!"

 

Wait, what.

 

Uh, that's not good, the table next to us isn't even here yet, nor is the friendo exhibiting with me, because we all thought the show began at 10am, as listed on the site. Guess not. Woo.

 

It was at this point I made kind of a snap decision to just...eschew 98, because 98 is 1. Kinda boring, and 2. Win95 is right there and is close enough, right? So let's run Longhorn for the full show! This turned out to be the best decision because a lot of people rolled by and saw it and were very confused but also very surprised when I explained what it actually was.

 

The Zunes (which for the most part worked) also got a lot of attention, with quite a number of people asking exactly what they were. Even had a few people come  by and kinda lament where things are going these days, with music streaming getting kinda shitty and longing for a return to the days of iPods and owning your stuff. The amount of people who came by and talked with me for a while on that just warmed my heart and gave me some faith in humanity.

 

Not long after show start thankfully everyone arrived and we got AIM up and running, with a group chatroom between all the machines spun up. It very quickly became unhinged in the best possible way, because hey, when you're kinda anonymous, you just let it all go, right? Thankfully nothing like, heinous was said, it was just people being absolutely nuts, kinda like we did in the 90s. Ah, nostalgia.

 

It was also kinda fun in the moment because none of this was logged, so hey, have fun now and enjoy it while it lasts because come Saturday night, this is all going away, never to be seen again. (Well, I mean, at least our instance of it. There's still nina.chat!)

 

I also had been putting out a call for people to bring their 3DSes to get some actual, real-world StreetPass pings, and sure enough, people answered the call! I got about 10 different pings, which is more than I've ever seen.

 

Prior to VCF I also had agreed--much like last year--to do some light promotion for BlueSCSI, and as a part of that printed off a bunch of BlueSCSI logo keychains. By the end of the day I had burned through about 70% of them. I seriously did not think they'd fly off the tables that fast, but they did.  

 

Now, on this day, I decided to wear a shirt to troll a little bit: The big theme for West 2025 was Amigas, because it's the 40th anniversary of the Amiga. Personally, I've no attachment to the Amiga, and honestly go out of my way to avoid it because it feels like every interaction I've had with Amiga People has never been a good one, almost reminding me of Linux People.

 

So, appropriately, I bought Cathode Ray Dude's Amogus shirt. I fully expected to get beaten to death with an Amiga-licensed baseball bat. But no. When they came around to hand out tickets for the post-event Amiga thing, they pointed at me and said "GIVE THAT MAN A GOLD CARD".

 

I guess it was for some award ceremony thing. I hadn't intended on going to it, because again, I don't really have an interest in the Amiga. But damn it, now I've gotta see this through. Or so I thought.

 

Because after the after party, we went up to go to the event, and...nothing? It was supposed to start at 8, and it was 8:40 and there was no sign of them starting anytime soon. The Amiga/040th info said the show was expected to run 2 hours, and if they began at 9 that meant I would be here until 11, with me getting home at maybe midnight. Only to wake up at 6:45 the next morning. Yeah, as CRD himself says so often, the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

 

I still would have loved to see what the award ceremony entailed. Especially if it involved pictures.

 

Though also to be fair I was getting some weird vibes from the whole thing because it was requested to be a formal event, with formalwear. As such there were a number of people in full tuxedos and it just felt...yeah. I know they said in the event info that hey, if you can't do it you can come as you are but I felt no less out of place. (Even as a good chunk of people had also shown up in like, a shirt and jeans.) 

 

The drive home was uneventful, and I proceeded to stuff my face with a baconator and get a nice, long sleep. Well, "long" insofar as I got about 5 hours, but hey, my sleep cycles are weird and mine are about 5h long, so that counts for something, right?

 

Day Two

Little did I know today would be hell. (Not in a bad way, just immensely busy!)

 

Last year, both days were kinda the same as far as attendance was concerned, so I was expecting more of that. But what changed this year was 1. The CHM doing a hell of a lot of promotion for VCF, and 2. NBC News coming out the morning before to talk to Erik (one of the showrunners) and do a quick tour of some of the exhibits. Yeah uh, I'm sure that's going to get word out, fast. And that it did.

 

The start was slow, like last year, But once the crowds began pouring in, oh man it was constant. Throngs upon throngs of people moving through the main hall. I've never been to Midwest (but would love to) but a few people who had been said that we were damn close to Midwest-level crowding before they moved to a new venue.

 

They actually had to begin turning people away because we were that full. There was no more available parking. The building was at capacity. It was pure insanity.

 

Most notably this is when a lot of the people I had hoped to meet up with were coming through. Friends from Discord, etc. But also someone I was really looking forward to meet: The one and only polpo of PicoGUS fame! He was able to get a last minute flight to attend West and I'm glad he did. One of the nicest guys you'll meet (and I'm totally not just saying that because he threw me a free PicoGUS at the end of the show).

 

The highlights of the day were having some industry people roll by, most notably someone who worked at Microsoft, someone who worked at Kioxia on SSDs (and gave me their business card!) and someone who worked at Shuttle during the time my model was in production (and we talked for a bit about it). That's really one of the things I love about doing this every year: Meeting people who worked on the things you're exhibiting and hearing their stories.

 

And also in the case of trying to really tap into the nostalgia for the mid-00s tech landscape, talking to people who miss how things were and how it truly felt like back then technology wasn't this thing that was out to get us, but rather it was there as a net good. There were a couple of people I talked to about this at length and even as an introverted autistic these conversations give me life. Because it's so nice to just meet random people that are on the same page as you.

 

Hell, there was even an awesome lady who had brought her autistic son in and he was much the same way: Interested in this old tech because he had become disillusioned with the way newer tech is. At 12 years old! It's just one of those things that gives me faith in humanity in a time where it feels like that's becoming harder to find.

 

That's part of why I wanted to do The Aero Aesthetic (I'm sorry, I just really am not a fan of the term "frutiger aero"). I saw a lot of people on TikTok fawning over the aesthetics of the time, and I wanted to do this table as a reminder of what we lost, a reminder that tech wasn't always this net negative and maybe hey, on a different timeline we'd still be enjoying the fun stuff rather than the drab, soulless husk that modern tech has become.

 

I am eternally thankful for everyone who stopped by (even the Linux Guy who politely told me Windows sucks) and had conversations, and I really wish we could have talked more because like, again, it's nice to see people on the same page. But the crowds were nuts. That said though, the amount of attention we got was nothing short of amazing and also heartwarming and if you're reading this and you were one of those people who stopped by, even for a second, thank you. You're the reason I do this.

 

The last real fun bit of the day was the final crowd wave, when I had to step out from behind my table to reboot a machine and got physically stuck outside my table and couldn't get back in due to how thick the crowd was. That was fun.

 

Load out was mostly uneventful, but also I was wiped by the end of it and only helped get one load down to the car before my back left the chat. I'm eternally thankful to my buddy who did his table alongside mine (and another friend from Discord who was volunteering) for finishing off the load out of our table because if I had to do it solo I don't know that I would have been able to, hah.

 

2026?

Given the current climate of things I don't want to make plans too far ahead because, well, everything could change in an instant, and I'd hope that I'd be able to go next year. I know near term I do tentatively want to do VCF SoCal (as a good friend lives nearby the SoCal venue and I can crash at his place, removing a lot of the cost barrier to me going), and hopefully I can swing it. 

 

But for West 2026? Well, I wanted to do PCs again. The reception to this year's table was nothing short of amazing. But it's also Apple's 50th birthday, and I'm told there will likely be a themed event to match. 

 

As such, I think I'm going to switch back to Macs for next year, because I've got a fairly overkill G4 Cube that's been just chomping at the bit to go back to VCF...

 

I really hope next year's show is as amazing as this year's was. Because holy hell. Easily a 9.5/10 show. 

VCF West 2025 - The Nvidia Trade Show PC

The Specifications 

• 2.66GHz Core 2 Quad Q6700 (4 cores, 4 threads)
• 4GB DDR2 SDRAM
• 128GB SSD/1TB HDD
• Nvidia Quadro K4000 (3GB)
• XFX 680i-SLI Motherboard (nForce chipset)
• Cooler Master Praetorian case
• Lightscribe optical drive (of course)
• 1.44MB floppy drive (if the header's there, dang it, I'm gonna use it!)

 

The Story:

This machine actually originally began as my overkill Windows XP machine. It had a relatively middle-of-the-road Core 2 Duo, with a potato-tier GT640 (that got moved over to the Shuttle!) that would have probably sucked in the context of the year that it released, but it's good for us because it has XP drivers and runs XP-era games beautifully. I was even able to get the "holy shit!" UT2004 Easter Egg (for maxing out your settings) and it ran great!

 

Unfortunately, the main case I had ready for this machine wouldn't fit. It was some fun Corsair case that looked like it should take a full ATX motherboard, but in fact only took mATX. Boo. So I had to grab this beige case that looked like it was from the AT-ATX transitional period to make it all work. This case was not meant for such high performing parts, so airflow was...bad. Not bad enough, yet. But bad.

 

The previous motherboard was a Gigabyte EP35-DS3L, and I liked it because it had modern stuff but also a bunch of legacy I/O. The board was a bit quirky though, as it would randomly refuse to boot and required a couple of manual BIOS flashes in an EEPROM programmer to get it to act right. It also had some bent pins on the CPU socket, but these were redundant power pins and not shorting, so that shouldn't have affected it.

 

Fortunes changed when I found another board in my stash, one I had completely forgotten about: The aforementioned XFX 680i board. With a Core 2 Quad in it. Oh yes. Now we're talking. Better yet, this board still supported XP, so we were pretty much good to go to stick this in and have the ultimate Windows XP machine!

 

Of course, this is the point at which the previous case started presenting airflow issues, so I put out a call on the Bay Area Discord and thankfully there was an answer: Compgeke had a selection of mid-2000s cases and among them was the Praetorian with a laser-etched acrylic window that had Nvidia's old logo and their slogan. This was perfect. Perfect.

 

Before all this happened though, I needed a GPU for the Shuttle SS30G2, which was being built up in tandem. The GT640 didn't run super hot and could be reduced down to a single slot with some difficulty, so it was the perfect GPU. Leaving me in the lurch for another GPU for this system.

 

Thankfully, it wouldn't be long: Onii (who's running the table next to mine!) offered to keep an eye out for good candidates at ewaste, and found a few Quadro cards, among them a K4000. These cards were never meant for gaming, sure, but they can definitely play older games perfectly fine!

 

The Quadro acquired and installed, I installed the drivers, held my breath, and restarted the system, expecting a load of artifacting and a broken heart. But it worked! And it worked well! Short of the fan bouncing around because someone robbed the screws. Feh. I was able to find replacements.

 

I did pull the card back out and cleaned/repasted it (which it certainly needed, there was a carpet in there!) and hopefully now it'll survive for at least another 11 years.

 

Wait, Vista? Why?

When I began planning this exhibit last year, my original plan was to just do something controversial and bring Windows 7, mostly because there has been a LOT of nostalgia about the Frutiger Aero aesthetic (which is a term that makes me uneasy, which is why I went out of my way to avoid using it in the exhibit title) flying around social media. But also because I'm really tired of retro gatekeepers who try and tell people what is and isn't retro/vintage.

 

This sentiment was mostly brought on by some in the vintage Mac community swearing up and down that despite turning 20 years old very soon, Intel Macs will never "be one of us". I think this notion is, frankly, bullshit. Time marches on, and all things eventually become vintage.

 

Windows 7--despite just recently falling out of third party software support--strikes me as pretty damn vintage. It's almost 20 years old, it's a product from a bygone era of computing (remember when technology wasn't just developed to exploit us for every nickel and dime we have?) and people are actively going nuts over the aesthetic. Plus I wanted to challenge the people who try to say "things aren't vintage".

 

But after running a poll on Mastodon, I had a change of heart. Vista, if you think about it, was a fun little blip in Windows' history. It launched in 2006 (2007 if you weren't an OEM), really lived and breathed the aesthetic that Windows 7 became known for, and went largely forgotten after 7 launched and we danced in the streets, finally able to ditch our XP installs for something good again.

 

So, screw it. Why not Vista? The OS that walked so 7 could run? It would be an experience for me, too, because while I did run Vista back in the day, I was still in high school and my parents suddenly took a hard turn into strictness and I wasn't allowed to have free use of a computer anymore. So I never got to really actually sit with it.

 

So, what about you?

Perfect segue into this: I first got into Vista when a friend of mine at school who had a far larger internet pipe than I did managed to grab the RTM version, and we installed it on our machines. He had a MacBook, I had a MacBook Pro. We were actually kind of impressed with it. Aero Glass looked cool as hell. The whole OS had some weird design decisions but ultimately the coat of fresh paint was much appreciated.

 

As I said, though, this was when my parents (well, mom and step-dad) decided to take this sudden and harsh turn into being insanely strict, so I never got to really dig deep into Vista because that MacBook Pro was never allowed to be in my possession. I was only ever allowed to use it if my schoolwork permitted it and no more than that. (It was bought for college and my parents were strict about that. Even though I got to have tons of fun with it back when I first got it, before they became strict. Yay.)

 

Past that I only ever dabbled with it lightly but by the time I had graduated/moved out/etc, we were in the Windows 7 era.

 

It was interesting though, because in school I did cozy up to people adjacent to the IT department and found out that the summer I graduated that they'd be ripping out all the old computers (it was some eccentric mix of Win3.1/95/NT/98/2000 machines) and replacing them with Vista machines, and because of this they needed to spin up their own Windows activation server. There was talk about how much fun that was going to be.

 

Part of me wished I could have stayed another year just to watch the absolute chaos unfold once the summer was over. 

I did get another shake with Vista, though it didn't last long: I went to community college and took some computer science classes, and as a part of that I was able to get a copy of Vista Ultimate for very, VERY cheap. I ended up dropping that class (and my laptop would end up getting stolen not long after) so my time with Vista was again cut quite short. By the time I had another laptop (sharing a laptop with my then-girlfriend) the 7 beta had been released and I was already onto that. 

VCF West 2025 Builds - The Shuttle SS30G2?

The Specs

• Core 2 Duo E4500 (2.2GHz)
• 2GB of DDR2 SDRAM
• 256GB SSD
• Floppy drive
• Nvidia GeForce GT640 (with 3D-printed cooler!)
• Sound Blaster Live! PCI 
• Windows XP Pro SP3 

The Story

This was a machine I never really expected to get, but it kinda fell into my lap. 

 

Zhinu (who's doing the Lisa table this year!) actually bought it from ewaste and had a bit of a time with it, so they offered it up for free and I took it because these little systems from the mid-00s are kinda neat to me. Products of a time gone by, when we'd go to LAN parties to play multiplayer games because the internet wasn't yet super reliable for this and voice communication wasn't as prevalent as it is now.

 

Unfortunately, as I said, Zhinu had a bit of a time with it, and I had some work to do. The original motherboard was bad, so a new one was acquired (which is from a SS30G2) but the chassis and PSU are from an entirely different Shuttle model. Thankfully the board just dropped in and worked. It was also recapped, so that was one less thing I had to deal with.

 

The problem it was having with me is that it would constantly bootloop when started and there was a video card installed. I did all the troubleshooting steps you could imagine (including rigging up a much more potent PSU just to make sure it wasn't a pending PSU failure, and it was not). I finally decided to just rip the whole works apart and reflowed the capacitor solder joints because usually in situations like this when work was performed I like to go back over said work and make sure none of the fixes decided to helpfully undo themselves.

 

Oh hey, cold solder joints! Now, to be clear, I'm not talking smack at those who did the work here: These are some beefy ground planes, and they suck to work with. I had to crank my solder station way up to even have a snowball's chance here. I reflowed them and the system seemed to be a lot more consistent, though still quite angry with certain cards. Specifically, I had acquired an 8400GS from a thrift store, and the card looked like it had failed, with artifacting everywhere.

 

But I later found putting the card into the Vista build that the card was just fine, it was something in the Shuttle not getting along with it. I did the usual troubleshooting (as in, reducing the configuration as much as possible, removing all RAM but the minimum) and surprise, surprise, it was a RAM failure manifesting as GPU failure. I took out the 4GB of DDR2 and put in two 1GB modules and suddenly it was completely fine, and the old 8400GS worked great. But I wanted more.

 

So I got the GT640 back out (that previously had issues in here) and it actually worked! Only there was a tiiiiny issue with the Shuttle in this case. 

 

The PCI-E slot is on the very edge of the motherboard, meaning the only GPUs that'll fit in here are single-wide ones. The GT640, as is, was double-wide to accommodate a fan. If I popped the fan off it would fit, but I doubt this card was low power enough to survive passively cooled.

 

But wait! I have the magic of basic CAD knowledge and a 3D printer! I fired up Tinkercad and got to work, and eventually made a really janky cooling baffle to direct airflow over the GT640's heatsink. It looked like garbage, sure, but it worked!

 

For a fan I just retrieved a blower fan from one of the many dead video cards in my parts bin.

 

While I had the Shuttle apart I also stuck a 256GB Samsung SSD in, which is vast overkill. But it also means I don't have to worry about upgrading the storage for a good while, I hope!

 

Finally, topping the whole works off, I noticed a nice sight on the side of the motherboard, right under the PSU: A floppy header! And I had a slim floppy cable that came out of an SFF Dell Optiplex that fit perfectly. While I could have done like my other systems and put a quick-swap bay in the 3.5" bay, I chose to make this a Real Computer (uxwbill reference) and toss in a floppy drive. Because why not?

 

Update, August 2025: Right before VCF West I decided to try a last minute upgrade: Seeing if this machine would take a Core 2 Duo. After all, it was running a Pentium Dual Core (which was an Allendale chip, like the early C2D). 

 

Unfortunately, while I had such a CPU on hand (E4600), the Shuttle didn't like it. Looking deeper, it seemed Shuttle only certified board revision BOM14 and newer for C2Ds. Feh. Oh well, the E4500 is only $5 on eBay, let's roll the dice.

 

It got here, I threw it in, and imagine my surprise when the Shuttle POSTed and actually booted with the E4500 in place. Given the E4600 is the very same chip with a slightly higher clock speed, this seemed surprising (or my E4600 is dead). Either way, I was happy to have a full fledged C2D in here, now, and thankfully it's still thermally sound. 

So, what about your XP-erience?

Shockingly, despite having a relatively poor upbringing, I got in on the XP fun fairly early on. I got a burned install disc from a friend of mine, and got to work installing on a computer that had been given to me: One of those HP "bubble" PCs of the late 90s. Had a relatively pedestrian 600MHz Celeron in it and 128MB of RAM. But man oh man was XP a breath of fresh air compared to ME (which is what the system came with).

 

I remember spending lots of time trying to figure out how to get around activation (and eventually being successful), and also spending lots of time sitting in front of Windows Media Player watching the visualizations just go. Also played my fair share of Unreal Tournament, The Sims, Starcraft and Diablo II. Though for a lot of games I actually used the "family" computer because it had an actual video card in it, versus the integrated video of the HP system I was on. Eventually, that family computer (the Deskpto I mention in the 98 build post) would also get bumped to XP.

 

Eventually I'd step up to a much better system, a Toshiba Tecra M2 that was rescued out of a dumpster. This would be my first time experiencing XP properly, not just on a machine that could barely run it.

 

Around the same time, though, the school I went to would build up a media lab, and in it were a bunch of Sony Vaio desktops also running XP. Despite the fact that I started out on 98, by far I've had the most exposure to XP. As much nostalgia as I carry for 98, I really do think I carry the most for XP by a long shot because it was the OS I got to play around with through most of high school.

 

Even when I would later get a MacBook Pro, I'd dual boot XP on it just to be able to play all the games I previously played but turned damn near all the way up because look, I have a powerful computer now! 

VCF West 2025 - The Windows 98 Machine

The Current Specs (as of 7/15/25)

• Intel D875PBZ Motherboard
• 3.2GHz Northwood Pentium 4 (Socket 478)
• Nvidia GeForce FX5950
• 128GB SSD/1TB HDD
• 2x DVD drives (one of which is a burner)
• 1.44MB Floppy
• Aureal Vortex 2 sound card
• BlueSCSI v2 (for optical drive emulation)
  
• AHA-2940UW SCSI card

Given this is the system that started my Windows PC retrocomputing arc, it's only appropriate that it has the most effort put behind it and the longest story to tell, with multiple chapters. 

The First Incarnation: Dell Dimension 4100

This machine began as a thrift-find Dimension 4100. I spotted it for pretty cheap ($8 or so) and scooped it to give to a friend, who handed it back to me some years later as he was looking to downsize. One day in 2023, I got this itch to play some SimCity 2000, as the Mac version of it didn't allow quite the number of cheats, so I got the 4100 down and began to dig into it. 

Another motivator was that a fellow retro collector was looking to downsize and was giving away a large chunk of extra parts, among them a Radeon 9250 AGP. I needed to stick this into a system, so why not the 4100? 

This system originally had a Pentium III Coppermine (933MHz) and a ATI Rage 128 Pro, so this would have been a hell of an upgrade on the video front. I got it all dialed in, and for the most part, it was great. I could play all manner of games on this system and they handled pretty damn well.

 

I also added in the various cards that would stick around for a bit at this point, like the SIL3114 SATA card.

 

But in building up this system, it gave me the itch for something better. This was fueled by the fact that the CPU fan was beginning to go, and in these systems the CPU fan and CPU cooling baffle are all one unit and not easily separated and replaceable. The proprietary nature of the 4100 made me feel like this system was a dead end, and I should think about something else, and thankfully something else happened not long after.

The Second Incarnation: Asus CUV4X Custom Build 

Seeing as we were still in the land of Coppermine here, not much changed in the CPU department, but it was nice to be on a standard ATX system with standard components, unlike the Dimension 4100. I brought the 933MHz P3 forward, as well as all of the cards and drives.

 

The case was some generic beat up beige case, but hey, at least it was standard.

 

This was kind of a successful failure as this was the product of me seeking out a Tualatin system, but again, it was still a win, because I got closer, and I had a system I could build up rather than being stuck due to proprietary garbage.

 

It didn't take long for fortunes to change, though...

 

The Third Incarnation: TUSL2-C and Lian-Li case

I doubled down on my efforts to find a Tualatin-capable board and thankfully one popped up at ewaste and I was able to broker a trade for it. The only thing stopping me was that the board I ended up with had been hit hard by the capacitor plague.

 

Decided I wasn't going to just give up, pulled the offending caps off the board, and placed a Mouser order to get it all done. This all hit at a really messed up time though, as I had to essentially move out of my room (floors getting replaced) and as such my garage workspace was all sorts of messed up. I also caught COVID around this time, so that was fun.

 

Despite it all, I got the caps replaced, and at the end of it had a fully functional TUSL2-C! The CPU on it was a 1.2GHz Celeron, and while that would do for now, I hungered for more. A quick trip to eBay rendered results: A 1.26GHz Pentium III-S. The III-S chips were notable for having double the L2 cache as the regular Pentium III/Celeron chips. I would have loved to get a 1.4GHz III-S but alas, they're quite pricey so I opted to just hang back. I mean, Win98 was already going to fly on this machine.

 

Plus, I mean, this was a Tualatin Pentium III. They're known for running pretty cool. There's likely some room for overclocking, so that's exactly what I did, and as of current it's sitting at a 1.4GHz overclock and perfectly stable.

 

By this point I was still using this beige, unassuming chassis. Cool if I wanted a sleeper PC, but man. It'd be nice to have something cool. That's when the perfect case showed up at an ewaste facility I frequent: an aluminum Lian-Li case, much like the one LGR uses for the Megaluminum Monster.

 

Appropriately, it even had green fans installed in it. Little on the nose, there.

 

Next up was the video card: While the Radeon 9250 was getting the job done for the most part, something better would be nice, as this card's a little on the weaker side. I mentioned this within earshot of Tech Ambrosia, who suggested the GeForce 6600GT, as they were relatively low-key but still performant.

 

This ended with a challenge: She bought one on eBay, and told me I could have it if I could meet her at VCF SoCal. Alas, I wasn't able to make it (LOTS of life stuff happened around SoCal in 2024) but she gladly handed it off to a friend of mine who was in attendance and willing to hold it.  

 

With that, the third incarnation was completed, and it was awesome. There were quirks here and there, but for the most part, this system ran like the wind. 

A New Challenger Approaches! (The Fourth Incarnation)

As I write this, I'm in the final stages of prepping for VCF West, and, well...developments happened.

 

Initially, I planned on transitioning this system to an AMD Athlon XP-based setup, with a Asus A7N8X motherboard and Athlon XP 3200+, which would net a fair boost over the Tualatin of before. I had even acquired a swank Zalman cooler! This system was going to rock, but given the difficulties in getting this system stable for VCF, I wanted to wait until after West to actually install everything.

 

(Brief intermission: In the quest to get this system stable I actually downgraded video cards, moving over to an Dell OEM Radeon 9700TX, figuring the drivers would be better and it would be more period correct, which would hopefully mean more stability. Alas, Direct3D is just cursed, and using OpenGL ended up being the fix.) 

 

However, as fate would have it...I went to the ewaste facility a few days ago as of this writing, and boy oh boy did fate have something in store: I was there to acquire a case for Windows Across the Ages (the table next to mine): An old, mid-00s Alienware. What I didn't know was that there would be some good hardware in it, acquired for a steal: A 3.2GHz Northwood P4 system and a GeForce FX5950. Uh. Yeah. This changes plans a bit. Don't get me wrong, the Athlon is still a good system but at least according to old articles, the 3.2GHz Northwood (especially at 800MHz bus speeds) lays the smackdown on the Athlon.

 

But more lucrative was the FX5950. These cards are NOT cheap, and here I am with one for far less than eBay prices (especially since the friendo running Windows Across the Ages agreed to go halfsies with me on the whole lot). 10000% this card was going to the show provided it worked (and it did, thankfully), and if I'm in for a penny, might as well be in for a pound, right?

 

I decided to just throw caution to the wind and transition everything over to the Pentium 4 board. This had several side benefits:

• Integrated SATA that's separate from the PCI bus so it isn't sucking down that bandwidth
• Integrated Gigabit Ethernet (since my gigabit card died)
• Integrated USB 2.0 (no need to burn a PCI slot for it)
• It just looks cool, it's a black board.

Of course, getting everything working wasn't the easiest thing (and this board doesn't support dual floppy drives so I had to pull the 5.25" 1.2MB drive), and the whole escapade caused me to launch a side thing where I write my documentation, you can find that here. 

But, in the end, it all works, and as I type this it's currently playing UT99 and is plenty happy with it. 

So, what about your experience with Windows 98?

This is to answer a question that I'm sure is in the back of peoples' heads: Why are you nostalgic about Windows 98?

 

It really was one of the first OSes I used when I really began gaining consciousness and started actually knowing how to use a computer. It was the late 90s and I lived in a not-so-great town with my mom and we got one of those cheapo HP Celeron boxes with 98 onboard. Not sure how we ever ended up with it. All I really remember is that it came with some fun home design software and I spent hours playing it like I would The Sims on the Compaq Deskpro we'd get a number of years later.

 

This would continue later on, in the early 00s: Right after life kinda upended everything (my sister ended up moving back in with us after my father had passed away) one of the things we got from a neighbor was an old Compaq Deskpro, which had a super fast (joking) Slot-1 Pentium III in it. Along for the ride was Windows 98, of course.

 

That 98 install carried us for a long, long time until eventually we Did Some Things and upgraded to XP, which despite the relatively low specs (it did only have 128MB of RAM, after all) was a breath of fresh air mostly due to being NT-based.

 

I did put in a lot of hours into various games on that Deskpro. The Sims. Diablo II (so many play discs broken). Planescape: Torment. Divine Divinity. Unreal and Unreal Tournament. Starcraft. That Deskpro did eventually become mine after the family computer was upgraded to a newer (but still old) Compaq Presario. At which point I threw an ATI TV Wonder USB on it and made it a makeshift TV, too. 

Quit The Shaming, FFS

This is a quick one.

This month the Switch 2 launched. It's been selling big. I personally am not buying one because I'm effectively priced out and too broke to buy one. I really hate that Nintendo opened the door to $80 games, too. 

But hey, for those that bought one and enjoy it? Have fun with it! On paper for me, it fixes everything I hated about the original Switch. If I had more disposable income I'd sure as hell buy one too.

This isn't about what I think of the Switch 2, though: Rather it's about how some people just have this reaction to a bunch of people buying it, wondering where everyone found all this money, and worse, shaming them for buying one, usually followed up with something like "so you'll buy a Switch 2 but you won't give money to $SomeCharityHere, I see how it is".

I say this from the perspective of someone in the US, but please: sod all the way off with this mentality.

The last few months have been grueling if you're someone who's not white, not cisgender, not able-bodied, and not a dude. Things didn't go well last election, and the minute it was called for the current administration, at least for me, I went into survival mode, and that means both mental and physical.

Years ago, as I was effectively killing myself at the tail end of high school and entry into adulthood as a T1 diabetic, my doctor had to beat an important lesson into my head: You first, then everyone else. I know, it sounds greedy on the surface. But the intent of the message was that you're not going to be helpful to anyone if you're dead because you put your own mental and physical health on the backburner so many times that it ends in you dying or severely incapacitated.

And since the election went the way that it did, putting people like myself and many of my friends in danger, we're now locked in survival mode because our lifelines could be cut at any time, and that is not--and I cannot emphasize this enough--is NOT a comfortable thought to have to live with. Our mental health as at an all-time low, because the adage that tomorrow is not guaranteed is landing a lot harder than it usually does these last few months.

If buying yourself a treat, or a distraction like a Switch 2 helps you through a mental tailspin and helps you relax, by all means. That's what Animal Crossing did back in 2020 when we got violently hurled into this pandemic we're in. It helped a LOT of us (myself included) process all of the goddamn everything that was happening around us.

It is not your place to give someone grief because they don't have the mental capacity to put themselves on the back burner for your cause, and shame everything they do because of it. Lots of people are at their mental breaking points with all of the everything going on with each passing day, and if purchasing themselves a little distraction will help keep them from crossing the despair event horizon and/or causing harm to themselves, that's entirely valid, and I will reiterate: It is not your damn place to shame them for it.

Leave them alone. Let people enjoy things.

Always Angry, Never Happy

There has been Quite A Lot of Discourse on Bluesky in the last 48h and while it's too much to talk about here and arguably outside the scope of this blog, I wanted to talk about a component of it.

There's this sect of people that I've seen called the Always Angry and Never Happy crowd. The terminology is definitely apt, because the defining characteristic of this crowd is even if you give them what they're asking for, or start to move in the direction they want you to move, instead of acknowledging this in any capacity they'll instead move the goalposts and act like they got nothing for their efforts.

Maybe I'm wired differently, but if I were on the receiving end of this type of criticism my response would be to go back to doing what I was doing previously, because it's clear that even if I make an effort to do what is being demanded of me, nothing I do will ever be good enough. Why bother?

That said, don't misconstrue this as me saying that if a company or individual starts moving in a direction you like that you suddenly have to shower them in praise and act like they're suddenly the best ever. What I am saying is that you have to acknowledge their efforts. Praise them doing the right thing. Ease up on the gas a little. But continue pushing them. Don't act as if they gave you absolutely nothing and continue being just as angry at them as you were prior.

This is one of those things I'll agree with Louis Rossmann on, because he said the same thing throughout many of his Apple videos. He'll rightfully criticize them, but also praise them for when they move in the right direction on right to repair. I do this, even. I will be relentlessly critical of them over their handling of AI, but one of the things I will gladly give them is--well, at least for a bit--that AI was entirely an opt-in affair. They didn't force it on you like everyone else is. (But now, sadly, they are. You can still shut it off after the fact, though, and it's unfortunate to admit that this is still better than Apple's contemporaries.)

Point is, if you're not willing to stop and at least show someone some appreciation that they're taking steps to do the thing you want them to do, do not be surprised if they just stop listening to you entirely and/or go somewhere where their efforts will get some level of praise. 

Apple's Comeuppance

I really, really hope the day is approaching where Apple finally, finally gets the comeuppance they so deserve. The day is near, I can feel it, but Apple being what they are won't go down without a fight.

I am referring to the ruling as of recently that Apple could no longer do their anti-steering bullshit (in the US) with the App Store. You know, that thing where apps were not even allowed to so much as hint they could take payment outside of the app, or they'd be kicked off. All because Apple forced you to use its payment processor, which takes 30% off the top of all transactions, to start.

I've long felt that Apple's payments system could very well compete on its own merits. Apple Pay is extremely convenient, you've likely got your cards on file with Apple already. No need to enter new card info or anything. Apple manages your subscriptions, and is generally pretty good about canceling when you ask them to.

But, nope. Apple until recently forced you to use their payment system, and forced you to take a gag order saying you couldn't tell customers to go elsewhere to get a better deal at the cost of convenience.

This was bad enough from the start (for example, you can't buy ebooks from Amazon and the like because Apple believes it is entitled to a 30% tax on those items), but it became worse once Apple entered the services game and began competing with TV/Music streaming services.

For example, if we compare any music service to Apple Music, Apple has an unfair advantage with this 30% fee. Apple doesn't charge itself the 30% fee, of course. So if Apple Music is $10/mo, to compete and look good, I have to also price my service at $10/mo. Except in this case, Apple is now making that full $10/mo (minus credit card processing fees) where I'm only making $7 (minus credit card processing fees AND the yearly $100 I'd have to pay to Apple for the ability to deploy apps).

Apple is forcing me into a losing situation. Either I take a loss to look competitive, or I raise my price by 30% to make up the shortfall and look worse by comparison. This isn't even considering that Apple's services come preinstalled on their phones. Feels like Internet Explorer all over again. Services that compete with Apple's are at an inherent disadvantage from the get go and the 30% fee is just twisting the knife.

It was only a matter of time before Apple got taken to task for this, and thankfully, the ball is rolling. The EU did their thing with the Digital Markets Act, and now the US is (thankfully) catching up. Apple has tried to play their malicious compliance card, by allowing external transactions but trying to say those are also subject to a 27% fee, but fortunately it seems like the legal system isn't about to let them get away with their hubris.

Now, with regards to this, there have been a number of Takes(tm) and I wanted to talk about those.

Apple should be entitled to SOME of that money, after all, they provide so much value to developers!

They sure do. And those developers pay for it. That's what the $99/year pays for. That's what it always paid for. Yes, I'd argue there's room for change here, specifically that bigger companies should pay a higher fee, as $99 is a rounding error to them. That much I can agree on. Other than that, app developers are already paying the fee Apple has asked of them for the services they provide, that $99.

This take also implies that developers--even paid ones--are freeloading off Apple's ecosystems. Hardly the case. Developers themselves provide value in the apps they develop for Apple's platforms, giving people reason to buy iPhones. You know what happens when you can't get developers to bring their apps to your device? You die off like Windows Phone.

Apps in and of themselves provide value to Apple. They enrich the ecosystem. To act like they don't is a vast disservice to developers.

Why is it okay for Sony and Microsoft to do this, though?

1. A game console is not a general purpose device like a phone is, or a computer. The two are not comparable. A game console does games and maybe some media, but not anything near what a general purpose device like an iPhone can do.

2. Sony and Microsoft don't force you to use their stores for subscriptions. 

For the sake of this piece, I actually went and tried to purchase a Spotify and Apple Music subscription on my PS5. You know what happened? Both apps directed me to go to a web browser and sign up there. Neither app directed me to process my transaction through the Playstation Store.

Sony nor Microsoft issue a gag order on developers telling them they can't inform people to go sign up in a web browser. Apple, until recently, did.

To make matters even better, you can also purchase games outside of the consoles' respective stores. Both consoles (if you buy the appropriately equipped versions) can take physical media which you can buy from your store of choice. And then resell. Or lend to a friend. Try that on the App Store. 

But what about Google?

This is less of an issue on the Google side because of multiple factors: Android has always been friendly toward sideloading so you can do a complete end run around Google if you so please. Look at Amazon, they made their whole damn Fire ecosystem on top of Android with their own app store! 

But even if you stick with Google Play, one could argue this is less egregious because you know what Google charges to allow you to deploy apps to the Play Store? $25. One time. No subscription required at all. And far as I know, it isn't illegal over there to tell users they can sign up for your subscription in a web browser.

(Some apps used to even allow you to sign up using an in-app browser, but I think Google began swatting that down.)

Nonetheless, this isn't really an issue over on Google's side if only because you have a mechanism to get around Google if you so pleased. Apple doesn't have that luxury. 

But Apple is going to take such a loss on the App Store! They can't possibly afford to keep it running!

Eh. Debatable. Apple makes money hand over fist. They're one of the most valuable companies out there. They'll be fine. They're not some plucky indie startup that needs to keep the lights on. Apple is a monolithic megacorp. They have loadsamoney. They'll be fine. This ain't the 90s.

But I'm an Apple investor and--

Oh, please, pull your head out of your ass. 

I vehemently hate the Xbox Controller.

There is a special kind of hate that I have.

It's toward those things that are actually excellent pieces of equipment on the surface. Something that gives you bliss, but due to something dumb, some little flaw, it's completely unusable. It's 99.99 percent of the way there, but it's that 0.01 percent that kills it.

For me, one of those things is the Xbox controller. I originally wrote this with the Elite Series 2 in mind, but really, this extends back to the original Xbox One controller.

I think the Xbox One/Series controllers are--ergonomically--some of the best controllers ever made as far as my hands go. The button action is nice and tactile. The grips are comfy. The stick layout mirrors that of the GameCube, where the left thumbstick is right where your left thumb naturally rests. (This has been one of my gripes with Sony's controllers for ages now, I have never EVER liked where the thumbsticks are on their controllers. I've grown to mostly tolerate them.)

This isn't surprising, after all--the Xbox 360 controller was one of the best controllers of its time from an ergonomics standpoint. The One/Series controllers merely build upon that.

Where the whole thing utterly falls apart, though, is how the internals are designed. Rather than having the entire controller on a single PCB, the One (and Series) controllers all use a sandwiched design with a front and rear PCB, splitting the controller's functions between the two. For the most part this works, but where it gets weird is the face buttons.

I assume to accommodate the very aggressive curve in the design of the One controller, the B button interfaces with the rear PCB, and is the only face button to do so. The other three face buttons interface with the front PCB, and those are the ones that gave given me trouble.

You see, my main issue with the One controller is that you really have to press down on these buttons to get them to register a consistent press. If you press them slightly off axis, the button may not register properly, even as you've gotten the tactile feedback that communicates yes, you've pressed the button. This may not be an issue if you're a gamer with bigger hands and a tendency to press down hard on these buttons. But if you're someone with a lighter touch and smaller hands, this becomes a problem.

I've noticed this problem getting worse with wear, yet it doesn't seem to be fixed with the usual refurbishment process. I've cleaned up the pads, cleaned up the rubber membrane, but yet the problem persists.

I first noticed this with my Xbox One X's controller back in 2020. The controller was well out of warranty, so I took a leap and bought a Series controller from Target because they were on sale and they had a blue one. Initially? It was much improved! 

But a few months later, it started happening again.  This time, damn it all, I was going to make Microsoft answer for this. Except that never happened. You know why? Because--at least at the time--Xbox controllers purchased separately from a console only have a warranty of 90 days. You heard that right. (Verge article talks about extending the warranty for the Elite S2, but it's there to confirm that yes, the warranty was at one point at least 90 days.)

I threw the controller in a drawer and never really thought about it again for a good long while. I picked it up to play some Elden Ring mostly because the way it fudges inputs doesn't really affect that game so much, but it's still just disappointing to look at. The Xbox controller is such a damn comfy controller and would be one of my favorites if it was just internally designed better.

But how? Simple. Look at Nintendo and Sony, and look at how the PCB contacts for the buttons are designed, and copy them. The way Nintendo and Sony design their contacts, it's able to detect a button press even if you don't press it perfectly. As long as you press the button down and get that tactile bump, the button has been pressed. It's not intermittent at all.

Microsoft themselves are capable of this, because they've shipped good controllers with good buttons! Yet for some reason, they've lost the plot entirely with the One controllers.

Anyway, this would have ended here, but I'm a glutton for punishment and acquired an Elite Series 2 from a good friend of mine. As you can probably expect, in short order, it began having the very same issues, except much worse. I had to press the buttons dead on or they wouldn't register properly.

But instead of just shrugging, I decided I wanted to try and fix this. No one has found a real fix for these, but there was a promising one of trying to find some way to put a spacer in between the membrane and button to try and increase pressure on the membrane when it pushes down. I tried this, and while it improved the problem, it didn't fix it. It just went from "significantly worse than my Series controller" to "a touch worse than my Series controller".

As insult to injury though, I decided to try dusting off the Elite S2 to give it a run in Helldivers 2, since I could see the paddles being immensely useful. Guess what happened? The damned sticks began to drift.

I simply do not have words for the level of rage I felt. Not at the friend who gave me this controller, but at Microsoft, who seems hell bent on designing great controllers with a tragic flaw that they seemingly just completely refuse to fix. People have been talking about these issues for years. Years! And nothing has changed. The controllers still have the same damn flaw. And considering the Elite Series 2 retails for $180, this is downright criminal.

If you go looking on reddit for people with problematic controllers, they're everywhere. You'd think these things have damn near the failure rate of the Xbox 360. And Microsoft's solution is to just replace them with something that is just as defective.

Guess they never understood the definition of insanity.

A quick journey: The Compaq Deskpro PD1005

This is one of those posts I'm writing down more for my reference, but hey, you might get some enjoyment out of it, too.

I wanted to make note of this because, well, Compaq wasn't super great at differentiating their Deskpro line, at least from the front. There were so. many. computers. that only said "Compaq Deskpro" if you looked at the front. The only time you'd get a model number is if you looked at the bottom, or the back, and oftentimes photos didn't have this information.

But before we go on, why do this? 

Because the PD1005 was my first "real" computer, so to speak. It was the family computer we had as I was starting the journey into becoming a computer nerd. Sure, I had an old Macintosh LC as my "personal" computer, but that machine couldn't go on the internet or do anything modern by early 00's standards. Or play any "modern" games.

I cut my teeth on it in a LOT of ways. I learned a lot on it. I played a lot of old games I cherish to this day on it. I wouldn't necessarily call it a grail machine (mostly because I'm not actively seeking it out, it's a behemoth of a machine), but it's one I've been wanting to know the exact identity of for a minute due to the aforementioned thing about Compaq being not-so-great at labeling their machines in an easily identifiable way. 

I set out to Google, knowing only the CPU's specs: It was a 450-500MHz Pentium III, Slot I. Desktop form factor (so it lays horizontally, such that a monitor can sit on the chassis). After scrolling through a bunch of models that definitely weren't it (have I mentioned that Compaq called a LOT of computers "Deskpro"?) I eventually landed on something that looked like an exact match on eBay. And there, on the underside, barely readable was the model number I was after: PD1005. 

With that number in hand, I refined my search, and found more pictures. This was it. Everything matched. Including the motherboard, which had a really interesting layout (and the slot 1...slot laid on its side rather than vertically like most motherboards I've seen). 

You might ask why I care so damn much, and yeah, this really is a personal thing. Like I said, this is more for me, not for you. But this Deskpro in particular seems to be one of the less common ones at least, because if you try to look for a Deskpro you're either going to get the tower model, or the SFF model that seems to be extremely common. The big-ass desktop model doesn't seem to come up super often.

The only missing piece of this puzzle was what video card mine had: These Deskpros don't have onboard video, and used this weirdly proprietary AGP slot for video. It used this oddball double-wide half-height slot that I think is very proprietary to these Deskpros: 

 

(Once again, thanks eBay for having this info, somehow!)

And given the timeframe and seemingly relatively few cards made this way, I think this is it: It was this very card, a 3D Rage Pro Turbo.

Interestingly enough, the card still seems standards compliant otherwise, as I've seen (whilst searching) other cards with the same PCB dimensions and Compaq markings but with a standard bracket on them. I do wonder if it would be possible to finagle a standard AGP card in here some way, some how. 

Maybe if I ever stumble into one of these systems. And, y'know, if I had the room for it.

But with all that, I now know the identity of the computer that really got me started out on, well, everything. The computer that saw me through many, many, MANY hours of Diablo II, UT99, The Sims, and Planescape: Torment. That damn Compaq Deskpro PD1005.