I was just entering adolescence when this computer showed up in my house. It was a massive upgrade from the old Pentium II and had that newfangled Windows XP! I spent many hours on it in those formative years, surfing the web with the new DSL connection, playing Star Wars Battlefront, and messing around with different emulators that the old PII couldn't handle.

However, time was not kind to this machine. The Dells of this era were, frankly, complete garbage. The plastic creaked and groaned with the slightest touch, the power supply was woefully underpowered and had to be replaced under warranty, and the decision to use RDRAM killed any chance of upgrading it affordably ($200 for an extra 512MB... in 2009, six years later!?!?). It started to struggle under the weight of later XP service packs and a huge amount of bloatware which I was powerless to remove at the time since it was a shared family computer. I eventually drifted away from it towards my Athlon 64 system once I was allowed internet in my room, and it ended up in the original Basement Lab(tm) in 2009. At that point, I was messing around with Hackintoshing and turned it into a respectable OS X 10.4 system (10.5 didn't support the Radeon 9700 on Intel). That was fun! (Note that the weird "Dell OEM" Sound Blaster Live, which is a kneecapped version of the card that doesn't work with normal SBLive drivers, never worked in OS X, but a $5 USB audio adapter did the trick)

Over the years though, the thing really started to fall to bits. The fans stopped working, the front USB ports died, and the optical drives seized up. And I STILL couldn't stand that creaky plastic. I ended up scavenging the useful parts and took the rest down to electronics recycling. The CPU is in my spare CPU drawer and the Radeon got flashed to a PowerPC ROM and went into my G4 MDD. Anyone need some RDRAM?

May 2005

August 2006

April 2009

I have a long history with Packard Bells, and so I have a soft spot for these FrogDesign 3x3 cases. Thus, it was inevitable that I would end up with more than one of them. This one was supposed to have a Pentium 75 in it, but I was pleasantly surprised to open this one and find that the stock 75MHz Pentium had already been replaced with a 133. I decided to keep pushing and use some adapter magic to get a 233MMX going - this machine needs all the help it can get as there is no L2 cache on the motherboard. While it is never going to be a speed demon, the 233MMX gets it up to a speed that suits my needs just fine.

Always wanted a Tandy ever since I saw the "Tandy graphics" option in Lemmings and wondered what the hell it was. Now I have one! This thing is so tiny and adorable, and the enhanced graphics and sound over the standard PC make it a real winner. It had a 40MB "IDE-XT" drive installed when I got it, which was unsurprisingly dead. I opted not to replace it and go with the CF card which works wonderfully.

This was my grandmother's second PC, once upon a time- a follow up to her old Packard Bell now that the Internet was more of a thing. I actually used it when it was new, around late 2001 or 2002 until 2006ish, and had some files and stuff on it. I think it was actually the first Windows XP computer I ever saw. It ended up in my possession almost 20 years later, and to my surprise... all my stuff was still there. Downloads, save games, chat logs, even a hidden Linux install... perfectly frozen in time. Talk about a nostalgia trip :) I'm working on enhancing it a bit, for instance removing the RIVA TNT2 M64 video card (I can't believe it shipped with one of those in 2002!), but I'm not sure exactly what I want to use it for yet.

Fun fact: These machines will not boot if the CMOS battery is dead. I don't mean they'll power up and nothing will happen - I mean pressing the power button will do absolutely nothing. I actually thought the motherboard had died before someone tipped me off to try putting a new battery in. I've never seen that on a PC!

July 2005 (forensic reconstruction)

DEC's PC line doesn't seem to be very common but I ended up with one. It has some benefits for the era, such as onboard PS/2 ports, nice industrial design and an interesting CPU board design, but it also has many downsides: weird 4.5V CMOS battery, ISA slots only, and onboard video that performs extremely poorly in DOS - we're talking half the framerate in Doom compared to other 486DX2s I have used.

So, might as well do something different with it. Now it's running OS/2 2.11! I put in an ATI card that has IBM 8514/A compatibility which provides a nice high-resolution experience. It's still just as slow, though, it just matters less when you're not gaming. The Pro Audio Spectrum 16 was a lucky find but is also great in OS/2 since it can be used for both the main OS/2 and Win-OS/2 audio at the same time.

May 2023

It's an XT clone, yay. Nothing really standout about it, but it worked well. It was superceded for "really old DOS stuff" by my Tandy 1000 RL though. What impressed me most was the ST-225 hard drive. These drives are just absolute tanks -- The drive was 35+ years old and I was able to low level format it with zero bad sectors! Not having an affinity for such a bare bones 8088/CGA PC, I sold it to a new owner.

Ah, the Legend 204CD. Literally the first PC-compatible I ever used, as my grandmother owned one. I spent many an hour playing games, drawing, listening to MIDIs, and breaking Windows.

Unfortunately, this isn't the exact same unit I used as a kid, but it's close enough to make me feel nostalgic. Packard Bell has a bad reputation among folks, but I've never had a problem with them. They may not have been the best choice compared to the competition at the time, but the computers have seemed solid enough and the parts are a good combination for retro fun. The only downside I can think of for this system in particular is that the CMOS battery is a soldered on BR1225. My preferred fix for this is to remove it and attach an external 2xAA battery pack. These provide the same 3V required, are easily replaced, and the holder can contain any potential leakage.

I have gone kind of nuts with upgrading the system. The PB450 motherboard at first glance appears to support both 5V and 3.3V CPUs, but the actual parts to use 3.3V CPUs are not on the board. I rigged up an external voltage regulator to provide 3.3V, adding support for those later 486s (alongside the Micro Firmware BIOS upgrade for this board). I also added 512KB of L2 cache on the motherboard (still looking for the right chips for a VRAM upgrade, though!). Oddly, the AMD 5x86-133 I tried causes issues with the board, namely problems with the keyboard controller resetting constantly. I narrowed this down to 5x86's with the "25544" package code printed on them, which I believe is basically all the 133 MHz models so that sucks. I went for my next fastest 486-class CPU, an IBM/Cyrix 5x86-100, and that works great. The rare 133 MHz model would be even better, but good luck getting one of those!

You may see this one out in the wild sometimes - I use it as a demo unit for showcasing music from The OPL Archive!

Literally the first computer I ever went online with. Once it became outdated, it was the first PC I personally owned... and I upgraded the hell out of it over the years. I've jammed in more drives, more cards, a series of increasingly faster CPUs and GPUs-- anything to push it to its limit. To think that it started as a Pentium II 450, with 64MB of RAM and a Riva TNT based card. These days it's my default Win98 computer and still sees a lot of use. I just absolutely love this machine and don't plan to part with it, ever.

March 2005

May 2005

July 2007

March 2010

December 2020

"Hey, I have some servers I'm trying to get rid of. Want them?"

Desperate for beefy hardware of any kind, I gladly accepted. A real server, to do real virtualization, replacing the original rei! Not sure I should have taken that offer... These big bulky 2U servers had okay hardware to use for hobbyist purposes in 2016 (twelve cores across the CPUs felt insane, plus a whole 32GB of RAM!), but they had absurd electrical costs and produced so much heat in the tiny room that I called my lab at the time that I kept the window open all winter. I kept one running and used the second one for spare parts.

This was quickly decommissioned once I realized my mistake and had something to migrate everything over to. Now I have two of these damn things in my basement and haven't been able to get rid of them.

The first PC that was wholly "mine" from the very beginning, and a big upgrade from the Gateway G6-450. I did a LOT with this computer- light gaming, development, music, mid-2000s web goodness, trying many, many operating systems... the list goes on. I upgraded it a bit over time, such as replacing the original Athlon 64 3500+ with an Opteron for dual-core (required a BIOS flash if I recall), bumping up the RAM, and adding the 8400GS to desperately escape the horrible integrated graphics. After it got replaced as my daily driver, it did Linux duties and hosted a Minecraft server for several years until increasing server requirements finally caught up with it. Unfortunately, this system has not only fallen into disuse but apparently also disrepair; last time I tried to boot it, it wouldn't POST at all. Given the manufacturing timeframe... probably capacitor plague. A sad end for a legend... until I recap it myself.

October 2005

October 2006

August 2007

October 2007

November 2008

November 2009

May 2012

July 2013