Introduction
Travel back in time to the 1st April 2003 and you’ll find five-year-old me together with my parents at PC World Bristol(?) looking at new PC’s.
Our old PC was in need of being replaced due to age, but mainly because the CRT monitor had blown up! As far as I know, it contained either a Pentium or Pentium II and ran Windows 95/98. I do know it was bought second-hand for £300 in 1997.
The Compaq Presario 6000 series (6505UK) was chosen. It included the base unit, Compaq TFT1501 monitor, JBL Platinum 2.1 speakers and the standard PS2 keyboard and ball mouse. As far as I remember, it also included an Epson inkjet printer. The whole package set us back £750.
To give you an idea of the hardware you got, it used an AMD Athlon XP 1800+, 256MB RAM, 40GB HDD, VIA ProSavage DDR onboard graphics and a CD-RW drive. Preinstalled was a copy of Windows XP Home SP1. A mid range and mid priced PC for this time, as far as I know.
The PC came with a small box full of disks. Some drivers, some manuals and some games. The Sims and Beach Life were probably my favourite, I couldn’t tell you how many hours I spent on those games (I do still play them today) Other games included were Football Manager 2002, Medal of Honour and some English & Maths games.
Fast forward to 2004, I was bought the Sims 2. After it was installed, many hours were spent searching the web (on dial up!) to try and figure out why Sims were not speaking in English, and how to change the language so they would. Embarrassingly, after a while we realised they have their own language called Simlish!
By this point, I had a Sony PlayStation 2 and the PC to play with. I mainly used the PC for homework and the internet. I was only allowed 10 minutes on dial up though, and I could only use it in the evening when the rates were cheap. Because of this, most of my hours of gaming was either on The Simpson’s Hit & Run on the PS2, or the Sims 2 on the PC.
Moving on to early 2009, The Compaq became unbearably slow to use and was subsequently replaced by another mid range PC for the time, A Dell Inspiron 530.
The Compaq was left a corner of the office room for a few months, my Dad was adamant it was going to the dump, but I didn’t was to see it go anywhere. Instead, I wanted to get my Nan into using PC’s & the internet, so she had it, got another 1GB stick of RAM added and used it for a year, and loved it. It was replaced in April 2010 so the Compaq came back to me.
I had never taken apart a PC before, I’d never even reinstalled Windows before. I completely stripped down the PC, cleaned everything I could, put it all back together and the Reinstalled Windows XP using the disc it came packaged with. This is what helped to get me into PC hardware, and to where I am today.
Since then, it would come apart multiple times, I’ve had various different parts in it: Athlon XP 1800+, 2000+, 2200+, 2400+ and 2600+. Various graphics cards, countless hard drives and many different CD drives, including beige ones :(.
In January 2018 I had the idea to transform the Compaq into a high end gaming PC of the year, making sure to keep most of the components period correct. I’ve even kept to using a ball bearing hard drive so it sounds old.
Below is some parts I have bought for it this year:
– FSP 350W power supply,
– Thermaltake Silent Boost CPU cooler,
– Western Digital Caviar 120GB (WD1200JB-00DUA3) hard drive,
– ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB graphics card,
– Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 sound card,
– I also renewed the power button and both LED’s.
– I already had the Athlon XP 2600+, 2GB RAM and DVD ROM which were purchased a few years ago.
Please see below for some photographs, videos, spec lists and other general info.
If you’ve got one of these PC’s or one like it, feel free to get in touch, my email address is ben@benstrange.co.uk.
Cheers,
Ben.
Current Specifications
- Processor: AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (2.13GHz)
- Motherboard: FIC AM37 Socket A Motherboard
- Memory: 2.0GB DDR 266MHz RAM
- Graphics Card: ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128GB
- Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar 120GB (WD1200JB-00DUA3)
- Power Supply: FSP 350W
- Operating System: Windows XP Professional 32 Bit Service Pack 3
Original Specifications
- Processor: AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz)
- Motherboard: FIC AM37 Socket A Motherboard
- Memory: 256MB DDR 266MHz RAM
- Graphics Card: S3 Prosavage DDR 32MB shared
- Hard Drive:Western Digital 40GB (WD400EB-11CPF0)
- Power Supply: LiteOn 250W
- Operating System: Windows XP Home Edition 32 Bit Service 1