Here at the office I’m still cleaning out parts of the building that haven’t seen human habitation since 2020… And today’s bit of entertainment is powering up a few antiques found in one of the labs.
The first machine is an old Quantex that the company picked up from G2 Interactive back when we first started (they didn’t pay, so we kept the equipment).
Anyway, all of the caps looked ok so I gave it some juice – and it fired right up!
After a CMOS reset and some jumpering to properly configure the machine, it went right into Windows XP (Home, SP2)…
The video banding is somewhat expected from that circa 2001 PCI Diamond Stealth 64 VGA card – which has been upgraded with the extra ram!
It always surprises me just how snappy WinXP is compared to today’s OS travesties – even on a machine with a CPU you’d find in a modern calculator and less ram than your refrigerator.
Next up we’ll go a bit further back in time… Back to the last century…
That there is a Slot-1 233Mhz Pentium II – and it too appears to still work… Unlike modern computers, where if you turn them off for a couple of weeks they give up the ghost, Y2K machines don’t seem to care that 20-25 years have passed since they last saw electricity.
One interesting quirk with this particular machine is in the BIOS:
Here’s the “SeePU & Chipset Setup” screen… SeePU? Whatever. 🙂
Unfortunately, the HD on this machine had been pulled sometime in the last 25 years and it’s unhappy with the WinXP install on the 10Gig drive from the first machine. But – I’m sure if I felt like it I could install 95/98/XP on this machine just fine.
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