Was cleaning out some old stuff around the house today & behold, I was surprised to find an old early 2000s beige coloured box stuck in a dusty corner of a storage area. I must have forgotten I even had this box or how I acquired it well over a decade ago... this was from the days when my ex & I frequented charity shops selling old stuff & assorted electronic gear back in the day. I obviously bought it, put it down somewhere then got swept up in other matters of life at the time.
Opening it up revealed a pristine MSI KT4V based system (socket 462) with a SURPRISING over powered Cooler Master's first 1kw PSU on the market, way back from 2007 jammed into the PSU area of the box....
I have no idea whatsoever how on earth this came to be inside this old box or who installed it back then.
View attachment 221020
Yep, 6 x 12v rails!!
Apart from that shocking (pardon the pun) surprise, the case itself is most interesting in the sense that it is made of thick steel all round, unlike the thin stuff often seen today in system cases, the case itself has very limited option for fans, here is the front of it when the cover is closed.
View attachment 221021
Opening the cover reveals this with an out of place optical drive in black, no colour coordination here my friends!
View attachment 221022
Opening the side cover revealed this system...
View attachment 221023
I removed the somewhat lacklustre Nvidia MX440 8X 64Mb card & replaced it with this Asus ATI 9600SE 128Mb unit I had stored away for years already ... all AGP of course @ 8X speed.
View attachment 221024
Before attempting to boot it up I wanted to check the ID of the ram modules & clean out any sort of dust anywhere in the system before attempting to boot to bios & ensure they were seated properly. This is what they are, nearly a matched set of 3!
View attachment 221025
The optical drive... CD only!
View attachment 221026
I don't know what model Athlon XP is in it, presuming the sticker at the front is correct for the cpu ID.
IF all boots up well, I was thinking of resurrecting Windows 2000 Pro for it!
Oh what fun....
Ok, update on installing Win2K Pro. The ATI card was giving a bit of trouble when rebooting so lucky I had another AGP card handy. This time it's Winfast A280 LE, based on Nvidia's Geforce 4 Ti 4200-8x gpu. System seems to like it & at least it has 128bit/128Mb memory.
View attachment 221049
Anyway... on to the software side of things & the Win2K Pro disk (original MS disc) throws up this error msg...
Quick bit of trouble shooting without mucking around online, I replaced the optical drive with this model...
View attachment 221051
Same error msg turns up again...