How I restored a mid 2000s PC

Ever since I was a kid, we had a desktop PC in the bedroom downstairs. I had so many fond memories playing games on it, listening to music etc. and then suddenly my parents got a shiny new netbook and stopped using it, claiming it was broken.

When I returned back to this house in 2023, I found this old PC exactly where I left it.

So let's dig deep into what I had to do to get it running, any upgrades done along the way and how it performs now.

The first issue

So, the first issue was actually painfully obvious... the monitor and keyboard were missing.
I managed to find a site from my country that sells refurbished PC parts so I treated myself to some nice stuff. I got a 2000s HP keyboard and... a CRT monitor. Compaq 7500. I was so happy I could get one. It's still unbelievable just how good CRTs. Saturated colors, vivid contrast, great viewing angles, solid motion clarity and really crisp resolution scaling. It's still a great technology and it kinda hurts seeing it gradually disappear.

And with the first thing out of the way, let's get down to business.

First disassembly in years

When I unplugged the PC, turned off the power supply and ventured deep inside the bowels of this machine, I felt like Lara Croft uncovering an ancient tomb. When I opened this up, I found a 300W power supply, ATI Radeon 9550 Sapphire OC, Celeron D 2.53Ghz, 512MB of RAM and... a TV card and a pretty basic ForteMedia FM801 soundcard.  There were two optical DVD ROM drives and a card reader at least.



So to dissect this setup...
It's a pretty low to mid end PC by 2004 standards with a few oddities.

The 848P Neo V2 motherboard still had an AGP port and Socket 478, which were getting obsolete by 2004 but still not bad.

The Celeron D was a less than welcome sight. There's a reason why those were called "Celeron Disaster" by quite a few people. They were essentially repurposed faulty Pentium 4 Prescotts (which already had a pretty messy reputation due to high power draw, the heat and very small performance improvement over Northwood Pentium 4 CPUs). They removed multithreading, cut down on the cache and clock speed and there you go... a Celeron D. It's just... not good.

The Radeon 9550 was from 2003. And by 2003 standards, it's pretty good. But by 2004, we already got heavy hitter games like Doom 3, Far Cry or FEAR, which absolutely decimate this GPU in every way. But if you just wanted to do office work etc., it was still adequate. The Sapphire version is very close performance-wise to the bigger brother, Radeon 9600.

The 512MB of RAM was very adequate for the time. The soundcard though... is frankly quite ancient and wasn't good even back in the DOS days. I don't even understand why it was a part of this setup.

As for the HDD, it was a SATA 80GB drive. I swapped it out for a 750GB drive I salvaged from a broken netbook.

I cleaned out the dust and we were ready for the boot.

First boot

Of course, the PC greeted me with a CMOS error. It ran fine but the BIOS settings just didn't save. The culprit was actually fairly simple. A single CR2032 battery powering the CMOS memory storing the BIOS settings. I swapped it out on the motherboard and the error was gone. I enabled SATA and PATA in the BIOS settings and installed Windows XP SP3 on the hard drive. Everything went smoothly at first. I installed drivers, important software etc. and we were in.



However the issues didn't wait for long. The PC slowed down to a crawl. Even 90s games like Unreal Tournament 99 ran poorly with frequent stuttering. And as I ran a SMART check on the hard drive... I realized this PC might need more love than it got ever before.

Fighting the CPU cooler

The SMART check said the HDD is still okay but I was fearing the worst... that I might need to replace it.

So far at this point, I decided for the next major upgrades. I bought a Pentium 4 Northwood 3Ghz to replace the Celeron, a Radeon X1950 GPU from 2006 as a replacement for the 9550 and a 1GB Corsair DDR1 RAM stick. Bought an Arctic MX5 thermal paste to chill out and went to work.

I pushed on the clips and had issues releasing the cooler. Took me around 30 minutes before I finally got the cooler to budge. I wasn't used to this old system but in the end I won... at least it seems. I replaced the CPU, applied thermal paste.. and...

THE PC DIDN'T BOOT NOW. I panicked. Was it the PSU? Was it something else? I hastily spent 10 minutes removing and then reseating the cooler. I accidentially cut myself on the heatsink as a blood sacrifice to the CPU gods and... it worked.

It booted now. I replaced the GPU and RAM and... another problem. Purple screen and lines. The GPU was dead. I put the 9550 back in and hey, the PC works now.

While I was looking through the closet, I found a floppy drive. Connected it using an IDE cable and... it works!

HDD strikes back

At this point I decided to give a GPU upgrade another try. I managed to track down the best AGP GPU ever made, the Radeon HD 3850. And as I slid it into the AGP port... IT WORKED PERFECTLY.

And I went for another shopping trip, upgrading the mouse which started acting up and I replaced the soundcard with a shiny Creative X-Fi Extreme Audio. We have EAX support now, HELL YEAH.

After a few weeks, I suddenly couldn't boot into the PC. The HDD started acting up.
I did a scan and... it died completely. So many dead sectors, jeez. I was surprised this thing still worked.

I salvaged what data I could, cloned it into a new HDD and started over. To my surprise only 6 files or so were lost. But hell yeah, we won.

PSU enters the stage

The final hurdle was the PSU. The PC was still slow and suddenly started randomly turning itself off and restarting itself. When I went to check the inside, I could feel immense heat coming from the sad overworked aging PSU. It was time to say goodbye.

Got a new 450W, plopped it in and to my surprise... WOAH. Massive performance boost and no more crashing. We're in the game now. And the PC is finally working perfectly.

The experience

So to start this off... the boot times are about what you'd expect. This has an HDD, a mid 2000s CPU... it's not an excruciatingly long boot by any means but it does take at least 20 seconds or so. After that, it's actually smooth sailing.
The desktop experience is silky smooth. No stuttering or anything of that kind.

And this is actually the most impressive thing about XP. It's still such a smooth and user friendly OS after so many years. The menus are easy to navigate, the control panel is laid out wonderfully and it's just a joy to use.

I also tried connecting it to the internet but here's the thing...
There has been this viral video floating around the internet about how XP is so unsafe.
The truth is that the guy just plopped the PC straight into the cable, bypassing the router, disabled all security features and didn't even have an antivirus. It was staged. Even back in the day this was considered to be bad practice.

In reality if you connect the PC to to the internet via the router and set the security settings to something reasonable... it's perfectly safe. Just the presence of the router's firewall itself is enough to deter all the rootkits trying to get into your network. And this PC works remarkably well. I did later install Malwarebytes for extra security but so far... no viruses, nothing.

The network browsing experience is not half bad. The best modern browser for XP is MyPal, based on Firefox 68. Loading websites can take a few seconds but it's pretty good. Youtube runs fine at 360p without stuttering and download speeds are decent.

Gaming

To finish this off, let's play a game.

F.E.A.R. by Monolith Productions was an obvious first pic. If this PC can't run it... I did something wrong.

And it runs. It's an absolutely great game. Very fun gunplay, solid graphics, great soundtrack, engaging worldbuilding and story, some of the best AI in the history of gaming and... there's a reason why it was used for benchmarking back in 2005. All the excessive particle effects, highly detailed shadows and advanced physics could easily bring weaker PCs to their knees back then.

My benchmark results? Max fps was 78, 1% lows were 18fps. Pretty good.

The EAX really works and hearing the sound echo and muffle realistically really improves the immersion.

It runs smoothly. Usually around 45 fps and while it does sometimes drop during the extremely over the top firefights the game is legendary for, it's actually a really good experience.

And so... my mid 2000s retro gaming setup beat the trial by fire. Let's see what other adventures we'll run to along the way.