When I first got my emachines mini tower, I was watching a ton of LGR reviews of old, prebuilt systems, and one brand that especially stuck out to me was the emachines brand - because I had never even heard about them before. I learned about their towers and various prebuilts of the 90s to the 2000s, and a video about the "never obsolete" eTower 566ir. The odd branding, display stickers and general air of mystery got me very interested, and while browsing ebay late at night I submitted an offer for an XP-era "media center PC". I chose it in particular because it was a completely untouched, estate sale piece - meaning that it still had the original hard drives, as well as the emachines branded peripherals. By the next morning the seller had accepted my offer and it was on its' way.
After a week or so, it arrived. Looking back, my original plan with it was to run with xp for a bit until I had the money to put newer hardware in it and turn it into a sleeper of sorts. When I got it, the PC wouldn't boot at all, only beeping. I started with completely tearing it apart completely. It was pretty amazing how filthy and dusty the inside was. It was a dust bunny habitat!
Prior to this I had zero real experience with assembling or even working with computers, so after some quick advice from a friend I tried swapping the ram out to start with. I reapplied the thermal paste, did some cleaning by finger and reassembled everything. After trying that I still got the stupid issue so I assumed everything was dead (smart!) I ordered a new cpu, psu and motherboard, because I read somewhere that the original PSU in these emachines had the tendency to fail and kill those two components. I got the exact replacement for my CPU and some random gateway board for the mobo, and an allied 300w micro ATX power supply. this was a dumb choice in hindsight, as allied is known for poor quality power supplies - they even appear on the
PSU blacklist. I was really deep into the early 2000s pc accessory scene at this time, thanks to LGR, so I ordered a pretty unknown drive bay accessory, a Thermaltake Hardcano 11.
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| heatsink cleaned |
When I received everything I assembled it back and tried for a power on. I only had a goodwill TV and a terrible VGA to RCA adapter which didnt work, so I lugged over a monitor with VGA and tested it. And I was greeted with an emachines edit of bliss and a windows activation screen due to my hardware changing.
Good thing you can still activate over phone.
because the hardware was different, it took me a while to hunt down the drivers for the onboard 3d graphics chip, audio etc. But when I finally did, I was thoroughly enjoying the feeling of being able to use xp again after over a decade. The sounds of the old harddrives was very interesting to me, and I was quickly becoming addicted. I got to exploring the contents of the HDDs, and found a copy of the transformers movie and a ton of downloaded music. I also made a quick trip to the local goodwill and found this tiny little dell monitor that was a bit old, but very cheap.
One of the first things I threw onto it was winamp, and to try games I downloaded a copy of juiced to check the graphics capability. In hindsight it ran terribly even in windowed mode and I eventually rage quit as it was pretty impossible to win races while playing at 15fps.
Even though the game sucks compared to its competitors, those first moments were very memorable and I still think back to it in semi-awe of how amazingly dated it is. From this moment on my love for tuner cars of that time was increased by ten.
One awesome thing I discovered while shuffling through the downloaded music was that some of the files included videos, which winamp would automatically play through a built-in video player. This blew my fucking mind when it happened! All these cool things happening compounded with my later discovery and viewing of serial experiments lain made me give up my idea of turning the PC into a sleeper and become fully dedicated to a retro PC.
Next post will go over my first mods and other stupid things I did with my pc.
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