Building a Windows XP PC, And Reliving A Golden Era

For me, Windows XP is where I really got my start in PC gaming. Growing up with computers, I had always dabbled in PC gaming — trying to get games to run on the school computers, or using one at friends' and relatives' houses, putting a game or two on the family computer — but I didn't actually get my own gaming PC until XP was well on the scene. And it's then that I really began learning about them, building and tinkering my machine until I could get a good framerate out of the game I wanted to play. It was a magical time.

As a teenager, it had always been my intention to get a job at 15 and save up for a brand-new computer. I watched my friend do that very thing, toiling away during the summer, scraping up his pennies and chatting with me enthusiastically every day about what parts he was planning to get. It was to be the end-all, be-all of gaming computers, and it was an exciting time for the two of us. Eventually the weekend finally arrived to build the PC, and I brought over my VHS camcorder to preserve the occasion. Printed on a sheet of paper was a list of steps we would take, as neither of us had actually built a system from the ground up. This was a new experience for us, and some hours of sweating went by before it was finished. We set it up on the desk, held our breath, and pushed the power button. Nothing happened.

Upon pulling the system off of the desk and looking inside, we discovered we had remembered everything....except the power switch wire. A sigh of relief was uttered when a few moments later the beast roared to life as planned, and it was off to installing Windows XP.

Many more weekends were spent at his place watching the latest games whir away with luxuriously smooth animation, and all the bells and whistles turned up. This was a time of CRT gaming, and 1024x768 standard resolution, as a new generation of DirectX 9 games were just beginning to find their way to store shelves (back when they still occupied them). Most of them did not sport the notion of split-screen multiplayer, so it was usually a spectator-only experience. Nonetheless, it was lots of enjoyable nights watching online Halo matches, Unreal Tournament 2004, or Call of Duty, and eating hordes of junk food.

It was a happy getaway from my tired old computer at home, which struggled to match just a fraction of his system's opulence. My plans for a job in my teenage years, for one odd reason or another, never panned out as they had for all my friends. I was poor most of the time, and so then was my computer — a hand-me-down from my parents — which I had upgraded piece-by-piece whenever I could. An aging Athlon XP 1700+, and various old or low end graphics cards from the DX7 to 8 eras were all I had. I would do what I could to eek out as much performance as possible, sometimes going to extremes, though it never seemed to be enough.

A very old picture of my Ti4200 carrying a heavy burden.

But I still fantasized about owning a 9700 Pro, or even a 9800 Pro, and a Pentium 4 to go with it. It had been my dream since the beginning, and would continue to be my dream for a couple of years.

Things did eventually change for me, but I'll never forget that 2003-2004 time period where PC gaming felt so unique and special, and I was always chasing that ideal. Major exclusive games came out all the time, and each one demanded the best in hardware technology. When you upgraded your graphics card, massive performance gains were immediately seen, and major visual benefits were apparent in ways you don't encounter anymore.

The span of just one year in PC gaming during the golden era.

Games truly sold the hardware during this time, much like in the console world. It's this era that I decided I wanted to recreate, inspired by YouTube channels such as Phil's Computer Lab, and best of all, I could do so with hardware I already owned!

The Build

Through the course of moving to many different places, I lost a lot of the hardware I once had. But I still hoarded quite a bit of it, and I was lucky to still have an old DFI Socket 939 motherboard that I had bought refurbished back in 2005. Inside was a Athlon 64 X2 3800+, and 2GB of some very fancy PC4000 DDR memory. This was a system I had handed down to my sister, but when she moved out, it came back to me, and sat in a closet...and then a car trunk.....for quite a while.

It was already equipped with a GeForce 8800GTS 320MB, but I wanted to go back even further. Enter a spat of unnecessary spending from a couple years back:

At that point I had wanted to play with some old GeForce 6800 cards (because nerd), so I bought a couple off eBay. One was a 6800 Ultra, the other was a Quadro FX 4400, which was basically another 6800 Ultra but with twice the usual 256MB of memory. When I couldn't get either card to work in a modern PC with modern drivers and OS, I abandoned the idea, and stowed them away. To be honest, I thought I had lost them, but imagine my surprise when despite the limited space in my apartment, there they were sitting in a box in the closet, having survived the latest move.

The hard drive was tricky. The system's original one had died, and I didn't have a lot of extras. Of the ones I did have, some of them also didn't work. This had to be a machine I could build without spending any extra money, or it wasn't going to happen. Using a SATA/IDE to USB adapter, I went through a trial-and-error process of figuring out which ones were dead, and which weren't. A 30GB hard drive worked, a 60GB one didn't. 30GB would be quite limited, but doable. Then I saw a hard drive I had buried in a desk drawer with "Only 32GB Usable" written in Sharpie on it. The original label said 120GB. I had to confirm if it was true first.

Using Windows' Administrative Tools, I found out the rest of the hard drive's space was still there, just unpartitioned. Were they all bad sectors, or was this just a mistake? I deleted the 32GB partition, then created a new one with all the detected space assigned. It formatted without a problem. The perfect hard drive for the job was in hand!

The system also needed a power supply, and I had exactly one in my closet. It was a Thermaltake unit rated 420W, so it would do.

Some quick assembly, a bit of tidying up, and the system turned right on. It was time to install Windows XP. After downloading various drivers, now was the moment I found out if either of my graphics cards actually worked. I started with the Quadro card.

Please excuse the creepy giant Ninja Turtles in the background.

Bingo! Old hardware given new life and purpose! I was off the ground running at this point, and it was a flurry of game installations from old disc booklets, software updates, and the various tweaking of things for the next few days. Of course I tried the regular 6800 Ultra as well, confirming that it worked too. I'm sticking with the Quadro just because it has extra memory and extra driver settings, so why not?

In total I have eight games on the system so far, including Far Cry, Painkiller, UT2004, Half-Life 2, Doom 3 (+expansion), Halo, Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, and Serious Sam 2. One great help is Valve's continued support of the XP platform with Steam, something which can't be said for many other software programs out there.

Overall this experience was a fun trip down memory lane. Using parts you already have, it's really a blast getting to just play with a computer without the stress of needing that system for your primary desktop. And if you're tight on money, it may be a way to get back the feeling of building and upgrading hardware without spending anything on it. Most of all it's a portal back to a time when PC gaming was the way to go for experiences you couldn't have anywhere else, and where new tech features being introduced were quickly being utilized in the most bleeding edge game engines. An optimistic time, not just for technology, but perhaps even for yourself if you happened to be young back then. That's always something we'll want to hold on to.