Bear with me I’m feeling nostalgic. I know these are generally regarded as a pretty poorly appointed system around here so here’s my nostalgia trip of the month. When I was a preteen/teen I was largely computer illiterate and my childhood computer suffered under a massive load of bloatware I foolishly installed and eventually succumbed to heat death due to my failure to dust it (ever). But what I still had was the original hard drive that has been sitting on a shelf for the past 7 or 8 years so recently I got it into my head that I would transplant the soul of my childhood system into a new box.

Now I know the dimension 3000 sucks, objectively, but when you’re in 4th grade circa 04-05 and your parents buy you a cheap computer you take what you can get. Mine had a Pentium 4 which I cannot remember the speed of so eventually the Celeron in this one is going to go. The eBay seller had it listed as a Pentium 4 but the bottom of the picture with the sticker was cut off and for all I know they have no clue about technology. Ended up being $5 and $47 shipping but came with a PCI BFG GeForce 8400 GS so I feel it makes up for the frustration a bit. At 1GB of ram it’s twice what I had as a kid too. I ran my original one up until about 2011 and the last game I remember working fine was Sins of a Solar Empire but it eventually fell out of favor with me when I couldn’t get Sims 3 or Eurotruck to install properly.

So when it arrived I couldn’t get it to turn on and I had it most of the way dismantled to clean it before I found the problem. Someone had tried to remove that heatsink but the OEM Dell thermal paste was so ossified that it yanked the processor right out with it. Instead of trying to put it back in properly someone just jammed it down and reinstalled the locks meaning that I had to unbend 5 flattened pins (successfully mind you!). Booted it into clonezilla, cloned my original hard drive (March 11 2005 per the WD sticker), plugged everything in, crossed my fingers, and powered it up. It started right into my old desktop still frozen in time from 2011full of bad MS Paint art and high school papers so I’ve been having a great time exploring all the junk I left on this thing. My desktop is a wasteland of dumped documents and photos and pirated movies and old school work. After slaughtering a huge amount of bloatware in the startup services its back to being pretty snappy and I’m doing this post on it using the backported version of Palemoon browser.

Aim started up with my saved login info and it kinda makes me sad my old account (and the whole service) is gone. I can’t bring myself to take it out of the startup programs so I just leave it there trying to phone home to a server that’s never going to answer it.