Very nice system. It's also very well kept for its age, with no yellowing whatsoever.
Are you planning to expand it? If I'd be in your shoes, I'd max the RAM out, install a USB 2.0 card and reserve a flash drive for Eboostr (since you've installed Windows XP, trust me, additional cache will help to speed your system up!) and put the fastest graphics card you can get, as long as it uses an AGP slot (and if it's a universal one, it's even better!).

One little thing though: the computer uses SDRAM modules, not DDR ones. Now it just needs a matching HP monitor, keyboard and mouse. 😉

Thanks for sharing ! 😀

Also thank you for the background story, which you wrote so feelingly. ^^
This PC totally reminds me of the transition between old and new millennia.

Back in late 20th century, there was this feeling of a new hope and euphoria (..) and
more natural, colourful, more rounded machines like this were on the rise.

Oh and then there was Digimon (more than often featuring Windows98SE/PC-98). 😉

Anyway, it were machines like yours who accompanied our younger selfs throughout the 2000s.
It were PCs like this we were making our first steps on in writing E-Mails, chatting to our friends via ICQ, MSN or Skype - still via dial-up.
They were the ones Windows XP would finally find its home in. They were also the ones we proudly lined
up next to our huge 17-19" CRT monitors and big speakers we had.

Boy, it's been a long walk in time we've gone since then..
Nowerdays, machines are all gloomily or come in an icy, minimalistic industrial look.
Sometimes I whished childish, colouful acrylic designs of the N64, the original iMacs or
the designs of the beige machines (aka "office-gray" colour tint) would make a cameo.

That's wonderful guys, thanks for the positive comments and your wonderful stories. 😀

I miss PC cases that were beighe/white without looking like they came out of an accountant's office..

Nice PC:) I enjoyed reading this

Oh I also forgot to mention, these systems didn't ship with an AGP slot, surprisingly, so I have to stick with PCI, which is not a big deal. I'm not planning on maxing the RAM out just because of how little of it is actually taken advantage of due to OS bloatyness and lack of software optimization to the extent of consoles. Which would actually argue the reason to add more RAM....

I wouldn't say the system is scarce, more that HP absolutely flooded the market with various OEM systems like this one so much that some slipped through the cracks and weren't covered a lot. Similar thing with an old HP Pavilion laptop I used to own (P3-1ghz, 256mb RAM), only Google results were spam for replacement batteries and powercords.

Rare and Pentium II in the same sentence is kind of funny. While one particular manufacturer might not have flooded the market with their P2 system somebody else did and there is nothing special about most of them (outside of old memories). Having said that it looks like a nice system, but people who game would probably want a later system with AGP.

Looks like there's an ATI Rage chip on the board. That's probably why there's no AGP slot - they used AGP to attach the onboard graphics. I wish manufacturers had not done that. It would have been nice of them to attach onboard graphics via PCI and leave an AGP slot available. It's much more useful for addon cards then it is for some onboard chip.

I was trying to find what chipset this motherboard uses but I see what you mean about all the RAM/etc spam. Didn't find any real info on the system, but it's probably a 440LX/EX. It could be a 440FX (which has no AGP) but that's very early and pretty uncommon.
The capacitor vents look like Sanyos, which is good news. I see the BIOS chip has a label that says "PPA3" or something like that. Maybe that's a clue to the motherboard's real identity.

0101000000110101 wrote:

Oh I also forgot to mention, these systems didn't ship with an AGP slot, surprisingly, so I have to stick with PCI, which is not a big deal. I'm not planning on maxing the RAM out just because of how little of it is actually taken advantage of due to OS bloatyness and lack of software optimization to the extent of consoles. Which would actually argue the reason to add more RAM....

If you max the RAM out, add a USB 2.0 card with a flash drive attached to it and install Eboostr to reserve the drive for cache, you would gain a significant improvement in performance in XP, but it's up to the way you're going to use it. I'm personally an enthusiast of maxed out machines, but not everybody want that after all. 😉

You're kidding, right ? USB 2.0 in 2017.. It is equally out-dated like USB 1.0 was in 2005. 😉
Win XP SP2 can handle USB 3.0 just fine, he's probably better of with a NEC-based USB 3.0 PCI card.

Here are a few such cards, albeit pricey :
https://www.startech.com/Cards-Adapters/USB-3 … ower~PCIUSB3S22
https://www.lindy-usa.com/4-port-usb-30-card-pci-51048.html

Maybe they can be found cheaper somewhere else ?

Edit; Never mind. 😀 If there's already a spare USB 2.0 card around, someone can keep using that, of course.
But for a serious upgrade, I would rather invest in an USB 3.0 controller card, so pen drives will work in native mode.
Who knows how long devices will be backwards comaptible ? Intel already removed native USB 1.x/2.x support in their chipsets
(it's now translated by an internal USB 3.0 hub),

Looks like there's an ATI Rage chip on the board. That's probably why there's no AGP slot - they used AGP to attach the onboard graphics. I wish manufacturers had not done that. It would have been nice of them to attach onboard graphics via PCI and leave an AGP slot available. It's much more useful for addon cards then it is for some onboard chip.

By that logic, we could blame pretty much any server makers. They integrated a lot of ATI Rage 128 chips, too.
Anyway, I can imagine that this was done for another reason than trolling users. Back when the Pentium II was around,
AGP wasn't exactly mature yet, you know. 😉

Jo22 wrote:

You're kidding, right ? USB 2.0 in 2017.. It is equally out-dated like USB 1.0 was in 2005. 😉
Win XP SP2 can handle USB 3.0 just fine, he's probably better of with a NEC-based USB 3.0 PCI card.

Nice to see that there are USB 3.0 PCI cards, but man, they are incredibly expensive! 😵
That doesn't make them very desirable, at least to me, being in a perpetual shoestring budget.

By the way, I still use USB 2.0 in my Pentium 3 system and I don't have particular issues with the speed. Yes, it's outdated but it's way better than good old USB 1.1, that took ages to transfer a file of a few megabytes.

Hopefully in future, prices of those cards will decrease, and we will snatch them like a cheetah with its prey. 😉

Startech make a PCI USB 3.0 card (model PCIUSB3S4). Problem is that speed is limited by the PCI bus, but should still be faster than USB 2.0 and has a power connector to enable use with bus-powered drives, etc. Have no experience with the card myself, but remember it being one of the few that came up when I was considering such an upgrade. Opted to go with eSATA in the end though.

Hi, yes XP works just fine with USB 3.0. I was an early adopter back then and can confirm this.
You may need to use a controller with a NEC chip, though. NEC released XP drivers, before it was bought by Renesas.
Early Renesas drivers may also still work. I'm running version 2.1.28.0 right now (on XP).
Link: https://www.techspot.com/drivers/driver/file/ … ormation/15904/

Nice to see that there are USB 3.0 PCI cards, but man, they are incredibly expensive! 😵

That's no wonder. These always had been niche-market items. Probably to upgrade small Atom-based mainboards.
That's similar to those Geforce GF200/GF600 series of cards. They also come in PCI flavors, probably by using bridge chips.
Edit: Pure USB 3.0 cards are not so much in fashion anymore. They get replaced by USB 3.1 cards (Gen 1 and Gen 2), which are based on different chips.
Edit: Firewire, also known as IEEE 1394 or i.Link, is also worth a thought. Firewire 800 was released around 2002, so it is not only period-correct,
but there should be plenty of PCI controller cards, too. At least for external HDDs, Firewire could still make sense, I think. Afaik, even some cardreaders were made for it.

Jo22 wrote:

By that logic, we could blame pretty much any server makers. They integrated a lot of ATI Rage 128 chips, too.

Servers usually put the Rage on the slowest of their PCI buses, keeping the faster bus(es) available for high performance controller cards.

Desktops, on the other hand, use it to amputate the fastest expansion bus in the system. It probably juiced up their Winbench scores slightly in magazine articles. 😀 My take on it is that if the performance impact of putting the Rage on PCI vs AGP is enough to bother the user, then they'll want an addon card regardless.
To be fair though, at that point in time PCI graphics cards weren't yet at a huge disadvantage vs AGP, so if an owner of this type of system had to upgrade to a PCI graphics card it wouldn't have been the end of the world. Still an annoying design choice though, IMO.

I guess the best solution is allowing the onboard AGP device to be bypassed when an AGP card is inserted, but it seems it took a while before motherboards/chipsets started to be capable of that.

How on earth is that thing running GTA San Andreas! I remember getting around 20fps at 800*600 on a 1.7GHz single core vista laptop with intel 945 graphics.

cj_reha wrote:

I wouldn't say the system is scarce, more that HP absolutely flooded the market with various OEM systems like this one so much that some slipped through the cracks and weren't covered a lot.

While I wasn't old enough to be aware of anything at the time, it appears that this system just wasn't widely sold.

If it somehow was, then it must have suffered being trashed in the masses way back in the early to mid 2000's, resulting it in being rare now.

Jo22 wrote:

You're kidding, right ? USB 2.0 in 2017.. It is equally out-dated like USB 1.0 was in 2005. 😉

My man,

I use USB 1.x almost 24/7.

I would now use my "p a i n" meme, but, I never usually complete data transfers above 15GB.

If a system of mine supports MMX instructions and at the very least supports PCI, I will add a few games, usually GTA SA, GTA III, and MAYBE NFS Most Wanted.

Almoststew1990 wrote:

How on earth is that thing running GTA San Andreas! I remember getting around 20fps at 800*600 on a 1.7GHz single core vista laptop with intel 945 graphics.

I would imagine that laptop was not well rounded and had 400 gallons of bloatware.
It vastly depends on your selected OS, background tasks, and graphics settings in the game. It's possible you had a Celeron D laptop which has a microscopic amount of cache, half as much as any Pentium ii in fact.

Every PC is capable of so much more, it would just take years and years of extra development to make sure EVERY PC is taken full advantage of like consoles are...(for the most part)

Also, I use the PS2 console as a reference to guess (if the system requirements signify SSE instructions or higher are required) if a game will run on MMX instructions. Almost guaranteed, if the game had a PS2 and PC port, the PC port runs on MMX instructions. So technically, the oldest/slowest technologies that can run games from that era, are Pentium Overdrive MMXs and Pentium MMXs, Which I sadly can't get working in my Gateway 2000 properly, I would imagine acquiring a system that was designed with a Pentium MMX would fix the issue.

0101000000110101 wrote:

My man, […]
Show full quote

Jo22 wrote:

You're kidding, right ? USB 2.0 in 2017.. It is equally out-dated like USB 1.0 was in 2005. ;)

My man,

I use USB 1.x almost 24/7.

I would now use my "p a i n" meme, but, I never usually complete data transfers above 15GB.

If a system of mine supports MMX instructions and at the very least supports PCI, I will add a few games, usually GTA SA, GTA III, and MAYBE NFS Most Wanted..

Ah, okay then. :) I'm also limited to USB 1.x on my Mac in OS9. And on my Compaq Armada, too.
My point rather was that upgrading to USB 3 makes more sense now (if possible)..

I guess USB 2 vs USB 3 is just something that makes me a bit emotional (@looking4awayout sorry about that) - I switched to USB 3.0 circa 7 years ago.
Well, at least I tried so. Getting the new PCIe controller was easy, but it took me forever to get an USB 3.0 HDD enclosure.

I had to buy it online from a foreign place, because the local sellers just couldn't let go off their old USB 2.0 goods.
Even ~3 years after USB 3.0 was out, they resisted to sell any USB 3.0 pen drives or card readers.

Nope, just USB 2 stuff (even aged USB 1.x web cams). But the saddest part was, that the young shop assistants had never heard about USB 3.0 at this point.
This was in ~2013. And I asked in these big electronic stores (you know, those who sell graphics cards, keyboards, mice, etc.).

Jesus, USB 3.0 has been out for THAT long?

It really shows low tow tech I am over here, the most I have ever experienced was a USB 3.0 device bottlenecked to a USB 2.0 based machine.