First post, by EddieHimself
- Rank
- Newbie
Hello y'all. When I was about 7 years old in late 1998, my father decided to upgrade from our Olivetti 286 with white monochrome display that he had received for free from his friend a few months earlier, which he then ended up taking to the dump due to it being completely worthless at the time! The PC he replaced it with was a Compaq Deskpro EP 6333. The "6" referred to the 6.4-GB hard disk drive, whilst the "333" referred to the 333-MHz Intel Celeron microprocessor. It was a fairly pedestrian affair, with a fairly pedestrian 64 MB of RAM; some kind of video card, Creative PCI 128 sound card (which drove a 10-W speaker on the back of the case); CD-ROM and floppy drives; 28.8-k modem; and Windows 95. This, along with matching Compaq 15" CRT monitor, keyboard, and mouse, came in at a snip for just £1600 (about £2900 in today's money).
We gave it a couple of upgrades, including a Freecom 32A CD rewriter in an external USB enclosure, before once again upgrading in late 2002, pretty much exactly 4 years later. That old Compaq eventually made its way to me. I had a keen interest in building PCs at this point, so I decided to take it all apart. Unfortunately, it didn't quite work when I put it back together; the hard disk had failed. We got rid of the system in about 2005. I kept the monitor for a bit but ended up selling that for a whopping £10 when I was about 15. The worst thing is that I didn't put it in proper packaging, and it was killed during delivery.
All that remains of that old system is the mouse and restore CD (which I have uploaded to Archive.org should anyone need it). Fast forward another 15 years, and an opportunity presented itself when I saw a very similar (but not quite identical) PC case to the original system on eBay, which I promptly bought. The case had some rust spots on it, which I patched up with a bit of rustproofing. The other thing is that the case had been converted from desktop to tower form factor. With these Deskpro EP cases, this could be achieved by simply rotating the bezel that sits in front of the 5.25" drive bays by 90° and putting the drives in that way as well. However, they hadn't changed the badge plate with the Compaq logo on it to the tower version, meaning that the text would be vertical in tower format. Since our Compaq was a desktop model, it was a simple matter of rotating the bezel and the included floppy drive bracket back to their original positions to be used as a desktop case.
But wait, there's more! In their infinite wisdom, Compaq decided to use some proprietary form factor for their power supplies. When I saw the price of such power supplies, I decided on a better idea: a bracket. Now, remember when I said the case wasn't identical? This worked out in my favour. Basically, for the later Pentium III models with the Intel 810/810e chipset, they decided to open up the area where the PSU was, rather than only having holes for the IEC connector and fan. This meant that I could use a bracket to attach a standard ATX power supply to the case. I created the bracket in FreeCAD, which I then printed out as a drawing that I used as a template to make it out of plywood. Why plywood? Because I’m far too cheap to make it out of sheet metal.