Here is my painted Dell. The paint is very fingerprinty - it is only 3 days old and I didn't touch it for one of those days! It's got a Q6600, 4GB of RAM and will shortly have an AMD 7470 gor graphics. Just fine for XP games. I will also add some new stickers to cover the junk I couldn't persuade to clean off.

Not sure what to do with it now. I can't really sell it as it's been painted.

The Dimension 4300 is all ready to go!

Dell Dimension 4300 case
Antec EarthWatts EA-380 380W power supply
Lenovo ThinkCentre M91p motherboard
Arctic F9 92mm fan
Intel Core i5 2500 3.3GHz quad core processor
8GB RAM (4x2GB)
AMD RADEON HD7770 1GB PCIe video card
DVDRW drive
640GB 7200RPM hard drive
128GB SanDisk X110 SSD
Windows XP Professional on HD
Windows 7 Professional on SSD

Side of the case with Windows Millennium sticker

dat rear end

Clamshell master race!

The GPU looks absolutely massive in here

Front panel wiring... didn't even bother with the proprietary USB pinout (front ports are USB 1.1 anyways)

Found this online and saved it.

Drive bays

BIOS screen

System summary

OS selector

Windows XP desktop

Programs + specs

Windows 7 desktop

speccy

Got the power button + LEDs to work!

Will get photos here soon - my neighbor handed me a Dimension 4400 in excellent shape!!
Only problems are: brittle plastic holding cards in is slightly broken, two bloated capacitors on motherboard next to cpu

Pentium 4 Northwood 2 GHz
256 MB of RAM (keep reading)
RAGE 128 Ultra AGP
SB Live! 5.1 sound card
80 GB 7200 RPM hard drive

I installed XP on it after some CD-ROM drive woes. It's snappy, but I want to upgrade the graphics, and, of course, the RAM. If any of you watch uxwbill on YouTube, you may remember that he said something about Dell never putting enough RAM in these machines. That is absolutely true. I've seen some with as little as 128 MB, while the rest of the machine is "loaded to the mines" with sound, graphics, and CPU. In any case, upgrading it is very easy, so I'll get on it shortly. I'm still deciding what AGP card I want.

A very nostalgic machine indeed. By the way, does anyone here remember a set of sample songs that was seemingly exclusive to Dell? Or was that just me?

I bought a fully functioning Dell Dimension 3000(XP) from craigslist and repurposed it into a wayback retro win98 gaming machine.

I removed all original internals, except for the dvdrom and 3.5'' floppy drives and replaced with all that you see here.

Intel Pentium3 1000/256/133
Intel D815BN
Crucial 1x256mb pc133 cl2
WD 20gb 7200rpm
Dell GeForce2 Ultra 64mb
HP SB PCI128 CT5801
VIA USB2.0 4port
Dell 16x dvdrom
Dell 3.5'' Floppy
Enermax 420w 20pin

oeuvre wrote:

The Dimension 4300 is all ready to go! […]
Show full quote

The Dimension 4300 is all ready to go!

Dell Dimension 4300 case
Antec EarthWatts EA-380 380W power supply
Lenovo ThinkCentre M91p motherboard
Arctic F9 92mm fan
Intel Core i5 2500 3.3GHz quad core processor
8GB RAM (4x2GB)
AMD RADEON HD7770 1GB PCIe video card
DVDRW drive
640GB 7200RPM hard drive
128GB SanDisk X110 SSD
Windows XP Professional on HD
Windows 7 Professional on SSD

Side of the case with Windows Millennium sticker

dat rear end

Clamshell master race!

The GPU looks absolutely massive in here

Front panel wiring... didn't even bother with the proprietary USB pinout (front ports are USB 1.1 anyways)

Found this online and saved it.

Drive bays

BIOS screen

System summary

OS selector

Windows XP desktop

Programs + specs

Windows 7 desktop

speccy

Got the power button + LEDs to work!

What "blaspheme" is this? A lenovo board in a Dell case!!! 🤣 Naw, looks good, do you happen to know how the Radeon
does with Dx9 games?

pretty fine for things like Dolphin, NHL06, GTA VC + SA ... Dolphin emulator in XP is the most intensive thing I've run on it. Runs well

oeuvre wrote:

pretty fine for things like Dolphin, NHL06, GTA VC + SA ... Dolphin emulator in XP is the most intensive thing I've run on it. Runs well

Was just curious as I was wanting to upgrade the 7950GT card in my XP build, ended up getting an 660 gtx ti, hope it works!

Quite nice with that E8400!

Dell Optiplex GX110 case modified to ATX layout
Corsair CX750M 750W PSU (cheapest semi-moudlar name brand PSU microcenter had at the time)
ASRock B450M Pro4 mATX motherboard
AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8 Core processor
be quiet! Pure Rock Slim cooler
Arctic F9 92mm PWM rear fan
MSI ARMOR RADEON RX580 8GB PCIe video card
Samsung 970 EVO 512GB NVMe SSD
2TB Seagate ST2000DM001 7200RPM HD
Teac DV-W524GSB DVD burner
2xUSB 3.0 ports front
2xUSB 2.0 ports rear
4xUSB 3.0 ports rear
USB 3.1 port rear
USB Type C port rear
Ethernet
Audio in/out jacks
PS/2 port
DisplayPort
HDMI
DVI
Steelseries Rival 110 mouse
Rosewill RK9000V2 Cherry MX Brown mechanical keyboard
25" Dell UltraSharp U2515H 2560x1440 monitor
Altec Lansing ACS495 2.1 speakers

Side

Rear end is a bit janky but functional

The guts. Fixed up some new mounts for the motherboard and it is more secure and stable now.

Closeup of GPU

Desktop

Specs

Works great! Minor issue where the power LED stays on even when the machine is off but it's not a big deal.

oeuvre wrote:

Works great! Minor issue where the power LED stays on even when the machine is off but it's not a big deal.

Consider yourself lucky that you do not have OCD.. That shit would have left me awake at night for weeks.

Thankfully the LEDs are not very bright so they're not distracting at night

This is an awesome thread! I like old Dells!

I'll post some pics of some of mine on here after a while.....

This Dell Inspiron 4150 is a trooper! I put Windows 7 on this 1.7 GHz P4M with 1GB of RAM, and it runs FINE! The initial boot-up takes a little bit, but once it's running it's actually pretty quick! I've had Core 2 Duos run 7 slower than this!

I think I'm going to throw in a bigger drive and dual boot XP and 7.

Edit: I should mention that the graphics card isn't nearly strong enough for Aero, but I really couldn't care less.

what resolution is that screen?

oeuvre wrote:

what resolution is that screen?

1400 x 1050. Looks pretty sweet. They also made a 1600 x 1200 option for this laptop, which I'd love to find someday. You typically see these laptops with the standard 1024 x 768 display.

I finally got the dual-boot all done. Took forever to reinstall everything, but it was well worth it.

Well, the more I used Windows 7 on here, I started noticing that the CPU usage frequently and randomly would shoot up to 100%, which I don’t like, as it makes the CPU get quite hot. Vista and 7 seem to be very bad about that on older systems. I’m sure I could spend hours and potentially find the problem, but honestly it’s not worth it, and I like XP better than 7 anyways. I just thought it was kinda neat to see 7 on such an old machine.

I have put the original 30GB drive back in, which I thankfully didn’t format yet, so this machine is now back to just XP. XP never disappoints.

hnnng SXGA+ was great! Had many 14" ThinkPads with that resolution. You might be able to find 1600x1200 ones around, just keep an eye out for them.

Got a lot of four 1ghz slot 1 processors (SL4BS) on eBay so I was able to put a second one into my Precision 220. Still not enough muscle for usable Windows 7 but it's a great 98/XP machine.

oeuvre wrote:

hnnng SXGA+ was great! Had many 14" ThinkPads with that resolution. You might be able to find 1600x1200 ones around, just keep an eye out for them.

Indeed! Yeah, I’ll probably be able to find a UXGA at some point, it’ just take patience.

Finally got this laptop that I have been wanting forever!

This is a Dell Latitude XPi (not the CD version). It is a Pentium 133 and this particular one has 24MB of RAM. I even have another memory module somewhere, but I don't know what I did with it. This laptop is small and chunky. It's pretty small width and depth wise, but it's also pretty thick. Love it.

Another cool thing is that it has full sound, which not all laptops at the time did. Also, it has a trackball, which is awesome. Very good quality trackball too.

The overall shape of this laptop reminds me slightly of the re-badged Olivetti Ehcos I had roughly ten years ago, which I dearly miss (It was branded as a "Patriot Model 800c"). The Olivetti Echos laptops are incredibly hard to find in the US. I will absolutely find another one someday though. It will just take patience. I will probably never fin another Patriot branded one though, as the one I had is the only one I have ever seen or heard of. I would happily settle for the regular Olivetti branded one though.

Anyway, I'm really happy to have this Latitude XPi!