Introduction

Year released: 2007 (Unit made in 2008)

CPU: AMD Phenom X4 9150e

GPU: None (By default)

RAM (2GB, upgradeable)

Optical Drive: CD/DVD with Lightscribe

Fun fact: This writeup was written on a Dell CPi-R running Windows 2000 and written on Microsoft Office 2000 then exported to USB for further work

This PC might not mean much to many people but this is a really special find for me via Ebay. After knowing the product number for ages I found one in pristine condition with all the labels and even some of the protective plastic still place with the computer appearing basically unused, even the tamper stickers that void the warranty if split were still intact.

This was my first real games machine, living out the majority of its life playing the later stage of my RuneScape playing time and doing basic internet browsing

The computer as it came out the box

My first port of call with this desktop was to remove the hard drive, this presented the first problem of this laptop, in that the drive rails had gone brittle during the 17 years after manufacture. Unfortunately during this process I made an error and broke one of the rails in doing so. Lesson one I guess, be careful when dealing with old plastic rails in old computers, thankfully there are others free in this machine. The hard drive was examined for fitness and useful files (Such as ones that could be sent to the RuneScape cache Recovery project that is currently ongoing).

With the hard drive refitted, still having its original Vista installation and the machine going I decided a power on self-test (POST). Unfortunately this is where a second problem immediately came up in that it wouldn’t POST with a dead CR2032 installed, this is a problem I associate more with 90s computers of a certain age, I wouldn’t expect a machine made even in the early 00s, let alone a machine made in 2008 to have this issue with a dead battery stopping the computer dead.

Once that was replaced the machine appeared to boot just fine however this led me onto the next problem I encountered with the machine in that the HDMI output wouldn’t be recognised by the modern monitor I had it plugged into and lacking an older display I could test it with I had to resort to going immediately for the upgrade route of plugging in a graphics card (The venerable Quadro K2200 with 4GB VRAM) as a potential solution, which it worked handsomely though it’s a shame for now I won’t be able to test its current onboard AMD graphics solution. Though the K2200 is way overkill for the machine it was what I had and the 8600GT with 512MB Vram is no longer available at the time of writing.

With all these problems out the way I was ready to boot into the stock Windows Vista operating system on the computer. The main event and it was exactly as I remembered it, to a complete fault.

This machine struggled so much with Windows Vista to my exact memory it was rather shocking, feeling sluggish with its mere 2GB RAM inside it and slow to load much of anything, this image from Acer of Windows Vista is something I would very much like to avoid for all time I could argue and show how disappointing Windows Vista could be as an OS. Thermals seemed fine from my diagnostics however a healthy dose of Arctic MX4 thermal paste to remove the mummified paste easily took temps down by 10C which is a great result.

Even giving a chance by doubling the RAM to 4GB, doing the factory refresh from Acer and installing Service Pack 1 still couldn’t save the poor experience and as a result. What also doomed this install was the fact that it was a 32 bit install on a 64 bit PC, something sadly rather common for this era. During this time I also ran Half Life 2 on the stock install but while performance was relatively fine on this PC, the CPU bottleneck of the AMD processor started to appear, and appear hard with hundreds of frames per second coming crashing down at points with a lot of going on. Something perhaps not noticed when I was using a 768P resolution screen locked to 60FPS but very noticeable now.

It was time for the machine to undergo another upgrade, an SSD I had lying about was acquired and an install of Windows 7 was installed. This was something I done on Christmas Day in 2010, which feels rather odd in retrospect (Spend time with the family instead surely?) but had to be relived here for the sense of functionality.

Windows 7 needs no introduction to many I’d imagine, it was just an improved Vista all round and so much friendlier to this machine. A clean install was performed and after a few minutes I was into the desktop (Though installing what I needed took time, this was mainly down to the amount of stuff needed such as drivers and GOG versions of games installing all at once)

And then comes trouble, huge this time

Around this time Windows 7 appears on the machine it becomes apparent a huge issue is dawning for the machine. Sudden freezes after the BIOS boot screen appears, usually after the Microsoft OS selection screen which would completely lock up the system and require a restart.

This turns into something of a head scratcher and many hours are spent as a result going into BIOS settings and fiddling about with hardware to try and fix the issue.

My first attempt was to remove the RAM and adjust to various configurations, this solved nothing as did stripping the machine down to a base configuration.

The breakthrough came when in desperation and having ran out of options, I untangled a major mess of cable tied wires and removed the power supply and opened it up. (Caution: If you don’t know what you are doing with opening up power supplies, please don’t open them under any circumstances) Revealing the culprit, capacitor plague had claimed a number of capacitors on the unit, something I scarcely thought possible on this machine from the late 2000s since the plague had allegedly ended by at the very least 2005 according to information on the Internet.

This explained all the woes I was having with booting, now I needed to consider a solution to the problem. The immediate solution, to recap the entire power supply either partially or in whole was ruled out quickly due to a lack of space in my working area (At least for now) so an alternative Power Supply from an inactive PC was sourced, this was not ideal as it now deprived another PC from working but it unfortunately was the best I had on me. Cable management in a cheap case from 2008 made the experience of connecting everything up again also one to forget, though the addition of an external GPU power is welcome. The PC has behaved perfectly fine since

Even more upgrades (Though probably undeserved)

The next upgrades after replacing the power supply are overkill but something I wanted to explore. Firstly a late era PCI-E Sound Blaster card which caught my attention due to the addition of being able to take over front panel header functionality so it was grabbed though I soon found out I hit a wall as the uses for such a card are limited due to mainly outputting the sound through HDMI instead, which is perfectly fine.

The next upgrade was a Blu-Ray and HD DVD drive, this required an involved process of annoyingly taking off the front panel face and removing a sharp metal cut out which was more like banging it out of place with the back end of a screwdriver. This drive isn’t necessarily needed but given how it supports the abandoned HD DVD format as well as Blu-ray drives and the computer was made just outside the ultimately brief HD DVD heyday I thought why not. It’s a wonderful, if very odd upgrade and the drive is one of the quietest drives I know of. It’s a shame the front panel of the drive is obscured but it still belongs in this machine.

So after all that, was it really worth it?

The question of whether this machine was worth a nostalgic punt back to a not too distant past is probably one of the most subjective things in this whole write up. For my purposes, I think I would agree for the most part.

Getting this machine going took quite a bit of work but I wouldn’t say it was an absolute uphill struggle. I consider myself experienced with the internals of PCs and what can go wrong with computers of various ages. Were the end results really what I would call satisfying?

I would argue I’ve got immense satisfaction from fixing up this computer, it still isn’t the fastest machine I’ve used and the CPU bottleneck is something that cannot be fixed without a complete motherboard replacement I feel but this was my first games machine for better and for worse.

To relive the days where I was PC game playing on what was essentially an office machine at heart gives me a very humble feeling, even in 2010 as I started to go beyond RuneScape I found a huge variety of games that could be played on this machine, the PC back catalogue is one of the greatest in the history of video games so I had plenty to choose from and many are represented on the current machine. This history also allows me to feel free to install whatever I want on this machine because I was playing many games from many different eras back then. A core memory of pinging a friend in 2010 asking how to defeat the final boss of Doom (1993) on the exact same model of PC is a special memory and definitely increases the value of this machine for me.

I also can go back and test the machine’s limits with eyes afresh. This machine is very much my Xbox 360 era machine, what this means is that it’ll play basically anything from the Xbox 360/PS3 era with usually quite good performance levels. I was replaying Tomb Raider from 2013 recently to extremely good performance levels and to me represented the tip end of that era.

Where this machine falls down however is the next generation, having tried Rise Of The Tomb Raider and Wolfenstein The New Order the limits of the machine are reached very quickly, the CPU bottleneck comes and limits what you can do heavily and marks the end of playability as the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 class video games make their mark on the landscape.

For what its limits represent however I have a whole library of games, both ones I played at the time and games I didn’t I can access and find out how they run on this machine. Replaying Bioshock on the machine I fell in love with the game is priceless as is replaying Half Life 2’s trilogy.

This machine made me work for it to show me what I did with it fifteen or so years ago, but its on the whole worth it, even if I did have to scavenge parts from other systems to get it going again.

This computer is one for the quiet evenings playing games and will take a very special place in my collection due to being the starting point for my love of PC game playing that has nearly been with me for half my life at this point. It wasn’t the fastest or best at anything in its time but I didn’t need it. Keep going into the future old friend.

Reviewed: 03rd May 2025

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