I’m not immune to that irrational surge of emotion one gets when receiving a new toy. And in my case, I get most excited about computer hardware – surprise, surprise.
My windows XP gaming computer handled all my favourite late ’90s and early ’00s games like Age of Empires, Lords of the Realm II, Civilization II and the like. It was, however, a refurbished HP Compaq office PC without a video card, and with only a modest Pentium D inside. It was better than what I was using for XP gaming before, but it was by no means a proper gaming computer.
That PC was loud because its fans were always on. And because the processor and RAM were always running hot, the PC eventually died on me. I was always expecting that. I only paid about $200 for it.
So off to ebay I went looking for a replacement. And I found something really nice: an HP Z200 workstation with an Intel Core i3. And I only paid $100 for it, plus $50 shipping. Even better, I was able to put an unused low profile graphics card into it that wouldn’t fit into the HP Compaq that had just died.
My “new” computer is about 8 years old, and from what I could tell, they were originally selling for around $2,500. Well, gosh. It’s nice to have something that can finally run my copy of Scrapland that I bought. That game will only run on Windows XP, and isn’t available on Steam or GOG.com. Hooray!
One sad note is that when I installed Empires: Dawn of the Modern World, I found that all the text everywhere in the game (and some graphics too) were either completely invisible or appearing as odd blocks of colour. So that game is completely unplayable. I might have to buy it again on GOG.com and play it on my Windows 10 gaming PC – the one that can’t even handle the fucking Sims, lol.
And what’s to become of my old HP Compaq PC? I was going to remove it and recycle it, but then I was thinking about where to get a monitor stand. My monitor sits right on top of it. Then I realized that my old dead PC is now my monitor stand.
So hooray for people salvaging old office workstations and selling them on ebay. I now have the fastest and most powerful Windows XP computer I’ve ever owned, and I got it cheap.