It’s been a hot minute since I wrote anything for the blog, I’ll admit. I have plenty of dead drafts sitting on my WordPress dashboard that I never finished, and I struggle to really motivate myself to write anything for the blog. But I might as well write some more about my XP PC while I’m here.
You may be familiar with my XP PC if you read my previous post about it. While I haven’t exactly used it much since then, it is still a source of coziness I occasionally return to, mostly just to play Bejeweled 3 or something. I enjoy tinkering with it and installing new software on it every now and then, most of it being games I find on archive.org and think I might play.
That being said, I never really delved into the technical side of it, nor have I provided a single update on it since a year ago when the previous post on it was published. So here it is in all its glory.
For the technically minded, the specs of my XP PC are: – CPU: AMD Athlon II X3 445 – Motherboard: ASUS M4A785-M – RAM: Kingston HyperX 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2-800 – GPU: ATI Radeon HD 4850 – Sound Card: Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium (SB0880) – Power Supply: Corsair CX450
It’s pretty funny to me that this PC (and by extension my first ever PC, as a lot of the components are shared) happens to have a tri-core CPU. It’s always been a bit of an interesting curiosity to me in recent years, but back when I actually used it as a daily driver as a kid, I never cared or paid much attention to it (except for it being slower than I’d like around the time it was replaced). Some other interesting parts (though not originally in my first PC) include a 250 GB HP Enterprise hard drive as the main HDD and a DVD-RAM optical drive mostly used for regular CD/DVD reading. No clue where my dad got those enterprise-tier parts but sure.
Of course, the other highlight of the build is the sound card (at least, in my opinion). It’s actually an upgrade that I literally installed today, mostly for hardware accelerated EAX on the supported games. I lucked out on getting the final X-Fi card that is compatible with XP while still being very up-to-date for my purposes. Honestly, considering I have a good pair of cans to justify it, I should look into getting a DAC/Amp for my main PC or even a newer sound card. We’ll see if that ever turns into anything. But for now, I get to enjoy higher quality output from my XP computer to my TV’s internal speakers, lol.
As for the updates: most of it is just more software/games installed, to the point where the hard drive is slowly but surely getting filled. I actually thought about formatting it and reinstalling XP for a cleaner and more focused system, but I find it hard to part with installs that I’ve had for years, so I won’t do that for now. Here’s the desktop in its current iteration:
That is it for now. I may or may not properly get into the swing of things and write more for this dead blog that like 2 people read at any point in time, but for now, enjoy this small bundle of XP-focused joy written up by yours truly.
May 2 2025
The Other Yoshibox Part 2: Bloaty Bloaty Bloat Bloat
It’s been a hot minute since I wrote anything for the blog, I’ll admit. I have plenty of dead drafts sitting on my WordPress dashboard that I never finished, and I struggle to really motivate myself to write anything for the blog. But I might as well write some more about my XP PC while I’m here.
You may be familiar with my XP PC if you read my previous post about it. While I haven’t exactly used it much since then, it is still a source of coziness I occasionally return to, mostly just to play Bejeweled 3 or something. I enjoy tinkering with it and installing new software on it every now and then, most of it being games I find on archive.org and think I might play.
That being said, I never really delved into the technical side of it, nor have I provided a single update on it since a year ago when the previous post on it was published. So here it is in all its glory.
For the technically minded, the specs of my XP PC are:
– CPU: AMD Athlon II X3 445
– Motherboard: ASUS M4A785-M
– RAM: Kingston HyperX 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2-800
– GPU: ATI Radeon HD 4850
– Sound Card: Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium (SB0880)
– Power Supply: Corsair CX450
It’s pretty funny to me that this PC (and by extension my first ever PC, as a lot of the components are shared) happens to have a tri-core CPU. It’s always been a bit of an interesting curiosity to me in recent years, but back when I actually used it as a daily driver as a kid, I never cared or paid much attention to it (except for it being slower than I’d like around the time it was replaced). Some other interesting parts (though not originally in my first PC) include a 250 GB HP Enterprise hard drive as the main HDD and a DVD-RAM optical drive mostly used for regular CD/DVD reading. No clue where my dad got those enterprise-tier parts but sure.
Of course, the other highlight of the build is the sound card (at least, in my opinion). It’s actually an upgrade that I literally installed today, mostly for hardware accelerated EAX on the supported games. I lucked out on getting the final X-Fi card that is compatible with XP while still being very up-to-date for my purposes. Honestly, considering I have a good pair of cans to justify it, I should look into getting a DAC/Amp for my main PC or even a newer sound card. We’ll see if that ever turns into anything. But for now, I get to enjoy higher quality output from my XP computer to my TV’s internal speakers, lol.
As for the updates: most of it is just more software/games installed, to the point where the hard drive is slowly but surely getting filled. I actually thought about formatting it and reinstalling XP for a cleaner and more focused system, but I find it hard to part with installs that I’ve had for years, so I won’t do that for now. Here’s the desktop in its current iteration:
That is it for now. I may or may not properly get into the swing of things and write more for this dead blog that like 2 people read at any point in time, but for now, enjoy this small bundle of XP-focused joy written up by yours truly.
By yoshi • Nonsense • 0