This is the Dell Precision 390 and insane $3,519 workstation from 2006. My configuration has 2GB of non-buffered ECC DDR2 with an Intel Core 2 Duo. With the highest spec system coming with an Intel Core 2 Extreme processor, 8GB of RAM and Nvidia Quadro card. This thing was a monster back in 2006 and I bought it at Savers for $12.99. The moment I saw this at Savers, I thought this would be perfect for a budget Windows XP gaming computer. Okay, so this fucking piece of shit is the GPU that was actually originally in the system when I bought it. I still have no idea what it is and it has a really weird port on the side that is definitely not DVI. So I'm basically going to say fuck that GPU and we're going to do something completely different. I was thinking about putting something kind of like extreme in there, like a original Titan or maybe like a GTX 960, but I figured we should probably do something a little bit more period accurate. So I thought I would go with this. This is a G4 GTX 275 and I figured this would be great for that system. So I figured that yeah, we should probably just put that in there. So if we're going to put a much higher power GPU into the system, we're going to need a better power supply. So I just figured I would throw in this Antek True Power 430W. I was going to use an Antek EarthWatt's 500W. But I no longer have that for certain reasons. It's nothing special or anything like that, but I figured it would probably work great for what we're going to be doing with the system anyway. I also got this Core 2 Quad Q6600 I want to throw in the machine. And for the operating system, we'll be using Windows XP Professional because well, why wouldn't we? Now there is actually a hard drive already in the computer, so we don't have to really worry about it. It's just a random Cgate 500GB drive that was in there when I got it, which I figured would be more than enough space for that anyway. So the system came with two gigs of RAM, but I might actually end up upgrading it to like four gigs in the future, so I can really max it out. I'm not going to go anything further than that because we're using Windows XP 32 bit, and 32 bit operating systems have a limit of four gigabytes until you cannot go anymore. And quickly adding up to total for all the parts, that is $46. Wow, feel like it did pretty good for that. Now let's get this thing put together and running. While I was assembling the system, I figured I would add in this dial emoto. The reason why I'm adding this is actually worthy of a video on its own. I have another video coming out soon about dial a bit to net. So now let's start on the computer and actually see if it works. Alright, so it does work, floppy-seek failure. Okay, well I mean I could fix that later. Oh, so it looks like there's already like Windows installed? Hey, look, there's already Windows XP installed. Oh. Okay, so obviously this, you know, it's going to need to reinstall. I mean I was going to reinstall Windows XP anyway, but you know, that's just giving me even more reason too. Uh-oh. Okay, so for some reason, the CD drive is not showing up. Yeah, what? It's just not showing up. Okay, so I went ahead and swapped the cable. Well, I hope this actually works now. Now we have no hard drive diagnostics. What? Well, I mean, you know, I'm pretty sure that's a cable plugged into the motherboard, so... I'm going to take a second look at the system setting to see if there's anything in there that maybe needs changing. Uh, Windows XP is loading up now. Oh, wow. That is a very old version of Steam. Okay, so the drive does not show up. So what we're going to do is we're going to turn this computer off and figure out what we can do to maybe make it work. All right, so I figured it out. Apparently in the BIOS, there was options to enable or disable each, uh, say the connection. And I just passed by it without even reading it. And yeah, it was the SATA port was actually turned off. So now that it's on, I'm able to load into the Windows setup and I can actually reinstall Windows just fine. And also apparently the version of Windows XP that was on that hard drive is Windows XP 64-bit edition, which I thought was interesting. Hmm. I don't think my keyboard is working in the setup. Just a hunch. All right, so all I did is actually just restart the setup and now it's letting me install on my keyboard as being detected. Everything's going fine. The way that you see the text that it is actually that hard to see in real life, I'm not really sure why, but let's just hope that when we actually get into Windows and when there's a graphics driver installed, that issue will go away. But yeah, right now this is like really incredibly hard to see. It's hurting my eyes looking at it. Well, that did not take long at all. I don't have mouse and keyboard not working again. But that boot up is so quick here on the desktop, but I have no mouse. Oh, oh wait, no, the mouse works now. Yo, so I can't go up to 1920 by 1080 yet, but I can do this. A couple days went by and I have a USB already to install drivers and patches. And for updates, I'm going to be using a program called Legacy Update. Legacy updates a program that's compatible to Windows 2000 and up that brings back automatic updates and other things. Check this out, it even brings back the old Windows update page. So all I need to do is download and run the program and then it will automatically install Windows XP Service Pack 3 and then I can actually install my graphics driver. I tried installing the graphics driver before, but it just didn't work and I assumed that I had to have service pack 3 before I could even install it. And my hunch about needing service pack 3 was right because the Nvidia drivers installed right away and it just worked. And of course, I'm installing updates. After I installed the GPU driver, I got this pretty weird BSOD afterwards. I have never seen this before. This... What the fuck? But after another system restarting a BIOS flash, everything went completely fine and that issue never appeared again. After I got back into Windows, I went ahead and searched for updates and I had to install an ungodly amount of updates. And this took a few hours. Logging back on after updates, I saw a message that I haven't seen in forever. Windows XP End of Support is on April 8, 2014. Oh my god, I got a print screen now. We're going to say this is a screenshot. We're going to need to file sad day. Heh heh. Now we can finally start installing some games in this computer. How about we start off with the original Far Cry? Now I don't have a speakers plugged into this right now, but I guess we'll figure that out later. I'm just going to put all this stuff to high and see if it could run it. You know what I should have done? I probably should have installed the Frap so I can actually keep a framerate counter. Yeah, this feels really good actually. Smooth. I guess I decided to try Half-Life 2, but here's kind of where I got sent out a weird rabbit hole. Half-Life 2 when it was originally released required the use of Steam to keep the game updated. Well, Steam hasn't been supported on Windows XP since January 1st of 2019. So I could have done one of two things. One, I could have just googled it to see if I can find a way to run Half-Life 2 without Steam, which I do know there is ways to do that, or I could try getting Steam to run on Windows XP. And that's why I decided to get a little bit creative. I saw this guy on YouTube posted a tutorial on how to get Steam working on Windows XP in 2022, and all he did was download an old version of Steam, modify a few files, and he actually got it working, though you cannot download any games or updates. So I kinda wanted to give this a try. I downloaded a copy of Steam off of their website, I installed it, then I just replaced all the files and modified all the files that I needed to, and I actually got it to work. I was chatting with a friend, and it actually all worked great. But I still couldn't install anything. I even tried copying games from my modern machine over here and it just wouldn't work. I would just say the game would be pending, and it wouldn't even try to import my Steam library. But for shits and giggles, I actually did get a version of CSGO working from November 2014. So I'm getting a whopping 100 FPS in the Inspec screen, which I mean that isn't very like extravagant by any means, but hey man, that's pretty cool. Let me try getting a game really quick. Oh my god, I appreciate that card! Okay, well, I'm in game. I don't know where my skins are, so I don't know what's going on there. Damn, you know, 40 FPS? That ain't bad. You know, that ain't bad. It's playable. Wait, so, okay, inventory. Okay, so I have the knife equipped, so it should, I don't know why it's not working. Hey, hey, hey, hey, I'm right behind you. Oh shit. Okay, so that's a bug. My knife is completely black. That is not what that's supposed to look like. So like not only is it really laggy, but the amount of input latency is really bad. I'm sure if I had more RAM, and if I probably just like went ahead and lowered the settings, it'd probably be better too, but like, I'm hitting clips on Windows XP. Okay, well, that's it for 2014 CSGO. Purely for shits and giggles. Maybe one day, I'll like hop on here just because I feel like it, but yeah, that's kind of crazy that I got this running on Windows XP of all things. Next, I wanted to try Star Wars Battlefront 2. The game actually ran really good performance-wise, but I was kind of disappointed. The game launched in 1280 by 960, which is all right, but there was actually no way in the options for you to change the screen resolution, which I thought was really weird. Is this really the only options that give us for anything? And the frame rate was capped to 80 FPS's entire time. And like the screen resolution, there was no way to change it. You know, growing up, I really only used two operating systems. Windows NT4 and Windows XP, and Windows 2000 here and there. I didn't upgrade to Windows XP until 2012, which is super late in its lifetime. And I used Windows XP all the way up until 2019 when I actually built myself a new computer. So coming back to Windows XP, playing games on it and building a whole system dedicated for it feels really nostalgic. But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed watching this video. If you liked it, hit like. This like, if you hate Windows XP and old computers, or if you just hate me. I have a lot more videos coming up in the future, so stay tuned.