£10 Windows XP PC from a house clearance, repair and upgrade.

Beankp60

Beankp60

Beankp60

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After my Pentium 166mmx build/rebuild i was keen to build another old pc. I was looking through Facebook Marketplace and i noticed someone selling a computer desk locally with an old pc tower sat on it. She was also selling loads of other items so i though i would message her and ask if she would sell it. She said she would and it would be £10.
I had no idea what spec or anything it was but my mum lived near her and picked it up for me.

Screenshot 2025-12-05 165351 - Copy by Bean Beano, on Flickr

On arrival i opened it up to find this.

20251205_135000 by Bean Beano, on Flickr

All air vents or anywhere dust could gather it was caked in it and the case was pretty grubby and i thought it had spots of rust on it (but it was just dirt).

20251205_140949 by Bean Beano, on Flickr

Unfortunetly it didnt have any decent cards in it like a sound blaster or a graphics card, but it was worth a shot for £10.

20251205_134925 by Bean Beano, on Flickr

I thought i would power it up and see what it did. It would post but the CMOS settings were lost, i thought the battery must be flat so i reset the bios setting.

20251205_135342 - Copy by Bean Beano, on Flickr

So its a Celeron 2.66ghz CPU and an odd amount of ram.

The XP loading screen apeared but then it would just power down every time and not get past it. I then started cleaning the pc and noticed the state of some capacitors on the motherboard around the CPU.

Burst
20251205_141005 - Copy by Bean Beano, on Flickr

Burst and buldging.

20251205_140927 by Bean Beano, on Flickr

It looked like there were only 2 values of caps in the area 3300uf 6.3v and 1500uf 16v. I thought it was worth a shot to try and replace them and see if it fixed the booting issues, so i ordered them from RS. The damaged ones took a little removing i guess the board was soaking up a lot of the heat from my soldering iron. I have never replaced components on a motherboard this recent before but i got it done after a good clean up with IPA and fibre glass pen in the affected areas.

20251209_202749 by Bean Beano, on Flickr

Some had really failed and others were bulging ready to go.

Some of the new ones fitted and after everything had a good clean.

20251209_202832 by Bean Beano, on Flickr

After reassembling the PC it would now boot and ran scan disk, then i was greeted with the desktop and a wall paper of someones Bentley.

IMG-20251209-WA0006 by Bean Beano, on Flickr

The PC seems to have been used very little, hardly anything on the hard drive, just pictures of old cars, car insurance details, digital camera and printer and scanner software.

After this i decided to install an old Creative XFI Fatal1ty sound card i have had spare for a good few years. After installing the drivers that worked great.
I then started looking for upgrades, i found some new old stock 2x1gb ddr400 ram on Ebay to max the board out.

20251213_102903 by Bean Beano, on Flickr

I also spotted a very nice Mitsubishi Diamond plus 220 CRT monitor on a gaming group. It was a good couple of hours away from me but it turned out someone the guy worked with only lived a few miles down the road from me so he managed to get it delivered to my door for me the next day!
20251210_062229 by Bean Beano, on Flickr

It is boxed with manuals and packaging ect. It is huge, it only just went through my front door.

I hooked it up to this machine and transfered over some 1600x1200 images from my main pc just to see what they looked like.

20251212_143705 by Bean Beano, on Flickr

20251212_143716 by Bean Beano, on Flickr

20251212_143726 by Bean Beano, on Flickr

The images look much better than in these pics i am really impressed with it. Also the menu on this montior allows you to tweak every adjustment which is impressive. I didnt adjust much i just got the image centered and resized slightly. The max resolution the screen goes to is 1920x1440 @75hz. I dont remember CRT monitors looking this good when i used to use them but i guess i could never afford a high end one like this back then.

Heres one showing the new ram installed 2x1GB DDR400

20251213_103432 by Bean Beano, on Flickr

I have also got a Graphics card coming in the post for it which is a ATI Radeon HD4670 1024MB AGP. I had been looking and posting on groups but it seemed hard to find a good spec AGP card for sensible money. Im also looking for a Socket 478 Pentium 4 cpu for it 3GHz + if anyone has one spare.

Ive also replaced the CR2032 CMOS battery with a new Panasonic one.

So heres the spec so far
Unknown generic case
Gigabyte 8s661FXM-RZ motherboard
Celeron 2.66GHZ CPU with stock cooler.
2x 1GB Corsair DDR400 CL3 Ram.
DVD drive - not sure if this works, the tray seems a bit sticky.
Liteon CD rewriter.
Floppy drive
Creative XFI Fatal1ty sound card, i have the front panel for it but i havent fitted it yet.
Seagate Barracuda 80GB hard drive i think.
700w PSU which is much newer than the rest of the components. I think the capacitor issue maybe caused the PC to stop booting up for long so someone thought they would try and replace the PSU to hopefully fix the problem but never did. Also there was hardly any screws holding the motherboard in so maybe someone has looked it or or tested it in the past but never went any further with it.

The case came up a lot nicer i have scrubbed it inside and out. It is missing the flap which goes over the USB ports but maybe this could be 3d printed at some point in the future. Ive been enjoying fixing and getting these old PC's back up and running. Ive been looking though my boxes of old parts in the loft and i have got an Athlon 64 X2 6000+ CPU with big Zalman cooler in a Asus Crosshair motherboard and some Dominator Ram and an R9 270X OC GPU (i think it is) So i am also thinking about getting another old tower case and buiding that PC up as a later model XP machine maybe.

The plans for this PC though are to get a half decent AGP GPU and a P4 CPU in it, defrag the HDD then load it with some games and see how it gets on, i have thought about adding an SSD but this HDD seems good for now. I also need to change the AMD sticker on the front to a Pentium 4 one which i pick up a CPU for it.
 
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Love this.
It's funny that so many of us want to get a CRT again. I always keep an eye on the used market here, but I just don't have the space for one in the house. The wife would definitely kill me if she came home to an old PC monitor. :D
 
Emlyn_Dewar said:
Love this.
It's funny that so many of us want to get a CRT again. I always keep an eye on the used market here, but I just don't have the space for one in the house. The wife would definitely kill me if she came home to an old PC monitor. :D
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I have quite a few of them installed my loft. Ive got a B&O mx4000 tv with the motorised stand, a Sony Trinitron 21" tv, a commodore 1084s monitor modified for a scart connector, an old Japanese cctv black and white monitor i rescued but not sure it works and also a cub monitor which needs repair for a BBC micro 32k computer. So ive a few up there. Ive also got a few arcade machines which have their crt's also. So ive a few spread about.
 
Zefan said:
Very cool. The CRT is a thing of absolute beauty.
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It seems ive got lucky when I spotted it and i didn't realise how high end of a crt it actually is. Certainly a good find. I had been thinking about a crt monitor since I did the win98 pc rebuild recently. So i had been keeping an eye out for one locally.
 
Emlyn_Dewar said:
Love this.
It's funny that so many of us want to get a CRT again. I always keep an eye on the used market here, but I just don't have the space for one in the house. The wife would definitely kill me if she came home to an old PC monitor. :D
Click to expand...
Its better to ask forgiveness than permission ive found. Sometimes my misses has came home from work and after spotting what I've bought she has gone back out the house and jumped in her car. Im still not quite sure where she was going on those days
 
They're all over fleabay, but you need to be mindful of the sSpec number to make sure you get a Pentium 4 HT (the one with Hyperthreading, 800MHz FSB and dual-channel memory).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_4_processors#Northwood_(130_nm)_2 for reference.

I can see a SL6WG going for £21.50. Almost tempted to replace my Prescott :P but the mod project planned for her is purely aesthetic and practice.
 
Ive just been having a good look and ive ordered this one sl6wk

Pretty sure its Northwood, socket 478, ht and 800 fsb.

I still haven't found an agp card though. My radeon 4670 came but its dead.
 
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Vinno said:
Came for the PC - stayed for the CRT. What a gorgeous beast.
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Its lovely isn't it. Im just desperate to get a decent agp graphics card to test it out properly. Im even thinking about building another pc as I have these parts ive already got from years ago.

Crosshair am2 mobo
Amd x2 6000+ with a zalmam cooler
Dominator ram ddr2
Xfi sound card
I think its a r9 270x gfx card pcie
I just need another case. Or do I take this socket 478 machine to bits and use this case I cant decide. I might have an old case ive left at my step dads from years ago in the loft so I might go round and check.
 
I can't speak for Vince, but for forum members it's Gratis normally, if it peeks his interest. He does some amazing board level fixes on some complex kit. He has fixed other members GPU's in the past also.
 
This is awesome. Impressed with the cap-swap repair job. I'd have written the board off because I'm a lazy sod. I feel sad I didn't keep some of my old hardware cos it would've been fun to get it going again like you have done.
 
LePhuronn said:
If you do find one, make sure it's a Northwood. I got the later Prescott and it's hot junk :cry:
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To be fair Prescott although running hot isn’t slow, the problem was it just wasn’t a great advancement for the additional power usage. In some scenarios it can be quite a bit faster though.
 
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