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The Basement Scrap Pile

A few months later after our very first LAN party, in the fall of 2022, we were starting our optional 13th grade of high school. One late October afternoon, while wandering the lower ground floor with some friends, we peeked into one of the classrooms and couldn’t believe what we saw. Along the wall, stacked almost from floor to ceiling, for several meters straight, a row of old computers. One corner was filled with CRT monitors and printers, another with stacks of flat screen monitors. It felt like stumbling onto a real goldmine.

We immediately ran to find the school’s system admin and asked him if those machines were all headed for disposal and if we could maybe rescue a few. Luckily, he said yes, but with one condition: we had to help him pick out anything relatively modern and working, and set those aside for him. That’s how we ended up spending several of our free periods in the basement, digging through the pile, picking out parts for our own retro builds. At first, we tried to help the sysadmin with his request and test things for him, but honestly, there were just too many machines piled on top of each other. It was exhausting just moving them around while also trying to cherry-pick stuff for us and for him too, so before long we completely forgot about his condition and just focused on our own treasure hunt.

A few weeks later one of our teachers mentioned we were done with the curriculum, so he wouldn’t be holding more classes. Instead, anyone interested could join him in the old phone lab to help clear it out, since the lab was shutting down and being replaced by yet another Cisco lab. Of course, my friend and I went. From then on, we went every week, because the place was absolutely packed with retro stuff. Old PC components, vintage phones, even VHS tapes. Most of the things were interesting but not useful for us, so we had to sort through a lot. My best finds were an Intel Pentium II CPU with an Intel SE440BX-2 motherboard, a Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back VHS tape, a KVM switch, a ball mouse, a floppy disk case, and a zip drive.

By mid-November we had finished digging through the basement pile. Unfortunately, that meant the once neatly stacked rows of computers were now a chaotic mess scattered everywhere. On our last day of searching and testing computers we managed to plug in one machine that instantly blew up and immediately fried the wall socket it was plugged into. We didn’t tell anyone about that, but years later we still laugh about it. We haven’t seen the sysadmin for quite a while, but we didn’t really dare to after the mess we had made. We still went down a few more times, pulled out a handful of decent parts, but eventually stopped altogether. Everything else left down there was scrapped. The phone lab cleanout, though, kept supplying us with parts for months afterward.

The plan

With all those new parts and cases, I came up with a lineup of builds I wanted to make:

• a Windows 98 PC with the Pentium II
• a fresh Windows XP rig in a proper ATX case with a new board (and hopefully a better GPU),
• a Windows Vista retro machine with a first-gen i5 in my old case,
• and a small SFX multimedia (or maybe a server) PC.

That meant my retro computer collection had grown from one to four PCs.

Building the New Retro Computers

December rolled around, and I hadn’t really had the time or motivation to start assembling things. I still needed to figure out which parts would go into which build. On December 14th, the first day of winter break, I finally started tinkering. I began with the one I was most excited about: my new Windows XP rig. I cleaned the case, then put it together: an MSI P35 Neo2 MS-7345 motherboard, Intel Core2 Duo E8400 CPU, a Gigabyte GeForce 8500 GT 512MB GPU, and the hard drive from my previous XP machine, so I didn’t even need to reinstall Windows.

The very next day I built the Windows 98 machine. At first it was an Abit KV7 board with an AMD Athlon, since I hadn’t yet brought home the Pentium II and its board from school (that would happen in January). I didn’t spend much time on this one at the start, I didn’t even install an OS yet.

On December 26th, I gifted myself another day of PC building. Sadly, this also meant saying goodbye to my very first XP build. At the time I didn’t know it, but in hindsight I should never have taken apart that working machine. I cleared the case to make room for the i5 system: Intel DH55TC board, first-gen i5-750 CPU, and I swapped the GPUs – the 8500 GT went here, the GT610 went into the XP rig. I didn’t do much else with it at the time. Only in January did I finally boot it up as a server, installed Lubuntu, and ran my very first Minecraft server on it. We played on it for a few weeks with four friends, and then it got abandoned. The Vista retro project never really happened; I just never had the motivation to dive into setting it up.

In February I came back to the Windows 98 build and finalized it with the Pentium II setup. I was curious if it would even power on, and to my joy, it did. So, I went ahead and installed Windows 98 Second Edition. Quickly I realized this would be way tougher than XP. For starters, I had zero experience with Windows 98, I grew up with XP, so that one feels nostalgic to me, while 98 was totally new to me. My very first problem was: it didn’t support USB drives. I couldn’t get files onto the machine at all until I discovered the nusb driver (that I had to transfer via a floppy disk). That solved it, but then the OS turned into a weird bilingual mess, since the driver was only meant for English installs. Honestly, I haven’t touched that build much since, but one day I’ll dive deeper into the Windows 98 retro experience.

When everything fell apart

By 2023 I had a whole new lineup of retro PCs. I used the i5 build briefly as a server in January, barely touched the Win98 machine, but the XP rig saw regular use, even for schoolwork, like when we had to use Microsoft Project 2003 for some homework.

Summer came, and with exams behind us, we started planning another LAN party. I prepped by installing games, testing them out, even set up recording software to capture gameplay. The lineup: Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, Serious Sam 2, Heroes of Might and Magic, Unreal Tournament, and Worms: Armageddon.

We were excited, but then disaster struck at the worst possible time. One day the PC worked perfectly, but the next day it simply refused to power on. Two days before the LAN party. Total panic. I tried everything, changing the CMOS battery, swapping RAM, disconnecting components, but nothing worked. After about 10 hours of non-stop troubleshooting, I had swapped literally everything: RAM, CPU, motherboard, GPU. At that point the only original part left was the case, but that wasn’t even touching anything that could short out, could all my spare parts really be dead?

The next day I took it to my friend’s place, where it booted first try. To this day I have no idea why. I was too tired to care, just relieved. We fixed up the other three PCs, installed all the games, and packed everything up for the next day. When we arrived at my friend’s summer house, my PC died again. Half an hour of fiddling later, it suddenly decided to work properly again.

The LAN itself was a blast, but once I got home, I shoved the PC back into its place and had no desire to touch it again.