I did what I'm pretty sure is the gold build of marfGH: Volume 2 last night! And I'm tired of talking about it, for now, anyway. A lot has actually happened for me over the past two weeks, but it came with some of the most aggressive lows I've experienced in a while, so I wanted to hold off on the journal updates until I felt good again. Thankfully, I think we're in the clear. I hope.

So I said a few months ago that the eMachines Box developed more issues and I had to abandon it in favor of trying to make the eMachines laptop I brought to Wales work as a desktop. That never did, though—the gaming performance isn't there, even to the level of the onboard Radeon chipset in the eMachines Box, and the PS/2 adapter I bought has consistently had problems with the keyboard, which may pose a bit of a problem for using it.

I've been surprised—any time I find myself without a retro machine, I feel like I'm missing the ground. There's just something comforting about having access any time I want to a computer, even an objectively not great one, that feels exactly like the ones I grew up on before I went Mac. That's ignoring all the practical things I really do use the eMachines Box for, from CD ripping to Protoweb testing to a distraction-free writing machine and space to maintain my more retro sites to just fuckin' UT99 and IRC. I miss that fucking computer, man.

So, seeing as I have been thrust into a new job once more, if I'm gonna be slinging cases of beer again, it's also going to pay for my self-indulgence. We're not just going to figure out how to make the eMachines Box run again, we're gonna make it better than ever.

The issue with it, I'm fairly certain, is the power supply. It's freshly twenty years old and it may be too weak to sustain load anymore—other than board caps, which visually all look fine, it's the only thing I can think of that causes the issues I've had. I've read eMachines went with two different OEMs for the PSUs in the w3507, and while I got the better of the two (judging by the machine still working at all), it doesn't mean it lasts forever.

Apparently, these can take a standard ATX power supply no problem, so I got an MSI one with enough juice on the relevant rails rated at 550W (over the stock 300W one, since I plan on upgrading it like I said) picked out. I was waiting to see what my first paycheck looked like before I ordered it.

As far as upgrades go, I've got RAM and a nice GPU for the spare PCI-e x16 slot in mind. The board supports a max of 2GB and came with 512MB, so I've got some new old stock DDR2 PNY sticks on the way, and then I'd like to give it a real nice GPU (for what I'm looking to play, anyway)—a GeForce 8600. These were midrange cards from 2007, but given I'm looking to play stuff like Half-Life 2, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and Oblivion, I've heard good things about its performance, especially at 800x600 like I tend to run games at.

The only other potential bottleneck is the Pentium 4 Celeron in it, and ideally I should upgrade that as well (to another P4 seems to be my only choice given it's a Socket 478 board), but I think those two plus the SSD that's already in it will give me some real nice gains enough to get a lot more games playable, let alone the stuff like UT99 and Half-Life I already enjoy.

I haven't mentioned on here my plans to upgrade my now-thirteen year old daily driver as well, but I'll save that for another journal entry. Let's space out some posts and get the Cammy news mill spinning again, yeah?

Tagged under: emachines box tech