Hole in the sky?

My name is Major.

Sunday, July 6, 2025

My first REAL Gaming Rig - Playing Wow in 2005

 

This was a beast back then, and I'll explain why.

     In 2005 I was already over a year into playing World of Warcraft with my wife. I use to own a small but well known PC Repair Business, which I sold my controlling stake to a friend, so I had no shortage of old and aging PC parts, monitors, keyboards, etc. Really common in the business sector at the time was Pentium 3 Coppermine gateway computers, so I had tons of them laying around. There was a well known FAQ how to get an extra 200-300mhz out of them, and really get them screaming for zero dollars spent. I had an entire box of used Geforce 2-4 video cards, so this was the PC's we rocked at the time for many, many years:

  • Gateway Moo-moo box
  • Pentium 3 Coppermine T, Overclocked to the tits
  • Geforce 4 MMX (or shittier 2/3)
  • 512mb ram
  • Random sound card
  • Random junk monitor
This would be an exact example of what my wife and I gamed on for a loooong time

     We had just moved into our first real house, and we wanted a baby, so money was super tight. I started taking computer jobs again out of the house. Replacing broken modems, selling parts, replacing hard drivers, easy stuff. Our Pentium 3's just screaming away in the office room in the front of the house, still playing WoW on 17 inch monitors. A big job got dumped in my lap from someone I use to get a lot of work from, these huge Dell Dimension Business Class PC's from 2005, brand new, four of them total. They needed to be set up, office installed.. nothing crazy. He dropped the PC's off to me, then came back to grab them about a week later, but with no payment. He promised to pay me in a month, next week, you name it. Needed it right now, and how important it was. We talked over a beer, and next thing you know, in lieu of payment, he offered me one of these brand new PC's. The specs:
  • Dell Dimension Business E500 series?
  • Pentium D (early Dual Core!) 3ghz
  • 1.5GB Ram
  • Dual AMD 1900XT Video Cards (why!?)
  • Two hard drives
  • Random Tape backup drive under DVD rom
    Insane luck. I needed the money, but I wanted this so much more. Instantly went from everything on Low settings and taking minutes to boot, to having the best of everything. This PC got me all the way to playing Skyrim in 2011, and beyond. A friend hooked me up with an old viewsonic 21 inch CRT as he was going the LCD route, and I took it in trade for some work. I was all of a sudden a high-end gamer, and it forever changed my outlook on having a high end gaming PC. For it's day, I did not know many people that even had performance video cards, the market was so small. PC gamers were the huge minority, and many games were just not available, or hard to get. I would later sell this PC, and use a free Core 2 Quad, which I bought two of from the State Library Auction, but that's a story for another day. 

Note: Before you say a Pentium 3 was not good enough, here is a picture from the original manual. We played on dialup by the way!

Saturday, July 5, 2025

Vampire Hunter D - Full Movie!

 

     Vampire Hunter D was on of those movies that I heard about in middle school, in the early 90's. "Hey, have you seen that crazy R Rated japan cartoon with the Vampires?" Suncoast Motion Picture Company had the goods, but holy hell did you have to pay. $39.99 for a VHS tape on the worst quality that you would pass around to all your friends, watch at sleepovers, and introduce tons of other people to the genre. I lump this movie up with Wicked City and Ninja Scroll- I watched them around the same time and felt like this was the more tame of the three. I was really into Vampire shit at the time, reading tons of Anne Rice, so this was icing on the cake.