What Can an Office Computer from 2000 Do? - Minor Repair, Exploring Linux, Finding a Use for It!
I recently came in to possession of a 26 year old HP e-Vectra computer. I'm 25 at the time of writing meaning the machine is older than I am. I received it from a TV production company who in turn found it at a semi-local college which had sadly closed down. Instead of sending it straight to e-waste, I decided to tinker with it "in my spare time". I ended up spending quite a while getting antiX Linux installed, a notepad and most surprisingly, MAME (an arcade machine emulator).
Firstly then, I needed to see if the capacitors had leaked. This machine had potentially not been used in 20 years and it was built during the capacitor plague (1999 - 2007) thus I set about dismantling it. That proved tougher than expected as documentation is lacking for these machines but I managed to find an old blog post which proved immensely useful.
https://goughlui.com/2020/05/24/tech-flashback-hp-e-vectra-2000-a-business-sff-desktop-pc/
Once dismantled, I was pleased to see that only one of the caps showed signs of failure. I replaced it and its neighbour with 2 generic, 2nd hand, caps from my stash - I wasn't about to spend money on such a computer; I just wanted to see if it worked or not. After checking over the rest of the machine I replaced the thermal paste and cleaned the internals. I thought how unusual it was to see an 80mm fan wired directly to 12V as the only cooling for the whole computer. There's not even a failure sensor though it turned out to produce a fairly distinctive whine. I suppose you'd be able to hear if it had failed.
The computer has a tool-less design which surely must have been a novelty in 2000. Initially, I couldn't work out how to remove its HDD or how to slide the lid off. The EMI shield for the RAM proved difficult, as did removing the motherboard and so on. The cooler was precarious as you had to use a screwdriver and loads of sideways force to remove it. People used to put screwdrivers through their brand new motherboards back in the day. Though modern machines are more locked down, they are at least easier to service. Still, now that I've worked on this computer, I know it would be easier next time.
Anyway, after sorting everything, I put the computer back together, plugged it in and held my breath as I powered it up. Amazingly, not only did it work, but it seemed to work without issue! Besides mouse, keyboard and date and time errors, there appeared to be nothing wrong with it. Whilst the BIOS only had one page "Main", it looked like it came from a later machine. There was a level of polish unusual for a machine this old. I had to laugh at the "Serial Number" feature built in to the BIOS which could be enabled or disabled. Why not just enable it by default?
Getting an OS on to the machine was the next major hurdle. After booting in to the 26 year old Windows 2000 install and being greeted with a domain logon (yes, really!) I poked no further and decided to just install Linux. Some research led me to antiX Linux. It is related to MX Linux which I'd had had great luck with running on lower spec machines in the past so I was happy to give it a try. I (naively) attempted to USB boot. Nope! A machine this old needed a 2GB USB drive or less. My smallest one was 16GB. Oh how times have changed... I ended up using a customers desktop to burn a CD (I had to buy a pack first - 4 for £2.99) in order to boot. Still, I was very happy to see it boot a "modern" OS. You could technically browse the web with it though you certainly wouldn't want to. Installing Linux was simple enough as it wasn't my first rodeo - I still have flashbacks to installing Debian back in 2015. It is easier these days.
I was really happy when the machine booted from its internal HDD. The first boot took a while, as did downloading and updating all the packages but it boots quickly (by the standards of yester-year) now. At this point I decided to install a desktop environment (DE) though my paltry specs meant my choice was limited pretty much exclusively to IceWM. It is very efficient but also fairly limited. Customisation is practically non-existent though that shouldn't be a concern to anyone seriously considering using a machine like this. My main objectives were to have it boot automatically upon login and to have the following links on the desktop: a file manager and a notepad. By this point I hadn't decided I'd keep (and actually use the damn thing) but that decision would come shortly.
I'm a bit of a Linux noob so it took me a good hour to get the DE looking not terrible. I didn't have a display driver installed and there was an issue with the theme so everything looked blurry. It was only just usable enough for a demonstration. You couldn't have used it for work. After some research (and a bit of help from AI) I got the display driver installed, sorted out the theme and set the scaling. It looked 10 times better and was actually usable! I made a mistake when creating the launcher for PCManFM. I called it "pmanfm" thus it didn't show in the menu. I spotted it fast enough and a quick restart had the menu options working as I wanted them to. I used AI to sort the auto-launching. I regrettably didn't have time to dig in to each instruction and work out exactly what was going on but sometimes you don't. I still learnt tonnes by doing this project and, as auto launching a DE is something that is automatic in any modern OS, it wasn't taking the time to learn; I would only have forgotten before I next needed the knowledge.
At this point I was happy with the machine. I'd decided I go on using it for writing the blog posts that accompany each video. Who cares that it uses 10x the power of a newer machine? Old is gold! Really, the last thing I had to do was connect my NAS. That way, data loss would be far less likely as my notes would be saved to another machine. However, in order to test the limits of this computer, (and to challenge myself), I set about installing MAME, an arcade cabinet emulator. I'd mentioned that a computer with comparable specs could be used for such a thing and wanted to prove it.
Getting MAME running was a marathon endeavour, never mind actually making it run reliably. I naively installed the latest version of MAME (from the current repositories no less) and quickly realised I'd need an older version as it ran at 5% speed at best. I tried XMAME. Nope. Then some other version. Nope. Finally I settled on mame2000 version 0.37b5 (an ancient build) and a Retroarch build from 2016. I had to compile both from source and went back and forth for ages correcting errors, downloading missing packages and libraries, etc. I felt sorry for the CPU as I had it pinned at or near 100% for hours on end compiling all of this stuff.
Watching the game load at full speed for the first time and hearing the sound made me very happy. I didn't linger on it in the video but I sat and played for 20 minutes off camera. Imagine playing games on a computer older than you are! I couldn't believe it was able to keep up. If your preference is PacMan, Donkey Kong or other games from the 80s, they'd run even better (as they're less graphically intense). No doubt that with more optimisation you could have this machine running most arcade games at 60 FPS with sound but I'd shown what was possible and with that, I was happy. Plus, I only had so much time spare to tinker. These bills don't pay themselves...
I had a lot of fun making this video; I was amazed to see Puzzle Bobble run so well. Remember, we're talking about a machine with a single core, single thread CPU, 256MB DDR RAM and a pitiful IDE hard drive. There's your proof you don't need a powerhouse to have fun. You could use the machine for streaming music via Music Player Daemon, you could emulate pre-90s games consoles, the Commodore 64, the Amstrad CPC, etc., you could use it a serial terminal or as an SSH machine (although there are admittedly very few cases where a machine this old would make sense for that). Lastly, you could use it for legacy program support. Like me, you could use it for distraction free writing which it is so far proving perfect for.
Thank you for reading. As usual, the accompanying YouTube video is linked below:
(Repair Wins Blog - Post #2)
(May 2026)
