So I got this thing years ago. I was at my uncle's house and saw it being used as a coffee table in the guest room I was staying in at the time, asked if I could take it and the rest is history. In addition to the tower itself, I also got a boxed copy of Windows XP full of goodies (the various other manuals and paperwork associated with the PC, including the original recipt!). The PC is from 2001 and it seems it originally shipped with Windows ME of all things, but my uncle quickly upgraded it to XP once that had come out. (Also, my brother coined the name The Mesh, since it was made by a company called Mesh who put their name on the front of it, it's a relatively unknown brand, and I think it sounds kind of funny to call it The Mesh
Once I got home, I first installed Windows XP, I don't recall much from that time period but when I checked back on it later on it had a bunch of azumanga daioh stuff on it (I'd just gotten into the series in 2019 and was a big fan, which also helps place when in time this was all taking place). Since I was using the original XP disc I had some struggles with activation (IIRC it would force you to dial in to microsoft's servers to activate it, which of course was broken by then), which eventually caused me to lose interest in using the thing once the 30-day trial window had ended.
So, on the second time around I decided to use Windows 98. In this form I got much more done with it, using it to play games (with liberal use of daemontools), ingest photos from some of my old digicams (more on those another time) and even did some web browsing using the wayback proxy (one of my favourite sites was greggman.com, which was a cool blog about a guy in Japan in 2001, turned to a much less fancy site by 2010, and all but gone from the internet by 2020). One particularly cool thing was being able to play Quake 3 online seamlessly without any setup (this seems to no longer be the case, oh well).
However, my time with this incarnation of The Mesh was cut short when the VGA Cable on my CRT Monitor started to die. It went from working most of the time, to not showing any red colours unless you put pressure on the cable, to eventually just not showing any red at all. Now, I'd seen this issue before with some of the LCD monitors in my old school and it was always solved by replacing the cable. But annoyingly, the cable in this monitor was hardwired and even after taking apart the monitor and attempting to reverse-engineer it, I could not reverse it's fate. I briefly flirted with the idea of using the CRT chasis for an arcade project before letting it get swallowed into the void of my storage (I think my parents eventually disposed of it) and used the housing for another project (which I shall also tell you about some other time)
With the monitor gone, I The Mesh was retired once more to it's duty as a coffee table. Until! I recently got the bug for vintage computers after selling my iMac G3 (another story for another time), and with the Mesh sitting there, begging to be used once again, ideas started brewing in my mind.
I would've liked to get another CRT monitor since they really can't be beat for this kind of thing, but they've become basically impossible to find second-hand these days, my only option would have been paying up the arse for one from a scalper and I did not feel like doing that. So my next best option was a period-accurate(ish) 4:3 LCD monitor. Once I obtained one of those I had to think about what OS I wanted to run.
Windows 98 worked last time, but would have been pretty boring and doesn't have any multi-language support (which would have been a step back compared to my experience with MacOS). Windows XP introduced that feature and is very well regarded, but in my mind that OS is cemented more in the mid-2000s rather than the turn-of-the-century period I wanted to emulate with The Mesh. That left two other oddball windows versions, Windows ME (as Mesh intended) with all the downsides of windows 98 and less of the upsides, or windows 2000, the oddest of oddballs (I think you can guess which one I went for).
And that's where I'm at today! I've been having loads of fun with Windows 2000, but that story is still incomplete, once I've settled down I'll post more experiences as a part 2 to this, but in the meantime check out my BlueSky posts about it!
