Long before I was a Mac user, I had two different computers I considered my first; a forbidden Windows 95 Compaq Presario which I took apart when I was 9, as well as my first real computer – an HP Pavilion a420n. My first real computer was the one where I could have my own user account, games, internet access, personal files, and more; I’ll never forget it.

(Photo: VCF Midwest 21 (2026) – Saturday Morning Walkthrough! – Ron’s Computer Videos)

Fast-forward to the Saturday of VCF Midwest 2026; I’m completing my first quick loop around the entire room, walking back toward the entrance to try and think where I should go next. As I was walking by EcoTech (Tables A108 – A106) to the right of me, a familiar HP computer beckoned upon me – several of them to be exact, all slightly different models, stacked on top of each other. Could that be it?

First one we tested had an AMD Athlon 64 and a model number I wasn’t familiar with despite looking like the one I remember, so I asked to test out the second one. Lo and behold it booted to the desktop, with an all-too-familiar set of system specifications printed on slightly worn but unpeeled original stickers. It became one of the first things I bought at VCF.

Story time

Picture this – it’s a somewhat cloudy but comfortable day in October 2003, and you just walked into this absolutely massive maze called Ikea. Upon stepping off the escalators to the second floor, past the initial hallway and beyond the kitchenware room, you enter a museum of aesthetic living spaces, quite a few of which had this mysterious, aesthetic gray flatscreen HP computer monitor.

Sometime a few weeks later, the same looking mysterious computer monitor appeared on a desk in my family’s living room, joined by a matching computer tower, speakers, a printer, a keyboard, and a show-stopping transparent laser mouse which glowed a bright beautiful scarlet red when used. “Surely, they must’ve bought it from Ikea.” my little brain thought. I found out years later it was a Best Buy computer.

We also had a Windows 95 Compaq Presario pizza box-style PC, but that was the forbidden computer stuffed away in a box in the basement which a friend of the family tried fixing sometime in 2001 – 02. The HP was first the family’s before becoming my own, but was the first-ever place I could have my own user account, saved documents, pictures, have personal internet access, and where I made my first steps to learn more about computers. A few years after the family bought the HP, I took apart then reassembled a computer for the first time, managing to revive it in the process – the forbidden Compaq Presario PC.

There’s something about the convergence of aesthetics from this computer and this time period which really stuck with me – glowing blue semi translucent power buttons with color changing indicators, a professional, clean, matte metallic looking gray that’s not metallic contrasted by dark blue, rounded corners, and a clean look. Seeing a computer like this at age 7 when mostly anything else was a shade of beige, felt like seeing the future.

Sometime in 2007-8 the PSU or logic board stopped working, hung onto it a few years before tossing it out without attempting to replace the parts, troubleshooting with what I had at the time. Today, this PC has an honorary spot in my collection amongst Macs.

System Specs

I wanted to recreate a near-identical build to what I had 23 years ago, but slightly better – I already had an HP Pavilion f1903 1280 x 1024 19-Inch LCD display from someone who gave away a bunch of old electronics including a period-correct laser mouse. For now I’m using a wireless Microsoft keyboard, but will soon find the matching keyboard along with speakers, and the color-matching HP printer.

For the time being it’ll remain on a spare 80 GB IDE Apple HDD, although the plan is to have an SSD for a boot drive, hard drive for storage. If I feel like experimenting down the road I’ll probably go minimalist-maximalist: an upgraded AGP GPU with Windows 10 or 11, dual-booting the original OS, and other low-cost upgrades which don’t alter the character of this PC. It’ll be a great nostalgia computer as it is, but it can also help flash Mac ROMs on AGP GPUs for PowerPC Macs to use.

Setting it up

Since Windows POSReady 2009 had 5 more years of support over XP but was essentially XP at it’s core, it’s what I chose to install after getting the drives sorted. Originally it had a 250 GB, which unfortunately stopped working when I got home from VCF.

An inspection with Disk Utility in my MDD proved my suspicions, the drive wasn’t working anymore, so I’m on an 80 GB spare Western Digital. I also fortunately had an IDE to SATA adapter laying around.. maybe it didn’t work in some Macs, but perhaps it could in this HP..?

Had the IDE to SATA adapter have worked, I’d be on an Intel 120 GB SATA SSD right now.. though this made me think of getting a SATA PCI card. The Dual 2.0 G5 and Sawtooth G4 have one, why not get one for the HP?

All setup

The HP Pavilion a320 is sitting on a padded, sturdy wooden dolly for easy wire access on any of the three towers for this setup, and is nestled comfortably against a Mac from the exact same time in computing history – a Dual 1.25 Mid-2003 Power Mac G4 Mirror Door Drive (Thank you again, Dan!). All that’s left is getting the matching accessories at this point.

Looking back

There was a time two decades ago, well before the “Hi I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” commercials or the iPhone, when it felt like everything was just-right with using Windows.. or rather, this computer; Bright glowing buttons, new era design aesthetics, having Microsoft Office 2003 installed just like I was learning to use in school, playing Castle Cat, Gorillaz and Candystand Adobe Flash games in Internet Explorer, watching YouTube, making my first purchase online ever (getting a Star Trek TNG Tricorder from eBay I couldn’t find anywhere else), and the silver Luna theme tied it all together through the years.

This HP was equally as stable as it was temperamental throughout the years, just as this VCF find reminded me when playing RAM musical chairs on the motherboard. If there were a rough Mac equivalent in terms of “stability-within-configuration + unstable at times when tinkered with” combo.. this a320n behaves either like a B&W G3 or a very picky Dual G5.