In this video I’m messing around with a real monster from 2001: an IBM eServer xSeries 220. This isn’t your average Pentium 3 desktop—this thing has dual 1.0GHz Pentium III CPUs, 1.5GB of PC133 SDRAM installed, tons of internal expansion, and it can go up to 4GB of RAM. I grabbed it at a garage sale for eight bucks years ago, and it’s been sitting around waiting for the right kind of dumb experiment… so in 2019 I decided to see what “modern” operating systems feel like on it. To keep it as fair as possible, I mostly left it stock and just tossed in SSDs—one with Windows 7 Ultimate and one with Xubuntu 18.04. Both OSes actually boot pretty quick thanks to the SSDs, but once you start doing real tasks, the pain sets in. Windows 7 will run (Windows 10 won’t), and basic stuff opens surprisingly fast, but web browsing and YouTube playback quickly turn into a slideshow. On Xubuntu, app launching is decent too, but I got stuck at a brutal 640x480 resolution and the UI is just… painful. I also tried for two days to get a GTX 1060 (and even a GT 1030) working through a PCI-to-PCIe adapter and riser, and it was a complete no-go. Next installment, I’m coming back with more RAM and a video card that actually works (like a GeForce 6200) because I honestly think this server has a lot of potential if the graphics situation gets fixed.