I dug my little white “Borg cube” out from under the workbench and decided it was time to build a proper retro box—something just powerful enough to run the older stuff I’ve been tinkering with: Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8.1. This one had a rough life thanks to a mouse infestation (yeah… they moved in when I left the bottom open), so I tore it down, cleaned it up, and rebuilt it with an H97N board and a 4th gen i5 setup. I also tossed in a spinning-rust 1TB drive for ROMs and used an SSD for the OS partitions. And because nothing is ever simple, onboard video gave me fits—Vista finally behaved once I threw in my old GTX 950. From there, the whole game was getting a clean triple-boot install working without dragging these machines onto my main network. I used Medicat (Ventoy-based) on an NVMe-in-USB enclosure to boot installers, split the SSD into roughly three equal partitions, and installed in the right order: Vista first, then 7, then 8.1 so the bootloader plays nice. The end result is what I’m calling “Vista 87”—a sandbox-ready retro rig that I can VLAN off with a UniFi Flex Mini, keep it away from the internet, and use it for old OS testing, drivers, and whatever weird project I’m into this week.