Success! After considerable issues with the drivers, which despite the fact this machine and others like it are common workhorses were hard to locate I finally got it all working. I bought this fucker (used) in pristine condition off of some guy on one of our domestic auction sites years ago for what would now roughly be 20 EUR (25 - 30 USD.) He was selling multiple and I'm assuming some office or similar was clearing its stock, however as mentioned the machine was pristine in and out so if it was used in an office it was a very clean office. There was no dust whatsoever within it and not a single scratch. 100% as pure as a virgin. It did have two 2.5" HDDs inside with scribbles on it so it was in fact used for something.
Anyway, my goal was to have a fully functional Win XP machine that isn't a laptop. I have a Thinkpad of that vintage and my actual Internet Hate Machine of myth and legend that I bought back in 2004, but the issue with that beast is the fact I had to resort to its stock cooler which I bought used, because the one I had in it (a Zalmann no less, back in the day these were top tier and expensive) crapped out some seven or eight years back. Needless to say it sounds like Admiral Kuznjetsov on a bad day. There's also some cryptic electrical issue with the USB, it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Given that this PC survived multiple moves, multiple power surges and a PSU failure it's a miracle it works at all. Ergo this HP Compaq Pro 6300SFF.
Locating the drivers for Win XP was a nightmare. The ones offered on their official site refused, point blank refused to work or install and if (some) did install the system would shit out random error messages on basically any move I did. This persisted on both version of Win XP, the 32 bit one and the 64 one. I gradually managed to hunt down working drivers on various websites, mostly by using Yandex with US search engines of all varieties are useless. More importantly, I managed to "borrow" two old but working 4:3 monitors for it, Samsungs no less. One for usage and another for backup.
The goal of all of this was to have a perfectly functional machine able to handle any sort of video I throw at it, while at the same time being fully offline. The critical error and mistake of Linux and seemingly all modern OS's is their need to be fully online for updates and program downloads. On the other hand, I have a lot of software for Win XP. A LOT OF SOFTWARE. Cracked or with serials of course, because it's all from the good old days. This is without counting freeware. This may be inconsequential to zoomers, but back in the day cracks and various forms of warez were a necessity. Given that technological progress is essentially over, the last version of MPC-HC can and does play any and all video formats I can throw at it. I also tested out Touhou, and it plays the games without issues or random shit errors and whatnot.
Also the PC has a single speaker of acceptable quality and usefulness, making it perfect, just perfect, for intended purposes.
Anyway, is anyone streaming tonight?