Acquired a Fujitsu ESPRIMO 588/VW for a Gaming PC Build

Step 1 of building a gaming PC.

This is likely a corporate lease-return unit, as a lot of them were being listed. I managed to get it on Yahoo! Auctions for 5,500 yen plus tax (6,600 yen), with 1,100 yen for shipping, bringing the total to 7,700 yen. The specs feature an 8th-generation Core i3 CPU. Since the CPU shares the same socket as 9th-gen processors, the motherboard can actually be upgraded up to a 9th-gen Core i9. My only slight mistake was that this was the 500GB HDD model—I would have preferred an SSD. But since you can buy a 250GB SSD for just over 2,000 yen, I can always replace it later.

What I was most concerned about...

...was the slot on the riser card. I checked this first, and thankfully it was the PCIe x16 slot I was hoping for, which allows you to plug in a graphics card—the standard type you usually see. It would have been a huge disappointment if it had been an unfortunate option with a weird PCI slot or something, which would have forced me to buy a replacement riser card. What a relief.

Next was checking for dust and cleaning it out. There's a fan next to the CPU, and it was heavily clogged with debris, so I cleaned that out thoroughly. There wasn't much dust on the heatsink itself.

I don't have a monitor, so I'm outputting to my Panasonic TV at home. Modern TVs support 4K, easily surpassing the specs of typical PC monitors around, and they have insane performance like a 144Hz or 170Hz refresh rate. Since it's a TV, it only has HDMI terminals, and the PC unit itself only had a DVI-D output. So, I bought a DVI-D to HDMI conversion cable at Hard Off and used it to boot up. The pre-boot screen appeared without any issues. It threw an error because I hadn't plugged in a keyboard yet, but that's normal. I figured that since it's a lease-return unit, it wouldn't have any weird quirks preventing it from booting up.

Since it's a pre-built manufacturer PC, a Windows Pro digital license is tied to the motherboard. That's a great advantage of manufacturer PCs because you don't need to buy an OS. Furthermore, as I mentioned earlier, lease-return units flood the market, so even with competing buyers, you can usually win them at the starting price. Nothing but wins.

The OS wasn't installed, so to install one, I first used my ThinkPad to create a recovery disk and tried booting from it. However, the boot partition wasn't created properly, resulting in an error saying it couldn't recover. So I started over, went to the Microsoft website, downloaded the Windows 11 installer image onto a USB/SD card, rebooted, and ran the installation again. This time, the installation started without any issues.

Windows 11 installed successfully, and I confirmed that it rebooted and booted up properly.

Checking the Windows license, I can confirm that Windows 11 Pro is successfully activated.