I had a Steam Deck 15 years ago

Before tablets and Steamdecks we had UMPCs

My father was always a tech focussed guy, which of course benefited me greatly as it lead to a steady stream of hand me down technology for me to play with.

He was a man ahead of his time, all he wanted in the mid 2000’s was a handheld device to read ebooks, listen to music, watch movies, browse the web, and play games.

Sadly, the 2024 iPad Pro or the SteamDeck wasn’t around back then, so he made do with a burgeoning new type of mobile computer called an Ultra Mobile Personal Computer (UMPC).

They were mainly meant for enterprise needs, jobs on the go and the medical field, but it didn’t stop them from being bought by people like my father. Then when he wanted an upgrade he would hand me down the old model.

So picture this, i’m 17 and I’ve got my own UMPC, and I’ve become very experienced at setting them up and optimising windows XP on them (for my father’s benefit).

So I turned it into my own personal gaming handheld. It was about the size and weight of the Steam Deck today, the battery life about similar, however, a lot less ergonomic I will add.

With a windows handheld the sky was the limit. I played any steam game that could run, I emulated everything, mainly my favourite Pokemon games, and honestly, spent just as much time optimising that UMPC as I do the Steamdeck.

I taught myself how to build an optimised slimmed down version of windows, to reduce the install size and impact on RAM. This improved the performance of games, like Fallout 3, and lengthened the battery life.

I wasn’t alone in the quest, there were all sorts of websites and forums dedicated to getting games to run on UMPCs. Guides, unofficial patches, and tweaks to make the experience that much better.

My first experience with batch scripting came from a forum that showed me how to kill the window manager at launch of a game, and bring it back after, this saved me precious RAM and CPU whilst the game was running.

I can’t recall the first UMPC my father handed down to me, I just kinda remember what it looked like, however my next one was the Samsung Q1. The biggest downside is that it released running windows Vista 🤮, so I flashed my slimmed down windows XP onto it to improve performance.

At the time, the holy grail of UMPC’s, and definitely the one I would have bought if I had all the money in the world, were the Sony’s.

The Sony Vaio VGN-UX1XN was sleek. Featured a slide out keyboard, lots of buttons, and even a fingerprint reader (they were new and exciting back then). Alas I never could afford one, and UMPC’s faded into the dust a few years later as Android tablets and Netbooks took over the world instead.

As an owner of a Steam deck, I’m constantly experiencing that feeling of familiarity as it’s really not that different from the UMPC’s I had as a teen. Not to be too negative on where game design and hardware has gotten to these days, but I feel like I play the same calibre on game on my deck today, that I did on my UMPC back in 2008.