“Those were the days,” some people say. In the case of the hype surrounding affordable home computers in the early 2000s, this phrase really fits well. People camped outside ALDI stores, just as they did outside Apple stores a few years later. All to get their hands on one thing: a Medion computer with good technical specifications at a low price. Heavily advertised but only available in very limited quantities.
The two models now in my possession were no exception, especially the model with the advertising-effective Intel Pentium 4 processor with breathtaking “real 3.0 GHz” and “hyper-threading,” which must have sold really well.
In fact, you can still find excerpts from the brochures from back then because careful people have kept scans of them somewhere. For example, there is such a collection of ALDI PC brochure excerpts at https://www.dosreloaded.de.
Nostalgic!
I was able to find the two exact brochures for my models there:
⧉ Aldi
⧉ AldiThe MD 8083 with Pentium 4 was available in ALDI stores from March 24, 2004, for €999. The MD 8030 with Celeron D brochure is from July 2004, and was priced at €799 at the time.
How has the model series aged?
Medion called the series “Titanium PC” back then – when many computers were still beige or gray. The design with the sliding door on the front panel was already flimsy even back then. But I still find the design attractive today, “clean.” I didn’t really like this design when it was new, but over time I grew to like it more and more.
It’s clear that Medion and MSI (Micro Star International from Taiwan) were already partners back then: the hardware has been noticeably slimmed down in some areas to save costs, even at the board level. Both PCs are based on the same motherboard, an OEM variant called MSI MS-7012.
However, it must be said that the Medion PCs of that time really offered a lot for the money. A remote control for a PC was already an exception back then, as was support for many standards and even a built-in TV card. Wifi was also not commonplace.