Haha, thanks! I’ve had plenty of those moments myself. I was determined to make this thing work with just the tower. Here’s the section of the doc that clued me in. I’ve also found a two pin header that can power the system up and I’ll share my solution for adding an external power button soon! …

Cardboard is not an RF insulator.

In my extremely limited experience, shielded speakers were only really shielded on the outside edges and not front to back: on my family’s second computer (first multimedia PC) the speakers didn’t impact the CRT as long as there were on the sides and not slightly in front. Is this possibly your …

Yes, unfortunately that is one goofy looking bracket! You might have some luck trying to find an identical dead or parts card for cheap that you can scavenge the bracket from. I basically did the same thing for an MWave card last year.

Can you post a picture of the card out of the case? Also, what motherboard and kind of case do you have? There are a number of OEM systems that have nonstandard heights, I have one of them.

What games are you playing? There are a couple out there that ran poorly on the k6-2 compared to even the P1 MMX chops that were running at half the clock. If I recall it was due to the weaker FPU.

I’d love to know myself! I’ve got a mid-90’s Aptiva that’s an AT PSU with two 3.3v 6pin cables and a 3 pin for standby/button power. It’s nothing too off the wall and I’ve seen workarounds for the 3 pin cable. I also imagine splitting a 3.3v to two six pins is a sound idea. However, it be nice to …

I have a 2176-c65 that had a similar issue. It ended up being a bad connection between the riser and the motherboard. Apparently the recommended connection order is connector pieces in the riser first, then install I. The motherboard. Once I took it out and put it back together in the right order …

Have any of you fine Aptiva owners that have a system with a riser card had issues with ISA cards causing the system to not boot? I've got a 2176 and post-cleaning and restoration the Mwave card just causes it to not post, no beeps. It boots with a PCI card but only occasionally seems to see it. …

Update: While trying to review the process I had been going through to get the system working I decided to work on the chassis, drives, and wiring to get things cleaned up and functional. I was able to CA glue the front cracks and separated parts back together, got the sliding door mechanism …

AlessandroB wrote on 2022-12-22, 18:52: It is the same mainboard used in the desktop oriented pc? Yes, I know there is an earlier board with SiS integrated video, but mine is ATI, and I believe the desktop only carried the ATI integrated video. Chipset for all boards was Intel 430VX.

AlessandroB wrote on 2022-12-22, 18:00: It is a 486 with ISA/PCI riserboard??? It's a socket 7 Pentium 1 with the ISA/PCI riser board. It's the same board as the 2134 just with the riser oriented for the mid-tower. Really fun to have to take that riser apart every time I need to get underneath 🤣!

Thread revive for the sake of an update: I've gotten the case exterior and interior components cleaned, broken plastics re-glued and retextured. I even got the front door mechanism repaired and working again. As far as functionality, I finally had windows 95 OSR 2 up and running a few days ago. I …

Sounds like a fun project. I'm too lazy too look it up but it looks to be a socket 7 with integrated graphics. Not really you normal pc I guess. The downside of this might be that you need to carry some spare parts yourself which is maybe a downside of you are low on space. But I personally dig the …

Good afternoon! I recently got an Aptiva 2176-C55 off of ebay in an unknown state for a pretty good price. It's the same model as the first Windows PC we had when I was 10. I learned quite a bit on this old system, including my first foray into GPU and RAM upgrades, lots and lots of software …