That case is clean, very nice. Got any shots of the guts?

I have the emty case from one of those and just gave away another one. Great systems! The stock PSU is heavy and adequate but if it needs replaced keep in mind that you will need to buy or build an adapter as Dell used a proprietary pinout. AFAIK these will take the modded Tualatin and the motherboard maxes out at 512mb of ram. Mine came stock with a 866 coppermine, 512mb of ram, a Creative 16mb TNT, 10gb Seagate and a SB Live! Oddly enough the paperwork for it says that it was sold in 2003.

Got the Slot 1 version (XPS T500) but still in the same case. I mounted the HDD under the floppy, don't like it sitting nose down in the front. but apart from that its a nice easy to work on case. Everyone always mentions the non standard ATX connector which is probably a good thing just in case you don't know but the PSU is good quality so not really an issue

Private_Ops wrote:

That case is clean, very nice. Got any shots of the guts?

You betcha! Sorry for the delay.

The Dimension 4100 is an amazing machine. 😀 The only things that would make it perfect for me are ISA and Tualatin support, but as it is, it's a very capable performer for Win9x games.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

The Dimension 4100 is an amazing machine. 😀 The only things that would make it perfect for me are ISA and Tualatin support, but as it is, it's a very capable performer for Win9x games.

I asked the South Korean seller with the modded chips and he said that his cpu's were compatible with the 4100 😀 and as far as audio goes you cant go wrong with an Aureal Vortex 2 card for pci

Hi! I'm popping in from the other thread.

Yep, I too picked up one of these for $10 from a guy on CL. Mine is not as nice as yours though. The case exterior is much dirtier with some numbers marked on it in permanent ink. I'll try to clean that off someday.

The one I found was also heavily used. It had so much dirt, dust, and hair inside of it that I'm sure airflow ceased completely several years back. I'm surprised the CPU and HDD still functioned at all, but they did. Mine had a P3-866 in it which I have replaced with a 1ghz CPU. It also has a SB Live Value, PCI modem, and a PCI NetGear NIC. For ODDs, it had both a Sony CDRW and a Samsung DVD player. I've since repurposed these two drives and replaced them with some other spare CDRWs I had. I left the 384mb of PC133 alone and won't bother upgrading that. This will be a Win98SE machine. There was no video card, but I installed a GF4 Ti4800SE. I've also dropped in a PCI USB 2.0 card and a PCI WiFi adapter. I've removed the modem and will probably dump it.

I'm not quite sure what I'll do with this PC. I guess I'll just hang onto it as a spare or keep it around in case somebody wants to borrow it and play some old video games. I know you can install those pin-modded Tualatin-S 1400 CPUs in these and they work fine. I'm just not interested in dumping any more cash into this system. I also don't want to task the 200W PSU more than I already am.

My favorite part of this Dell 4100 is the Quantum HDD. I don't know if it's just old and its bearings are failing or if it's supposed to whine/click/grind like it does, but either way I really like it. It sounds really "retro".

One of these days I'll post some pics of this system after I finish getting it put together.

I guess we can count these as two Craigslist success stories 😀 My machine was in generally excellent shape when I got it. Either it never got much use, or the previous seller cleaned it regularly. It even had a seemingly clean install of XP that I promptly nuked to make room for 98 SE.

However, it did come with the requisite broken optical drive - the TDK, in this case. I don't have any beige 5.25" drive blanks that fit, so I'm just leaving it in for now. Is it just me, or do optical drives have a super high failure right relative to other components?

The only other problem I found was the noisy case fan. Man, that bugger was loud... I guess that was a common problem with this model. The machine oil has it behaving well for the time being, but I imagine it will need to be replaced eventually.

Great machine overall, though. No need to pour lots of money into it... works great as-is.

maximus wrote:

The only other problem I found was the noisy case fan. Man, that bugger was loud... I guess that was a common problem with this model. The machine oil has it behaving well for the time being, but I imagine it will need to be replaced eventually.

You mean the one doing double-duty as combination exhaust and CPU cooler? I figured mine was just ancient, but it's really loud too. When I got it, it was barely spinning at all. I didn't have any machine oil handy and didn't feel like making a special trip to Ace Hardware, so I put a couple drops of 5W30 in it. I mean hey, cars are machines too, and it's oil, so we're legit. 😎 It spins now, but it's really noisy. It sounds like it is grinding itself to death. I'll probably replace it at some point when it annoys me sufficiently. Did you notice the temp sensor built into the fan? I guess it's how the motherboard is monitoring the system temps.

KT7AGuy wrote:

Did you notice the temp sensor built into the fan?

I did not notice that. I guess it would help explain the non-standard pin order on the connector. Replacing the fan might be tricky if the motherboard is expecting to get temperature data.