First post, by athlon-power
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I recently was able to get my hands on an old Gateway 2000 tower from mid-1997, a Gateway G5-200 with a Pentium 200MHz (P54C), 128MB of RAM, a 3.2GB Quantum Fireball, a 2MB S3 Virge PCI card, an Ensoniq AudioPCI ES1370, the modem that came with it, and a D-Link NIC card (what it had in it when I got it).
It was quite clean on the inside, though had a massive amount of scuffs and dirt on the outside that I removed with a combination of disinfectant wipes and a magic eraser. I took it completely apart, cleaned all of the outside and inside parts, including the power supply, and put it back together slightly differently than it came (Virge PCI in the 1st PCI slot instead of the second, that sort of thing). The first thing I noticed was that the original hard drive was dead, and made spinning up and slowing down sounds that were honestly quite awful, so the spindle motor had likely gone bad at some point. I replaced it with a Seagate 4.3GB HDD, and so far it seems to be doing okay with that replacement. I also replaced the CMOS battery, which oddly enough, while being 3V, was noticeably larger than a normal 3V CMOS battery, but with the smaller (normal) Energizer one I put in there, it seems to work fine. Once I had gotten through with all that, I downgraded it to 32MB of RAM that I pulled from the P200 MMX machine, and started trying to work with it.
The first few things that went wrong related to me not putting it back together quite right, but some red flags I've noticed are that when the Virge is in the first PCI slot, it will sometimes work, and sometimes display garbled video or the system won't POST at all. I had seen similar cards have bad capacitors on them, so I decided to try and replace it with a Trident ProVidia 9685 I had lying around. With any other PCI video card than the Virge (I also tested with a Trident TGUI9440-3), the system will either refuse to POST at all, or will just beep a video error and continue POSTing, just with no video output (I can hear the RAM counting, there is a floppy seek, etc.). This is when I insert them into any of the PCI slots.
However, with the Virge in the second PCI slot (the way it came), it works just fine. It occasionally will not POST, but that stopped after a little bit ago. Every time I turn it on, it POSTs and goes to Windows just fine. My immediate thoughts are a bad PSU (though when I opened it up everything looked fine), or bad capacitors on the motherboard (though they all look fine, and there is also a distinct lack of electrolytic capacitors on this motherboard, the only ones that are there are concentrated in the upper right corner of the mobo).
I don't know if these issues will return again, as so far, they seem to have stopped. Right now I have removed the D-Link card, and replaced the Ensoniq PCI card with a Vibra 16C. I took out the 32MB of RAM and put it back in the P200MMX, and it now has 64MB of RAM until I can get another 32MB stick.
On the bright side, I find this system very interesting, with the odd case design as well as the animated BIOS logo (the Gateway 2000 logo fades into place and the text "You've got a friend in the business." appears from left to right under the logo). Pretty fancy for 1997 if you ask me. This system also came with a Conner tape backup drive, which is fairly fancy as well. If I can get this system to be stable for the most part, it'll be a pretty cool Win95 system.
Pictures:
Where am I?
