Any ideas?

If this case don't use door-style 5.25" drive bays cover, use some random biege flat covers, that will match the yellowing of the case's plastics.

I had one of those back in the day...

There's supposed to be a drive bay cover that goes all the way to the left of the case, and there's also supposed to be a matching, slightly taller, piece around the optical drive with an opening for the optical drive.

Back then, you could buy these from IBM parts - I actually bought an extra one of the optical drive pieces because I thought I would need it to make a CD burner look pretty. I was wrong, as it turns out...

The Internet seems to actually have the parts list for the 2137-E56 I had - http://ps-2.kev009.com/pcpartnerinfo/ctstips/29e6.htm . These would have been the parts you're looking for:
Drive Bay Panel (Second & Third 5.25" drive) 02K2330 All
Drive Bay Panel (First 5.25" drive) 02K2331 All

The 02K2331 is the taller one with the opening for the optical drive.

Now, how you'd manage to find those 25 years later... I don't know.

Also, dumb question - why do you want to buy one of those? The one you're looking at appears to be an Intel model so hopefully it has a better motherboard, while the one I had was a K6, but it was a very mediocre machine. Soldered ATI Rage something video that had bad drivers for 95/98 that ATI never fixed, no AGP slot, a very lousy onboard sound card (Crystal something?) that won't play two sounds at the same time, moody BIOS that didn't like fancier/newer PS/2 mice, etc.

Oh, and some Aptivas of this era apparently shipped with Quantum Bigfoot hard drives. Don't think mine had that, thankfully.

If I wanted a big-OEM machine from this generation, I'd look for something like a Dell Dimension... R... series, I think it was? There were two Dell generations with PIIs and AGP slots...

Agree VivienM ! since it is incomplete and being an IBM of the questionable years would look for something else, unless I had one as a kid and wanted that nostaglia thing.
yes Dell, Micron or Maybe a Compaq would be a better choice for a Corp built of those years IMHO.

Horun wrote on 2024-01-08, 02:53:

Agree VivienM ! since it is incomplete and being an IBM of the questionable years would look for something else, unless I had one as a kid and wanted that nostaglia thing.
yes Dell, Micron or Maybe a Compaq would be a better choice for a Corp built of those years IMHO.

For better or worse, it's not a real IBM. It's an Acer - in 1997 or so, IBM made a deal with Acer where Acer would make Aptivas.

Whether that's a good or bad thing - who knows. You're losing the IBMisms, the temperamental junk like Mwave cards, the proprietary IBM features like Rapid Resume, other things like the super-cool "Stealth" S series with the floppy/CD console under the monitor (now that was a cool computer... at least if you didn't own one, not sure how good it actually was to own), etc, in favour of a ... full?... ATX case with el-cheapo standard internals - mine had that ATI Rage something video chip soldered, that Crystal sound chip, an LT WinModem (probably less of a piece of junk than anything else in the machine) in a slot, etc. Unclear how standard the BIOS was - it looked all IBMy, so... who knows. And, of course, there was never a single BIOS update for the machine. No AGP slot.

I like Dell/Micron/Gateway for that era because all three specialized in using generic Intel boards with plenty of expansion ports and slots and no lousy soldered video chips/sound chips/etc. A Dell/Gateway/Micron with a Creative Labs sound card and an AGP video card is a good starting point for anything, and perhaps you'd want to upgrade that AGP card.

Maybe there were some nice high-end Compaqs, but the ones I remember were the same store-computer-garbage with the most Mhz and gigs they could stick on the label and everything else being super-el-cheapo soldered-junk with the minimal amount of expansion option possible, same as AST, IBM, Packard Hell, later eMachines, etc. I was watching some retro channels on YouTube recently and it made me so sad seeing a 1GHz PIII... with i810 chipset and no AGP. I think that was a Compaq or maybe HP. What a tragic waste of a wonderful processor.

And it's funny, you want to talk about that nostalgia feeling, I had that 2137-E56 as a teen. Managed to talk my parents into getting a Dell T700r after about two years of suffering with the Aptiva. The T700r, I regret e-wasting a decade ago (if only the idea of a retro 98SE machine had come to me then, I would have kept it, but that's also the machine that soured me on 98SE - biggest mistake I made ordering that machine was picking 98SE instead of Win2000), now that's a machine I have nice feelings about, but the Aptiva, honestly... not so much. It's the little details - e.g. on the Dell with an SB Live, you could hear ICQ beeps while playing an MP3, which you couldn't do on Crystal chip in the IBM - that just drew out how lousy and cheap the IBM was. Oh, and when I installed a CD burner in the IBM, I had to replace the IDE cable because IBM only gave you a cable with one connector; when I moved that CD burner to the Dell, the existing IDE cable had two connectors like a proper IDE cable is supposed to. Dreadful tech support - I had the matching CRT go moody, and the first thing the guy wanted me to do was to use the restore CD to wipe the drive and go back to the factory software. WTF?!? People on the Aptiva newsgroup had actually learned to partition their hard drive simply so that they could keep their documents on the second partition so they wouldn't need to back them up/restore them every time tech support told them to use the restore CD and wipe the C partition (a habit I continued to follow until... the mid-2010s, actually, when I realized Windows had become stable enough this was no longer necessary). If someone had a positive experience with these machine that they're nostalgic about 25 years later, consider me very jealous...

Nice write up ! Only IBM have positive experience with is a NetVista 8307, and that is hybrid 😀

VivienM wrote on 2024-01-07, 23:33:

Soldered ATI Rage something video that had bad drivers for 95/98 that ATI never fixed, no AGP slot, a very lousy onboard sound card (Crystal something?)

In my aptiva I can disable the onboard audio but for some reason I cannot disable the ATI Rage, which does indeed give me nothing but problems so far.

VivienM wrote on 2024-01-07, 23:33:

Oh, and some Aptivas of this era apparently shipped with Quantum Bigfoot hard drives. Don't think mine had that, thankfully.

Were these really all that bad? I do enjoy their sound and huge size but that was probably not a good selling point in its time...

This Aptiva's case isn't so bad. It can be used for non-IBM build. But I think there's minimal chance for the missing original drives bay cover to be found.

Thx for the reply everyone. I was thinking to buy it as it is cheep and maybe worth of saving/restoring. I do have/had Compaq PCs in my collection, but never had IBM. Now, I am thinking to skip it 😀

MyOcSlaps6502 wrote on 2024-01-08, 06:29:

VivienM wrote on 2024-01-07, 23:33:

Oh, and some Aptivas of this era apparently shipped with Quantum Bigfoot hard drives. Don't think mine had that, thankfully.

Were these really all that bad? I do enjoy their sound and huge size but that was probably not a good selling point in its time...

So... I never had one and I don't recall hearing them talked about much at the time (probably in part because the people who would do the talking knew enough to steer clear of them), it's somewhat like when SMR hard drives started being snuck into laptops and such in the 2010s, but I think they have a bad reputation on the performance side. I think they are a very low number of RPMs, for one thing, plus physically bigger platters/lower density which is also not great for performance.

But hey... things never change. The objective of a manufacturer of a computer sold at retail is to offer the most megs/gigs with zero regard for performance, and for a couple of years in the late 1990s, the Bigfoot drives accomplished that goal.

We got an Aptiva in '95 and it was magnificent! P75 model 2168 with the beautiful sliding door, which we later upgraded to a P200 (if I remember correctly) - Loved that machine. I mainly collect the IBMs today because I like their bulky, industrial case designs.

I also have the one you linked to in this thread, and a thing about this one, compared to the 2168, is that you can pop another atx motherboard in there easily, if you want to upgrade the hardware, or make a sleeper.

Speed winner? Definitely not. Gorgeous design? Definitely so.

I've got both the 2137 (K6-233) and 2138 (P2-266) next to eachother. They both are crippled by the onboard video adapter, especially the 2137 with it's 2MB Rage IIc (should have been AGP) and it's Aladdin IV chipset (should be Ali V) but i like the machine nevertheless. For 3D speed any Voodoo or PCI GeForce / Riva will crank it up enough and the cpu becomes the bottleneck. If i want faster, I'll boot up an Athlon XP.

These covers are indeed some special design that runs around the corner. Also the cd drive had a cover with small bezels, following the case design.

I have on of these aptivas with a cyrix 133 and o an n board ati rage II+DVD and i think it is a great computer for what it is. Pretty low end for when it was released, but nice non the less. ya, it sucks it has no agp, but i kind of like the low power of this computer, kind of makes it like a beefed up super powerful 486 🤣. it is one of those computers that got thrown away by the millions by the mid 2000's, i am sure they have less than 5 percent of them still running. that said, the good thing about these computers of this age is that they do not suffer the capacitor problem. also, i find the Aladdin iv board not as bad as people say, and it is a very well documented board.

if anyone knows where to find a recovery disk for 95 version for my machine, it would be greatly appreciated.

Tommas072

Tommaso72 wrote on 2024-01-09, 00:59:

I have on of these aptivas with a cyrix 133 and o an n board ati rage II+DVD and i think it is a great computer for what it is. Pretty low end for when it was released, but nice non the less. ya, it sucks it has no agp, but i kind of like the low power of this computer, kind of makes it like a beefed up super powerful 486 🤣. it is one of those computers that got thrown away by the millions by the mid 2000's, i am sure they have less than 5 percent of them still running. that said, the good thing about these computers of this age is that they do not suffer the capacitor problem. also, i find the Aladdin iv board not as bad as people say, and it is a very well documented board.

if anyone knows where to find a recovery disk for 95 version for my machine, it would be greatly appreciated.

Tommas072

Have you checked here:
https://archive.org/search?query=ibm+aptiva