I used to see hundreds of these machines back in the day. Used to work for a small computer repair shop in the UK as my first job.

IIRC the power supplies in these machines were terrible. Cheap 110w Hippo *I think which we always used to have to swap out. The trouble is most of these cases do not take the standard size ATX therefore its the smaller type PSU with the fan on the bottom.

These machines use to sport the Celeron, PIII, Socket 370 era - most of the supplied motherboards did not have a AGP, instead two Win modem slots (AMR rings a bell) which actually were the same colour as the AGP. We used to have to break the news to many disappointed gamers who would have to settle with a PCI card - typically a Geforce 2 MX PCI.

I do like the case and it brings back many fond memories, hardly see any of them around now!

I scrapped one of these cases a few months back 🙁

I would have arranged something with you had I known!

I saw the title of this post and shuddered. Unlike yours, my memory of Tiny was not pleasant.

Glued in components. Awful cable routing. Overheating. Faulty components. Windows ME.

I spent more time troubleshooting that thing than I did playing on it.

How much of it was legitimate hardware problems, and how much was just WinME being WinME I don't remember.

Ours looked pretty much the spit of your pictures. It may still exist in my parents attic... If it does it may also have CRT, KB and Mouse. May.

I heard more people say they where bad computers, personally I had minor troubles but to me it's just part of 90's computing isn't it 🤣

My machine presumably came with the following specifications which I took from the BIOS (I took these from an old video that does not contain the machine itself):

MX3S-U R1.04 Nov 09 2001 AOpen (Motherboard)

The BIOS had a silver AOpen logo (which is somewhat rare and hard to find).

NVidia Geforce2 MX400 (AGP, the motherboard was a normal ATX one, even had a video port on the motherboard itself which caused some confusion back then).
A sound blaster card, with wrong drivers which would cause not the system time to be sped up, but audio and video would play 40% faster, the audio was even pitch shifted. I used to drag the Windows sound effects into the sound recorder, but slowed down twice made it too slow, once too fast. Eventually I solved that myself.

The power supply must've been a normal one also.

The case had that exact same rounded top but the power button was more of pretruding pill shaped button, with a small pill shaped reset button above that, or under that.

It makes me believe it was one of their bigger cases, most likely one of their more powerful workstations at the time.

If anyone knows anything about this, or recalls it, please tell me because I would like to know if one of these still exists on the planet.

Duouk2000 wrote:

I scrapped one of these cases a few months back 🙁

I would have arranged something with you had I known!

Well that's too bad, what made you scrap it?

There seemed to be many different styles of these Tiny systems, this one is similar to the one you posted but bigger.

If people keep dumping these systems, there will come a time in the future where there are none of these left and any that exist will be a rarity, especially if they still work and can be used.

Riiiiiiiiiiise from the grave my dead thread.... for I have the machine you are looking for!

sorry for re upping this dead thread, but I know how hard it can be to find the one thing you want, but it will never show up.
(I'm after my old 286 Olivetti PS from yesteryear… never comes)

but if ye wonderer passes back on this thread. I have the PC in the Picture. i picked her up from a Gumtree for a flag last week. Inside she's not to shabby either.

Pentium IIII slot 1 on a BX motherboard running 450mhz

seems to be untouched at the moment, all original. Although I'm on a hunt for the original Tiny PC install CD to get her back to as she was.

at moment I've given her a ESS ISA soundcard, doubled the 64mb RAM and considering a GPU to put in it. Spare i got a mx400 or mx440.

long story short, if you ever pass by this thread again, give me a shout. happily send it back to someone who loves it for the same flag I picked her up for. from what I can tell its all original and in perfect cosmetic and I've put her back to working order. The old lady was kind to her and even had the original stickers too. Hopefully you see this and its the one you need mate.

by the way... if anyone knows where to find copies of the original System Disks for Tiny PCs it would be great. my internet searches just bring me NUC PCs... seems google treats it literally.

all the best

Austin