These machines weren't designed to run for much more than a couple of years before the user was expected to upgrade to a newer model.

^
Funny, mine still works. 😊

Cobra42898 wrote:

I was fortunate enough to aquire a gateway g6-266 recently. I'm curious about a few things though.

1. Are all of these Pentium ii Gateway machines really cooled by just the one lone PSU -attached fans? I can't believe a CPU with a heatsink the size of a brick is really getting adequate airflow from what appears to be a very slow single fan. It makes no noise and no vibration, but this can't be right. I was worried about other pcs I have that had far better airflow compared to this.

Sounds like your Gateway's PSU fan(s) are not in a good condition. On my system the fans are quite noisy and blow hot air out of the system...
If you want to add an additional fan, the case should have mounting holes for one.

2. When did gateway eliminate the 8.4gb limit? I thought that was done away with by then. Did all p2 gateways have it?

On my 266 MHz system, produced in 1998, the limit is not at 8.4gb (it uses 4 Gb and 40 Gb hard disks). So no.

3. I'm not going sdd or cf card. What are you guys doing for HDD space? The quantum firebrick was DOA. I reformatted a spare 120gb drive I had to the max the bios allowed. I'd love to get something closer to period correct, but it appears drives under 10gb are hen's teeth. One the other hand, I can buy big lots of 120-160gb drives all day long. It just seems kind of wasteful. Any ideas?

Upgrade the BIOS.

I didn't even know bios updates were still available for a gateway this old. Are they gateway specific, or will any generic 440bx bios flash work? I didn't snap a picture of the startup screen, but I will the next time I have a minute. I was kind of laughing at the ALR splash logo though. I hadn't seen that in quite a while.

I'll have to measure the case so I get the right size fan. It just seems like a really terrible idea to take a cooker of a CPU, put an underflowing fan on it, and then "cool" the PSU with oven air. Kind of amazed the PSU held up to it. Or the CPU, 🤣.

Cobra42898 wrote:

I didn't even know bios updates were still available for a gateway this old. Are they gateway specific, or will any generic 440bx bios flash work? I didn't snap a picture of the startup screen, but I will the next time I have a minute. I was kind of laughing at the ALR splash logo though. I hadn't seen that in quite a while.

Gateway-specific, but I'm not sure you can still download them from the Gateway site. AFAIK, their internal search engine is broken and won't find the pages, but using Google it was still possible to find the updates a few years ago.

I'll have to measure the case so I get the right size fan. It just seems like a really terrible idea to take a cooker of a CPU, put an underflowing fan on it, and then "cool" the PSU with oven air. Kind of amazed the PSU held up to it. Or the CPU, 🤣.

The PSU is supposed to have two fans, one at the back and one at the bottom.

You made me curious so I looked at the PSU. There's no second fan that I can see, internal to the PSU. I can see straight through from the back to the bottom fan. It does keep the heatsink from getting super hot, it's more like lukewarm. Still, I think I'll get a second fan for it. Case was dated late 1997, maybe mine is an early revision. Big sticker with "200W" visible with the side cover off.

I have another P2, an "essential", which I thought would be a Celeron. I got lucky in that it seems to be a real p2-400. There was some.kind of discoloration on the contacts of the slot/in the slot. Cleaned it up real nice but it won't post. I'm assuming the mb is shot.

If I get my hands on an early p3/slot1 in the 500-600mhz range, with the same 100mhz bus, would the p2-400 cpu post in it? Both should be 440bx I think. I think I could get it for next to nothing, so it might be worth trying.

Use something like Seagate's OnTrack software to allow the machine to use the larger drive

That could be it. A number of slot 1 Pentium II/III cpus were equipped with substantial heat sinks. It may operate just fine if a little warm under those conditions, they aren't modern multi-GHz CPUs with 2,4,6,8 or more cores. That is to say that air cooling should be adequate and even passive air movement may be enough. Adding a case fan won't do any harm and might help if you're worried it's too hot. The heatsink is supposed to conduct heat that's the whole point, so it shouldn't be cold. If you can touch it and leave your finger there for a minute or two it's probably perfectly fine.

Hard drive size limitations spring from a combination of factors and there were apparently quite a few limits bumped into over the years. They can stem from BIOS drive addressing limitations, file systems not designed for large disks, Operating Systems with subsystems written in the dim dark past before drives with tens or hundreds of gigabytes were common. Basically any time hardware or software is written certain assumptions must be made about available hardware or extra work must be done to accomodate either semi-predictable or even unpredictable improvements/changes/etc. This site (the section is three pages worth) explains a few of the known historic problems pretty well: http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/dri … limitations.htm

Given the age of the systems there's no reason not make use of used drives. Late model IDE and somewhat more recent 80 GB SATA drives (use with an adapter) are perfectly fine as long as you don't expect them to last indefinitely. Just consider keeping a backup copy of the install and any really important files on something modern.