Living wrote on 2026-03-29, 11:21:

After almost 27 years i finally have my own Athlon Slot A, bought from a collector that happen to encounter in FB Marketplace. ( […]
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After almost 27 years i finally have my own Athlon Slot A, bought from a collector that happen to encounter in FB Marketplace. (when i found it i was like Homer when he learns about the free trampoline in the newspaper)

* The motherboard its an Asus K7m rev 1.04 with the A5 rev chipset (Super Bypass enabled via the last Beta bios). I think this is the famous case of the motherboards that came in blank boxes due to fear of Intel. The quality is superb, all the capacitors are Rubycon and not a single one is bulged (this was prior to the capacitor plague)

.........

i did a quick test and it destroys my k6-2+ @ 600Mhz even at 500Mhz by 50% in most of the games (back in the day i jumped from a k6-2 500Mhz directly to a Thunderbird 900Mhz, the difference was massive but i thought in that time that it was mostly due to raw clock speed advantage)

Nice find , enjoy it.

Must have been some kind of OEM board (like the ones found in HP Pavilion series)
I see it doesnt't have sound , but does have the AMR slot and all 3 ram slots.

What bios did it came with ?

giantenemycat wrote on Today, 15:50:

I was also able to get this going. As I suspected, taking out the USB card and PC speaker allowed it to boot up just fine. Everything works, including HDD and CD-ROM. 40MB RAM. Windows ME installed, but it's pretty bare. What interests me is it's slow as all hell, now this reminds me of the ME experience I had on my first family PC.

I honestly haven't seen Windows Me running on a PC since I worked at a repair shop in the early 2000s. I will have to install it sometime to remind myself of what it was like. I remember, at the time, actually liking setting up WinMe systems because they had so many more drivers pre-installed compared to Windows 98\SE. We had nifty "shop CDs" (complete with custom interface and disc labels, 🤣) that contained as many of the drivers, runtimes and other things that we needed to set up most computers... but Me systems tended to not need much at all to work.

It's funny how different things were then. Now, the idea of just using whatever old drivers the OS came with (because Windows update didn't automatically update drivers like in later versions) seems weird. Back then, it was like "Hey, these drivers actually work and don't cause a BSOD, potentially requiring an OS reinstall! Use them and then DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING!"

... also, 40MB on WinME sounds excruciating! My Gateway with Win98 (first edition) and a PII 400 came with 64MB in early 1999. My brother was running a Pentium 200 MMX with 96MB of EDO back then too. Can't imagine having so little to run Me.

Ozzuneoj wrote on Today, 18:25:

I honestly haven't seen Windows Me running on a PC since I worked at a repair shop in the early 2000s. I will have to install it […]
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giantenemycat wrote on Today, 15:50:

I was also able to get this going. As I suspected, taking out the USB card and PC speaker allowed it to boot up just fine. Everything works, including HDD and CD-ROM. 40MB RAM. Windows ME installed, but it's pretty bare. What interests me is it's slow as all hell, now this reminds me of the ME experience I had on my first family PC.

I honestly haven't seen Windows Me running on a PC since I worked at a repair shop in the early 2000s. I will have to install it sometime to remind myself of what it was like. I remember, at the time, actually liking setting up WinMe systems because they had so many more drivers pre-installed compared to Windows 98\SE. We had nifty "shop CDs" (complete with custom interface and disc labels, 🤣) that contained as many of the drivers, runtimes and other things that we needed to set up most computers... but Me systems tended to not need much at all to work.

It's funny how different things were then. Now, the idea of just using whatever old drivers the OS came with (because Windows update didn't automatically update drivers like in later versions) seems weird. Back then, it was like "Hey, these drivers actually work and don't cause a BSOD, potentially requiring an OS reinstall! Use them and then DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING!"

... also, 40MB on WinME sounds excruciating! My Gateway with Win98 (first edition) and a PII 400 came with 64MB in early 1999. My brother was running a Pentium 200 MMX with 96MB of EDO back then too. Can't imagine having so little to run Me.

IIRC, WinME was also a lot better at automagically solving IRQ conflicts.

Ozzuneoj wrote on Today, 18:25:

I honestly haven't seen Windows Me running on a PC since I worked at a repair shop in the early 2000s. I will have to install it […]
Show full quote

giantenemycat wrote on Today, 15:50:

I was also able to get this going. As I suspected, taking out the USB card and PC speaker allowed it to boot up just fine. Everything works, including HDD and CD-ROM. 40MB RAM. Windows ME installed, but it's pretty bare. What interests me is it's slow as all hell, now this reminds me of the ME experience I had on my first family PC.

I honestly haven't seen Windows Me running on a PC since I worked at a repair shop in the early 2000s. I will have to install it sometime to remind myself of what it was like. I remember, at the time, actually liking setting up WinMe systems because they had so many more drivers pre-installed compared to Windows 98\SE. We had nifty "shop CDs" (complete with custom interface and disc labels, 🤣) that contained as many of the drivers, runtimes and other things that we needed to set up most computers... but Me systems tended to not need much at all to work.

It's funny how different things were then. Now, the idea of just using whatever old drivers the OS came with (because Windows update didn't automatically update drivers like in later versions) seems weird. Back then, it was like "Hey, these drivers actually work and don't cause a BSOD, potentially requiring an OS reinstall! Use them and then DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING!"

... also, 40MB on WinME sounds excruciating! My Gateway with Win98 (first edition) and a PII 400 came with 64MB in early 1999. My brother was running a Pentium 200 MMX with 96MB of EDO back then too. Can't imagine having so little to run Me.

The drivers are a good point, especially for USB mass storage. Obviously you can "hack" support onto 98(SE) and maybe even 95 if you're crazy enough, but ME was the first to do it natively. I suspect that was the draw for the owners of this PC, considering all the camera/photo stuff (recent documents had DSC .jpg files pointing to an external volume).

I have tried to replicate the ME experience on a PC in the same series as our first family PC, which was slow as balls to startup and shutdown. Even trending towards the lowest possible configuration it could have had - Pentium 166 and 32MB, it runs fine. Consider that's after doing an upgrade from OSR2, which we did back then on the original PC. Also with Office 97 and its "OSA/findfast" startup entries, and system restore kept on. We didn't have the internet for the entire life of the PC, so there wouldn't have been many vectors to get junk on there. Not sure what the missing link is.

giantenemycat wrote on 37 minutes ago:

Ozzuneoj wrote on Today, 18:25:

I honestly haven't seen Windows Me running on a PC since I worked at a repair shop in the early 2000s. I will have to install it […]
Show full quote

giantenemycat wrote on Today, 15:50:

I was also able to get this going. As I suspected, taking out the USB card and PC speaker allowed it to boot up just fine. Everything works, including HDD and CD-ROM. 40MB RAM. Windows ME installed, but it's pretty bare. What interests me is it's slow as all hell, now this reminds me of the ME experience I had on my first family PC.

I honestly haven't seen Windows Me running on a PC since I worked at a repair shop in the early 2000s. I will have to install it sometime to remind myself of what it was like. I remember, at the time, actually liking setting up WinMe systems because they had so many more drivers pre-installed compared to Windows 98\SE. We had nifty "shop CDs" (complete with custom interface and disc labels, 🤣) that contained as many of the drivers, runtimes and other things that we needed to set up most computers... but Me systems tended to not need much at all to work.

It's funny how different things were then. Now, the idea of just using whatever old drivers the OS came with (because Windows update didn't automatically update drivers like in later versions) seems weird. Back then, it was like "Hey, these drivers actually work and don't cause a BSOD, potentially requiring an OS reinstall! Use them and then DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING!"

... also, 40MB on WinME sounds excruciating! My Gateway with Win98 (first edition) and a PII 400 came with 64MB in early 1999. My brother was running a Pentium 200 MMX with 96MB of EDO back then too. Can't imagine having so little to run Me.

The drivers are a good point, especially for USB mass storage. Obviously you can "hack" support onto 98(SE) and maybe even 95 if you're crazy enough, but ME was the first to do it natively. I suspect that was the draw for the owners of this PC, considering all the camera/photo stuff (recent documents had DSC .jpg files pointing to an external volume).

I have tried to replicate the ME experience on a PC in the same series as our first family PC, which was slow as balls to startup and shutdown. Even trending towards the lowest possible configuration it could have had - Pentium 166 and 32MB, it runs fine. Consider that's after doing an upgrade from OSR2, which we did back then on the original PC. Also with Office 97 and its "OSA/findfast" startup entries, and system restore kept on. We didn't have the internet for the entire life of the PC, so there wouldn't have been many vectors to get junk on there. Not sure what the missing link is.

Maybe you had something weird going on that made the hard drive controller work in PIO mode? That is one of the few somewhat common things I can think of that would completely cripple performance without rendering the computer unusable due to errors or instability.

Or... maybe drive compression was being used because of low disk space? I don't have much first hand experience with this feature at the time, but I think that would turn an otherwise usable budget PC with a small hard drive into a complete dog.

Drivespace compression has certain uses, and use case limitations.

1)It can only be used on a fat16 volume.

2)The volume must be equal to or less than 1GiB in size.

3) The drivespace compression driver eats 64kib of memory.

4) The version for win95 with pluspack, or on win98, (drivespace3), has options to crank the compression level higher, but this really hits the cpu hard.

I dont realistically see a 'reason' for an ME era computer to have a 1gb or smaller drive. Even budget drives from this era would be much bigger than this.

I know about / have experience with this, because I use it to compress ramdisks. (Like memdisk hosted ones, or ones abusing the 'scandisk / mount' behavior). If you have correctly mastered a small disk image this way, you can boot a fully self-contained win9x ramdisk with grub2 and memdisk on 'more modern' hardware without burning a partition for it. (The disk image can live in your linux partition, along with dozens of other disk images that are loadable this way)

On such anachronistic hardware, the cpu costs are negligable; accesses still *greatly* exceed those possible with ata133 and pals.

A full win98se deployment can live very comfortably with lots of room to spare on a 512mb compressed ramdisk. (Minimum size is 384mb)

Anyway. Enough about that. 😁

More than likely, the IDE speed was incrementally pushed down to PIO speeds because of the way Win9x handles interface crc errors.

If there are lots of bad reads, win9x reacts to this by dropping the transfer rate until the errors go away. It then writes a value in the registry that records what this speed was, and will never try to operate faster than that afterward (unless you manually fix it).

Slapping a fast HDD on a channel with a slow ATAPI drive was a common culprit, as was using a 40 conductor cable instead of an 80 conductor one.