Tetrium wrote on 2023-05-20, 12:29:

This case looks very nice, never seen that one before. Seems to be in good condition and the air circulation looks like the (as […]
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johnvosh wrote on 2023-04-30, 14:33:

Well, my first system came in finally. This is the Gateway 2000 GP6-400 system with a PII 400MHz. Started it up and had to install the integrated sound card drivers, then started having BSOD, Windows Protection Error's. Tried formatting the HDD and could only get to 20% then it would freeze. Tried another HDD and was able to get into the setup, but only could get so far before I would get Windows Protection error. Tried removing ram and still getting same issue. Took and removed all but 1 ram stick and then started testing them. Found that 1 stick of 128MB was no good. So now I'm done to 384MB, running a fresh install of Win98SE, has a Plextor SCSI CD-ROM, then replaced the TDK CD-RW drive with a Plextor drive. Found the floppy drive needs to be replaced as only sort of works. Also added an 80mm case fan to the front to bring in some air. Video card is a ATI Rage 128 GL AGP with 90MHz core/memory clocks.

This case looks very nice, never seen that one before.
Seems to be in good condition and the air circulation looks like the (as we could see things nowdadys) poorly optimized as was basically standard before the P4/Athlon era.

What does it weigh? 😜

I don't know how much it weighs, but it has to be the heaviest of all my systems!

Got my final System in! Another Gateway, this one with a 1GHz AMD Athlon Socket A CPU, Sound Blaster Live! sound card, DVD-ROM, CD-RW, Floppy, 32MB GeForce2 MX400. It had 512MB ram, but one of the 256MB sticks went bad. Seem to be having bad luck with 256MB PC133 SD-RAM lately as I've had 2 sticks go bad.

All 3 of my beige boxes! A Pentium II, Pentium III, and an Athlon!

johnvosh wrote on 2023-05-14, 15:28:

Got my 3rd system in today, just waiting on the second one to get released from stupid customs! This one is a Dell Dimension XPS T700r system. I don't know why, but I really like the look of these Dell's. This one has a Pentium 3 700MHz/256K/100 FSB Slot 1 CPU. I would like to try and upgrade it to the 1GHz CPU. It has 640MB PC-100 SD-RAM, Promise ATA66 IDE card, Turtle Beach sound card, ATI Rage 1280 Pro 16MB AGP video card, CD-Rom, 100MB Zip drive, floppy drive, I installed the TDK CD-RW drive from the Gateway system in this one replacing the Tape Drive it came with. It didn't come with an HDD, so I installed a 6GB test drive for now with Win 2000 Pro SP4. I was looking back thru Maximum PC and it looks like this system was $1,400 to $2,400 USD in Apr-June of 2000 depending on how it was equipped. I'd love to find the Altec Lansing ACS-340 speakers and 17" E770/P780 FD Trinitron monitor and matching Dell Keyboard/mouse to complete this system.

The XPS Txxxr machines were great workhorses. Had one for over a decade before I stupidly (with the benefit of hindsight) e-wasted it. In that decade, it was my main desktop, then my dad's main desktop, then a secondary desktop, then a home server running 2003 R2, etc. Very versatile machine. My first "good" computer is how I would describe it. Also the first computer I had with a good CRT instead of some elcheapo retail bundle with lousy refresh rates.

One of their great features is that they had very few onboard peripherals. No on-board Ethernet, no on-board sound (if you had ordered it with a sound card), no onboard video - just quality PCI/AGP add-in cards. When you're coming from "IBM" Acers with lousy on-board video, lousy on-board sound (which won't let you play MP3s and hear ICQ beeps at the same time), etc, that's a nice upgrade. Similarly, you got a real Microsoft IntelliMouse with these, rather than the elcheapo OEM mice that boxed retail systems came with.

Legendary 440BX chipset with 3 PC100 DIMM slots too, runs up to 768MB of RAM which was enough to keep it very relevant in the 2000/XP era.

Funny thing is, it would make an absolutely great Win98 retro machine, but... it's the machine that soured me on Win98SE back in the day. It was so good/stable that it would run out of system resources (anyone remember those?) within like a day or two, if not much less, requiring a reboot. Ended up upgrading it to Win2000, which was a crazy RAM-guzzling breath of fresh air that now had multi-month uptimes. And that's probably how most of these got e-wasted - they were seen not as spectacular Win98SE machines but as meh Windows XP machines that couldn't run Vista/7 (I distinctly remember trying to boot the T700r with a Vista or 7 disk and it didn't make it into the installer). It's hard to imagine now that 98SE is retro-cool just how unusable 98SE was for daily activity by the early 2000s.

Mine (also a T700r) was ~2300CAD, I forget if that's including taxes or not, in late June 2000. Funny thing is - back then, Dell Canada charged $160CAD for shipping - I think shipping has been free for over a decade now. 19" P991 (I think that was the model number - the Trinitron 19"), SB Live! Value, TNT2 M64, 20GB HDD, 128GB RAM, 3C905 network card, 48X CD-ROM, 98SE, floppy drive, MS Works Suite, IntelliMouse, and some low-end keyboard I never used. Also, it was one of my first e-commerce experiences - I remember ordering it on Thursday, it got built on Friday/Saturday in Texas, and it turned up in Ottawa, ON around noon on Tuesday. Ahh, those were the days. The peak of Dell's build-to-order model.

By the time I got rid of it, it had an ATI 9000 Pro, SATA card, some gigabit Ethernet card replaced the 3COM, 768 megs of RAM, upgraded hard drives, a combo DVD reader/CD-RW, etc.

One suggestion - if you want a period-correct CRT monitor to go with it, try to see if you can find the 19" and in particular the 19" Trinitron. I think those are the monitors most people got with these - by 2000, 17" monitors had started to be rather low end, and these systems were quite solidly middle-end.

Oh, and you know what - I might still have the documentation box that it came with, along with the 98SE restore CD and the other discs. I'd have to look.

Well, looks like the motherboard in the Gateway AMD system is no good. I have tried different memory sticks, cleaned the memory slots and nothing but issues with it. I'll get it working one day and then the next day it will just give me memory beep errors or nothing at all. I then have to re-seat the memory a few times and it will boot again, then I'll be lucky if it will stay running for an hour before the system freezes, you restart it and then it acts like there is no memory again. And man does the 1GHz Athlon run hot! Touch the heatsink after just booting into windows and it is quite hot, I even cleaned and replaced the thermal paste too.

Going to be replacing it with an Abit KT7A-Raid motherboard that will hopefully work. I can then also hopefully doing some testing with some Duron's that I have and see the difference between them.
All the other systems are working good. Have been playing Maxis Marble Drop on the PII 400 Win98SE system! Haven't played the game in years, forgot how challenging some of the puzzles are.