First post, by steakguy120
- Rank
- Newbie
Found a Free Gateway 2000 PC tower recently, a 4DX-33V, in pretty good condition barring some 30 year old coffee on the front.
Admire the size of this thing.
To say it has presence when next to any of my various other PCs is a bit of an understatement, I mean it's nearly at tall as my leg, in that vein the entire thing is tall enough and likely sturdy enough to be used as a seat, as soon as I saw it in person I immediately understood why my primary PC's already sizable case is only referred to as a 'mid tower' and carrying it is a real pain as a result of both the size and the plastic rim around the bottom, it feels like I'm carrying a medium sized dog whenever I have to move it; from the outside there's not any noticeable rust or damaged ports, and the plastic has hardly yellowed, and while the unit wasn't exactly clean when I got it, with the last person to use it seemingly having a habit of leaving their coffee on top of it, which inevitably seems to have resulted in it being covered in by now 30 year old coffee down the entire front panel when I initially got it, though wiping it off was barely a challenge, with seemingly no lasting damage or staining.
On the front there's an assortment of drives, included a 3.5 inch floppy drive, a 5.25 floppy drive, a CD ROM, as well as three unused front bays to boot, and on the back I noticed there was a modem, video card, sound card, and set of what I guess are Parallel ports and a serial port taking up a few blanks on the back, the model number for this unit is "TOWER" in all caps which I find quite fitting.
After getting it open
Once I got the case cover off, there was a fine coating of dust on everything, but a light brushing and some vacuuming later soon rectified that, not even the power supply was particularly dusty when I took the chance to dust it while everything was completely flat, as for the the included expansion cards were a Trident video card which makes use of the Vesa local Bus, a Creative Sound Blaster, and a AT&T Modem, there's also about 8 megabytes of ram across two modules; the original hard drive was included, being a Western Digital Caviar 2200 with a whopping 212.6 Megabytes of storage which was found in the bottom most 5.25 drive bay with a steel 3.5" to 5.25" mounting bracket, though unfortunately it seems to be dead as when trying to boot the system throws a "hard drive controller error" with this drive specifically, otherwise everything else at least has some signs of life during the the POST, the CD ROM even had an encyclopedia CD in it from the previous owner.
All round this is a pretty awesome find as I've been thinking about getting a system of this era for a while now, and the only thing stopping me from doing anything more than look it at the moment is the lack of a boot disc, which I am still trying to figure out, if anyone has any advice or wisdom for a system like this, that'd be greatly appreciated, as for now, it's mainly just sitting in my workspace at the moment ready to use.
