Let's explore some mystery custom PC towers!
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- Опубліковано 11 лип 2024
- If you'd like to support the channel and help me to produce more videos like this, you can find me on Patreon: / miketech
You have my eternal gratitude!
Stuff I used in the video:
Fiberglass resin: amzn.to/3Nmld54
Fiberglass cloth: amzn.to/3NJRjZO
De-soldering gun: amzn.to/3N8vvXm
De-soldering alloy: amzn.to/3UcWwuD
De-soldering wick (I swear by this stuff): amzn.to/3VBrUnB
Solder flux: amzn.to/42qnodH
Anti-static brushes: amzn.to/3mb35Bw
CR-2032 battery holders: amzn.to/43BevyC
CR-2032 batteries: amzn.to/45BElUZ
These are all either custom builds or products of some really small manufacturers. Been going slightly mad not knowing exactly what's in them, so let's rectify that!
0:00 Intro
System 1:
0:19 System 1 Tour
1:15 S1 Teardown and repairs
7:03 S1 Testing
9:30 S1 RTC hack and verdict
System 2
12:09 System 2 Tour
13:22 S2 Teardown and repairs
19:04 S2 Cleanup and testing
24:59 S2 OS Tour
26:36 S2 FDD repair and verdict
System 3
27:36 System 3 Tour
28:47 S3 Teardown and inspect
32:59 S3 Component testing
36:22 S3 Verdict
System 4
36:40 System 4 Tour
37:44 S4 Teardown and cleanup
41:38 S4 Drive repairs and testing
45:23 S4 Verdict
45:36 Outro
Awesome, it's Friday, Tired of watching Titanic all week, now it's time to watch Mike Dive into these computers!! I'm ready lol
Exactly what he said! I've been looking forward to this video all week!
@@gmtm2162 Same!
So many small independent computer stores in many towns. The cases had the square spot for thick custom logo for the company. I don't remember what company made the custom stickers but I remember seeing them in PC Shopper
There are only two scenes I like in Titanic, the scene where he's drawing her lushous boobs. And the sinking part, especially the propellor guy and the ship breaking in two.
I am morbid, depraved, and fkkkt up.
: )
I guess the spiders that used to live on the dial up modem were trying to get on the world wide web, and send an email to relatives in another PC somewhere in the world 😆
What would we do without Mike's wonderful "all right" remarks each step of the way of dismantling his latest PC finds, at the end of the week?! Love it Mike... keep up the good work. :)
"...I'm guessing the rapidly blinking light means anger..."
HAHAHAHA! That was the funniest thing I have heard all day... thanks for your content, keep it coming.
The inability of some drives of that period is related to lower reflectance of CD-Rs. Early DVDs were bad at reading CD-R for first generation.
I've encountered many a drive, particularly in the 2000s that just refused to load some CD-Rs. It was very much an imperfect technology that I don't miss any more... 😂
But they fixed those problems, just in time for napster. I'm happy when things come together like that. Man, the tunes I stole....... uh ...... borrowed..... sampled.
The main problem is cdr's are less reflective that cd's so had a lower signal return strength. Also the lasers could be just getting weak so they read cd's but cant get a good signal from cdr disc's
The hack job on that third system was impressive, but still makes me feel a little better that my hack jobs have never been anywhere close to that! Quite a mixed bag today! Great video as usual!
Mike: "CSI doesn't ring any bells to me"
My brain: **puts on glasses** Good to know. 😎
_YEAAAAAAAAH_
The sticker over the speaker performs potentially two functions, but making it quieter isn't really one of them.
It's either for allowing a vacuum pickup tool to have a flat surface to grab the component during assembly (the same reason why you sometimes see a small piece of tape on USB connectors), and/or (perhaps more likely) to prevent ingress of cleaning fluid during an ultrasonic cleaning process at the end of assembly.
Making it quieter is just a side effect of the sticker being left in place after assembly and cleaning.
That CR2023 battery is the same battery used in my Toyota key fob. The original battery lasted about 5 years before I had to replace it
Even LED teacandles use it, it's quite popular choice of compact power source._
Wow what an assortment of unknown systems. The third one was a little disappointing. They remind me of going to the computer parts stores and getting things needed for our computers. I miss those days. Your videos take me down memory lane to an assortment of memories watching you fix or build systems. Your sense of humor is great, I love it! As always looking forward to your next video! I think I’ll rename my Fridays as Computer Friday!
The super glue and baking soda method is also very good for fixing broken face plates. Keep up the nice videos!
Homocidal looking handwriting; That's priceless! 🤣
26:53 « _Another one boots the DOS_ » Queen, circa 2023.
Nice! Cracked me up! That case was Jank! Pay attention to those weird coincidences. Those are glitches in the Matrix.
Those glitches in the matrix have been seeming like full-on kernel panics.
I found a trick to revive floppy drives which won't move even with new grease. The trick is to spray some contact cleaner into the stepper motor that actuates the head, you can spray some in there through the holes in the back and so far it has revived 100% of the floppy drives that I did it on
16:33 that *is* a cool switch, but still, nothing can beat a 1980s 386 red flip switch, the kerchunk on that badboy....
Wow! An AT/DIN keyboard port *and* USB header on the same logic board! I've definitely never seen that.
That Nero burner program sure brings back memories, I still have the archive of pirated music CDs from mid-2000's._
Well I know this reply is late, but you need to be ashamed of yourself!! Have you been to church lately??? You have sin on your soul. Do you think Jesus would steal tunes on Napster??
Me, I auditioned tunes on Napster. It was all about quality control. I had to do a lot of auditioning but it needed doing!
And most of the time, the quality sucked balls. 🙂
Just wanted to say there was a period of time when it seemed like CD-ROM drives just wouldn't read CD-R disks for some reason. Like in the late 90s or early 2000s it seemed like we had a bunch of different brands with that issue. Finally started to order every system with a CD burner, just so we knew that they would read. Great channel and fun to see you restoring the same type of systems I started my career on.
Great Channel 👍🏻 UA-cam algorithm brought me here 🎉 Seen a few of your vids as a new subscriber. This is great viewing. Brings me back to when I used to build these PCs back in the day as a day job and as a hobby. I’m surprised No coin cell manufacture is sponsoring you. The amount of them you go through repairing these retro systems, they should do. How do you not get bruised hands or cuts when pulling these parts out? I always find that’s the issue I get…😊 Keep up the video content… Cheers from the U.K 🍻
That Celeron looked like a BX chipset, very popular pairing, you could overclock the smeg out of celerons.
You mean CeleronA (with the on-die cache), didn't you?!
Yes, I had one of those back in the days. 300 MHz easily overclocked to 450 MHz, that was awesome value for money.
The celeryA was the one worth OCing. The non A 266 did overclock well though
and P2s, or so I heard.
20:45 - The capacitors aren't what you have to worry about, it's the primary side heatsink, which is just above them. Most power supplies have that heatsink in-circuit with the primary switching mosfets, meaning that it's anywhere between 60-375v RMS, depending on the switching topology used. Some power supplies are of piss poor design and can have that live heatsink just 1/16th of an inch from the lid with no insulation between them.
I had an Antec SL350 that was such a design. Had a spectacular bang one time when a ground wire broke out of a molex connector and a one in a million shot, the wire whipped back and the end went directly into the vent of the PSU housing and touched the heatsink. Sounded like a gunshot and blew a deep crater in the heatsink. PSU was unfixable, that bang destroyed the mosfets, the PWM controller, bridge rectifier and controller IC.
The capacitors are perfectly safe to touch powered on, since their legs are hidden under the board. The heatsink, not so much. Accidentally brush against it and you'll be swearing right quick. The capacitors can keep that heatsink charged up from minutes to several hours if the bleed down resistors are missing or damaged. Best to poke a multimeter across the heatsink and the PSU body to make sure there's no voltage left. Don't try shorting this heatsink out, because you'll most likely blow up the main switching mosfets and destroy the supply.
Your channel makes me happy. It's so peaceful.
I'm always happy if a new video comes!
Nice systems!
That was a "floating point" temperature sensor. Popular in DIY builds and upgrades at the time.
And you know it *was* floating.. in a way. : )
once again great video i do love seeing these old computers come back to life thank you
Awesome work. I'm into old PCs also but now as well versed as you. Learning a lot, Thanks.
Another Great Video. A very nice selection of Retro Cases. Thanks for sharing
That last system with the 2003 parts takes me right back to my high school years. That was the rig i was running right around my senior year of HS, first video card i bought was the Voodoo 3 and that would have been in 2001 i believe. Time flies.
Just out of curiosity, I'm wondering if they were still teaching computer science in hs in 2003. We took it in grade 12, but that was in 1982.
Also, it's just weird what time changes. When I was learning how to run my own computer, reading those Dummies books and doing the disk tutorials, we were told that we needed to get a "computer guru" to help and guide us in our computer journey. That was in the mid 90s.
Now, it's like who the fkkk needs one of those? The damn comp explains itself. : )
@@keithbrown7685 They were still teaching computer science in 2003 in high school because I was taking some of those classes back then while I was in high school. They were tech prep/vocational program classes that counted towards college but I never used that credit for anything as I did not go to university, only to a vocational college.
As always a good video! Thanks for the content I always enjoy watching
rhx for all the awesome videos, been watching them all in a marathon, keep up the good work
11:05 NICE WORK Mike!
😮🤝
My first custom PC in 2000 was in an Aopen case. Fond memories. Popular like Antec. Keep your eyes out for an old Lanboy case + system.
This saves me the trouble and mess of doing this kind of treasure hunting myself. My garage and sanity thanks you.
I absolutely love the channel Mike, you inspired me to build my own windows 98 SE computer, which I did couple weeks ago. It works great with xp dual boot.
always enjoy tour vids mike...
Great way to start a Friday morning. Thanks!
i have been waiting for a channel like this for years :O
Mike, I could literally watch you do this all day.
My gut feeling with the CD-Rs not working is due to the dye. Modern CD-R blanks are made with much lighter dyes (phthalocyanine) which might not reflect quite how those old drives need. I recall that most of my discs back in the early 2000s were a lot more blue in color than they are now. I could be wrong but just a thought.
You may very well be right. I have plenty of Verbatim disks that used their dark blue AZO dyes and those disks always read well, compared to many of the cheaper disks I used in later years that had like a very pale green type dye.
Do you remember orange dye CD-Rs? The first Maxell ones I bought in the very early 2000s were like that and ugly expensive. I seem to remember they were something like 18 Austrian Schillings each, or €1.50 in 2002 money. Finding a 10-pack of no-name CD-Rs for 10 Euros felt like a steal and they were decent too. The packaging was something to behold. A plain white cardboard box with black print and the discs in paper sleeves inside. No manufacturer info or anything on the box I think. If I remember correctly these off-brand discs had a deep green dye. Blue ones came later and I loved them as a teenager.
@Ragnar8504 I never saw orange dye disks, but I did encounter recordable disks probably a bit later in the lifetime of the tech. However I have very fond memory of the Dysan black CD-R, as rumour had it those would work best for pirated PS1 games. I never could test that, but the black disks looked really neat and all of those I burnt still work to this day. Can't same the same for those pale green-ish dye ones.
YES! I AM FALLING IN LOVE WITH MIKETECH!
Another awesome video! And IDE RAID sounds awesome!
I’m going to try and find the noisiest HDDs imaginable for it. 🤣
Wow, the buff pc tech 💪 you got a subscriber
Awesome videos. The P4 is not dual core but Hyperthreaded. Was a way to get more performance with those chips
And more heat. That was the whole point with the P4. Geeks needed space heaters. They also needed comps, but they often lived in cold cramped spaces, like dorm rooms. Enter the Pentium 4.
Great video, wow that dust bunny pc was something else, wonder if had been running 24/7 all its life.
Listen, MikeTech, I don't mean to criticize. Matter of fact, I approve. There are a lot of towers getting starring roles on this channel. I just wonder if this is your subconscious way of saying, that people who send their comps to the landfill or to eWaste....... that they should be taken to the Tower. You know, coz in merry old England, that's where people went before the King finally disposed of them for good.
First pc is from Nimble Microsystems Inc.
They are mostly into servers and enterprise level tech nowadays
love your videos and cant wait to see a full video, on some of more in depth repairs. That some of these need. 😁
Great channel Mike! Glad I found it. And great to see a techie UA-camr who also works out 💪 keep it up!
Thanks! Gotta stay in shape moving all these heavy old machines around! 😂
Came here for the handsome guy, stayed for the PCs... 😂 I wish I had one of those old towers. Everyone I know has long disposed of them.
If you ever do merch, you need a sacrificial harddrive t-shirt ;)
It's so funny you mentioned that, I've been planning to try the merch thing this week!
@@miketech1024 Please make sure its international shipping, as I am in the UK
I'm in the middle of moving... But you make me want to go through my old pcs i refuse to ever get rid off lol, i will once I'm settled 😁
Perhaps you'll do a video on them 🤞
The AOpen was obviously from a smokers house. I know, both of my parent's smoked, so I know that dust well. The reason it's so difficult to clean is because it's got cigarette tar, which is incredibly sticky. A bit of degreaser, like Dawn dish soap, will work wonders on plastic parts.
The spookier part, is how that stuff binds to lung tissue. I think of the things I did to my lungs. And even now, I'm not sure if I got away scot-free. But I LOVED smoking, in the beginning, and it was because of that very tar, that my tastebuds went to nirvana, and ultimately short-circuited, so that cigs were tasting like something worse than ***t to me.
I'm not sure, the dust doesn't look quite brown enough to me. Besides, it would have smelled. Humidity can make dust properly difficult to remove. My parents have a holiday home that sits empty and unheated throughout most of winter and that has dust just like this PC. Spring cleaning is always a chore.
The last case is an Enermax. They had a ton of different looking front panels but are identical on the inside. Still using mine after almost 20 years.
woow this first PC, it gave me some nostalgia....
very similar to our first PC when I was 5 or 6 years old it had also an Asus MB and a 120MHz intel P1 and 2x 16MB ram sticks :)
also the case is similar, maybe just different front plastic front panel (more rounded buttons)
it had a 1.6 GB seagata and a 8x CD rom
and i thought the dust in my PC was bad Holy shit man
It was so exceptionally bad... I feel for their lungs...
Love aopen stuff, specially the cases...been trying to find one..ive got an alps floppy drive, very reliable
That CD drive at the end is a BENQ drive :) once again a great video! Can't wait to see the video if you capping the boards
Thanks! Yeah I was moving pretty fast by that point in fear of the video being late, didn't even see it...
@@miketech1024 We don't mind videos being late, don't overwork yourself, a day or two is fine :-) although can't get enough of your videos, drooling over the videos and you haha
You never know what you'll find in these mystery towers, system 4 looks like the kind of cheap somewhat flimsy case I built a metric ton of PC's in while working at a local PC repair shop in high school. It's really cool it supports a 120mm fan tho, none of the ones I worked on despite looking very similar supported more than a single 80 front and rear. Could make a really good candidate for an IDE RAID array 'cause you could put a modern high static pressure silent fan in there and keep those drives cool. Pair of 80mm's out back, you'll be set. Thankfully modern fan designs are much imporoved over ye olde days where even the silent fans probably buzzed when new, or just screamed, or both.
The system 4 case is almost perfect for it. I’ll definitely use some modern, quiet fans so that those delicious drive sounds won’t be drowned out.
@@miketech1024 Yeah, no pesky vibration dampers either, though I dunno what that's gonna do for the life of four drives hammering away in sequence.
Back in high school, a friend of mine and I thought it would be funny to RAID a bunch of these noisy 1GB Western Digital drives he'd gotten in bulk. We never got to do it though, but man that would've been loud. The drives were leftover spares from some office building, NOS, and they were loud. Never thought I'd miss that sound, haha!
It's fine to try and start a MB with bulging caps, ie, it will ether start, or won't start.
Also those rows of caps are usually in parallel, so you can replace 6 caps of 1500 with 2 caps of 4500.
Some of those cases look like some of my builds back in the day! 😆
i did pc repair in the 90's- early 2000's you would had no idea what you might come across or what the issue might possibly be "mystery jumper" was a good day .... people using keyboard 5pin din as a midi port was something i came acreoss way to often
Good idea using a fiber glass repair, myself I usually use a plastic welder to repair bezels llike that (both automotive and PC) it fills in the gaps a bit better, but i always end up having to sand and paint the whole thing as its hard to match the color
Fiberglass is my favorite material for repairing thin plastic like this. Stuff is crazy strong! I do wish there were a good way to replicate original texture after filling/sanding. Especially that classic IBM texture.
I remember the first GPU I bought was a Voodoo 2. And it was really cool with the 3-4 games that actually made use of its capability at the time.
It looked to me like that second computer was used in a very humid (or at least not climate controlled) place -- the dirt/dust was *caked* on. Ick. Love these vids & keep 'em coming! :-)
I would've thrown the whole computer into a soapy bath, risk be damned. Or should that be 'risc' I don't know. 🙂
Those banging and clanging sacrifical hdds I anticipate that they will chug along like that for days on end if you let them.
My weekly or so broken record comment of "so many memories". Cheers
Just off topic, I would like to go on record as saying that "Permanent Dirt" is a good name for a punk band.
And you heard MikeTech utter it first! So when Permanent Dirt becomes famous and people ask where the name came from, we can point them *right here*!
Ngl, I am looking forward to that BTX-133 RAID octet. Should be really cool to hear.
I think the AOpen system was built at a local computer shop or as mail-order instead of assembled by a home enthusiast because of the CSI label. CSI was an acronym for Custom System Integrator which is what a lot of those type of smaller vendors were classified as back then.
The matching AOpen CD drive, PSU, and AOpen chip on the sound card lends further credence to a purchased build, as does the Coolermaster 3rd party CPU cooler, since the boxed Intel chips for home end users included a fan but the OEM brown box CPUs didn’t always.
You are my favorite channel discovery of 2023. ^__^ Love the way everything is put together and that includes the host. 🤠
Thanks! That is interesting. The CSI badge was giving me a bit of a hunch. It's incredible how difficult this information is to find via search.
For that out of round belt - could you pop it in some hot water for a time? It would likely reshape its self.
Lots of love as always x
The last one was probably a custom gaming PC from the early 2000's would have been cool to have a hard drive
Yeah I was pretty disappointed by that.
24:50 beautifully smooth
Love your videos! I'm sure the fiberglass repair works well, haven't tried that myself, but I can also recommend Plastruct Plastic Weld. It is solvent based and chemically dissolves the plastic and melds it back together. I've used it to repair cracks in computer cases with great results. Edit: I see someone else already suggested this, at least I'm not alone :D
Thanks! I thought the previous comment was referring to the electric plastic welders (the ones that essentially just melt a heated wire in). Never heard of that stuff, but it looks interesting.
Wow. That Malwarebytes logo looked really old! Also, thought I was the only one who uses glary utiltities lol.
Those weird sound effects and cursors were part of the "Travel" theme from Windows 98 as far as I remember.
And some CDs show quick blinking while reading the disc. If it keeps blinking forever it might be a sign it can't read it.
Hi buddy, I am sure a cap popped when you switched on that last computer. Go back and review your footage. As you switched on you can hear a pop and a sudden silver "light" from the board. It looks like the top of the cap pushed out catching the light. I just love your channel.
Regards from South Africa
S1 - P133, nice! I'm not a big fan of 'Dallas' style RTCs but still better than those Varta barrels & also hackable!
S2 - Where the fudge was that AOpen case used? It's a zoo for dust bunnies!
S3 - Capacitor Plague was a real thing people!
S4 - More dust! More bad caps! But Mike turns it on anyway! 😛
Looking forward to the future upgrades & repairs!
Oh yeah I’ll take a dead RTC over an evil Varta battery any day!
I use to do this all the time in the Mid 2000s collect a bunch of random bargain store pcs and go to town lol I made several good working computers in this era..
You should've made them into YT vids!
Some of those older CD and CD-RW drives would read -R but not +R or the other way around. Would not read -R but would read +R's. And/or were just finikey about reading both. Depending on how the CD-R was closed when written. And there's just no rhyme or reason to it.
Excellent video, I look forward to watching more.
That would be DVD. CDs only came in -ROM, -R and -RW flavours. Early DVD drives were sometimes indeed limited to whatever rewritable format the manufacturer thought to be more likely succeed in the format war. DVD-RAM was even more limited, especially the cartridge type.
@@Ragnar8504 Whooops, you're right, I got'em mixed up.
17:40 😅😅 C&C 👍🏽👍🏽
Complete with cobwebs, the new communication protocol!
Regarding that AOpen chipset... Acer Labs Inc was part of the same conglomerate, and they did make some chipsets. So possibly that was the origin of that chip.
Create a floppy disk with hdat2 to do full surface scans to your hard disks. It's also capable of displaying the SMART attributes and reallocate damaged sectors automatically. I also recommend having a memtest86 floppy or boot CD nearby. Should be part of your testing tools
I never knew before of hdat2, where has that been all my life ! Thanks sharing 👍
It has always been my experience that the CD session has to be closed when burning the disc before writers/burners will read them.
Yeah i had that a lot over the years 💿
At the start of the audio cd rip-off era, someone gave me a disc that sounded like the audio had tiny little pperforations in it. Turned out they forgot to finalize it.
I don't know why I remember such trivia, but this was in the year 2000.
Also, I just noticed the watch background. Happy Pride Month! :)
So if I were to touch it, I might ride the lightning?
It's funny because the Phillips burner was the first I ever bought! I think it was 200 euros at the time and it was all the money I got for my birthday!
In those days, it was just a matter of understanding the RAM IC manufacturer and the timings. Looks like the RAM in the first system was LG EDO RAM with 60ns timings. Pretty standard fare for the day.
26:36 obviously the person was into trains. Cool person.
i would love to see you building a pc with that s370 ide raid board
yes
Your videos are great! Where do you get these old computers from? Do what you're doing because you're doing it in a great way! 🥳
Thanks! These systems came from a huge lot of e-waste scrap, chronicled in this video: ua-cam.com/video/JCOw8Rt0WnY/v-deo.html
UA-cam linked me here.
"Reinforcements have arrived". Yea, you're getting a sub. This vid is surprisingly relaxing and just fun to watch :)
This time of the week again... i also didn't know custom PC building was popular in the 90's like today
Oh yes, and you kids have it easy nowdays. 🥳
Let me introduce you to our friends in the 90s, "everything is an expansion card" and "IRQ conflict from hell"! 😂👹
Oh yes, it was! I started messing with old and cheap or free computers (mostly 286 to 486) in around 1997 and played with a bunch of P1 machines throughout my teen years. I never built a PC from scratch but I did help a friend design his custom PC in 1999 or early 2000. We picked all the components from a local small computer chain, I think we even used their web site rather than a paper catalogue, and then he had the machine built by the store, it was a service they offered. One thing I remember very well is how upset I was that he got a crappy video card (might have been an NVIDIA something) so he could afford a huge 19 or 20" CRT monitor - I'd have preferred a decent video card and smaller screen. He was happy with the computer for several years though and eventually gave it to me to play with when it was wildly outdated. It did run XP quite nicely, which was a far cry from the 98 it had been built with.
The real fun begins once you get back into the late 80s, with MFM and RLL hard drives. The first DOS machines I worked on were like that, 1987-1989 vintage, mostly cheap-ish 286s, featuring Seagate ST-225 or 251 drives. The two things that saved my sanity back then were a stack of DOS magazines my neighbour gave me and the early internet. Seagate had the data of all their ancient drives on their web site for free.
Those drives couldn't be detected automatically, you had to enter cylinders, sectors and heads manually. Some BIOS setups offered a custom type (often 47) that let you enter the data manually, with others you had to pick the closest pre-defined type with the same or slightly smaller size and format the drive with those values. Using that drive in any other machine required knowing the values the original user had used to format the drive. If you didn't know them you were out of luck. Early IDE drives were installed in a similar fashion, the cyl/head/sec values didn't have to match the physical drive though, just the size of the BIOS type had to be correct or smaller than the actual drive. Auto-detect came with 486 machines, possibly some very advanced 386s had it too but I haven't seen any. ESDI and SCSI drives were much more advanced. For SCSI you set the BIOS hard drive type to "none" and the controller did the rest, for ESDI you picked any type you wanted. Those drives were painfully expensive though.
MFM/RLL and IDE were similar enough that they couldn't co-exist in one system, so moving data from one of those old machines onto something more modern usually required a SCSI controller and hard drive. The last time I used that setup in a real world environment was in 2006 when I had the dubious pleasure of backing up the hard drive of a 1987 Mitsubishi 286 that used to control a CNC milling machine. The only thing that was wrong with the Mitsi was a flat CMOS battery but unfortunately the BIOS setup wasn't in ROM but had been supplied on a long gone floppy disc. Getting the controller and hard drive to work with any other 286 board proved futile for some reason, as did using the drive with another controller, so I spent the better part of two days scouring the depths of the internet for a setup disc image. I actually found a generic setup that I could then put on a flash drive, shift that to a 3.5" floppy on an older Mac with a USB card and finally copy it onto a 5 1/4" DOS boot floppy on a Pentium 1. Then began the fun of trying hard drive types one by one, thankfully type 2 or 3 was the correct one. Once I had the hard drive working I installed my SCSI card and drive, xcopied the whole C: drive to the SCSI drive, plugged that into a Pentium 90 running DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 and copied the relevant software to the Pentium's IDE hard drive. Thankfully DOS software could be copied from drive to drive without any issues. What a palaver!
Seeing the AOpen system interior brought to mind a service call I did for a local cement and gravel company. I was the most dust I ever saw inside a mostly working system. Every component was coated with about 2 mms of rock dust. The fans and heat-sinks were all rendered useless/non-functional by being gobbed tight by dust and grit. The bottom of the interior was coated thicker than the rest, easily a full cm of filth. How the system had managed to function in any capacity for more than a week in that location beggars belief.
Regarding CD-R incompatibility, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I had endless troubles with CD-RW and CD-R media, it all hinged on what color laser diode was used in the units. Some used a yellow laser diode that would not work with some media, others used a blue laser diode (mostly Sony) that would not work with some media, yet others used a red laser diode that would not work with some media. Some worked fine reading CDs burned by any color laser diode, but not read RW media at all, even if the burn session had closed the CD to any further changes. And some would read a RW media until it was used a second time, then never again would it read. So much jank hardware in those days.
That makes my bearings hurt lol. I used to work at a shipyard. It gave me a whole new respect for the environmental conditions that hardware can tolerate! Oh I remember all too well the wild-west days of early recordable optical media. I definitely don't miss that!
My very first computer was made by Nimble. They were great to work with.
Another great video. I have been on a retro computer kick for the last few months (I've been playing with computers since 1997 - first PC was a 133 Cyrix commercial build). Only recently found your UA-cam channel.
My first retro build is based on a Intel D815EEA motherboard (the very first motherboard I bought ) and put Windows 98 SE back on it. I'd purchased it for one of my sons, so we three could play LAN games in the house. It's great to play old games on - viva StarFleet Academy!
Works well for a 20 year old PIII board . . . with one exception: I keep getting a memory error at "Address 261472256." Thus far the error hasn't caused any crashes or data corruption.
I've tried different RAM and different slots, and even just one stick . . . and the error keeps repeating. the first two numbers stay the same, but sometimes the rest of the string may change slightly. I don't see any bad caps on the board. I don't have any testing equipment to diagnose the issue, so I'm guessing the problem might be with the Tualatin 1ghz processor. I have a 733mhz PIII I stored somewhere I intend to switch in to see if the error clears up.
Tons of fun, though! Again, thanks for a great video.
Thanks! Have you tried a different power supply? Could be due to ripple, which causes all sorts of strange issues. Also, couldn't hurt to hit all slots and sockets with DeoxIT.
I've not tried either. I'll give them a shot - another PSU I have. I dont have any DeoxIT but have been planning on getting some. Thanks for the suggestions!
Just a follow-up . . . I tried a different CPU and PSU. Cleaned the RAM slots as best I could. The memory error remained the same. The only variable was during g the CPU switch suddenly one of the RAM sticks was showing 100mhz instead of its rated 133mhz. That issue disappeared with a reboot and never reoccured. To paraphrase Heraclitus - A difference which makes no difference is no difference . . . As in the memory error hasn't impeded playing old games on the machine.
Thanks again for the tips!
Goodluck finding something to pair with the Media connector in the Nimble PC.
And I'm just waiting for the Jackcon caps on my Abit VP6 to fail. The board was clearly used heavily and yet they are all perfectly fine, even during extended use with the FSB at 143MHz.
38:07 500 dollars says Mike will fall in love with this machine.
I'll see your $500, and raise you 7 internets! Too rich for your blood?
@@keithbrown7685 I'm out! 😂😂
41:33 it is a BenQ drive, says right below the yellow label
Well spotted good sir 🧐
I remember boards with leaky caps working.
The ABit BX133 RAID was a pretty decent board many Pentiums like the 500 and the 700 with 100MHz frontside bus run perfectly well on 133MHz, good memory is important though. The Highpoint IDE controller was much better then most people thought, one could it even get to boot from a RAID and it worked well with the infamous IBM DTLA hard-drives which dies because they had the IDE protocol correctly implemented and many of the controllers of the time used "free" say rarely used signals for some proprietary stuff and this killed the IBMs. Highpoint did it right and gets the IBMs to serious performance. Most important is the reduced system load same like what SCSI did - for a much higher price.