Ooh I've always been curious about these! Been trying to find one for a while now but haven't had much luck. Perfect lunchtime viewing here, thanks for putting this together 👍
The original iMac in its Bondi Blue color caused all sorts of products to be redesigned to include that color. I once saw an electric toothbrush with that translucent color scheme.
@@demef758 And not just blue; all kinds of devices had a bunch of different translucent colors. It was just in style then, proudly (but not too proudly) showing off the innards of keychain games, handheld consoles, landline phones, computers and their peripherals, and other electronic widgets.
+12V: you are experiencing "I*R" voltage drop across your hacked power cable. Your cable's total voltage drop is (12V - 11.24V) = 0.76V. Assuming the current draw is, say, 4A, the total cable resistance is about 0.76V/4A = 190 milliohm. That's TOTAL resistance, which is split between the two power leads (plus and ground), meaning that each leg of your cable has about around 100 milliohm of resistance. What you want is a cable with heavier gauge wire and is SHORTER, too. Both of these actions will reduce the cable resistance, making the incoming +12V voltage increase at the PC. (I'm an old power supply designer, so I have a lot of experience debugging cable issues.)
As someone who had to do what I could with a 800Mhz, 32GB integrated graphics Windows ME machine for a good portion of my early teens the bit at the end about gaming really resonated, many memories of trying to get games to run at more than slideshow pace (or even run at all) came flooding back. Despite all that I really miss those times, nostalgia is one hell of a drug apparently.
My understanding is that your experience with Windows ME was entirely dependent on your hardware and that the problem is that it supports two different eras of Windows device drivers and, if you mix them, you get instability.
I had a biostar board and parts in a 2007 built machine. The case (Apevia X-Cruiser BK) looked like a race car which is the only reason my unknowing dad bought it, not understanding the specs at all. I do really miss the crazy and creative case designs of the late 90s and early 2000s
Reminds me of my old Compaq presario "internet PC" from the late 90's. Amazingly though, that had a decent GPU in it. But more or less the same specs(AMD K6, 128mb of ram, 8gb HDD), and was running windows 98SE, not ME. Good memories from those PCs, lots of hours spent playing games and browsing Microsoft Encarta(spent hours looking up dinosaurs on that as a child lol).
Windows ME was bad. I had to deal with it on an old Compaq laptop. My first ever laptop that I got for going to college. I upgraded to XP as soon as I could. Awesome video!
Agreed, he can try to justify Win Me all he wants, but Win 98SE with all the service packs installed was far better, and more stable due to the hardware drivers, and forcing Win 98 drivers onto ME did not always end in the best results.
I disagree. I always thought Win98 felt like a prop plane in a wind storm. Just barely hanging together by sheer ignorance. Win ME felt pretty stable in comparison. BUT, I have seen it postulated that the drivers you were using made all the difference in the world, and that seems plausible. I was running a Pentium III at the time, on an i815e (Asus TUSL2-C) chipset, 3dfx Voodoo 3500 TV (and later an ATI Radeon), Sound Blaster Live!, 3Com 3C-905C, and Adaptec 19160 SCSI. All top-shelf stuff, very well supported by their manufacturers and Microsoft, and thus probably reference-level drivers. It ran great, it was reliable, the UI was cleaner.. I had no issues with ME at all, and found it kinda baffling why so many people kept dogging it.
@@charlieretro Skipped Windows ME in favor of Windows 2000 Pro after upgrading from 98SE. ME was a buggy mess. I used to work on machines back in those days and saw rows of these in a computer lab bluescreen while idle (fresh install too). Yet that was only on ME. When they were upgraded to XP there were zero issues.
@@charlieretro I tried 2000 shortly after launch and it was too much for my computer at the time. It took too long to boot, I didn't have quite enough RAM, and driver support was lean. It was pretty common to have basic functionality for most of your hardware, but none of the advanced features would work. I think by the time 2000 was really ready for mass adoption, XP was already around the corner. Win 2K seems to have a much better reputation now, in retrospect, from people who used it in a professional capacity at the time, or people who hung on to it well after it was released. With mature drivers, a well-spec'd machine, and software that had been written with an understanding that Windows doesn't just let your code do whatever you want anymore, it's at a sweet spot between lightweight and robust, without all the eye candy that some people don't like about XP.
For the pinout. Just probe with a multimeter and see which pins are connected to the easy to reach shield of the ethernet plug. Those pins must be ground. So the others must be 12v. No need to take it apart necessarily
@@Henners Not quite, he checked against the Molex ground. I know he wanted to take it apart, I just wanted to share this tip if anyone else ever runs into such a situation
Someone posted a pick of these on reddit a few months ago and I've been googling for a video of one in action. I gave up but your video showed up in my recommendations.
HOLY Y2K that case is so cool looking, I have an itch for translucent plastics & blobby designs, and this is no exception, even if people were just ripping off Apple's design language at the time... still very interesting and nostalgic Also was the purple/green one supposed to be an Evangelion edition? (or if not could it perhaps be a reference?)
Try pressing Ctrl+a while on the main CMOS setup screen. On some setups, it will display hidden advanced options not normally available. Maybe you will find the floppy controller there.
What I did with a big wattage 12v supply I had was put something like an XT60 plug on the end so I could have modular ends. I have a few different sized barrel jacks, one miniDIN, a molex, a SATA, etc so it can be used for whatever is needed and I'm not locked into a single connector for a power supply that's that big and useful.
I fondly remember this time of computing... as Colin you and I aren't too far apart in age as I know I've mentioned before (I think you're older by a year or 3?). I was a Mac kid growing up, but I do remember when Windows 98/ME/2k etc were the hot you know what, and all my friends swore by it. This was an interesting trip down memory lane. Oh and is it just me or is the EasyNow PC literally ripping off the aesthetics of a Blue and White Power Mac G3? Or maybe a Bondi Blue iMac? That's the vibe I got when watching... Super bizarre. Thanks for this video as always!
Yeah, it definitely took some "inspiration" from Apple's lineup at the time. After the iMac launched, translucent colored plastics became a huge trend, not just in computing but lots of stuff...Nintendo released translucent N64 consoles and controllers, all sorts of personal electronics (portable CD players and the like), even office supplies like staplers. It only lasted a couple of years until everyone got over it, but I remember the era fondly.
@@ThisDoesNotCompute Yep I remember all those translucent gadgets... I had an early N64 back in the day with the "atomic" purple controller, and I think I had a translucent CD player at one point too.
I'm so psyched to see this! I happen to have two these little easynow rigs in my collection. One of them was unused when I got it, came as a barebones system with no hdd, memory, or cpu. Has the matching speakers, keyboard, mouse, cd, manuals etc. Ended up getting it set up with a k6-450 and Windows 98SE. Both are all aqua green... Unfortunately never had 100% luck with Windows-Me on these desktops (device manager code 10). Even tried a random sis530 driver with no go.
@@papelrexI've had my first Easynow rig since I was in elementary school. Was given to me by a family friend when they upgraded. I always thought it was really aesthetic so it never got scrapped or thrown out. The second rig, (the unused Easynow pc) I got on good old Ebay about 5 years ago by simply stumbling upon it while scrolling.
@@papelrex Your best bet would be Ebay, yardsales, someones basement, and possibly storage auctions. They are really hard to find for sure. I'm honestly still really surprised to find one here on UA-cam.
I had never seen one of these and I used to look high and low for crazy minis to turn into Linux terminals as internet kiosks. Great find, great video!
That input connector is a GX16-4, A.K.A. female 4 pin CB (radio) microphone socket. Definitely not a mini-DIN connector, as with (mini-) DIN, the distance between two holes on a row varies per row. And a DIN plug with thicker pins would, well, violate its very own DIN 41524 standard.
What the hell kind of "genius" engineer thought that repurposing a cb radio plug as a power connector for a pc was a good idea? I swear these people think up solutions in the moment and never give a single second of thought to the future of such an off the wall idea
You're of course correct - a real mini-DIN4 will have pins that, if you used lines to connect them, look like a trapeziod. That said, when I see this connector in catalogues it always says something like "Mini-DIN 4 pin power connector."
You are absolutely wrong about this computer not being able to play games. Yes, it's not going to play the latest games in 1999, but it will play every DOS game ever made and quite a few 3d Windows games if that is your thing from 1995 and 1996 and possible 97.
This is one of my favorite videos of yours. The number of times you simply threw up your hands (“Alright, we’re installing Windows ME!”) has me laughing.
A few days ago I bought one of these off Ebay because of the funky look. Today this video shows up, so I watched hoping for some info to get it running. I wasn't disappointed! You saved me a lot of looking around for a sound driver. Near the end of the vid, FedEx shows up with the computer. What timing! You are right about the hard drive. Mine is a Maxtor with only 8.5 GB. The man date is January 1999, and the IC date codes in the computer are all mid 99 so I'm pretty sure the Maxtor is original. Your 30 GB is a good upgrade. Did you find an ethernet driver? I poked around inside and the Ethernet Phy IC is an AMD AM79C901JC. That might help finding a driver. P.S. Clint B: Sorry, I got the one on Ebay. There's sure to be more.
It's good to know you had a great experience with ME. Couldn't say the same for myself. I used 98SE for most of my computing back in the day because Win ME just kept crashing on me after about 2 weeks. Tried to give ME another shot, but it didn't work out.
i have one of these in pink/red and have been trying to dig up info for ages- thank you! I only knew it as the "Gentry Tokyo Vogue". Been trying to figure out the power supply for ages- now i'm even more anxious about it 😂. Thanks for the video!
THANK YOU COLLIN! for pointing out that Windows ME is not the nightmare OS that people make it out to be. It's like Windows Vista, I use Windows Vista on a daily basis for business tasks and it works just fine and XP and 7 combined. I have used Windows ME back in the day and I ran it on a old Gateway 2000 GS model, a dell dimension 2350, 2400, 3000 and every other computer and it worked just fine. Did not crash any more or less than win98. I too agree people need to let it go. I always hear about how bad it was.
i have a small collection (4 or 5) of rare colored translucent aftermarket pc cases from the late 90s that i treasure a lot. Basically impossible to find anymore.
I trust those software voltage reports about as much as I trust Windows ME to be stable. I could always tell who would be calling on a regular basis whenever I ran into a Windows ME system.
Biostar is actually still around and manufacturing current-gen motherboards. They're one of the few motherboard manufacturers to survive the Dotcom bubble in 2001, and remain quite relevant still.
I do remember that era, I loved that translucent look, still do. I still have a computer from then, a very tiny sub notebook Sony Vaio running WinME, it is about the size as a netbook.
I don't really get the ME bashing either, it can be a fun os, however I must admit that in my use it really was pretty unstable. That's why I mostly use 2000 on my old PCs, you get nice stability and the retro looks of the older OSes.
@@harshbarj Yeah but it's far from the worst thing ever, and getting unjustifiably angry about an OS that came out over 20 years ago at this point is just absurd to me.
I used to work at a PC Manufacturer back in the mid-late 90’s custom building and configuring computers One day, the owner of the company stormed into the warehouse, and announced that if he finds out that someone shipped a computer with a Biostar motherboard, they would be fired on the spot…
Thats a bit if a bad rapp ... they made sone really nice boards... although that was 15 - 20 years ago no idea whatvthe "quality" would be like now even though they do make a z690 skt1700 ddr5!
I have that monitor too- it’s the peak of translucent designs. Especially matched with the Power Mac B&W and blue translucent peripherals. Looking forward to the video about it!
Its not uncommon to see 11+VDC on the 12 volt rails of this era of computers, be it desktops with cheapo 50dollars PSUs or SFF with external power bricks. I have system rebuilt and troubleshoot a lot of the AMD k2 to XP era stuff and most of the computers I seen have 12 volt rails of below 12VDC and they work fine. But that 8.99VDC is definitely something wrong with the components.
Computers like this (that took a DC input) rarely actually regulated the 12V rail at all. It was usually a straight pass-through from the supply, since converting 12V (+/- some tolerance) to a regulated 12V isn't (or wasn't, in 2000) trivial. You can step down easily enough, and even step up, but a regulator that could buck, boost, or work at around the same as the input voltage, is a little more tricky. Plus, in a space-confined application like this, it would have been desirable to only have a buck converter for 12-to-5V and 12-to-3.3V, plus an inverting regulator for a token amount of -12V and -5V, but not have to worry about 12V. It's entirely possible the voltage monitor is just straight-up lying.
Now that’s a lovely looking PC, which is quite hard to come by these days. It’s great to see you measuring out the contacts on the power socket. Though the PC only uses the +12V input, you’d be very wise to actually confirm there’s no +5V power rail on the socket itself, as there are a lot of proprietary basic OEM power supplies being used for these kinds of solutions. All with a different pinout. So please, at least check for continuity between both the +12V pins so you’ll be sure there isn’t another voltage input available on the device itself, even though the manual states it only runs on +12V. ;)
Absolutely my thought as well. It's _probably_ fine, but the label is already wrong about the connector itself, so I wouldn't trust that it wasn't intended to run off a split 12V / 5V supply. I actually have exactly one of these, with that same Mini-DIN plug, that was bundled with an external HDD enclosure.
Interesting. I never paid any attention to these machines. Your working knowledge/best guess approach pays off as you have a starting point. Good work!
I suspect that the floppy drive is an artifact of 32 bit x86 Windows, that it couldn't not have a floppy drive even if one wasn't installed. I'd love to see you install Linux onto that machine. Also, yeah, the look of that shell, totally looks like an eye turned on its side. Yep, completely suggestive of that. Definitely nothing else. ;)
*I suspect that the floppy drive is an artifact of 32 bit x86 Windows, that it couldn't not have a floppy drive even if one wasn't installed.* No. It's a BIOS configuration issue.
I somehow managed to get a motherboard of this weird thing. To power it on i used a 12V Molex from AT power supply on that one molex connector.. it worked. Drivers are out there on mobokive.
I would want to slap a modern mini ITX board in there and make it a Hackintosh. It certainly would look the part. Thing straight up looks like a Blueberry G3 "PowerMac Mini" concept that got to production but never quite made it to market and got dumped off later by the pallet. Never heard of these or even seen one before, and that's pretty rare for me, so thanks for posting! I'll keep an eye out for a dead one.
As someone who suffered through Windows Me for like a year before swapping to Windows 2000, I disagree with your assessment that it's "not that bad". That operating system constantly had BSOD errors, program crashes, driver issues, and caused extreme mental anguish. It's easy to use Windows Me for all of one hour to make a video, but if you were to use it as a daily driver back in the early 2000s... you were in for a world of suffering.
Got that right I can't count how many times I had to reinstall ME on machines for people, and eventually gave up, and went back to Win 98se, or just put them on XP after it came out if their computer was powerful enough for it. The main problem with ME was it was sold with so many lower end garbage computers that barely met the specs for it like eMachines of the time with places like Best Buy suckering people who knew no better into buying them for a low price just to get them out of their inventory, with my late step dad being one of those people who got suckered, and I eventually just maxed out the RAM in that poor machine, and went back to Win 98se as it still had all the drivers I needed for it, and it was far more stable.
I'm sure that was the case for some people, but ME was my daily driver back in the day, and it was totally fine. Well, as fine as Win 9x ever was or could be, anyway. I dual-booted between ME and BeOS, and to be honest, I spent as much time in BeOS as I possibly could. But, I was also into PC gaming, and did a bunch of audio stuff (multitrack editing in Cool Edit Pro, MIDI stuff in Cakewalk Pro, and so on), so I clocked significant time in Windows as well.
I do remember seeing ++ as the BIOS command, and I believe it was the Award BIOS also. I wish I could remember what system it was on. Maybe E-Machines (remember them?) Yes, it's a perfectly good gaming machine, if the games you play are Reversi and Solitaire! Has anyone actually tried making these useful in the 21st Century by finding a lightweight Linux version that will run on it? It would be a more secure way to surf the 'net more securely than an ancient version of Windows.
Windows ME had an issue with memory management where RAM wasn't freed up after closing a program, which caused the swap file to be used more often than necessary. 2000 and XP got along with more retro hardware than ME did.
It looks like someone removed the tube from an old iMac, stuck the iMac into a hydraulic press and then a reshaping mold, swapped the G3 for a K6, and sold it as a cute little blue and whitebox. I love it.
Yes, everyone was following that imac translucent plastic theme in that era. I personally hated that styling, everything had to be rounded and curvy, and colored plastic bits thrown on randomly.
Congrats on discovering that power issue in the BIOS in a computer that otherwise seemed to completely work, and fixing it. It is amazing you were not getting random hangs/crashes and you could install an OS and even some drivers with the machine in that condition (including underpowered hard drive and optical drive), I can imagine it would have failed after not much time though.
My second PC was a barebones box with a PC Chips motherboard that used the SiS 530 (6326) and CMI sound. Also a K6-450 that I overclocked to 500mhz. Very similar machine, and yes I DID game on it, with difficulty lol.
i love it. Remember going from say an amiga to what seemed like no time at all a pc on the internet now most of us have phones a couple of laptops and a gaming pc if were lucky not to mention all the computers we have built into things like smart tvs ect .
The Advent E-Go 2 would have been sold in the UK in what was then PC World, now known as Currys (Dixons, PC World, Carphone Warehouse and Currys were all once separate outlets). Advent was, and I think still is, their ‘in-house’ brand. Kind of the UK equivalent of Best Buy.
That was a lot of innuendos ... all justified! (yes I slowed the video to read the flash text 🤣) . Seriously though, I remember lots of 'inexpensive' ready-to-go PC's back in the late 90's to early 2000's; yes; you could get cheaper ones, but you had to know what you were doing to get them up and running, well, at least be a bit computer literate anyway. So an easy 'out of box' solution to accessing the new fangled Internet Highway enabled, to some extent, the world we live in today.
This is a very typical pc for the late 90s. Not many people where gaming on pcs at the time. Most people bought pcs to surf the internet and check email. The holy grail era of AOL. Back when the internet was new and amazing. FYI at the time 128mb of ram with a k6 was a huge amount. I'm guessing this system originally shipped with 32mb or maybe 64
The ideal case to build a mac clone in, just get a multimeter and test continuity to ground to find which pins are ground. Oh and the key combo to enter the bios on my MSI GS66 Stealth laptop is: Right SHIFT & Right CTRL & Left ALT and F2 I hope you realize the SiS chipsets were the best for MS Dos 6.2 Subscribed...
Ooh I've always been curious about these! Been trying to find one for a while now but haven't had much luck.
Perfect lunchtime viewing here, thanks for putting this together 👍
hi lgr
big fan of you
Just as this got me wondering if LGR also had a new upload-- there he is! 😆
I see it's gonna be saturn-v time after this one!
I love
it when I see comments from a youtuber on another youtubers video :)
Hey Clint!! Nice seeing you here too!
It looks like a cross between an iMac and an Electrolux.
*cliterous
The original iMac in its Bondi Blue color caused all sorts of products to be redesigned to include that color. I once saw an electric toothbrush with that translucent color scheme.
@@demef758 And not just blue; all kinds of devices had a bunch of different translucent colors. It was just in style then, proudly (but not too proudly) showing off the innards of keychain games, handheld consoles, landline phones, computers and their peripherals, and other electronic widgets.
@@AaronOfMpls we had an iMac with translucent pink.
@@AaronOfMpls I still have a classic translucent blue printer cable 😂 I truly love the aesthetic!
I love the chapter titles for this video. Especially "Power supply hacking" leading into "It didn't work"
Spoilers!
Thanks for the spoiler though.
_BIOS WTF_
😂
Hahaha, it’s too accurate.
+12V: you are experiencing "I*R" voltage drop across your hacked power cable. Your cable's total voltage drop is (12V - 11.24V) = 0.76V. Assuming the current draw is, say, 4A, the total cable resistance is about 0.76V/4A = 190 milliohm. That's TOTAL resistance, which is split between the two power leads (plus and ground), meaning that each leg of your cable has about around 100 milliohm of resistance. What you want is a cable with heavier gauge wire and is SHORTER, too. Both of these actions will reduce the cable resistance, making the incoming +12V voltage increase at the PC. (I'm an old power supply designer, so I have a lot of experience debugging cable issues.)
The fucking *aesthetic* on this thing. Catch me filling a room with these and these alone.
As someone who had to do what I could with a 800Mhz, 32GB integrated graphics Windows ME machine for a good portion of my early teens the bit at the end about gaming really resonated, many memories of trying to get games to run at more than slideshow pace (or even run at all) came flooding back. Despite all that I really miss those times, nostalgia is one hell of a drug apparently.
32 gb sound like a lot on a 800mhz pc i know it was a typeing mistake im just giving u a hard time.
My understanding is that your experience with Windows ME was entirely dependent on your hardware and that the problem is that it supports two different eras of Windows device drivers and, if you mix them, you get instability.
Correct, it supports Windows 9X and NT drivers but never try to use both at once
I had a biostar board and parts in a 2007 built machine. The case (Apevia X-Cruiser BK) looked like a race car which is the only reason my unknowing dad bought it, not understanding the specs at all.
I do really miss the crazy and creative case designs of the late 90s and early 2000s
Oh yah, designers were really starting to think outside the (beige) box by then!
Reminds me of my old Compaq presario "internet PC" from the late 90's. Amazingly though, that had a decent GPU in it. But more or less the same specs(AMD K6, 128mb of ram, 8gb HDD), and was running windows 98SE, not ME. Good memories from those PCs, lots of hours spent playing games and browsing Microsoft Encarta(spent hours looking up dinosaurs on that as a child lol).
oh yeah my parents had one of those too. I played allot of monster truck madness on it!
lol. I remember Encarta.
looking up dinosaurs on a modern day dinosaur .
That translucent plastic look is one of the most aesthetically beautiful things to look at ever
I like that CRT you showed with the orange transparent plastic. Reminds me of one of my GBAs. That's one of the few things I miss from that era.
Great video Colin , repaired many of these in early 2000s usually dead hard drives... still very nostalgic
Windows ME was bad. I had to deal with it on an old Compaq laptop. My first ever laptop that I got for going to college. I upgraded to XP as soon as I could. Awesome video!
Agreed, he can try to justify Win Me all he wants, but Win 98SE with all the service packs installed was far better, and more stable due to the hardware drivers, and forcing Win 98 drivers onto ME did not always end in the best results.
I disagree. I always thought Win98 felt like a prop plane in a wind storm. Just barely hanging together by sheer ignorance. Win ME felt pretty stable in comparison. BUT, I have seen it postulated that the drivers you were using made all the difference in the world, and that seems plausible.
I was running a Pentium III at the time, on an i815e (Asus TUSL2-C) chipset, 3dfx Voodoo 3500 TV (and later an ATI Radeon), Sound Blaster Live!, 3Com 3C-905C, and Adaptec 19160 SCSI. All top-shelf stuff, very well supported by their manufacturers and Microsoft, and thus probably reference-level drivers.
It ran great, it was reliable, the UI was cleaner.. I had no issues with ME at all, and found it kinda baffling why so many people kept dogging it.
2000 was also not bad I know a few people that hate it also.
@@charlieretro Skipped Windows ME in favor of Windows 2000 Pro after upgrading from 98SE. ME was a buggy mess. I used to work on machines back in those days and saw rows of these in a computer lab bluescreen while idle (fresh install too). Yet that was only on ME. When they were upgraded to XP there were zero issues.
@@charlieretro I tried 2000 shortly after launch and it was too much for my computer at the time. It took too long to boot, I didn't have quite enough RAM, and driver support was lean. It was pretty common to have basic functionality for most of your hardware, but none of the advanced features would work.
I think by the time 2000 was really ready for mass adoption, XP was already around the corner.
Win 2K seems to have a much better reputation now, in retrospect, from people who used it in a professional capacity at the time, or people who hung on to it well after it was released. With mature drivers, a well-spec'd machine, and software that had been written with an understanding that Windows doesn't just let your code do whatever you want anymore, it's at a sweet spot between lightweight and robust, without all the eye candy that some people don't like about XP.
For the pinout. Just probe with a multimeter and see which pins are connected to the easy to reach shield of the ethernet plug. Those pins must be ground. So the others must be 12v. No need to take it apart necessarily
That’s what he did in the video. He took it apart since that’s what the channel is about
@@Henners Not quite, he checked against the Molex ground. I know he wanted to take it apart, I just wanted to share this tip if anyone else ever runs into such a situation
You picked the most appropriate monitor EVER for this video!
Someone posted a pick of these on reddit a few months ago and I've been googling for a video of one in action. I gave up but your video showed up in my recommendations.
That machine was made in the late 90's-early 2000's "bad capacitor plague"😵
Great video! This era of computers holds a spot in my heart as well.
HOLY Y2K that case is so cool looking, I have an itch for translucent plastics & blobby designs, and this is no exception, even if people were just ripping off Apple's design language at the time... still very interesting and nostalgic
Also was the purple/green one supposed to be an Evangelion edition? (or if not could it perhaps be a reference?)
no doofus. here in america anime was considered homoerotic in the 90’s/early 00’s..
@@whoeusbsknsi No, it wasn't. They showed anime on prime time kids TV.
@@whoeusbsknsi Wasn't there 4kids tv that showed a fair bit of anime?
such fun industrial design, you don’t see this anymore in electronics outside of children’s products
Gives me strong flashbacks.. Installing drivers before internet..
Try pressing Ctrl+a while on the main CMOS setup screen. On some setups, it will display hidden advanced options not normally available. Maybe you will find the floppy controller there.
What I did with a big wattage 12v supply I had was put something like an XT60 plug on the end so I could have modular ends. I have a few different sized barrel jacks, one miniDIN, a molex, a SATA, etc so it can be used for whatever is needed and I'm not locked into a single connector for a power supply that's that big and useful.
I fondly remember this time of computing... as Colin you and I aren't too far apart in age as I know I've mentioned before (I think you're older by a year or 3?). I was a Mac kid growing up, but I do remember when Windows 98/ME/2k etc were the hot you know what, and all my friends swore by it. This was an interesting trip down memory lane. Oh and is it just me or is the EasyNow PC literally ripping off the aesthetics of a Blue and White Power Mac G3? Or maybe a Bondi Blue iMac? That's the vibe I got when watching... Super bizarre. Thanks for this video as always!
Yeah, it definitely took some "inspiration" from Apple's lineup at the time. After the iMac launched, translucent colored plastics became a huge trend, not just in computing but lots of stuff...Nintendo released translucent N64 consoles and controllers, all sorts of personal electronics (portable CD players and the like), even office supplies like staplers. It only lasted a couple of years until everyone got over it, but I remember the era fondly.
@@ThisDoesNotCompute Yep I remember all those translucent gadgets... I had an early N64 back in the day with the "atomic" purple controller, and I think I had a translucent CD player at one point too.
I don't know how I missed this one last year, but this is fantastic.
It's a weird computer, the design is like an iMac G3 and PS5 have a weird baby haha
Great video as always!
Really love the long form semi-unscripted videos. Your troubleshooting and repair content is my favorite
I'm so psyched to see this! I happen to have two these little easynow rigs in my collection. One of them was unused when I got it, came as a barebones system with no hdd, memory, or cpu. Has the matching speakers, keyboard, mouse, cd, manuals etc. Ended up getting it set up with a k6-450 and Windows 98SE. Both are all aqua green...
Unfortunately never had 100% luck with Windows-Me on these desktops (device manager code 10). Even tried a random sis530 driver with no go.
dude that's awesome. where did you find this pc? i've been looking to buy one everywhrre
@@papelrexI've had my first Easynow rig since I was in elementary school. Was given to me by a family friend when they upgraded. I always thought it was really aesthetic so it never got scrapped or thrown out. The second rig, (the unused Easynow pc) I got on good old Ebay about 5 years ago by simply stumbling upon it while scrolling.
@@papelrex Your best bet would be Ebay, yardsales, someones basement, and possibly storage auctions. They are really hard to find for sure. I'm honestly still really surprised to find one here on UA-cam.
Points at an ovoid shaped device and proclaims “corners were cut”. You crack me up. ❤
I really like the look of the case.
Its retro yet still feels modern in a way as well.
Maybe this could be re-fitted with current hardware inside?
A RaspberryPi would fit inside the case easily and would feature upgraded video and USB ! 🙂
I guess any ITX motherboard should do
I Love the pause after you plugged in the power supply…and nothing happened. I could almost hear that silent sigh during that pause. ;)
I had never seen one of these and I used to look high and low for crazy minis to turn into Linux terminals as internet kiosks. Great find, great video!
That input connector is a GX16-4, A.K.A. female 4 pin CB (radio) microphone socket. Definitely not a mini-DIN connector, as with (mini-) DIN, the distance between two holes on a row varies per row. And a DIN plug with thicker pins would, well, violate its very own DIN 41524 standard.
What the hell kind of "genius" engineer thought that repurposing a cb radio plug as a power connector for a pc was a good idea? I swear these people think up solutions in the moment and never give a single second of thought to the future of such an off the wall idea
You're of course correct - a real mini-DIN4 will have pins that, if you used lines to connect them, look like a trapeziod. That said, when I see this connector in catalogues it always says something like "Mini-DIN 4 pin power connector."
enjoyable episode. I lived through the 90's and bought my own computer in the early 2000's because didn't want to share the family computer any more.
You are absolutely wrong about this computer not being able to play games. Yes, it's not going to play the latest games in 1999, but it will play every DOS game ever made and quite a few 3d Windows games if that is your thing from 1995 and 1996 and possible 97.
This thing is so late 90's early 2000's it hurts.
A Friday night wouldn't be a Friday night without some quality technology entertainment from This Does Not Compute.
This is one of my favorite videos of yours. The number of times you simply threw up your hands (“Alright, we’re installing Windows ME!”) has me laughing.
A few days ago I bought one of these off Ebay because of the funky look.
Today this video shows up, so I watched hoping for some info to get it running.
I wasn't disappointed! You saved me a lot of looking around for a sound driver.
Near the end of the vid, FedEx shows up with the computer. What timing!
You are right about the hard drive. Mine is a Maxtor with only 8.5 GB. The man date is January 1999, and the IC date codes in the computer are all mid 99 so I'm pretty sure the Maxtor is original. Your 30 GB is a good upgrade.
Did you find an ethernet driver? I poked around inside and the Ethernet Phy IC is an AMD AM79C901JC. That might help finding a driver.
P.S. Clint B: Sorry, I got the one on Ebay. There's sure to be more.
Dang, you yoinked it from LGR somehow. He posted a comment here saying that he's been looking for one for awhile. Edit: heh, you saw his comment.
I kind of want one of these now even though I have absolutely no use for it.
And by "Cheap 90's PC", he means still more expensive than a loaded gaming rig today.
It's good to know you had a great experience with ME. Couldn't say the same for myself. I used 98SE for most of my computing back in the day because Win ME just kept crashing on me after about 2 weeks. Tried to give ME another shot, but it didn't work out.
imagine building a custom gaming pc with that case
i have one of these in pink/red and have been trying to dig up info for ages- thank you! I only knew it as the "Gentry Tokyo Vogue". Been trying to figure out the power supply for ages- now i'm even more anxious about it 😂. Thanks for the video!
THANK YOU COLLIN! for pointing out that Windows ME is not the nightmare OS that people make it out to be. It's like Windows Vista, I use Windows Vista on a daily basis for business tasks and it works just fine and XP and 7 combined. I have used Windows ME back in the day and I ran it on a old Gateway 2000 GS model, a dell dimension 2350, 2400, 3000 and every other computer and it worked just fine. Did not crash any more or less than win98. I too agree people need to let it go. I always hear about how bad it was.
i have a small collection (4 or 5) of rare colored translucent aftermarket pc cases from the late 90s that i treasure a lot. Basically impossible to find anymore.
I trust those software voltage reports about as much as I trust Windows ME to be stable. I could always tell who would be calling on a regular basis whenever I ran into a Windows ME system.
The voltage reports are in the BIOS though, nothing to do with Windows.
Biostar is actually still around and manufacturing current-gen motherboards. They're one of the few motherboard manufacturers to survive the Dotcom bubble in 2001, and remain quite relevant still.
Now I kinda understand where Valve got their idea for Portal sentry turrets from
I do remember that era, I loved that translucent look, still do. I still have a computer from then, a very tiny sub notebook Sony Vaio running WinME, it is about the size as a netbook.
Kinda like how carriers sold HTC phones under their own brands. For example, the HTC Excalibur being sold by T-Mobile as the T-Mobile Dash.
It's the PS(negative)5.
I had one of these in the uk it was branded as advent e.go still remember my grandad coming in with it thought it looked fantastic
I don't really get the ME bashing either, it can be a fun os, however I must admit that in my use it really was pretty unstable. That's why I mostly use 2000 on my old PCs, you get nice stability and the retro looks of the older OSes.
This is why the bashing -> "however I must admit that in my use it really was pretty unstable."
@@harshbarj Yeah but it's far from the worst thing ever, and getting unjustifiably angry about an OS that came out over 20 years ago at this point is just absurd to me.
I used to work at a PC Manufacturer back in the mid-late 90’s custom building and configuring computers
One day, the owner of the company stormed into the warehouse, and announced that if he finds out that someone shipped a computer with a Biostar motherboard, they would be fired on the spot…
Thats a bit if a bad rapp ... they made sone really nice boards... although that was 15 - 20 years ago no idea whatvthe "quality" would be like now even though they do make a z690 skt1700 ddr5!
I have that monitor too- it’s the peak of translucent designs. Especially matched with the Power Mac B&W and blue translucent peripherals. Looking forward to the video about it!
Its not uncommon to see 11+VDC on the 12 volt rails of this era of computers, be it desktops with cheapo 50dollars PSUs or SFF with external power bricks. I have system rebuilt and troubleshoot a lot of the AMD k2 to XP era stuff and most of the computers I seen have 12 volt rails of below 12VDC and they work fine. But that 8.99VDC is definitely something wrong with the components.
Computers like this (that took a DC input) rarely actually regulated the 12V rail at all. It was usually a straight pass-through from the supply, since converting 12V (+/- some tolerance) to a regulated 12V isn't (or wasn't, in 2000) trivial. You can step down easily enough, and even step up, but a regulator that could buck, boost, or work at around the same as the input voltage, is a little more tricky.
Plus, in a space-confined application like this, it would have been desirable to only have a buck converter for 12-to-5V and 12-to-3.3V, plus an inverting regulator for a token amount of -12V and -5V, but not have to worry about 12V.
It's entirely possible the voltage monitor is just straight-up lying.
Windows XP would have been the quickest install & go os. XP was amazing in its support for older hardware & it's capability to run on it.
That is the first computer power socket I've seen that isn't a standard three prong.
And this is... WORRYING.
Now that’s a lovely looking PC, which is quite hard to come by these days.
It’s great to see you measuring out the contacts on the power socket. Though the PC only uses the +12V input, you’d be very wise to actually confirm there’s no +5V power rail on the socket itself, as there are a lot of proprietary basic OEM power supplies being used for these kinds of solutions. All with a different pinout.
So please, at least check for continuity between both the +12V pins so you’ll be sure there isn’t another voltage input available on the device itself, even though the manual states it only runs on +12V. ;)
Absolutely my thought as well. It's _probably_ fine, but the label is already wrong about the connector itself, so I wouldn't trust that it wasn't intended to run off a split 12V / 5V supply. I actually have exactly one of these, with that same Mini-DIN plug, that was bundled with an external HDD enclosure.
Interesting. I never paid any attention to these machines. Your working knowledge/best guess approach pays off as you have a starting point.
Good work!
I suspect that the floppy drive is an artifact of 32 bit x86 Windows, that it couldn't not have a floppy drive even if one wasn't installed. I'd love to see you install Linux onto that machine. Also, yeah, the look of that shell, totally looks like an eye turned on its side. Yep, completely suggestive of that. Definitely nothing else. ;)
*I suspect that the floppy drive is an artifact of 32 bit x86 Windows, that it couldn't not have a floppy drive even if one wasn't installed.*
No.
It's a BIOS configuration issue.
A lot of my older computers had this problem, no floppy drive, but a floppy drive showing up in Windows (XP in that case).
There is no SiS drivers for Linux, so that is a silly idea.
@@IkarusKommt According to the internet there are, so duck it and update your database.
I somehow managed to get a motherboard of this weird thing. To power it on i used a 12V Molex from AT power supply on that one molex connector.. it worked. Drivers are out there on mobokive.
I've always liked windows ME, perhaps because it was what was on my first computer? The sign in chime still makes me happy.
I would want to slap a modern mini ITX board in there and make it a Hackintosh. It certainly would look the part.
Thing straight up looks like a Blueberry G3 "PowerMac Mini" concept that got to production but never quite made it to market and got dumped off later by the pallet.
Never heard of these or even seen one before, and that's pretty rare for me, so thanks for posting! I'll keep an eye out for a dead one.
As someone who suffered through Windows Me for like a year before swapping to Windows 2000, I disagree with your assessment that it's "not that bad". That operating system constantly had BSOD errors, program crashes, driver issues, and caused extreme mental anguish. It's easy to use Windows Me for all of one hour to make a video, but if you were to use it as a daily driver back in the early 2000s... you were in for a world of suffering.
Got that right I can't count how many times I had to reinstall ME on machines for people, and eventually gave up, and went back to Win 98se, or just put them on XP after it came out if their computer was powerful enough for it. The main problem with ME was it was sold with so many lower end garbage computers that barely met the specs for it like eMachines of the time with places like Best Buy suckering people who knew no better into buying them for a low price just to get them out of their inventory, with my late step dad being one of those people who got suckered, and I eventually just maxed out the RAM in that poor machine, and went back to Win 98se as it still had all the drivers I needed for it, and it was far more stable.
I'm sure that was the case for some people, but ME was my daily driver back in the day, and it was totally fine. Well, as fine as Win 9x ever was or could be, anyway.
I dual-booted between ME and BeOS, and to be honest, I spent as much time in BeOS as I possibly could. But, I was also into PC gaming, and did a bunch of audio stuff (multitrack editing in Cool Edit Pro, MIDI stuff in Cakewalk Pro, and so on), so I clocked significant time in Windows as well.
Everyone here used Windows ME because it had all the recent drivers and recovered automatically after user errors.
I'm one of those people who loved Windows ME. More than the other Windows available. Until XP.
I do remember seeing ++ as the BIOS command, and I believe it was the Award BIOS also. I wish I could remember what system it was on. Maybe E-Machines (remember them?) Yes, it's a perfectly good gaming machine, if the games you play are Reversi and Solitaire! Has anyone actually tried making these useful in the 21st Century by finding a lightweight Linux version that will run on it? It would be a more secure way to surf the 'net more securely than an ancient version of Windows.
Thanks for reviewing this beautiful toaster. But I couldn't find the slots to put bread.
Not the pcussy 😩
W comment 🤣🏆
Advent was one of the home/exclusive brands of Dixons Stores Group in the UK - They operated Dixons, Currys and PC World stores back then.
Windows ME had an issue with memory management where RAM wasn't freed up after closing a program, which caused the swap file to be used more often than necessary. 2000 and XP got along with more retro hardware than ME did.
It looks like someone removed the tube from an old iMac, stuck the iMac into a hydraulic press and then a reshaping mold, swapped the G3 for a K6, and sold it as a cute little blue and whitebox. I love it.
Yes, everyone was following that imac translucent plastic theme in that era.
I personally hated that styling, everything had to be rounded and curvy, and colored plastic bits thrown on randomly.
Does not look like an egg and barely resembles a woman's junk.
More like the outline of a human eye.
I like that you don't give up while trying to get something to work. I'm the same way but it sometimes causes me more trouble than it's worth.
Fantastic OS/monitor combo going on here
All we need now is for you to talk about FiFo buffers and StickyKeys .... Great accidental innuendo !
I had a computer with Windows Me back in the day, and it worked fine for a number of years.
My first pc, a Memorex Telex 286, had ctrl+alt+esc for CMOS setup. The key combo even worked while booted under DOS.
Windows ME was kinda fast. Fking loved the late 90's.....I just had a fond rememberance. Loved the video.
"Corners were definitely cut on this thing when it was made..."
Sure was. Just look at its shape!
I bought one of these back in the late 90’s.
Meanwhile....
"I don't' think I'm the first person to be inside this..." thingy.
I bought and sold around 60 of those the K6-2 was a great little cpu and it came with keyboard ,mouse and speakers for $190
Congrats on discovering that power issue in the BIOS in a computer that otherwise seemed to completely work, and fixing it. It is amazing you were not getting random hangs/crashes and you could install an OS and even some drivers with the machine in that condition (including underpowered hard drive and optical drive), I can imagine it would have failed after not much time though.
My second PC was a barebones box with a PC Chips motherboard that used the SiS 530 (6326) and CMI sound. Also a K6-450 that I overclocked to 500mhz. Very similar machine, and yes I DID game on it, with difficulty lol.
I love coverage of odd and obscure systems. Thank-you.
That's a nice pc, looks like something comming from aperture science
i love it. Remember going from say an amiga to what seemed like no time at all a pc on the internet now most of us have phones a couple of laptops and a gaming pc if were lucky not to mention all the computers we have built into things like smart tvs ect .
Not surprising that SIS has old drivers. A lot of their stuff is used in industrial embedded computer.
I would love to find one completely dead and put an ITX board with an i3, a Pico_ATX PSU, and a SSD in it to make an HTPC :3
I can't believe I've never seen this, that is absurd and I need it.
Awesome episode! Thank you!
That case looks you put an imac G3, a portal turret and a portal Core in a blender. beautiful.
The Advent E-Go 2 would have been sold in the UK in what was then PC World, now known as Currys (Dixons, PC World, Carphone Warehouse and Currys were all once separate outlets). Advent was, and I think still is, their ‘in-house’ brand. Kind of the UK equivalent of Best Buy.
That was a lot of innuendos ... all justified! (yes I slowed the video to read the flash text 🤣) . Seriously though, I remember lots of 'inexpensive' ready-to-go PC's back in the late 90's to early 2000's; yes; you could get cheaper ones, but you had to know what you were doing to get them up and running, well, at least be a bit computer literate anyway. So an easy 'out of box' solution to accessing the new fangled Internet Highway enabled, to some extent, the world we live in today.
OMG FINALLY SOMEONE WHO AGREES WITH ME ON WINDOWS ME! Thank God, I was wondering for so long for this moment..
This is a very typical pc for the late 90s. Not many people where gaming on pcs at the time. Most people bought pcs to surf the internet and check email. The holy grail era of AOL. Back when the internet was new and amazing. FYI at the time 128mb of ram with a k6 was a huge amount. I'm guessing this system originally shipped with 32mb or maybe 64
That’s moist. I would definitely be interested in something like this.
WOW, that stand is essentially REQUIRED for this thing because of the placement of that fan! wow!
The ideal case to build a mac clone in, just get a multimeter and test continuity to ground to find which pins are ground.
Oh and the key combo to enter the bios on my MSI GS66 Stealth laptop is: Right SHIFT & Right CTRL & Left ALT and F2
I hope you realize the SiS chipsets were the best for MS Dos 6.2
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I remember an SiS driver, with the rollercoaster!