+Pacon ! I can barely load anything on IE 6 anymore, all I get is an illegal operation error that says IE has to close. It takes several tries before I can even get firefox to download.
I've got this exact same computer case. I have no idea where I got it, but it's held a few setups over the years. Quite a good case, but the 'latch' which holds the PSU was a bit of a pain because you need to modify the case to fit a longer power supply. At the moment, my youngest son uses this case for his gaming rig, with an old q6600 and 4 gigs ram, + some old nvidia card which I can't recall at the moment (560gtx? - something like that). Not a bad set up. It's surprising what he's managed to play on that old thing - GTA5, MGS5, FO4, Dishonored 2 (which I couldn't get working on my own rig :/).
Another interesting video. It is interesting, when you come to think of it, how quickly these computers become relics. Spending their later days hidden away under a shelf, no longer required.
@Pizzscn It's an old 15-inch LCD with a large bezel. But on most camcorders, if you turn off image stabilization or set its shutter speed to 1/60 (sometimes called "TV mode"), that will reduce or eliminate the flickering and black bars when recording the image of a CRT.
I actually, and still use two Gateway desktop computers. One is an E4500G and the other is GT5034 Media Center. BOTH are running WinXP and have been quite reliable. Although I am using an old Dell 380 Workstation now I keep the Gateways for video processing and printer software. The GT 5034 actually has an F connector built in to allow for direct cable hookup. The Ram is maxed out on both as are the hard drives. I know there are newer computers out there but my philosophy is "Why buy something just because it's the latest and greatest when what I have works fine for me".
@BitsForPC Dell shipped those Altec Lansing ACS-90 speakers with their computers in the late '90s, and they actually sound pretty good for their size. I still see plenty of them in use today, because people get a new computer but keep the old speakers.
@kargaroc386 Because I wanted to try ME, and saw no reason to go back to 98SE. It plays H.264 videos fine; in fact when I was using it to make videos, I would use VirtualDub to deinterlace and reencode the Matrox MJPEG videos into X.264 format (the freeware equivalent of H.264).
@uxwbill The card has standard Video for Windows capture drivers and works with software like VirtualDub. You can easily disable the on-board hardware MJPEG compression and capture straight YUY2 which can be compressed in real time by any software codec such as HuffYUV (fast lossless, roughly 2:1) or MPEG if your machine is fast enough. Its a great capture card, the MJPEG part is pretty much a paperweight under 2k/XP though. For those looking for the addon its called the "Rainbow Runner".
I worked at a bowling alley about 10 years ago and everything ran on Windows XP EXCEPT the second computer (the first one was WIN XP running Qubica) on reception which ran Millennium Edition. Massive CRT monitor.
6:33. I am just guessing that was why the on-board audio was covered up. I know that some Dell systems will cover up certain ports with blanking plate if they are disabled, for example if an external graphics card is installed.
I bought a Dell Dimension 8400 recently and it had Windows XP media center edition that was installed in December 2006 (Replacement hard drive?) and it has a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS and the onboard audio jacks are plugged, but in the uninstall/remove programs roster, it shows SoundMax drivers where installed.
About the Windows ME version of Movie Maker? It's so limited in the video formats it accepts and produces that I never was able to successfully use it.
@uxwbill Almost all the iTunes songs I have come up as VBR. Apple probably uses 256 kbps ABR (Average Bit Rate), instead of CBR (Constant Bit Rate). The Matrox capture card can be used with any other video program, but then the video compression is done in software, which is much more CPU-intensive and prone to dropping frames than the hardware MJPEG compression. In fact, the Matrox PC VCR software allows uncompressed video capture too, but I could only get that to work at 320x240 resolution.
Doesn't look like a bad computer. I've been wanting a video capture card for a long time! It would be great to store some old VHS movies onto a hard drive.
I also had the Pentium 4 version of this same Gateway model, and it used RAMBus. That's the main reason why I junked it and kept the AMD one instead, because it uses PC133.
Matrox has a long history of releasing great video capture hardware, and then halting development of new drivers for it. They have the attention span of gnats. I still maintain an XP machine (non-networked) to house a high-end analog capture card because they lost interest in it after they put out its successor. Which they then forgot after their next release, and so on and so on down to this very day. Their response to requests for driver updates was always "Buy the new thing."
@RWL2011 The ACS-90s are designed to run on 16 volts DC, but I didn't have the original power supply handy while making the video, so I grabbed the 12 volt wall wart from my flatbed scanner, and it worked fine.
I found a very similar Gatway in the trash a while ago. It had a DVDRW drive, 350watt PSU, and a 64mb graphics card with DVI! It was broken, so I salvaged all the parts and threw it out
As an owner of a Matrox Marvel G400-TV, I know all about the driver problem. Blame Zoran, the makers of the MJPEG hardware codec chip. I used to run that card under Win 2000 using a hacked beta driver, MJPEG capture was touchy/crashy, but uncompressed YUY2 was fine, just used HuffYUV to compress lossless. That card was great for VHS capture, it would capture video with horrible sync signals (even Macrovision) without dropping frames and audio always stayed in sync, didn't even need a TBC!
@EatenSniperGuy I'd recommend upgrading the RAM and running XP on it. As long as you turn off all the graphical frills and give it enough RAM, XP will run fine on a Pentium II.
My PC also still has a Windows ME Product Key sticker on it. Originally it came with an AMD Athlon 900 MHz and 128 MB RAM but it was upgraded to an Athlon XP 2200+ at 1,79 GHz and 1024 MB RAM. Still working fine on Windows XP every day.
It'd be neat to see it in action again. Also, this request would be for new viewers to your channel who had never seen one of your systems used for editing videos (or this particular system in this case).
@RetroPCDOS This computer is now retired and I only use it when I need to read a Zip disk or retrieve an old file on its hard drive. Therefore it doesn't even need a web browser anymore.
TBH not having the start menu was the best. They finally fixed the search feature in 8, and made it even better in windows 8.1, so you never actually needed to look at what you where searching for. You could quickly just type in what you wanted, hit enter and it would get the right thing the first try. Then with Windows 7 the search was dogshit, and with Windows 10 50% of the time the search is great, and 50% of the time it's a million times worse than 7.
@TotalTQ As I showed in the video, the hard drive is a Seagate. However I may downgrade it to something smaller, because most of its 120 gigs is empty, and a drive of that size would be better used elsewhere, such as to add more space to my Compaq music server.
I bought a brand new HP computer in 2001 just before XP came out and a friend of mine advised me to get a copy of Windows 2000 Professional for it because Windows ME was so unreliable ! I used that computer right up until 2008 when i bought a Lenovo IBM Thinkpad T61 (one of thr last with IBM branding which was optional )which was a downgrade machine from Vista to XP, i put Windows 7 on it in 2012 and then upgraded to an SSD in 2014 and then did the free upgrade to 10 in 2016, still got it today working like a charm.
I have that SAME computer, but it's just a different model (I didn't make contextual sense lol) A Gateway Select 1200? Neat... Mine is a Gateway Select 1400, but they somewhat trimmed it down quite a bit...
i used to have a gateway similar to this one, although mine had an intel celeron with 1.2Ghz and 256mb of ram and a 128mb dedicated ati card. .it was my 1st computer.
I have a few questions. 1 can't you use that capture card in a sort of generic way with windows movie maker under xp? 2 why did zip drives seemingly die off before floppies? They were much higher in capacity than normal floppies yet I have never seen a working zip drive in person anywhere
FubarMike In Windows 2000 or XP you can't use the capture card's hardware MJPEG video compression, and besides, I have much higher quality ways of capturing video now, so I don't need it anymore. Zip disks became obsolete as soon as CD burners and USB flash memory keys become popular and affordable. Floppy drives remained in computers longer because sometimes you still need them to load a boot disk to install or repair an operating system.
have you tried using a different video capture program (like moviemaker) or does it only work with the matrox software? p.s. newton power supplies are pretty well built i hear :)
The Matrox software is the only one which supports the proprietary MJPEG compression that the card uses. If you use anything else, you can only capture uncompressed video, which eats up a *lot* of disk space!
Kamil Niewiadomski Yes, but that takes much more time than using the Matrox software to record MJPEG video directly. There are much better video capture cards available, but remember, I got this for free, so I was making the best of it.
i remember that ME would boot up really quick but apart from that i hated it. it was always so unstable and would cause problems all the time. vista was not much better but im running windows 7 home premium now and i have no complaints. xp was good too.
Me was no less stable than 98SE when you had WDM drivers in place. Problems came when people just kept using VxDs. I have a machine with Me and it's as solid as I ever remember 9X being.
+Jacob Turner yes! I agree! I used ME for around 5 years (until 2006 until I finally switched to XP SP2) and it was rock stable, solid OS, working well with Duron 800Mhz and 256MB RAM on 40 gigs drive
I had the same Gateway PC but mine was a Pentium 3 866MHz, 128MB RAM, ATI Radeon 32MB AGP video card, 30GB Hard Drive and it came with Windows ME but I downgraded it to Windows 98 SE as Windows ME was so problematic.
i have that same case. can i put a new motherboard in it. im planning on building a sleeper with it. I would love if u replied if possible. i know i have to cut out the i/o port holes
I never actually had a problem with using Windows 98SE with 1.5gb of RAM. I had an Athlon XP 1800+ that I put 1.5gb in and ran 98SE, 2000, and XP just fine.
actually you can run win98/win me on more than 1GB of ram i ran windows me on 1.7 GB of ram without any problems, there are just a few tweaks that need to be done, but it really isn't worth it, i don't even know why i did it, now i have Mint running on that computer
Then again if you put 1gig of ram in a win98 or ME PC it will be overpowered by its standards so I dont see a need for that but still your right, it'll crash cause I did it and your right
I like to call Windows Millennium Windows 98 Make-up Edition, because that's all it is, it's Windows 98 with Make-up on, not so nice, I understand from a computer course I did years ago that you need to have Windows 98 installed in order to use Windows ME, right?
+Timothy White In my old Packard Bell, for some reason there are no vents in the back so I had to install a fan on the side and one on the bottom (it was big enough for a 80mm intake).
