If you'd like to support the channel and help me to produce more videos like this, you can find me on Patreon: / miketech Thank you so much! Let's look at some out-of-this-world Gateways towers!
Fun Linux tip, if you forget sudo on a command that you just entered, just type "sudo !!", it'll repeat the last entered command but with sudo preceding it. I find that's quicker than hitting up, then home, then typing "sudo "
I used to get so frustrated with this era of OEM machine for omitting AGP slots. These systems were perfectly fine, but by cutting $0.50 in cost they absolutely killed re-use or upgradability of these machines. It's a big reason why I got into building my own systems for friends and family.
Even if it had an AGP slot, how much utility would it truly have added? Being a P4 with a RAM ceiling of 2GB, you wouldn't be able to go much further than Vista or 7 anyways, and having used 7 on a machine of this stature with a PCIe slot and a fairly fast video card, it's not a good experience. Additionally, the north bridge changes between versions with and without AGP, and so it required not only the 50 cent slot, but a $3 chip and then a whole $10 card because the integrated video was omitted.
While I agree it's disappointing, you have to remember these were being mass produced, so even the slightest cost savings multiplied by thousands adds up quickly.
@@AiOinc1 Due to the extreme limitations of the PCI Bus in the P4-era, the lack of an AGP port made this at best a budget office machine. Even an AGP x4 would have allowed this PC to rock a mid-range GPU of it's time and play almost everything pre-Crysis. To answer your question, if someone was using this machine for office tasking, web browsing, and light gaming: the inclusion of an AGP port could have doubled (or more) the effective lifespan of this machine. There is intrinsic value in expandability/upgradability as well if you care about things like keeping machines such as this one out of landfills and refurbished while they still have good life left.
@@ahabwolf7580 I understand the economies of scale, but the margins in the 2000-era could absorb a $1 sticker price increase. Especially at the volumes that Dell and Gateway were dominating at during this time.
@@AiOinc1At least 20 years ago that would still have been a decent gaming PC with a dGPU like Radeon 9600 or similar. Only a masochist used Vista/7 with a single core system anyway.
Found one of these a year ago on the side of the road, really cold and moist. had a 2.0Ghz Pentium 4 and a Maxtor Fireball 3 40GB HDD and a 1GB of ram. After rebuilding and cleaning, it sprung to life perfectly working, surprised on how it hasn't died yet after the harsh condition it was in.
I love adding new active 'descriptors' to my vocabulary Mike after watching your videos & superb commentary. Today's word is _disconnectify_ ! Thank you !👍
Gateway for some strange reason decided to engineer strange retaining systems for almost everything for no good reason, they just had a weird fascination with avoiding screws 😂
Been binge watching your channel, I am impressed with your knowledge and ability, I have learned new things, and the format you use is top notch for a pc channel.
I like systems that can cover up the floppy drives. I like the black and silver system. There’s something about it that speaks to me. The reflective Gateway logo is very cool. Another great video to kick off the weekend!
As always, excellent video! Always enjoy seeing these, glad to see the first system was basically in primo condition. The AGP thing still to this day baffles me -- my first XP machine was a 1.6 GHz P4, with 512 MB's of RAM and an AGP 4x slot that housed a 64 MB GeForce 2 MX200 stock. Granted that was a Compaq Presario, but still... lack of AGP is just a very odd choice considering how pretty bad plain PCI expansion video cards were.
I really liked this era of case, with the removable drive sleds, removable spacers, and removable PSU. I think they were really onto something with that. Its a shame we went back to screws on most cases but i kinda get it.
Watching the video, I see this one crawls too. I always wondered if something about this specific logic board design or BIOS revision factored into that, because it wasn’t slow earlier on in its life, and a similarly equipped Dell Dimension 3000 wasn’t slow at the time either.
I used to support someone who had one of these. It always seemed slower than it should be with a P4 HT (a 2.8 IIRC) and I could never figure out why, even with a clean OS install. Interesting that it doesn't seem to be a fluke.
@@jblyon2 a P4 3.0 HT Dell Dimension 3000 my Aunt had for over a decade was quite fast until around the time XP went EOL, so I’m thinking something unique to the Gateways
These systems remind me of visiting the Gateway store as a kid. Yes, the Gateway store. Actually, I thought it was a really awesome store. There was some interesting stuff in there. I remember Gateway was selling their own large flat-panel TVs (maybe just monitors since I think it was meant to go with their HTPCs). Then things just took a turn for the worst for ol’ Gateway.
For a futuristic design these Gateways were stuck in the past with no AGP & Crapacitors. Not surprised that the 2nd system's Maxtor is no good, living up to my channel "name" 😝
It amazes me how long these things just sit somewhere for so many years doing nothing. Who has the space for that? Its much harder to find old stuff like this in the UK and Im guessing its because we have smaller houses so just cant hang on to older stuff for so long.
Odd date codes for some of the parts are likely do to said parts being sent to the users for replacement. They designed these things to be totally user serviceable, with tech support to walk them through the whole process. Walked countless users through replacing just about everything in these
I like to keep my copy of SpinRite around for situations like that Maxtor drive. It either finishes off the drive, adding to the sacrificial pile, or it forces marginal sectors to reroute and in some cases can restore the drive enough to copy things off. I know in this case that actual data recovery isn't the goal so it may not make sense here but SpinRite can do a phenomenal job of bringing a mechanically sound but marginal drive back from the brink... or it seals the drive's fate. Either way, it answers questions. You'd want to run it on a test bench rig because it can take days for some drives to finish a pass through SpinRite.
Hirens boot drive had a ton of useful programs on it, I worked in a warranty repair and refurbish center for Asus in the early 2000's and all of us techs kept it on thumbdrives and cds for troubleshooting, also had password crackers for most flavors of windows since sometimes the owners weren't able to remove account passwords before sending them in, I feel like some of those programs could be helpful for mike.
I had luck using a hair dryer to unstick the heatsinks on an OG Xbox CPU and GPU. Worked wonders and now have a nicely refurbished and working system on my desk.
Man, that right there is my childhood pc I’m young however My dad gave his Gateway MDX500 series that was the exact same as that first one. I kept it for many years in 2014 I come home from the beach to find that it was gone among a bunch of other things. Would love to find one that doesn’t cost a fortune.
Hi I have a model from 2004 looks exactly alike just a little newer. Mine does have a AGP Slot and also SATA I am happy about that. I purchased a 60 GB SSD and a SATA to IDE before I knew it has SATA. I also have Gateway Recovery disk it is just a Red Drivers CD and a Yellow Application CD and a Blue OS CD One XP Home and 2 XP Professional. The red drivers CD is bootable has MS DOS and there is a hidden program called GW Scan. It is just an old version of WD Diagnostics and GW Scan will wipe a Hard drive and write 0's.
I used to own a Gateway of that vintage. That's one of their tooless maintenance models. You can change everything including the motherboard without lifting a screw driver. 🙂
The Pentium 4 based HP the library at my old highschool had used the same 20GB Maxtors. Have no idea how any of those PC lasted well into the Windows 7 era - no preventative maintenance they were only cleaned out when the fans clogged with dust, causing them to overheat badly enough to shut down. Still have a locked HDD from one of those that I was allowed to take home.
Heat gun on the heatsink for a few seconds usually softens and unsticks hard paste. Desoldering alloy? What? Wow, I've never ever had a cap fall out so easy. You missed a bad cap next to the RAM.
Mike. When you use xrandr and don't get the resolutions you want you can add them rather quickly. Use cvt command to generate a modeline. Example cvt 1920 1080 60 This will generate a modeline for a 1080p 60hz video mode. You can then use the output of this command to create it. Then use xrandr --newmode and use the modeline output here to generate your new video mode. Example xrandr --newmode "1920x1080_60.00" 173.00 1920 2048 2248 2576 1080 1083 1088 1120 -hsync +vsync Now use xrandr --addmode followed by the display id and the new resolution. For example xrandr --addmode VGA-0 1920x1080_60.00 Replace VGA-0 with the appropriate screen connection for your system. It is displayed as part of xrandr output or use xrandr --listmonitors. Replace the resolution and refresh in the cvt command with your desired paramaters.
Those green sliders are a great design. Other than Enlight cases, a few Dell models, and Apple's towers, machines back then weren't usually that easy to take apart like that.
I just found a Gateway desktop at a thrift store for $10. I think it's a few years newer than this one as it has an AMD Athlon 64 X2 badge on it. Haven't tried to boot it up yet but, yep, a capacitor plague victim as well.
i love youre videos please do a coustome retro build of trash picked parts bene watching since day one you have inspired me i am just starting in the tech industry pleas make more videos
Great video. Interesting, I have heard that opinion about Maxtor drives from several RU-vidrs now... I guess I have just been lucky with my drives because they still work. :)
Never see many Gateways here in Oz let alone these things! I do hope you thoroughly sanitised that hard drive in the first system after exploring it... Maybe 10 passes in DBAN should be enough? 🤠
XP from SP2 really needed 512MB RAM at minimum for a useable experience. Preferably 768MB or more. McAfee certainly wasn't helping on that first system, but the lack of RAM was the bigger problem.
I do not know the pinout of AGP, but there do appear to be traces to some of the pin locations. I wonder if soldering in an AGP slot would make it functional, or if the BIOS would restrict this possibility.
Dude, you missed greatness in this video by a hair. You should've used the meme with fellow that had fried hair that said "I'm not saying it was Aliens, *_but it was Aliens!!_* "
Oh man. I had one of these. Same case, but just a bit taller with one more drive bay. It was big, black and ugly. Pent4HT. I used it all the way up to 2013.Totally missed the core 2 models. Then graduated to an i5. The motherboard in it was a hotdog. It was pretty good speeds for the era it came from. Plus 2 sata ports on the motherboard. Mine also had AGP slot. No leaking caps when I put it away.
Hi Mike. First off, I want to say, I love your content. I’m reaching out to you, because I might have a retro PC, that you might be interested in featuring on your channel. It is an IBM Personal Computer 300XL. I found it abandoned, in an old single-wide trailer house, that I was helping my nephew clean out. When I opened it up, I did not see any bulging or leaky caps, and I was able to power it on for a short period of time. However, now it will not power on. While it did power on, the hard drive sounded like it was still in decent shape, and the floppy drive did spin up, but I did not have any floppy disks to test it. The case lid looks rather rough, but I did try to clean it up as best I could. Please let me know, if you are interested. I am willing to donate it to your channel, but I am not sure that the shipping costs would be in my budget. Anyways, thanks again for the amazing content, and hope to hear back from you soon.
I hated those slim Maxtor drives. I think in many years of refurbishing machines of the Pentium-P4 era the only drives that were more failure prone were the Bigfoots.
I had some of those in my shop. So many bad caps and guaranteed the CPU would rip out of the socket with the heatsinks. Its like the thermal paste turns into glue.
I was thinking the exact same thing, or a really stupidly obscure way of saying "2/1/02" as well -- either way you slice it, kind of is a dumb datecode.
I really must finish tinkering with my Dell Dimension 8200, so far, it had a 256 to 768MB upgrade (while my friend was using it), it's now had a 2GHz to 2.8GHz CPU upgrade (had one in another pile of junk), also taking to a whole GB of RAM (replace 2x 128 RDRAM with another 2x 256), and to replace the GF2 MX with a Ti4200 or 9800 Pro (2 more from a random junk pile) - should make an adequate XP Retro system, and it was probably my best AGP system even before the 2.8 CPU upgrade
not trying to be weird but how much pcs do u have ? and i am just saying u could if you want to make an tour of where you keep all your pcs and your workbench / fixing bench it would be fun to watch :D
Intel 845 GL/GLVA or GVSR. The good old cheapo OEM Boards without AGP-Slot. A big benefit for user: never any compatiblity issues with AGP-Graphic Cards 😁
