HP Bubble Systems! Classic late '90s computers - Teardown and test! 

Good to see your human malware didn't affect your pun generation. I have a bunch of medical issues and a mate says if my pun generation stops, he's worried. Lol

Around 3:45 - The reason the sound card would need a connector from the PSU is because, at this time, HP often bundled these systems with a complete set of peripherals which included unpowered speakers. The idea was that the PC's sound card would have its own amplifier to drive the speakers - I have come across slightly later Pentium III/4 era systems that have a label on the back which indicates "powered speakers required for sound" or something similar.

That first system is the pinnacle of DOS retro gaming rigs... Despite being designed for Win95. Socket7 Pentium1 w/MMX is very special to DOS... Ever since Phil and the Vogons guys showed us the setmul utility. That mobo with the 430TX chipset is fabulous... USB ports are not common for Pentium1. The second ISA slot would allow for a -5V Voltage Blaster, to run a good SoundBlaster. The onboard ATI graphics would save a slot on a 2D card, for running a Voodoo 1 or 2. When I was a teenager in 1996 my first high-end system was extremely similar. I had a Gateway P5-200 MMX Full-Tower. The similarly disguised ASUS mobo had a 430VX chipset, also with a couple early USB ports. Though I'm fairly sure it had an S3 Trio 64 of some variety as it's onboard graphics. If I had known back then what I know now, especially that the P1 MMX era would become my bread and butter... I would have pimped that rig to it's max potential, and gamed like mad on it, as if it was going out of style... Because it went out of style real fast. Always trying to get my hands on another one of that exact model... But they just never show up. I still kick myself that I tore it down for parts and recycled it.

I've been telling everyone I know about this channel. Your presentation and knowledge are top tier.

I see a Bestec PSU, I see a time bomb. I had to replace SO many of those in emachines desktops in the 00s. Chuck it! Another great video, Mike.

I absolutely love how the last system glows with the power and hard drive leds

Trigem was an OEM based in South Korea that was in a joint venture with eMachines from 1998-2004 I believe. They manufactured all in ones and many other computers also mainly for the South Korean market up until 2010 until going out of business. Strange to see them supplying HP with a hard drive though.

I bought a hp 8240 in February of 1998 when I turned 16. I save for a year mowing lawns and scraping every penny I could to buy a pc. If i recall it was around $1500 with a I think a 15in crt. The nostalgia I have been looking for one to play with and run some old dos games that friends and I would play.

Glad to see your feeling better! I loved the style of the 6535! I remember messaging all my friends on aim on mine. The matching crt monitor had a built in microphone and the setup had an optional matching webcam as well! It came with computer speakers made by Polk audio and they sounded amazing! I gave my entire setup to a friend when I upgraded to a compaq 4090us with windows me. I loved the 6535! It was very reliable! I’m amazed of the condition of this one and glad to see it survived to see another day!

It's always a great day when MikeTech uploads! Love those little gremlin baby ATs, wish that form factor and removable tray would come back.

I absolutely LOVED those style HP system. I had a Pavilion 6XXX series growing up. A gem to me.

"...this thing was being held together by hopes and dreams..." Hey Mike, don't knock it! ... It's how I got this far in life! 🙂

Hoping you get better soon Mike! I actually was a computer technician at the Huntsville Alabama plant that made those translucent Pavillion computers. Very problematic machines. How I remember those huge racks of testing and hard drive mirroring processes.

Woohoo, a new video! And with old, and reliable, HPs!

Great stuff Mike 👍🏻 Enjoy these videos immensely… Was wondering when a new video was to come out… Passing on the great word about this channel to others.. Cheers 🍻 From the U.K 🇬🇧

my favorite computer hunk blessed us with a new video

I saw this video was posted and all I could say was "yesssssss"

Those are some pretty futuristic cases for the late 90s

I love these motherboards with dedicated 3D onboard video. 👑

I had the 3rd one on the right with the flip up hinge. Brings back memories! I think mine was a 533Mhz Celeron at the time. Maybe 32MB of memory.... Takes me back.

glad to see you're back, love those strange looking hp cases from the 90s

these are the styles I learned how to internet on, super hype for this video.

I've had an HP Pavilion 8580c desktop since I was about 8 years old. Still have its original mobo transfered into a later HP Pavilion 8756c case that's next to my bed and in working condition 25 years after it was built. These were great little machines, and I even used the case of one till 2016 as a portable full atx case that fit in a suitcase for my main pc back then, too. TSA kept stopping me to ask what was in it, though. 😂

I love these late 90's HP Computers. My first PC was an HP Pavilion 4540! I still have it along with a 6545C I acquired a few years ago.

I remember having an Aptiva with Pentium MMX 166, it had two USB and after I upgraded to Win98, they worked just fine. :)

Wish I could find computers the way you do

miketech... this one's on you! i actually found my first system to restore! i bought for 4$ at a recycling center. it was complete besides it missing the hard drive. sadly came with a defective floppy drive and dvd drive. they didnt want to work. your advice really helped. if i wouldnt have watched any of your videos, i would have plugged it into my wall blindly. but, i thoroughly checked through all the parts to make sure i have a non-lethal machine. i did manage to get it to run windows XP. this stuff that you do, its really cool! one day i hope to do more stuff like this.

I want to see him teardown some early 2000's enthusiast systems, wish i had kept mine from that era but a series of small apartments taught me to downsize old posessions.

I thrifted a tower very similar tower to the first one in this video. It even had a sound card that was directly connected to the power supply. The main differences are: There is a small removable shield in front of a single 5 1/4” bay below the CD drive It has a Pentium II The motherboard doesn’t have integrated video and there was an ATI 3D Rage II+DVD card installed

I have one of those HP bubble computers mine is pavilion 6736 from 2000 and runs windows ME. I still have EM on it as this identical to first PC I ever used. When I got it the Samsung CD-rom drive was completely dead so I swapped in another from an HP bubble system that had a dead motherboard.

so much dedication for a cd-rom drive! love it! :)

To remove scuffs from plastics use just some water and a magic eraser Make sure not to scrub too hard otherwise you'll take away labeling and paint..

Pushing the door closed on drives is what causes them to fail over time, should always use the switch. If discs stick, there's a little gripper on the spindle top and it gets filthy, and sometimes they are some material that degrades and becomes a sticky mess. It's a particular problem in plextor drives and the disc will get stuck and the tray won't open.

The first computer I ever got new was from my grandmother. It was an HP Pavilion 6635. It was reliable and I still have it in my closet for some MSFS2004 awesomeness. :) I love your videos!

I still have a couple of those translucent HP towers at my parent's house. This video made me a bit nostalgic for that era of computers. I know everything today is about perfectly machined all metal cases but I still have a fondness for those colored plastic pieces and the rounded shapes of the front facade. Thanks for another great video!

i had that last one, it was so great. I loved it. Spent a many hours sitting in chat rooms and Napster .... lol

AWWW YEAH! 90'S HPs, BABY! Been waiting for this one... System 1: Is that a CD-ROM drive, or an out of balance washing machine? System 2: Cards: The modem/soundcard combo from these models were absolutely terrible. I had to replace so damn many of them back in the day. Zip Drive: "Zip drive made by, who else, Iomega?" Answer: NEC had a license to build them. I have an NEC-manufactured Zip drive in my collection. Power Supply: You're welcome! Nothing like having a spare just in case! System 3: Power Supply: Technically speaking, it is a "standard" ATX power supply. It just happens to be a lot shorter in depth than the "original specification". The closest you can get to replacing one of these, barring finding a used one, is an SFX power supply with an SFX-ATX adapter plate. (I say "original specification" because these days there is a plethora of power supplies that are significantly longer in depth than the original spec.) System 4: Celeron: "That's looking Celeronni." Celeronni... the San Francisco treat! Lack of slots and Costcutting: Yeah, small Celeron HPs were designed to be cheap and basic, with a capital C. Not designed for enthusiasts or power users whatsoever. Hard Drive: This one is REALLY throwing me for a loop. The serial number of the computer starts with a KR, which means it was built in South Korea. I know TriGem was one of the OEMs that HP farmed their manufacturing out to in the late 90's and early 2000's, and the motherboard is a TriGem Cognac motherboard (fairly widely used on Socket 370 HPs)... But the drive does NOT bear an HP Spares part label, and I have never seen a TriGem-branded drive in any HP, ever. It looks to me like that hard drive may be original-ish. My two hunches are as follows: 1) Drive is original, and the machine was part of a VERY early production run that didn't have proper labeling available or 2) Drive is not original, machine failed either at QC or delivery, and ended up in the hands of a refurbishment facility, which used a random drive. I'd kinda lean towards the former because I also see no spares label on the ram, motherboard, optical drive, or floppy drive.

Fair play to the previous owner of S4 for getting use out of a system that would have been a decade old at that point. Seeing XP on a 9x based machine was a surprise too! (although seeing as it was designed for 98, this machine would've been 2-3 years old by the time XP came out)

4'th case, i had an identical one, back in the days, nice to see they still exists😊

Great video. Just got one of those stubby translucent dealies (HP 6735) from a barn find along with the 17' HP monitor... took some effort to clean up and reseat everything properly with new thermal paste, but it's running now. We sold lots of these at Staples in the late '90s and early '00s. It's a Celeron 633 with a loud PSU fan that's most likely to die first. Still, glad to have it and I may drop a Pentium III in when I find a cheap one.

I still have one of those cases. Once you pop off the plastic panels it actually makes a great test bench since all you're really left with is an ATX sized frame.

I worked at CompUSA as a teenager and we had these there. They weren't that bad compared to the Compaqs and Packerd Bells of the day. The case was eye catching back then for a lot of people.

Me and my brother watches your channel. Happy you are up and about again. We were suffering some withdrawal symptoms...

Lots of good memories playing AoE on a friend's Compaq which also had this bubble styling. I often think about computers in this style of chassis as ones that ran Windows 98, got upgraded to Windows XP, and always ran like crap because of it!

30:53 the faceplate of that HP burner looks very Mitsumi. Like a CR-4802TE, CR-480ATE, CR-2600TE or other from around the same few years. I have a 8x read 2x write model somewhere from back in the day with the same pill-shaped eject button, raised bar across the bottom and flip-down door.

I have one of these bubble systems in my collection. It is a cutie with a semi-opaque blue plastic front. It needs some work. When I get around to it I will give it some love.

Your videos are great! When I was a boy, in tech support, we didn't need no steeken' MMX or SSE. We didn't even need CPU fans. Nope, we were fans, and that's what matters.

i like the hp 4550z 16:42

The first "modern" PC I purchased was a Pentium 233 w/ MMX Played a lot of Abe's Odyssey and Jane's Longbow Gold on that rig.

25:30 beautiful disc drive, loving that !

Thank you for the informative video. Hope you get well soon . Greetings from Poland . 👍🤝 Dziękuję za pouczający film . Życze powrotu do zdrowia . Pozdrawiam z Polski . 👋

what a hunk ! hummfff ! :)

"pinocchio style eject button" has been added to my internal dialogue. glad to see you back kitchen ace and taking names

these hps are before my time i was around in 98 but never had a pc till later.

TriGem is best known in the USA for the eMachines brand and HP using their motherboards, the same ones used in eMachines.

TriGem always makes me think of eMachines, which was the first computer I bought in 2002 after my work laptop died. There was some relation, so I wonder if that hard drive might have been from one of those originally.

awesome video as always, keep up the fantastic work Mike.

damn the 4th system feels like a time capsule with all those Norton stuff and good ol' Office XP

16:42 Now THATS a smol boi! Anyways,keep up the good work!

thank you for another great video

Glad you’re feeling better. We all had a human malware disruption here too. I had just gotten a human malware vaccine. I remember seeing systems like this in the stores. The disc door in the third system sounded like a fart. I’m glad your sense of humor is intact, you crack me up! I’m a fan of the systems that have a grayish transparent front. They always called to me. Happy you’re back in action, I’ve missed your videos.

10:25 You wanted an optical drive and instead got a demon capturing device, what a deal!

I had a few of those systems with translucent panels, they called it the "Skywalker " chassis. Love the CD storage on top. Asus was the OEM for the MB. My top one had a slot 1 P3 533 with 96MB of ram and CD burner. ATI rage onboard graphics and 20GB HDD. Bought my daughter the smaller version with a celeron CPU and 64MB of ram, dog of a system but I got it cheap ( for the time ). I do miss the P3 one, brings back my day on Napster on NetZero dial up

SWEET! Love the bubbles!

Great video Mike!

Good to see you back Mike ❤

Thank you for creating this great video even when sick from flu!

Welcome back 👍

Great videos, great personality. 👍

Gald to see you back in action. Those HP`s were everywhere back in the day. Thanks for the Video

Cool, I actually had a 4550Z, that very same Pavilion model. It came with a Maxtor 10 GB hard drive (I remember, because I changed it out for a bigger hard drive). $999.00 at my local Office Depot in 1999. Also, I remember I put an AGP video card in it. You had to switch 2 jumpers, to tell the computer to go to the AGP slot for video instead of the motherboard video, which was an ATI Rage IIc with 4 mb of video RAM, if I remember right.

OMG UR BACK YAY... So glad ur feeling better

I have an hp pavilion 6553 and it’s all original still working I found it in a woodshop and asked the owner if they wanted it they said take it they didn’t know if it worked it was filthy on the outside it came with the original monitor which was the most dirty I opened up the computer shockingly it was pretty clean still rocking the original hard drive and I got the speakers with it that mount on the monitor everything all original for free I’ve been using the computer now for about a month and a half it has windows 98 second edition it looks like the last computer you go over in this video but different model

Very nice HP desktop PCs!👍

You are the bob ross of retro computer repairs c:

Good vid. Good vid thumbnail. 💯

I love your phrase "human malware"! Great description. Hope you are feeling better 😷

I never opened up these older systems. It's interesting to see these fan duct systems.

Good to see you Mike ! And, OMG, I definitely always enjoy biceps action everytime it happens when you lift some PCs or case covers. 👍😜💪 Please accept my greetings, from France. Nicolas

I had one of those HP bubble systems. It was an HP 8750C. A friend of mine gave it to me. He bought it at the Ingram Micro returned stuff sale at his work. The problem was that the system kept intermittently going into hard lock. I tried swapping everything, but it kept going into hard lock. I looked online and a lot of people were complaining about the same problem with this model but HP wouldn't admit that they had a batch of bad motherboards. So I just replaced the motherboard.

PowerPC! What about finding PowerPC Macintosh computers? Wouldn't it be so cool to "renew" old school PowerPC macs. Please let my idea come to life, PLEASE!

34:17 If you like KDE 3, it still lives as the Trinity Desktop Environment.

37:20 "Fortunately, the motherboard tray is removable."

Love it my first PC was a Hewlett Packard from good old Circuit City. My second PC was a Packard Bell always wondered were they the same company.

I hope you will get better soon. Currently installing Windows 2000 on a Dell Optiplex GX1 !❤

Get a bottle of MG Chemicals "Rubber Renue" (yes, spelt right). Make sure you open the window when using! I've used it for 70s and earlier tape decks & turntables on all the rubber parts, belts & idler wheels! BTW, Im the original owner of an HP 760n (exterior perfect, I updated h/w & s/w a while back)

24:50 I was JUST about to comment about that...

I would totally put a modern system in the case of the first machine.

I had one like the last small bubble machine. Wish I still had that thing! Lack of agp was so annoying I used it up to 2010ish with a tnt riva 2 pci, a sound blaster live or something like that a USB 2.0 card and 192 of ram!

That 6535 was my families 1st computer growing up. Nostalgia overload when you booted it up. I think it was purchased 1999 or 2000? It was used as the main computer until probably 2004? After that it was used as an offline only pc we kids used to play pc games on increasingly less until probably the early 2010s. It was finally e-wasted probably 5 years ago after sitting for 5 or more years unused. It had a very long life for what it was, lots of memories with that translucent thing.

"That is one unlucky Goldstar." I see what you did there...

I had one of those samsung 8.4g (Under the spinpoint series) drives for a long time. seems as there were several trigem branded versions of these drives. the first time I saw a trigem branded drive was in a brand new emachines system that my brother in law was trying to set up for his mother. the thing was actually DOA from the factory lol.

Glad you're feeling better, getting sick sucks! I got a respiratory infection when I was about thirteen or so in the early summer, I sounded like Batman for a week. Hurt to talk but I couldn't stop talking 'cause it was so funny. I visibly twitched when you switched on the PSU from the 3rd system. Way back when, these are the PC's that taught me to test PSU's first. I plugged in a nearly identical system to this that I'd found out for trash, it had the Riva graphics onboard as well as the audio, weirdly enough. The PSU was shorted and gave me a nasty shock as I was touching the PC case when I plugged in the power cable. It somehow didn't damage the system, I transferred the motherboard, CPU, RAM, and optical drive, but used a different floppy and HDD in another case. I had that HP for a long time playing old games on it, it ran Half Life 1 great even with the weird onboard Riva graphics, I think it had 16MB of VRAM but I can't remember. I've seen another one of those Bestec PSU's go up in smoke, it's why 13 year old me was not allowed to test electronics in my Grandma's laundry room anymore, had to do it out on the back porch where the smokers got exiled to or way outside on the picnic table haha

It’s funny that back in the 90s and early 2000s I hated working on these machines, I was all about custom builds but now I would love to have one of these, especially that first P233MMX.

Human malware love it. You are just adorable.

I worked at a warranty repair and refurbish facility for Asus in the early 2000's, only once have i ever come across a zip drive that wasnt Iomega, it was a LaCie external zip drive, and im pretty sure that was just Iomega guts in a lacie enclosure, I wonder if iomega had the format for zip under patent for the entire time it was a relevant format.

The first pc i actually used and replaced parts in as a kid was one of these, similar to S4. Actually might be the exact same model.

i was using these old cd drives for playing audio cd.

WoW windows XP was a throw back i think i had nam flash backs

I swear the makers of all those weird to open hp 2000~ pc cases, were the same that made the pt cruisers window controls location.