Let's wrangle some Gateway 2000 systems! Vintage computer teardown from the Franklin eWaste haul. 

Most folks would give up if they saw that much corrosion, I have to admire your dedication. There's a good chance that someone loved those machines at one time, it always makes me sad when they are discarded.

My grandparents had a Gateway 2000 desktop running Windows 95 when I was a kid back in the early 2000s. That computer is long gone now, but a few years ago my grandpa found the original Gateway 2000 CD case that came with that computer and it still had all of the original CD-ROM games that we used to play as kids. My grandma loved to sit with us for hours and help us play through Pajama Sam and Muppets Treaure Island. This video brought back a lot of those good memories :)

You're dedicated for sure. You make the repair process look easy.

Very important you archive those drives. Some rare, if not entirely unique stuff on there. Thanks for another great vid.

I really enjoy your videos. You have enough detail to understand what’s happening but cut out the repetitive bits. I’ve learned things about soldering I didn’t know. Your enthusiasm is contagious.

Thank you for diving into computers I could only wish for at the time. Serious hit of nostalgia, for sure.

I think these machines are in good hands, you've got some nice soldering skills! Love hearing the WD Caviar drives as well.

Your videos bring back so many memories. I look forward to watching every Friday! One memory is when I worked with a teacher who brought her Gateway 2000 into her classroom in 1998 before every classroom got an iMac. We used Netscape Navigator in the schools back then. I remembered finding a game that used red cars for an autistic child I worked with. They only way I could keep his attention was by using red cars. I remember one summer I think it was 1992 or 93 the schools got portable computers for families to take home over the summer. I think they were made by Compaq. This thing looked like a suitcase lol. Oregon Trail was one if the floppy disc games that came with it. The microscope you used is awesome! It’s so cool to get up close to the parts you work on. Nice job with the cowboy hat lol. I always found it interesting that Gateway used cows as their mascot.

Two dialup modems could have been for multiple reasons. While this computer was a little late, it might have been used to support a BBS, or it might have been used as a server or gateway in an office. It might also have been used to support multiple leased lines, etc., or as you suggested, someone might have just wanted an upgrade and not removed the old modem!

Man, that corrosion on that first PC has to be the worst I've ever seen! Also, you have some very fancy AOL 7.0 discs! lol Fantastic video as always, and I love the "warranty void" sticker running joke.

I appreciate the thirst trap thumbnail 🤯Never seen an AOL booter before, that hilarious "Punt da' lamer" button is the sickest. The educational Mario game might've been Mario is Missing, appropriate because the exe isn't there.

Watching you take care of your machines makes me appreciate mine. Some 16:9 LCD monitors let you ask for the image to be rendered at 4:3. Also, 1600x1200 LCD monitors form integer pixels at 320x200, 320x240 and 800x600. You probably knew that, though. Thanks again,

i do so look forward to your videos on Fridays

DO NOT feel bad if you are repeating yourself. Your desoldering techniques are valuable.

Love your videos! And the thirst trap! 👀

Great talent, and patience. I love your videos. Keep up the great work Mike!

Keep em coming..... Loving it

Another excellent video. Absolutely love seeing each system from that mega haul! That second system in the small case is an absolute treasure, that install of Windows 3.1 got some heavy use

Still have my Gateway 2000 tower case sitting in a corner I just can't bring myself to get rid of it yet - not the first computer I owned but symbolic in that it was the first I bought entirely with my own money from my first job and the first time I bought a high spec system.

love watching your videos keep it going

I remember the enthusiasm you have as i did in the day . I loved PCs and mini computers and everything. I just turned 55 and had to clear out the cupboard of my SCSII cards, network cards etc. bits of SUN sparcs etc. I really felt a twinge but have to as my husband and me are moving to the country. Still love the computers to the day I die! Keep up the work.. so enjoyable😊

Just found this channel a few days ago subbed after watching a few videos! I love this content so much! I build PC's for a living and this is just so awesome to watch, I can tell you have passion for this work! It's so interesting seeing how old PC's work, I don't see many as I'm always working with modern one's. Greetings from Scotland

Thanks for adding the time stamps Mike! Makes things much easier especially watching during a work day and I for one appreciate it, I'm a novice at soldering myself so I think its great you demonstrated that a bit and I now look forward to your motherboard repair series, keep up the great work

Another great video Looks like you have an admirer lol Keep it up These noises of the machines starting up makes me feel young again Dave London uk

During the late 1990s I worked as a student technician servicing about 1,500 computers in a large community college. The older computers were HPs while the newer ones were Gateway computers. If a campus computer was acting up, we asked if it was an HP or a Gateway; and I would say, ‘Oh shit!’ if it was the latter. Reliability was not a feature of Gateways for oftentimes a brand new PC would arrive with a dead motherboard, or the assembly only partially complete. Sometimes debugging would take hours, even for our hardware specialist - for the Gateways often had buggy drivers for hardware that was state of the art, but obviously untested by the manufacturer. No wonder that Gateway now is more a distant memory in 2023.

LMAO that hair flick.

Really digging this channel.

Mike, you are a total trip! I can hardly wait for the Carmen Miranda hat episode, lol. This one is one of my favorites so far. The Win95 brought back some great memories. Thanks, man!

You and your luck with OPL3 chips. Amazing. Money back straight away. I love this PC archeology. X

I like to watch these for the old machines and the super hot host

When you got to the third one, and you had said something about the back screws being missing, I thought, "Imagine if there was 1 or more bag(s) with screws for the thing? And there was! I can't actually believe I thought that.

Winzip, omg the nostalgia kicked in.

Good job !

Brilliant video, took me right back to my early days of 286's, 386's and 486's not to mention the big a** Pentiums that looked like half a sandwich, you have another subscriber, thanks for sharing.

This brings back memories. Way back in my university student tech days we supported around 200 of these things in the various business and finance departments around campus. What I'd love to find is one of the huge same-styled Gateway 2000 towers.

Very nice. I have a p5 90 the first computer we ever had and a p5 133.thanks gateway was a very nice computer business.

You can wrangle me in that hat anytime you want lol 😍 Keep up the good work. Loving the videos xx

Finally someone using the desoldering alloy! I nearly destroyed an SE/30 motherboard trying to replace the SIMM sockets (all of the plastic latches were broken) because I did not know about this!

Amazing video man. I have a soft spot for gateway systems since they so common near me...and they got their start a mere 2 hours away from me here in Iowa. Hence the cow box marketing

I have a P5-75 in my collection and it looks to be the exact or very similar same configuration as the one you have - video card, modem, sound card, cd-rom, motherboard all the same. Not surprising as they probably sold thousands of these things in the same or similar configuration. It's a great machine - I picked it up for free in in like 2002 or 2003 and then it sat in a closet until a couple years ago when I actually had time and inclination to finally clean it up and use it. All it needed was an inspection and a good cleaning - Everything worked as it should when I turned it on.

OK i love the lil PBS bit at the end

I have a Gateway Pentium 4 that I use as a "retro gamer" for my Hasbro Interactive games. They don't work with most modern video cards, but they work well with the onboard VGA graphics on the Gateway. it also runs Windows XP, so it still supports full screen DOS games without using DOSBOX

On the first system, the application mIRC was a total blast from the past! The time spent on IRC in my youth was extensive!

My fav vintage machines

I used to buy PC Magazine just to see the newest ads for Gateway 2000! Wanted one so badly - but Packard Bell from Best Buy is what was on my future…

You need to setup your own dial-up modem bank and dial in with these old machines. I've got some old cisco equipment I'm going to try it with. That would be cool. Very great video! I like what you're doing. I love these old 486 machines and DOS! Keep up the good work!

omg you are triggering a ton of memories for me as well with this. I think we are around the same age, and I remember AOL 3.0. That was my first experience with the internet, and that was in the late winter/spring of 97 on a 386. Experience was dismal but it was my first

Another Superb Video, this is definitely making Friday, my best day! every time I see a CD Rom Drive, I hope a CD is in there, I still have my Original Quake, and Doom Cd, I bought way back in the day lol, also, I've noticed a lot of those dial up modems have a small Canadian sticker flag on them ?

I was gave a Gateway 2000 to use for a few months out of high school. It was not bad for a loaner at all. Pentium Overdrive, 16MB ram I think it had a 33.6Kbps Modem. I don't remember what video or sound card it had. I remember that it had a 2x CD-ROM as well. I only needed it for some basic work tasks and email so it fit the bill till I got a better PC.

Thank you for your videos. They are very informative without becoming boring. Keep up the fun!

Cocos, imi place canalul asta imi aduce aminte de calculatorele din copilarie, iti doresc sa cresti canalul, numai succes, sunt curios daca citesti si intelegi ce zic!😊

I remember having monitors that had the three-pin style Port that plugged into the power connector on the back of the PC I also remember the d sub connectors with the ribbon cables and the ports on the back just like this

Keen 4! Used to play that st the library while waiting for my sister to finish tai kwon do, lol.

I'm definitely getting one of those Amazon microscopes with a display on it when I have the money, been on my wishlist for awhile now. Also have you thought of using kynar wire? It's basically enamel coated wire that can be melted off and soldered with easily, meaning you don't have to worry about it shorting anything. The enamel also helps keep the whole wire from coming unsoldered as easily if you apply too much heat.

Looks like the 95 system was upgraded from MS-DOS 6. My family's 486 was the same, and I'm glad it was because it still had QBasic on it which taught me how to program (or at least as much as you can from BASIC). Awesome.

If you took the innerds from the dx2 66 and put them into the larger case that's my exact childhood pc. It was so bad ass. Ran win98 without batting an eye

The edge of an old slot blank is a great tool for removing "low" insertion force CPUs.

Nostalgia overload is a massive understatement lol. the first computer I ever rebuilt, an 8088, used Direct access 4.1. Before I had windows, that was my main program. I still have the thing on floppy somewhere. I have a P5-75 myself, but it doesn't have the plastic power button. for some reason I have had trouble finding one. despite that, the machine runs great. but yeah kind of annoying to have to use a screwdriver to turn it on and off lol.

Ouch,that 'cranchy' sound!!!! It reminded me my time in tech school!!!

Gateway 2000 Produkowalo kiedyś komputery AMIGA . Pozdrawiam z Polski . Gateway 2000 It used to produce AMIGA computers. Greetings from Poland .😁👍🤝

Finding those OPL3 chips was lucky... but finding those screws for the faceplate insde the case was EPIC LUCK!! hahaha

ahhhhh I missssssssssssssed almost everything. Talking bout the games back. My school had Gateway 96(yr)

That second computer is slightly older than me by 6 months, and I still remember using Windows 3 at school 22 years ago :3

For the system with 2 modems, one could have been used as an incoming fax line, while the other was used for dialup purposes. Or if one is a voice modem, they could have been running some sort of voicemail system. There is also the possibility that it was a multi-line bbs system.

I'm not gonna lie Mike, when I first started watching your videos, I loved your knowledge and passion, but I felt that you were very stiff and lacking emotion, and it made your videos less appealing. Fortunately as you've gained more confidence and comfort, you've become far more expressive and added in your personality to back up the passion, and I've been loving your newer videos! Absolutely look forward to them popping up in my timeline now! P.S. I was also made in 1988 😂

I was a Gateway premier partner and sold a ton of their PCs and Servers. I have to say I rarely had hardware failures. Their customer service and support was very good. Now, I’m a slave to Dell, ordering suxs as they take sometimes more than 24 hrs to get a quote back and the whole warranty support is a joke compare to Gateway.

I have a Gateway 2000 486/DX266, similar to the second system you showed. Needs Dallas RTC replacement. It does work, going to fit it with a SD to IDE drive. It does have a overdrive processor of 100mhz, 16mb Ram if I'm correct. Manufactured around the same time as yours..

email bombs, scrolling, blue screeners! AOL punters were so fun!

i saw a trick by branchus creations where he uses used solder braid to tin traces. really cool recycling technique. Just take the used portions of braid and heat it up and slide it over the trace to tin it.

"Why does it look like a chicken?" lol. That gateway 486 would be a pretty much perfect machine for early 90s DOS gaming. Win95 'works' but it'd be too bog slow to really do much of anything, and Quake really needs a Pentium to play.

I had 2 modems back in the 90s because we had something called analogue leased lines where you paid a fixed monthly cost to the telecoms company and they gave you a line that could only "dial 1 number" (sort of), like to join PABX's between two branches of a company, and I got one from home to the ISP, so we were online 24/7, with a fixed IP, and the 2nd modem was so if I would out, I could dial into home and use my own internet, or at night when my friends got home we could connect the 2nd modem to internet and route all my countries IP ranges through the fixed cost line, and everything else went out over the dial up one, that way I could sit on IRC and telnet/ssh work servers over the fixed line and not lag too much.

I remember back in the day, you could use 2 dial up modems to speed up your internet connection.

Let's wrangle some Gateway 2000 systems! You: OK, we're not actually doing that. Me: I'll watch the video anyway, but I'll be seating quietly as a sign of indignation.

That is a BEEFY power supply in the first PC.

sad that first GW2K suffered the fate of the varta timebomb. the 2nd one at least uses a dallas RTC that is socketed, and the 3rd one uses coin batteries

That second PC is pretty sweet.

"WP" in the drive parameters is Write Precompensation. It's used to tell the drive when it should shift to a higher or lower write current, depending where it currently is on the platter. The farther away from the spindle the head gets, the more current the heads need to write data. This setting is a legacy of the MFM and RLL days, it's entirely unused in IDE, the integrated controller on the drive automatically manages it. MFM and RLL drives were dumb and were almost entirely run by the disk controller card, and needed more values set to work properly. As for that ISA video card that wasn't working, it having a full purple screen is more likely a component fault than a dipswitch issue. I would guess that either one or more RAM chips are bad, or the two EPROMs have bit rot and corrupted the video BIOS to the point the card doesn't work anymore. You'll need a memory IC tester and a ROM programmer to verify those. There's the Retro Chip Tester Pro, but that thing is very expensive. Might be able to rig something up with an arduino cheaper. For an EPROM programmer, a TL48 or TL56 would work. You may want to get into the habit of dumping the ROMs in all of the cards/motherboards you work on, because in many cases, they're extremely difficult or impossible to find. EEPROMs, EPROMs and even mask ROMs all eventually go bad.

The smaller Gateway 2000 (the first one you broke into) was my first computer back in 1998. This surely takes me back... I can almost hear the AOL "YOU GOT MAIL!! and Playing AOL Games, SLINGO was my favorite =D The only modification I did to this PC was a CPU upgrade by Greenway Technologies from 486 to a Pentium. It was plug and play and came with a little CPU cooling fan. It made things run a bit faster but it was still system bottle necks, the computer itself was way too slow for what I wanted it to do... I recall the PC still had problems even playing MP3's... In the year 2000 I took advantage of the deal they were passing out back then getting a free Compaq computer with a paid dial up plan... Only then was I able to Play Mp3's Rip CD's... Ahh the Napster days...

I’ve had it in the past where a Customer has had Multiple Sound Cards / Network Cards etc installed in their PC as the Technician they originally approached were unable to find Drivers for the existing Card/s so they just installed another Card… Unbelievable! 😂🇬🇧

I enjoy watching you void warranties. :D I wonder if this was an old and very basic BBS server? IT would explain a lot of the unusual choices whoever last owned this made.

WP in the BIOS stands for "Write Precompensation" All hard disk types in common use after the early 1990s have a drive-specific controller built into the actual drive enclosure. This includes all IDE, SCSI, SATA, and SAS hard drive types, among others. Those internal controllers know everything they need to know about their specific drive, including which strengths of precompensation are needed on which parts of the disk. Therefore, they ignore any WPcom numbers stored in the computer's CMOS memory. Until the late 1990s, many PC BIOS setup programs still allowed the user to set WPcom numbers and other drive parameters for use with older hard disk types should the need arise; it wasn't always made very clear to the user that his more modern drive would almost certainly ignore the setting. Since then, the WPcom number is no longer even offered as a BIOS setting any more, as it has become a fully automated and internally handled feature of disk drives.

I want a Gateway 2000 so bad. I want to a video on my channel doing a 90s multimedia upgrade. Like Sound Blaster 16, CD-ROM drive, maybe a 4 MB Voodoo 1 (if I can find one for a good price) for early Glide games, and Windows 95 on top of it all! Great Video! Loved the old hard drives sounds and Gateway AnyKey keyboard. The folder that had Quake on the 2nd Gateway 2000 meant it was shareware. If the installer installs the full retail release of Quake, the default folder name is "Quake." But if the installers defaults to "quake_sw" that means that the Quake install is Shareware, standing for the "sw." I watched this while doing my end of the year 7th grade essay, thanks again!

I can’t see the continuation of the repair work! I don’t think I would have bothered especially knowing it’s likely a four layer PCB… who knows what kind of damage lurks beneath. Great stuff though. Thanks!

A friend of mine in the USA had a Gateway computer in maybe 1999 I think....not a bad machine from memory.

I thought you were announcing a Retro Roundup partnership with that into.

41:42 - You could use a second modem as a fax machine attached to a second phone line.

The two deadly sisters of vintage computers: RIFA and VARTA. "Flux is your friend" except for your lungs lol.

18:07 Back in the day, long before WD Red, WD Green, WD Blue, and their flagship icon WD_BLACK, there was a motto from Western Digital saying "Accept only the finest." (look at the top-right corner of that HDD)

You can mount two 3.5 HDD's side by side on that bracket over the PSU :)

You said "take me to DOS" and my mind automatically set it to the tune of Take Me to Church by Hozier.

There is also Prodigy and Netscape Navigator

My first computer. Gateway 2000 pentium 60mhz. Gateway was considered the most high end company… above Dell at the time.

00:00 oh shucks, I was hoping for some PC lasso hilarity. 1:12 maybe the previous owner lassoed it? I mean, the thumbnail had to come from SOMEWHERE. 6:20 oh no! 6:32 they call them *chips* for a reason. ... I'll see myself out. 8:43 yikes! Painful to watch. 11:15 very interesting, I didn't know that. Practical. 20:05 I shall call this screen Deep Purple! 21:13 Daffly flipping Duck

With 2 modems, you could "shotgun" your connections and get 2x whatever your speed was, in my case it was 28.8, the lines where I lived never supported 56K. So only way to get close to 56K was 2 DUN connections.

I'm using a Gateway2000 keyboard at work. Found it at a thrift shop for free still new in the box.

Lookelike someone was shotgunning thier dialup 😁. I did this back in the day

"...and flux is your friend" Bob Ross Vibes

RU-vid user necroware actually has a board that can replace those Dallas RTCs called the nwX287, it also has a replaceable battery, for further convenience

Those old gateways are so cool. My favorite design is the first system you show. Would love to own one some day but they seem to be sought after and go quick on eBay. Fortunately I own the second PC you show. It's completely identical except it doesn't use the Dallas RTC. I see yours also does not have L2 cache. Do you plan to put any in? From what I can tell having no L2 cache seems.to have a pretty bad effect on games like doom. I'd like to throw some in my machine, but not even sure what kind of chips to buy that would be compatible

Hey awesome footage again! But i have an idea... when you test CD drives, also try if they read CD-R-media. Might be disappointing when you wanna copy files, knowing you got a known good unit of drive, but then it doesnt read CD-R. The older ones are notoriously known to suck there, especially these slow-opening Mitsumi 4x drives. yuck... Oh and i didnt know your monitor is y2k compatible hehehe. Cheers!