Circa 2000, a number of tech influencers believed CD burners would wear out if we used them as readers, their logic being that the head was heavier in burners than in readers. Eventually we figured out it made little if any difference, but when your Compaq was new, there were people who would argue installing both was a best practice.
What i remember was you didnt want a 52x speed burner as it would give you more errors and was expencive AF. Had to wright the whole disc in one go and if anything stopped the data, the disc failed. So you had a high speed reader that was cheap and a slower drive speed for the writer. And yeah people talking about the burner drives wearing out. Given they cost more, it would be better to slap a cheapo reader and use it mostly then risk it.
I was literally working on an old Dell optiplex metal shell xp home version and was extremely confused why it had two different disk trays. The more you know. I just disconnected the second one and used the wires for the original hdd since I put an ssd on sata 0
That blueish HP was an animal at the time. I got it with an adjustable 4:3 lcd. It smashed Zoo Tycoon 2 no problem! The bundle was around $1200 CAD at Costco early 2000s...
On the Compaq 5000 series (purple bubble) PC, the top piece that is missing would have held a quick start guide on a little card that was punched into the plastic piece for reference.
@@koobydotnet Not all systems had the card if I remember correctly. The second system looked like it did not have one and had a permanently attached piece of plastic as a placeholder.
I remember deciding to throw our info card pullout away. 😂 i thought it was useless at the time. Damn. I just repowered our compaq5000 and the only thing im missing is the info pullout, and the additional cd holder plates.
Ahhh, the Presario 5000, the first computer I used as the shared family PC, then as a hand me down. Still regret throwing it out when I got the next hand me down Presario. Having XP on my own PC in 2005 was still a big deal, the boys in my (three year older) sister's class were mad jealous, them still having OSes like 98 if they even had their own PC. Still remember the evening my dad was setting it up for me, installing XP. I was supposed to go to bed, but you know I kept going over to the studyroom to take a peek. Many hours of Rollercoaster Tycoon 1&2, SimCity 3000 and LEGO Creator were spent on it.
Love your enthusiasm for old systems. I love getting my hands on older systems and getting them working again. Wish the sentiment was shared by my girlfriend.
YES! I like to do this as well AND...my wife is not happy about it at all. But...I tell her the Truth..its a low cost hobby that keeps me out of trouble with everyone but Her...but...she endures. Stay strong, stay inquisitive and have fun, sir.
@32discodave There are plenty of other uses besides those for these old systems. I just built an XP machine specifically for analog video capture. I would strongly advise anyone to not use these for a server unless you get a new case, these old OEM cases had 0 airflow and often no option to mount any intake fans.
Thanks! I've always been slightly more hardware-oriented. Kind of strange that I work 100% in the cloud now... This is my way of getting a hardware fix!
My mom had a Compaq Presario 5000 and it honestly lasted far longer than it should have. I upgraded it from Windows 98 to Windows Me and finally to Windows XP. If memory serves me correctly, we got hers in early 2001 and she had it until mid-2005.
...I acquired an 2005 Noblis business computer in 2016. It came from a small business and was used mostly for their on-line applications like check cashing, sales promotions, things like that. It had 1 gig of Ram, a 40 GB h.d.d.s and was using XP. ...and it often got Very Dusty inside...My wife brought it home twice for me to 'fix it' when...luckily...it just needed a good dusting...and 'Poof!' it worked again and she'd take it back to the store. One day, she brought it home and said that I could keep it. ...I upped the ram to 4 GB and a 3.4 Processor and installed Windows 7....I still use the Noblis...that I dubbed The Phantom Cruiser...not everyday like I used to but that bad boy works well....And I think for being made in 2005, it was/is Quite a computer. I was impressed by its speed and possible Up Grades it 'Could Have Had Done'.
I ended up with all these cases,3 was what our family computer came in,2 was what my mom's office computer came in,and I found number 1 on the curb with the original peripherals
Hey MikeTech, If you Don't Know about GameHouse Solitaire, This is Super GameHouse Solitaire Volume 1, It was a Card Game Developed by GameHouse and Released on October 31st, 2002, The Difference on Windows Solitaire and GameHouse Solitaire is That Windows has Solitaire, Hearts, and Freecell While GameHouse Solitaire has 10 Games on 1 Ranging From Klondike Solitaire, Pyramid Solitaire, Tri-Peak Solitaire, Golf Solitaire and others.
That last HP brings back good memories. My family had that exact computer although I remember ours had a 2.7Ghz Celeron so it might have been a slightly newer model. Loved the look of that case.
Sees De-Oxit on the shelf, and also used in the video....Ahh...I see, a man of culture. LMAO...That's great stuff. Love seeing these now retro machines come back to life. I'd have been around 15-20 when these were new. I remember them well. Cheers!
The HP 350n is very similar to an HP my Granny bought in 2001 with an Intel Celeron here in Canada. The extra speaker port was for the included Polk Audio speakers. The speakers had a single cable and no external power. You are correct, that is an amplifier in the case. An interesting system for sure. Brings back many wonderful memories! Not long after Granny bought her HP, our small town got high speed ADSL service. I hardly recall using dial-up. I was quite small when she got that machine.
Woah, thanks for this comment. I've had a similar HP and the Polk speakers since childhood, but had forgotten they were meant to be paired together. Every time I see those speakers I wonder where they came from and why they're unpowered, but now it makes sense and the memories of using them together are starting to come back to me.
I have an HP a500n. I paid to have it recapped because I like it. It is still a snappy computer with a 32-bit operating system on it. It was a workhorse in the home office for many years and is still very useful for many things. These old machines are like horses. They just need a job if we can find one for them.
Love these videos. I think the amount of dust in a fan correlates with the amount of pets you have. When I had cats the fans had a serious amount of hair in them. Probably because they spent hours sitting on my keyboard desperate to stop me working. These are a pleasure to watch…..
....Yes...I had four four-legged family members at one time, but only one enjoyed watching me hammer away on the keyboard. Often, she would lay above the keyboard, that was on a slide out shelf...and she'd reach out and lay a paw on the keyboard as I tapped away. ....I think it was her way of 'being a part of it' ...OR....her way of being with me.
0:28 gotta admire how much detail went into printing this manual and making sure the panel stands out. 1:03 love this CD storage. Very convenient. 1:57 ... I have questions :D 3:25 oh boy dust galore extravaganza. 9:29 ba dum TSSSSSSSS! 22:43 ouch. That fan looks like it's in pain. 26:08 ah yes, the wanna-be vinyl disc.
I had one of those HP Pavilion machines from the early 2000s. 800 Mhz P3 Celeron, windows ME and 64 mb of ram. Huge POS, replaced it with the first PC I built myself: a gaming machine I built out of an HP kayak workstation that outperformed the pavilion by a mile.
I love how the Compaq was "cutting edge" with its front USB but it was too shy to have them exposed to the elements, hence the door! But yes, when I was younger my grandfather had one of these with 64 megs of RAM. Years later upgraded it to 256 and years after that I managed to get Ubuntu headless installed and the TTY would just display hieroglyphics so I blindly installed SSH with Apt!
I sold a lot of those 5000's. I remember the first few years of that design having a special thing that I think one person took advantage of, where they'd send you one free faceplate in a color you could choose other than the included blue.
Early 2000's vibes going on here! I can remember seeing S1 at college starting around then though it was separate from the standard beige cases we had at the time. At home we also had a HP desktop in the style of S3 which had a slightly faster P4, 2.8Ghz. You barely get enough time to enjoy this side hobby, you do well to get videos out!
The 360N one with a CD folder on the top was my favorite dumpster dive find as a kid. First PC I had that ever had XP on it and that was something I wanted more than a PS2
I always get a kick out of watching your videos. I’m always impressed as how meticulous and gentle you are with these old systems. I also have your power supply tester. Can’t live without it.
You have to be my favourite youtuber in the space of retro pc restoration, your personality and presentation with these are brilliant. I recently fixed up a PC myself that had an Athlon XP 1800 in it too :p
That HP Pavilion A200N is the system my Dad bought me for my freshman year of college. I had the matching printer, monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers. It's sat in their house for about 10 years unused, and I think I sold it for about $65 in 2015. Should have held onto it. You don't see complete systems like that much anymore. Thanks for the awesome video, as always!
Ahhhh the memories. Our first family computer was an HP bubble computer of some description. I can remember it was a celeron cpu and came running with Windows ME 😄
I worked for ASUS as a bench repair tech for systems under warranty. They pronounced it ASOOS, not ACES. Just saying. Not being mean or anything. Nice video. I enjoyed watching this.
I worked in an Asus warranty and refurbish facility back around 2008, I was in the laptop dept. Was an interesting job if only they had paid reasonably for the work. Ended up leaving to repair industrial CNC and robots.
Thanks Mike for the video. I have to unhook the front panel. I didn't know how to do it. Now I know how. Regards , From Poland .Dzięki , Mike za filmik . Muszę odpiąć panel czołowy . Nie wiedziałem jak to zrobić . Teraz wiem jak . Pozdrawiam . Z polski🤔🤗🤝👍
In 1998, i was given a box of 50 of thise NICs when a friend working for an IT company did upgrades to all the company computers. He got around 400 or so in total. I gave NICs away to everyone at a party of local IRC' friends.
This is a trip down memory lane. I've had the middle one as a child, and my grandfather had the left one. I think the middle one is missing a weird plastic corner inside which directed the flow from the CPU directly to the outside of the chassis. I've had the matching crt screen with the weird ear like speakers and the matching mouse and keyboard. Wish I've kept both, but I was still a child back then.Thank you for this.
With the exception of it being a Pavilion 760n, same here! Yes, I wish I still had the elephant ear monitor and the keyboard! I was in my early 40s, though.
I touched hundreds and hundreds of these back in the day at both Best Buy store level and service center (repair facility when they sent it out for repair from the stores). Crazy how all the little nuaunces and details came back to me before you even cracked them open. Good video.
The nostalgia!!! There's a decomissioned a-series HP tower from around 2003 on my parent's house, and can definitely tell you its industrial design has aged quite well compared to the other HP you cleaned up. More so if you paired It with the then-edgy LCD flat panel (VGA only, though), as my father did!More on that later. That tower was our family computer for many years, until my siblings and my dad had each one a laptop. Our hp, however, was a more upscale model. It was clearly meant to be a multimedia PC as it came with an AMD Athlon CPU @2.8 ghz, had an onboard nVidia GeForce 4 graphics card with 32-128 MB shared memory over an AGP 8x bus (as well as a spare AGP socket), 128 MB DDR RAM, a DVD-RW drive on the top and a CD-ROM on the bottom, of course a floppy drive but also a multi-card combo which could take CF, MMC, SD, and Sony's own Memory Stick, as well as a USB 2.0 + FireWire header justo in case you wanted to download your DV-cam's footage. Over time, I upgraded it with a second hard drive, a standard PCI (not PCIe) 802.11abg WiFi card, and topped up the ram to its maximum 2 GB, but could not get Windows 7 on It because the AMD CPU lacked sse2 support. Ten years later, by 2013, It was so obsolete that even Linux mint struggled to run fine on It: this time not because of the CPU but because of the onboard graphics, which proved to be troublesome. I was stuck with XP sp3 for the rest of the computer's life, although I hacked the registry to get POSready updates from Windows update. At that point, I rarely used the HP but to write long papers, as my laptop was way more powerful and convenient. As I mentioned before, my dad bought the tower along a 15" LCD flat panel and matching Harman Kardon speakers, which are still in service to this day! Sure, an HDMI to VGA adapter had to be placed in the middle but, hey! It does help a lot if you want a secondary laptop screen -to check emails or do a quick web browse, on a raher cramped home-office (or, should I say appartment-office) desktop! I wonder why HP got rid of that classy navy/bluish silver color scheme, It does look bold yet classy and timeless. I still get compliments on the looks of the monitor whenever I have visits on my flat. Sadly, the keyboard an mouse are another story: the bundled optical mouse died three years later and, over time, the keyboard's keys jammed so much because of wear and tear. Neither a deep clean by pulling out the keycaps or lubbing the stems made an improvement so, for now, It Is stored away until I can figure out how to make It work properly. Gosh, so many memories... I strongly advice you to get the whole matching set for the tower and please your eyes, you won't regret It. Same for the Compaq: my uncle had one of those and looked so great with the purplish-blue speakers hanging on the sides of the CRT screen. How did PC design came to be so bland these days?
We had one similar to the first system you shown, from 1998. The storage on top held a kind of a quick-start guide, convenient, but rarely used lollllll.
Everyone of these systems that I worked on over the years, eventually the motherboard failed. These boards also were known for capacitor plague, every single one of them. I was able to swap in an aftermarket board, cpu, and memory to get them back up and running. Everyone of them were loaded in dust, and never cared for. The HP Pavilion was the easiest system to upgrade to a much higher platform, and even added a front all-in-one card reader in the 3.5 empty slot.
Heh, I still have one of those Presario 5000 series hiding in my back room. It likely needs to go in the recycle bin, but I've got to have SOMETHING to collect dust to keep it off my working machines!🤣 Nice work on the cleanup!
Yass! I've been waiting for that Compaq 5000 series. Let's do this! 2:21 those plastic Q's were cosmetic, not functional. But similar to the face plate, they could be swapped with different designs. 8:03 - Also, the model number starts with LTN, another clue it's a Lite-On. You made that thing shine! Nice!
These were my favorite computer styles. I used to sell these at Best Buy. I wish that modern PC's had this style again, or that at least it was an option. I guess I could always build a sleeper PC in one of these cases. The little tag you were looking at usually had some information on it. I think it had the serial number and service tag.
Had to watch this video as soon as I saw the thumbnail since I have all 3 of these cases, albeit different systems inside 😆 I was impressed by the quality of that first Compaq case. It's quite heavy duty and the latching side panel is really nice for a prebuilt of that era. I too assumed the gray piece on top slides out but I was too scared to try and force it. You have taught me how to remove the front panel though (why did they make it so complicated?), so thank you for that. Be careful with the power button on that last HP. The switch isn't centered (it's towards either the top or bottom, can't remember which) and the button will eventually snap off if pressed too hard in the center. Weird and annoying design flaw. My cousin had a PC in the same case and it happened to his too. This is a very cool, high quality video. I like the bits of humor you throw in and your knowledge of these old components. Definitely gonna like and subscribe. 👍
Just started up my familys old pc Compq 5000 (5bw140) which is the almost exactly as you first one. Works well after cmos replaced and it found a driver on c:\ sufficient for my samsung monitor. Thought it was scrap until realising people want old pcs. I remember that the clip at the top used to pull out with an info card. I remember throwing it out damnit. I have a restore disc here too.
My first computer was one of those bubble HP systems! I can confirm the extra audio output was amplified audio. The speakers it came with would plug directly to that without an extra power cable. Kinda neat for cable management!
I worked at Radio Shack from '98-'00 and I'm experiencing serious flashbacks seeing that Presario for the first time since then. Only thing missing is the CueCat scanner.
I'm a little younger, but it gave me the same feelings! I had the 5000 with the green accent plates as my first not-shared-with family PC as a kid. I remember upgrading the RAM from 128MB and the weird rubber bumper on the HDD; wasting my life playing the Sims-and even more downloading user-made objects over dial-up, haha. Annoying my mom to buy me Cakewalk ScoreWriter so I could turn random MIDIs into sheet music...So many memories; I ran that thing into the ground using it so much.
I got lots of components from radio shack all the time. Last thing I put together with RS components was an IR receiver circuit that plugged into the microphone jack and was powered by USB. The IR receiver was a 3-legged component that I bridged 2 legs (data and ground) with a diode. I probably didn’t need the diode. I then used lircd in windows and Linux. Worked a treat!
The Compaq Presario in the beginning had the regular CD-Rom and the CD-RW drive so you could copy CDs direct from disc. That’s why they had the disc holder built into the front. The PC was built around and marketed with Windows Media Center, which debuted with XP.
My father's first PC was a Presario 7000Z (looks the same) with the AMD Athlon. It had endless hardware issues - CPU, memory, hard drive -- all replaced under warranty. Got him to switch to a Mac in 2006. I ended up donating it around 2016.
Had a200n from 2003-2011, I loved that thing it got me into computers when I was younger, I would love to find another one and upgrade it. The lack of AGP really hampers the system though
My parents had a 360n. It came in the box with somewhat decent passive speakers, that required amplification. Amazingly I also had an a200n at the same time, so this video really hit me with the good nostalgia. I was not a fan of the gimped Celeron chip, I remember.
Man. I had one of the presario 5000s when I was in college. It was gifted to me by my hometown museum. I could not figure out how to put an operating system on it so I just gave up trying to fix it and had it taken to recycling. If only I knew.
New subscriber here and just had a pleasant afternoon watching many of your past videos. They brought back so many happy memories repairing old computers in my previous job. Great channel, great presentation and you're a pleasure to watch in so many ways😉. Keep up the great work.
I had a Pavilion 7966 growing up. It’s cosmetically the same as the 360n, except it has a Pentium. The audio jack on the back is an amplifier I believe, for desktop speakers.
Such a great video in your inimitable style. I love your humour. Its rather ironic expecting to hear your old faithful clickety-clack hard drives on power supply smoke tests. Cheers
A small tip: you can renew and reuse the original semi-dried up thermal paste with a little WD40. Needs a bit of rubbing until it completely dissolves it.
As always your sense of humor cracks me up! I like the CD storage on both the compaq and HP. I like the compaq better. The dust in the second system was crazy. I never saw that much dust in a computer. I like that it had a paper cd in the storage compartment. The look of the last HP really appealed to me. I like it. The bubble systems are cool too! The last one is especially cool. Too bad you didn’t have time for the last two systems. Keep the videos coming, they make my day!
I had a Presario 5000. My GF at the time had one with an AMD processor that would out perform my meager intel unit. The colored plastic just screams RGB. Nice bonus with the included restore disk.
That HP 360n reminds me to my 511k that I manipulated a lot and the MB died, but I keep the case and now is a sleeper with a i3 3220 and a full size ATX PSU. The prevoius MB had an Intel Celeron and 256 MB or SDRAM on 2 RAM Sticks. And I buyed at 2004 with the MX50 CRT Monitor.
Wow this is a blast from the past ❤ I had a Compaq that looked almost like the one at the start of this video and one of my best friends had an HP computer that looked exactly like the one on the left loved these style of computers ❤
On older Pavillion machines, HP often used unpowered speakers and put a small but powerful amp inside the tower. I once had one of those tiny amps fry itself. The smell was awful, the speakers were toast, and there were scorch marks on the little board attached to the speaker connector inside (the tiny amp board I guess). Fortunately, whatever blew out didn't affect the rest of the computer. So with a standard PCI sound card and some cheap powered external speakers, everything worked again. So on the second machine (first Pavillion), I suspect that's what the yellow speaker jack is. And the sticker on the back of the third machine (second HP) says you need powered speakers. Since that's the case for most computers, the fact that they felt it necessary to put that sticker there suggests that they did it the other way for so long with Pavillions, that they expected repeat customers to need this extra disclosure, in case they were using speakers that came with an older computer, which wouldn't have their own power supply.
@@miketech1024 it sure is people obviously love you and the way you present I feel privileged to be along for the ride joined at 2k subscribers Wishing you all the best
The MPX chipset is probably the RTL8139, I have a "higher" model Belkin+Compaq branded card and when I installed XP on the machine, the Realtek driver auto installed.
Compaq's are my favourite brand of desktop/tower OEM's... Acer and Olivetti are my number 2 and 3... awesome (if cheap'n crappy) PC's, but still awesome!!!!
I worked for Compaq around the turn of the millennium so I’m more familiar with these than I care to be. I’d love to see you work on a Presario EZ2000 is Baja-blue
